The Jesuit Strategy of Accommodatio in East Asia, c. 1549–1742
How did the Jesuit strategy of accommodatio shape the encounter between Catholic Christianity and East Asian civilisations in China and Japan, c. 1549–1742?
© 2026 Natalie Ross. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
I. The Architecture of Accommodation: Ruggieri, Ricci, and Valignano
II. Science, Mathematics, and Cartography as Missionary Strategy
III. The Virgin Mary, Guanyin, and Kannon: Marian Devotion and Religious Syncretism
IV. The Arts, Visual Culture, and Music as Instruments of Evangelism
V. Trade, Commerce, and the Entanglement of Mission and Empire
VI. The Chinese Rites Controversy, Suppression, and the Long Aftermath
Conclusion
Abstract
This text examines how the Jesuit strategy of accommodatio — the deliberate adaptation of Catholic Christianity to the prestige systems, intellectual norms, and material cultures of host societies — shaped the Jesuit encounter with East Asian civilisations in China and Japan across the period c. 1549–1742. Arguing that accommodatio was simultaneously the missions’ greatest asset and their fatal structural contradiction, the text traces the strategy’s operation across six thematic fields. It begins with the institutional architecture of accommodation as systematically designed by Alessandro Valignano, Michele Ruggieri, and Matteo Ricci — whose archival correspondence (ARSI, Jap.Sin.101) and foundational texts (Ricci and Trigault 1615; Valignano 1583) establish the strategy’s theoretical basis and practical implementation in both Japan and China. It then analyses the deployment of Western science, mathematics, and cartography as the primary currency of elite access: from Ricci and Xu Guangqi’s translation of Euclid’s Elements (1607) and Schall von Bell’s eclipse prediction of 1644 to the Kangxi Atlas (1708–1718), which Cams (Imago Mundi, 2017) has reinterpreted as a Qing imperial project rather than a Jesuit achievement. The third section addresses the figure of the Virgin Mary as a site of complex and uncontrolled cultural negotiation — from the Guanyin conflation at Zhaoqing (1583) to the Maria Kannon created by Japan’s hidden Christians after 1614, which Shin (Church History, 2011) has analysed as a distinctly Japanese Catholic creation. The text proceeds to examine the arts — tracing the trajectory from Ricci’s diplomatic gift of Western clocks and instruments to the Wanli Emperor through to Castiglione’s fifty-one-year career as court painter under three Qing emperors — before turning to the commercial entanglement of the mission with the Macau–Nagasaki silk trade (documented in Dias 1610, ARSI) and, finally, to the Chinese Rites Controversy, whose definitive condemnation in 1742 brought the Ricci-era mission to its institutional end. The conclusion argues that the strategy’s failure was inseparable from its ambition, and that the Vatican decree of 1939 reversing the 1742 condemnation constitutes a belated historical vindication of the Jesuit position. Throughout, the text foregrounds the agency of Chinese and Japanese actors in shaping the terms of the encounter, following the historiographical reorientation urged by Cams, Rule, and Mungello.
Introduction
The Society of Jesus, founded in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola, was from the outset a missionary enterprise of a distinctive institutional character. Unlike the mendicant orders that had preceded it, the Society was shaped by what John W. O’Malley has described as a fundamental orientation as contemplatives in action — a formulation whose intellectual genealogy lies directly in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, composed between c. 1540 and 1556.[1] The Constitutions established the principle of ‘finding God in all things’ as the theological foundation for Jesuit engagement with secular learning, encompassing the sciences, mathematics, cartography, and the arts — disciplines that would prove, in the context of China and Japan, not incidental but constitutive of the entire missionary project.[2] To understand the history of the Jesuit encounter with East Asia is therefore to understand that the missions were never straightforwardly spiritual enterprises: they were simultaneously scientific, cultural, artistic, commercial, and political, and their ultimate fate was determined as much by the logic of those entanglements as by the theological decisions of Rome.
The symbolic point of departure for the Jesuit encounter with East Asia is the figure of Francis Xavier (1506–1552), co-founder of the Society, who led the first mission to Japan in 1549 and died on the island of Shangchuan on 3 December 1552 — within sight of the Chinese coast, having been unable to enter the mainland.[3] Xavier’s letters from Japan, preserved in the Monumenta Xaveriana, document both the extraordinary potential he perceived in East Asian evangelism and the structural barriers — linguistic, diplomatic, and political — that would condition every subsequent Jesuit effort. His death on the threshold of China gave the mission a founding mythology of frustrated ambition that the Jesuits who followed him were explicitly tasked with resolving. That resolution came through the Portuguese colonial entrepôt of Macau, whose role in the Jesuit enterprise cannot be overstated. As Tang Kaijian has demonstrated, drawing on the First Historical Archive of China and the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Catholicism would not have existed in China in any sustained form without Macau as its indispensable legal gateway.[4] The creation of the Diocese of Macau by Pope Gregory XIII in 1576, and the subsequent establishment of St Paul’s College (Colégio de São Paulo) as the first Western-style university in East Asia, gave the mission an institutional infrastructure from which Chinese language training and the formation of missionaries were conducted under the auspices of the Portuguese Padroado.[5]
The central argument of this text is that the Jesuit strategy of accommodatio — the deliberate cultural adaptation of Christian teaching, appearance, and practice to the prestige systems of the host society — was simultaneously the mission’s greatest intellectual achievement and its fatal structural contradiction. In China, accommodatio generated scientific, cartographic, and artistic achievements of world-historical significance, enabling access to successive imperial courts that no other Christian body had attained; yet it rested on an unresolved ambiguity about the compatibility of Christianity and Confucian rites that Rome would ultimately refuse to tolerate. In Japan, the same strategy produced one of the most rapid and extensive Christianisation processes in early modern global history, before provoking a persecution so thorough that it forced Christianity underground for approximately two and a half centuries. In both contexts, the strategy’s success was inseparable from its contradictions: the deeper the accommodation, the more difficult it became to distinguish the Christian message from the cultural forms in which it had been embedded. This text traces that arc across six thematic fields — the institutional architecture of accommodation; the deployment of Western science, mathematics, and cartography as missionary strategy; the complex dynamics of religious syncretism generated by Marian devotion; the use of the arts and music as instruments of evangelism; the commercial entanglement of the mission with Iberian trade networks; and, finally, the Chinese Rites Controversy, whose definitive condemnation in 1742 brought the Ricci-era mission to its institutional end. Throughout, the text foregrounds the agency of Chinese and Japanese actors, following the historiographical reorientation that has collectively shifted the field from a mission-history genre centred on European initiative to a cross-cultural history in which Asian interlocutors shaped, appropriated, and transformed the terms of the encounter.[6]
I. The Architecture of Accommodation: Ruggieri, Ricci, and Valignano
The strategy of accommodatio was not an improvised response to circumstance but a systematically theorised and institutionally enforced policy, developed within the Jesuit visitatorial hierarchy across two distinct but convergent cultural encounters: Alessandro Valignano’s engagement with Japan and, under his direction, Michele Ruggieri’s and Matteo Ricci’s penetration of the Chinese mainland. What united the efforts of all three was a single, counterintuitive strategic premise: that the missionaries must subordinate their European cultural identity to the prestige systems of the host society, presenting themselves not as bearers of a superior civilisation but as learned men who had come to understand and engage with an intellectual tradition they respected. This premise, far from being culturally relativist in any modern sense, was entirely instrumental — a means of gaining the elite access without which evangelism among the influential classes was impossible.
The figure most often elided from accounts of the China mission is Michele Ruggieri SJ (1543–1607), who was in fact its true pioneer. A protégé of Valignano, Ruggieri arrived in Macau in 1579 and made repeated trips to Guangzhou and Zhaoqing between 1579 and 1582, establishing contacts with local mandarins before finally settling in Zhaoqing in 1583 alongside Ricci at the invitation of Governor Wang Pan. His letters to the Superior General Claudio Acquaviva — written from Macao on 14 December 1582 and from Zhaoqing on 7 February 1583, preserved in ARSI, Jap.Sin.101, and published in Tacchi Venturi’s 1913 edition of the Ricci sources — provide the earliest first-hand documentation of these negotiations with Chinese officialdom.[7] In 1584, Ruggieri published the Tianzhu shilu (天主實錄, ‘True Account of God’), the first Chinese-language catechism — and the first book written in Chinese by a European — of which 1,200 copies were printed and only two now survive. Together with Ricci, he also compiled the first Portuguese–Chinese dictionary between 1583 and 1588, a manuscript lost in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, rediscovered in 1934, and published only in 2001.[8] Ruggieri’s contribution to the intellectual groundwork of the mission — his establishment of the linguistic and diplomatic infrastructure on which Ricci would build — has been consistently undervalued in an historiographical tradition that has tended to organise the China mission around its most famous name.
Matteo Ricci SJ (1552–1610) remains, notwithstanding this correction, the most consequential figure in the history of the China mission. Trained at the Collegio Romano under the mathematician-astronomer Christopher Clavius SJ, Ricci entered the Chinese mainland in 1583 and spent the remainder of his life in China, dying in Beijing in 1610.[9] His initial strategy of presenting himself as a Buddhist monk was abandoned in a decisive shift after he recognised that the literati class held far greater social prestige than Buddhist monks, and that access to the Confucian intellectual elite demanded Confucian self-presentation. He subsequently adopted the dress, titles, and intellectual mores of a mandarin scholar, engaging Chinese interlocutors on their own terms: in their own language, through their own literary and philosophical references, and with a command of classical Chinese texts that commanded genuine admiration.[10] By 1601, Ricci had become the first Western missionary to be invited to meet the Wanli Emperor in Beijing; by his death in 1610, he had left behind approximately 2,500 Chinese converts, a significant proportion of them from the educated classes. The primary account of the mission — Ricci and Trigault’s De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu (Augsburg, 1615) — is itself a document of dual character: simultaneously the most important first-hand record of the China mission and a product of Jesuit editorial policy, shaped by Trigault’s posthumous redaction of Ricci’s Italian journals to serve the order’s institutional interests before a European readership.[11]
In Japan, the institutional architecture of accommodation was designed not by the missionaries themselves but by Valignano (1539–1606), who as Visitador of all Jesuit missions in Asia from 1571 imposed it with the authority of the visitatorial office. Visiting Japan three times — in 1579–1582, 1590–1592, and 1598–1603 — Valignano developed a systematic strategy that required missionaries to position themselves at the level of Zen Buddhist monks (bonzes), the most prestigious religious class in Japanese society, and to acquire Japanese language, customs, and etiquette to a standard sufficient to engage with the daimyō class on its own terms. He formalised this strategy in the Advertimentos e avisos acerca dos costumes e catangues de Jappão (1583), preserved in ARSI, Jap. Sin. 64 — the foundational institutional document of the Japan accommodation programme.[12] His most celebrated practical expression of that programme was the Tenshō Embassy (1582–1590): four young Japanese Christian converts from the Arima seminary were sent on a carefully orchestrated tour of Europe, received by Philip II of Spain and by Popes Gregory XIII and Sixtus V, and returned to Japan in 1590 as living demonstrations of the compatibility of Japanese Christianity with the highest circles of European power.[13] The convergence between Valignano’s Japanese strategy and the approach developed simultaneously by Ruggieri and Ricci in China was not coincidental: it was the product of a shared Jesuit visitatorial philosophy that sought, in both contexts, to transform the social and intellectual terms on which missionaries engaged with Asian elites.
II. Science, Mathematics, and Cartography as Missionary Strategy
If the accommodation strategy required the Jesuits to present themselves as learned men worthy of elite intellectual engagement, the question immediately arose of what form that learning should take. The answer, developed most fully in the China mission, was unambiguous: Western science — mathematics, astronomy, calendar reform, cartography, and precision instrument-making — would serve as the primary currency of intellectual exchange and the principal means by which the Jesuits secured and maintained access to the imperial court. This was not a strategic afterthought but a direct application of the Ignatian principle of ‘finding God in all things’ to the specific cultural requirement that the Chinese literati class be impressed by demonstrably practical and intellectually rigorous knowledge. Between 1580 and 1800, the Jesuits translated over 130 European scientific titles into Chinese, of which approximately 67 per cent pertained to astronomy and approximately 15 per cent to mathematics.[14] This constituted one of the most systematic and consequential cross-cultural transfers of scientific knowledge in the early modern world — and it was, in its entirety, a missionary project.
The most celebrated single instance of this scientific exchange was Ricci’s collaboration with the scholar-convert Xu Guangqi (徐光啟, baptismal name Paul) in translating the first six books of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry into Chinese, completed in 1607 under the title Jihe Yuanben (几何原本), a manuscript now held in the Beijing National Library.[15] The work introduced Western deductive mathematical reasoning into China for the first time, and its theological dimension was far from incidental: the sphere was employed throughout as an emblem of divine perfection, threading mathematical and theological argument together in a manner that made the translation simultaneously a scientific and an evangelical document. Xu Guangqi himself — subsequently a Vice-Minister of the Board of Rites under the Ming and the most influential Chinese Catholic of the first mission period — was drawn into the Catholic intellectual orbit in part through this engagement with Western mathematical method. The collaboration exemplifies what Mungello has characterised as genuine intellectual exchange rather than one-directional knowledge transfer: Xu brought indispensable linguistic and philosophical expertise, and the resulting Chinese text bore the imprint of both traditions.
The astronomical dimension of Jesuit scientific activity reached its most dramatic expression in the careers of Johann Adam Schall von Bell SJ (1592–1666) and Ferdinand Verbiest SJ (1623–1688), who served successively as directors of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy under the early Qing. On 1 September 1644, Schall predicted a solar eclipse to the minute — surpassing the calculations of both traditional Chinese astronomers and Muslim astronomers by thirty minutes and a full hour respectively — a demonstration of precision that prompted the Shunzhi Emperor to appoint him director of the Bureau. Schall’s account of these events, together with his subsequent imprisonment during the anti-Christian regency of 1664–1665, is preserved in his Historica Relatio (1672) — a first-person Latin narrative composed in captivity and subsequently published in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu series — which constitutes the most important primary source for the ‘Battle of the Astronomers’ and its aftermath.[16] After Schall’s death, Verbiest succeeded as director of the Imperial Observatory, revised the monumental astronomical treatise Lingtai Yixiang Zhi (靈台儀象志, 1674), and cast the Manchu cannon series between 1682 and 1689, the inscriptions on which survive in examples held at Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome and the Veste Coburg in Germany.[17] In both cases, the Jesuits’ scientific service was simultaneously an evangelical strategy and a political entanglement: having embedded themselves within the institutional machinery of imperial power, they could neither withdraw without forfeiting their position nor advance without becoming more deeply enmeshed in the dynamics of Qing court politics.
The cartographic dimension of Jesuit scientific activity is perhaps the most visually arresting and historiographically contested aspect of the mission. Ricci produced a series of progressively refined world maps in Chinese, of which the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (坤舆萬國全圖, ‘Complete Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World’) of 1602 — six rice-paper copies of which survive, including one in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC — was the most significant.[18] Revolutionary for Chinese readers, the map introduced the spherical representation of the Earth, the concept of the Equator, the identification of poles, and the practice of locating geographical positions by latitude and longitude. Martino Martini SJ (1614–1661) extended this cartographic enterprise into the European context with the Novus Atlas Sinensis (Amsterdam: Joan Blaeu, 1655) — a seventeen-map, 171-page atlas that fundamentally reshaped Western understanding of China’s geography, drawing on Chinese sources unavailable to European geographers and held today in the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.[19]
The most ambitious cartographic undertaking of the mission was the Kangxi Atlas (皇舆全覽圖, 1708–1718), produced under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Régis and Pierre Jartoux through a nationwide geodetic survey of the Qing empire. In a critical reassessment published in Imago Mundi in 2017, Mario Cams demonstrates that previous scholarship had misrepresented the project as primarily European in origin, obscuring its Qing imperial foundations.[20] The commission was driven not by Jesuit scientific enthusiasm but by the Kangxi Emperor’s own strategic imperatives — made explicit by the 1686 imperial decree issued in the aftermath of the Qing military retaking of Taiwan. The multiple editions of the atlas (a Chinese woodblock copy presented to the Emperor in early 1718; a revised copperplate copy in 1719; a revised Chinese and Manchu woodblock copy in 1721) were subsequently transmitted to Europe, where they provided the cartographic foundation for d’Anville’s 1735 maps of China.[21] Cams’s corrective exemplifies the broader historiographical shift in the field: the Jesuit encounter with East Asia was not a European achievement that China passively received, but a collaboration shaped at every stage by the political and cultural priorities of its Asian interlocutors.
III. The Virgin Mary, Guanyin, and Kannon: Marian Devotion and Religious Syncretism
No dimension of the Jesuit accommodation strategy generated more complex and unintended consequences than the deployment of the Virgin Mary as a central figure of devotion in both China and Japan. Deliberately presented as the supreme model of womanly virtue — aligned with Confucian moral ideals of chastity, filial piety, obedience, and maternal devotion — Mary proved dangerously susceptible to conflation with existing Asian religious figures. In China, this conflation was initially accidental, subsequently managed; in Japan, it was ultimately deliberate and transformative. The trajectory from Ricci’s calculated removal of the Marian image at Zhaoqing in 1583 to the Kakure Kirishitan‘s creation of the Maria Kannon after 1614 encapsulates in concentrated form the entire arc of the accommodation strategy: a movement from controlled cultural negotiation to underground survival in which the missionaries themselves had largely lost the ability to determine the meanings their symbols generated.
The foundational episode in the history of Jesuit Marian devotion in China occurred at the Xianhua Si (仙花寺, ‘Fresh Flowers Temple’) in Zhaoqing in 1583, when Ricci and Ruggieri — both still wearing Buddhist monk’s robes — hung a painting of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus on the wall of their chapel. The response of Chinese visitors was immediate and revealing: the Madonna was identified with the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin (觀音), the goddess of mercy, while the infant Jesus was effectively ignored as a marginal figure.[22] The episode is documented in the Fonti Ricciane (ARSI, Rome) and constitutes the earliest recorded instance of the Guanyin-Mary conflation that would become one of the most persistent and analytically significant themes in the historiography of the China mission. Ricci’s response was decisive: he removed the Madonna painting and replaced it with an image of the adult Christ — a shift in Jesuit iconographic strategy that reflected a clear-sighted recognition that Marian imagery, however theologically central to Catholic devotion, created a visual ambiguity in the Chinese context that threatened to dissolve the very distinction between Christianity and Buddhism that the accommodation strategy was intended to maintain.
The longer-term management of the Guanyin-Mary conflation was neither uniform nor uncontested. As Gang has demonstrated in a comprehensive treatment published in Monumenta Serica in 2018, the Chinese encounter with the Virgin Mary across the seventh through seventeenth centuries was characterised by a complex layering of genuine theological interest, strategic appropriation, and syncretic conflation that the Jesuits simultaneously exploited and sought to control.[23] Two Jesuit missionaries made significant contributions to the Chinese Marian textual tradition: Gaspar Ferreira SJ (費奇規, 1571–1649), author of the Song Nianzhu Guicheng (念珠規程, ‘Rule for the Recitation of the Rosary’), and Diego de Pantoja SJ (龐迪我, 1571–1618), author of the Tianzhu Yesu Shounan Shimo (天主耶穌受難始末, ‘The Passion of the Lord Jesus’) — texts that anchored Marian devotion within distinctly Christian theological frameworks rather than leaving it available for Buddhist appropriation.[24]
In Japan, the relationship between Marian devotion and indigenous religious culture took a radically different form, shaped not by the conditions of court patronage but by the exigencies of underground survival under lethal persecution. After the Tokugawa ban of 1614 and the ferocious persecution that followed — including execution by crucifixion, dismemberment, and the ana-tsurushi (the practice of hanging suspects by their feet over a pit) — approximately 300,000 Japanese Christians were driven underground.[25] Without priests, sacraments, or access to written texts, these Kakure Kirishitan (‘Hidden Christians’) preserved their faith across approximately 250 years in a form that was necessarily transformed by the conditions of its concealment. The annual fumi-e test — the institutional requirement to trample images of Christ or the Virgin Mary to prove non-Christian identity — was administered routinely by the Tokugawa shogunate from the 1620s onwards, and refusal meant death.[26] It was within this context that the most distinctive material artefact of the entire Jesuit encounter with East Asia was produced: the Maria Kannon (マリア観音), a devotional image of the Virgin Mary deliberately modelled on the Buddhist deity Kannon (Avalokiteśvara), created to allow the Kakure Kirishitan to venerate the Virgin while passing the fumi-e test.
Junhyoung Michael Shin’s analysis in Church History (2011) argues that the visual conflation of Mary and Kannon was not an accidental process of syncretic drift but the product of deliberate Jesuit missionary strategy under persecution: an adaptation the Society had itself initiated as a means of preserving Catholic devotional practice in conditions where its open expression was fatal.[27] The figure of Mary thereby acquired an extraordinary double significance in the Japanese Catholic story — simultaneously the object of forced apostasy and the secret object of veneration, carried across two and a half centuries of underground practice in a form indistinguishable, to the uninitiated eye, from standard Buddhist devotional imagery.[28] When the prohibition on Roman Catholicism began to ease in the mid-nineteenth century and Ōura Cathedral in Nagasaki was completed in 1864–65, approximately 20,000 Kakure Kirishitan revealed themselves within the year.[29] The Maria Kannon is thus not a symbol of the failure of the accommodation strategy: it is, rather, its most remarkable and enduring product — an object that the Japanese Catholic community created for itself, in defiance of both the Tokugawa persecution and the conditions of the original Jesuit mission, and that outlasted both by two and a half centuries. The capacity of the accommodation strategy to generate devotional forms that exceeded and ultimately escaped the missionaries’ control was nowhere more dramatically illustrated — and it is that capacity, as much as the strategy’s institutional achievements, that the following section continues to trace in the domain of the visual and performing arts.
IV. The Arts, Visual Culture, and Music as Instruments of Evangelism
The deployment of Western European visual art and music as missionary instruments was, from the outset of the China mission, a natural extension of the accommodatio strategy: if access to the Chinese and Japanese elite was to be maintained through the demonstration of knowledge and cultural sophistication, then Western figurative art — painting, perspective, portraiture, precision instrument-making — offered a form of cultural gift that was simultaneously novel, technically impressive, and capable of opening diplomatic doors that religious argument alone could not. As Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s comprehensive study of Jesuit art in Asia and Latin America (1999) establishes, the systematic use of visual arts was not an individual entrepreneurial decision by particular missionaries but a calculated institutional strategy, integrated from the 1580s onwards into the broader apparatus of accommodatio as the Society understood it.[30] In China, this strategy began with Ricci’s gifts of Western clocks, images, and precision instruments to Chinese officials, which attracted elite interest and opened doors to court access that theological arguments alone could never have unlocked.[31] Its most fully realised institutional expression, however, came over a century later in the career of Giuseppe Castiglione SJ (1688–1766), whose fifty-one years at the Qing court transformed the artistic dimensions of the accommodation strategy into something the Jesuits had not anticipated: a form of imperial service so deeply integrated into Qing court culture that its evangelical function had become almost entirely subordinate to its artistic and political one.
Born in Milan on 19 July 1688 and trained under masters including Carlo Cornara and Andrea Pozzo, Castiglione entered the Society of Jesus in Genoa in 1707 and arrived in Macau in August 1715 before proceeding to Beijing, where he served as court painter to three successive Qing emperors — Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong — for fifty-one years until his death in Beijing on 17 July 1766.[32] The Kangxi Emperor had explicitly requested Jesuit specialists not merely in astronomy and cartography but in ‘optical perspective, painting, mechanics, clock making, medicine, enamelling and topographical projections’ — a formulation that reveals the breadth of the court’s appetite for Western technical and artistic expertise, and the degree to which the Jesuits had positioned themselves as the primary European mediators of that expertise.[33] Castiglione painted in a distinctive fusion style: Western linear perspective and chiaroscuro, in a deliberately subdued form adapted to Chinese aesthetic preferences, combined with Chinese themes, subjects, and compositional conventions. His major works — One Hundred Horses, Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor in Court Robes, Ten Fine Hounds, The Qianlong Emperor’s Grand Military Review, and Ten Complete Military Achievements (十全武功圖), held in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and the National Palace Museum, Taipei — are neither straightforwardly Western nor straightforwardly Chinese: they are hybrid objects that bear the imprint of the encounter they represent.[34]
The analytical significance of Castiglione’s career for the history of accommodatio lies precisely in this hybridity’s institutional trajectory. By the Qianlong era (r. 1735–1796), Castiglione was producing imperial propaganda — battle scenes, hunting scenes, portraits of military campaigns — that had no discernible evangelical function. He was posthumously granted the title of Vice Minister — an honour without precedent for a Jesuit lay brother in China — not for his religious witness but for fifty-one years of service to the Qing state.[35] The accommodation to imperial aesthetic taste had, in the visual arts, become indistinguishable from service to the Qing political order. This is not a failure of strategy but its logical terminus: once the Jesuits had made themselves indispensable to an imperial patron through cultural service, the patron’s requirements increasingly determined the form and content of that service. The deep reciprocity that Mungello identifies as characteristic of the broader Sino-European encounter is visible here in its most compressed form: the Jesuit gave the Qing court Western perspective; the Qing court returned Chinese subject matter; the result belonged fully to neither tradition.[36]
The musical dimension of Jesuit cultural activity, though less extensively documented in the secondary literature, followed a parallel trajectory. Ricci’s presentation of the first clavichord to the Wanli Emperor inaugurated a tradition of European musical performance at the Chinese court that continued through the Qing dynasty, with the Kangxi Emperor subsequently requesting further European music and musical instruction.[37] As with the visual arts, the Jesuits served here as cultural intermediaries rather than direct evangelists: the clavichord’s utility lay not in the religious content of the music it produced but in the curiosity and goodwill it generated among an elite audience whose continued patronage was the precondition of the mission’s survival. The musical and artistic dimensions of the mission thus illustrate, with particular clarity, a tension that ran through the entire accommodation strategy: the deeper the cultural integration, the more difficult it became to distinguish Jesuit service from Qing imperial service. It was, moreover, precisely this cultural embeddedness — and the commercial entanglement that underwrote it — that made the Society’s critics within the Church most suspicious of its East Asian operations, as the following section demonstrates.
V. Trade, Commerce, and the Entanglement of Mission and Empire
No feature of the Jesuit missions in East Asia has generated more sustained analytical discomfort than their inextricable entanglement with the structures of Iberian commercial empire. The Jesuit missions in China and Japan were not merely spiritually motivated enterprises: they were financially dependent on and operationally embedded within a network of Portuguese trade that included, most consequentially, the Macau–Nagasaki silk-and-silver trade known as the Carreira do Japão (‘Voyage of Japan’). That entanglement was not incidental to the mission’s history but constitutive of it — a structural feature that shaped every dimension of Jesuit activity in East Asia, from the terms on which they gained access to Asian courts to the accusations of greed and worldliness levelled against them by rival orders, and from the political leverage they enjoyed with daimyō who valued them as commercial intermediaries to the precariousness of their position whenever those commercial ties shifted.[38]
The mechanism of the commercial entanglement is documented with unusual directness in a primary source held in ARSI, Rome: a report written by Manoel Dias SJ to the Superior General Claudio Acquaviva on 18 April 1610, titled Informação da armação ou contrato da companhia em que os moradores de Amacao mandão a sua çeda ao Japão. This document describes in explicit detail the price-fixing agreement (armação) by which Jesuit-affiliated merchants of Macau controlled the silk market in Japan, establishing fixed prices before Portuguese ships entered Japanese harbours.[39] The Jesuits’ involvement in this arrangement was publicly known and officially sanctioned — and was bitterly attacked by the Franciscans and Dominicans as incompatible with the evangelical vocation, constituting one of the sharpest intra-Catholic disputes of the period. Pedro Omar Svriz-Wucherer’s recent study of Jesuit involvement in Asian goods across the Iberian empires, reviewed in the Journal of Jesuit Studies in 2024, represents the most comprehensive treatment of this commercial dimension, drawing on archival sources across Lisbon, Rome, and Seville to reconstruct the full scope of Jesuit commercial entanglement.[40]
The structural logic of the trade entanglement is best understood by situating it within the political economy of East Asia. Chinese trade with Japan had been formally prohibited following the wakō piracy raids of the mid-sixteenth century, leaving the Portuguese — operating through Macau and the Jesuits — as the only legal intermediaries between the two greatest East Asian economies for over a century. The resulting triangular commerce, exchanging Chinese silk and gold for Japanese silver, was not merely lucrative for the Portuguese but strategically indispensable to China’s fiscal system: after Zhang Juzheng’s Single Whip Law (一條鞭法, 1581) made silver the only acceptable form of Ming tax payment, domestic demand for the metal became effectively insatiable, and the Portuguese-Jesuit commercial position was transformed from a convenient entrepôt function into a structural necessity.[41] This placed the Jesuits, whether they wished it or not, in a position of structural leverage within the Chinese and Japanese political economies that theological accommodation alone could never have achieved.[42]
In Japan, the commercial entanglement of the mission was most directly apparent in the relationship between conversion and trade. Christianity spread with remarkable speed among daimyō who explicitly associated conversion with access to the Portuguese trade: Boxer documents the perception, widespread among the Japanese ruling class, that the faith was an important link with valuable European commerce — a calculus that drove conversion rates that would have been inconceivable on purely theological grounds.[43] Within approximately thirty years of Xavier’s landing, the number of Japanese Christians stood at an estimated 130,000; over the subsequent century, estimates in the secondary literature approach half a million.[44] The consequences of this commercial-evangelical entanglement became tragically visible in the execution of the Twenty-Six Martyrs on Nishizaka Hill, Nagasaki, on 5 February 1597. The group comprised six Spanish Franciscans, three Japanese Jesuits — including Paul Miki, James Kisai, and John de Goto — and seventeen Japanese Third Order members. Thomas Kozaki’s letter to his mother, written in 1596–97 and preserved in Japan, constitutes the most significant personal testimony of this episode.[45] Critically, the Jesuits had initially been spared: Hideyoshi’s aide Mitsunari persuaded him to exclude them, reflecting the diplomatic calculus in which Jesuit commercial relationships made them more politically valuable than the Franciscans, whose more confrontational missionary style offered none of the trade connections that gave the Jesuits their structural protection. The commercial entanglement of the mission had, in this instance, literally saved Jesuit lives — while those who lacked it died for that deficiency.[46]
The collapse of the Japan mission after 1614 and the progressive erosion of Jesuit influence in China after 1700 are both, in part, consequences of the vulnerabilities the commercial entanglement created. In Japan, the Tokugawa shogunate’s decision to expel all missionaries and ban Christianity was driven not only by religious anxiety but by the strategic calculation that the political and commercial power the Jesuits had accumulated through their trade connections made them a destabilising presence. In China, the accusations of worldliness levelled at the Jesuits by Dominican and Franciscan rivals — accusations that found institutional expression in Rome’s eventual condemnation of the Jesuit accommodation in 1742 — were inseparable from the perception that the Society had become too deeply embedded in the structures of secular power to be trusted as disinterested interpreters of Catholic doctrine. The commercial entanglement was, in this sense, the material substrate of the theological controversy: the Jesuits’ intimate relationship with imperial power and Iberian trade gave their theological positions a political colouring that rendered them easier to condemn. It is to that controversy, and to the long institutional aftermath it set in motion, that this text now turns.
VI. The Chinese Rites Controversy, Suppression, and the Long Aftermath
The Chinese Rites Controversy (c. 1582–1742) was the point at which the fundamental ambiguity within the accommodation strategy — the question of where inculturation ended and syncretism began — was forced to a resolution by the institutional authority of Rome. The controversy had been latent in the Ricci method from the outset: if Confucian rites could be tolerated as civic rather than religious acts, as the Jesuits argued, then the boundary between Christian practice and Chinese cultural observance was porous in a way that their Dominican and Franciscan critics refused to accept. The controversy’s resolution in 1742, under Benedict XIV’s definitive condemnation, was not simply a theological judgment but a political act with institutional consequences that effectively destroyed the framework of the first Jesuit mission to China. Yet its long aftermath — culminating in a Vatican reversal of that condemnation in 1939 — suggests that the Jesuits’ position had been, in broad terms, historically vindicated, even as the institution that had held it lay two centuries in the past.[47]
The substance of the controversy turned on the question of Confucian ancestor veneration and ceremonies honouring Confucius: were these religious practices incompatible with Christianity, as the Dominicans and Franciscans maintained, or merely secular civic observances that Chinese Christians could participate in without theological compromise, as the Jesuits argued? The Jesuit position — first systematically articulated by Ricci and subsequently defended by successive generations of China missionaries — was not merely self-serving but rested on a genuine and sophisticated analysis of the functional character of Confucian ritual within Chinese social life, an analysis informed by an intimate acquaintance with Chinese cultural practice that the mendicant critics lacked.[48] The controversy embroiled leading European universities, was submitted to eight successive popes, and engaged the Kangxi Emperor himself, who issued a counter-decree expelling missionaries who refused to sign a certificate accepting the Ricci method — transforming what had begun as an intra-Catholic theological dispute into a crisis of Qing imperial sovereignty.[49] The Sacred Congregation sided with the Dominicans in 1645, then with the Jesuits in 1656, then issued a definitive ban under Clement XI in 1704 (reinforced by papal bull in 1715), and finally reaffirmed the condemnation under Benedict XIV in 1742. Rule’s survey summarises the implications with precision: the 1742 decree put to a definitive end not only the century-long controversy, but also the China mission initiated by Matteo Ricci.[50]
The Kangxi Emperor’s response to the papal legate’s rejection of ancestor veneration illuminates the political stakes of the controversy with particular clarity. His counter-decree — expelling all missionaries who refused to sign a certificate accepting the Ricci method — revealed that the accommodation strategy had, over the course of a century, become not merely a Jesuit pastoral position but a recognised instrument of Qing imperial cultural policy.[51] By rejecting it, Rome was not merely overruling the Jesuits’ theological judgment but repudiating a position the Kangxi Emperor had himself endorsed, and doing so in a manner the Emperor experienced as an assertion of papal sovereignty over his own court. The political and the theological were, by this point, inseparable: the Rites Controversy ended the China mission not only because it condemned the accommodation strategy but because that condemnation forced the Qing court to choose between the papal position and the Jesuit position. The Kangxi Emperor’s choice — in favour of the Jesuits and against Rome — made the mission’s institutional survival in China contingent on a papal reversal that was not forthcoming.
The suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, under the breve Dominus ac Redemptor of Clement XIV — driven partly by the aftermath of the Rites Controversy and partly by the broader political pressures of the Bourbon monarchies of France, Spain, and Portugal — completed the institutional collapse begun in 1742. Jesuit scientific activity at the Beijing Observatory continued until at least 1805, outlasting the formal suppression by over three decades and demonstrating the degree to which the Jesuits had made themselves structurally indispensable to the Qing court in ways that survived even their own institutional dissolution.[52] The Society’s restoration by Pope Pius VII in 1814 inaugurated a second phase of the China mission, centred on the Jiangnan region and anchored at Zikawei (Xujiahui 徐家匯) in Shanghai. Claude Gotteland SJ’s purchase in 1847 of land near the tomb of Xu Guangqi — Ricci’s great scholarly collaborator — was a gesture of deliberate historical continuity: the restored mission explicitly anchored itself to the memory of the first mission’s most eminent Chinese convert. Between 1852 and 1950, more than 1,100 foreign Jesuits came to China, and the Zikawei compound — comprising the Bibliotheca Zi-ka-wei (1851, now the Xujiahui Library of Shanghai), St Ignatius College (1850), the Observatory of Zikawei (1871), and the Tushanwan Orphanage — became the most significant institutional expression of Jesuit presence in China in the modern era.[53]
The figure who best encapsulates both the persistence and the continuing instability of the Jesuit tradition of science as mission is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ (1881–1955). Sent to China in 1923 in what amounted to a de facto exile — his superiors having forbidden him to teach after his writings on evolution and original sin were deemed heterodox — Teilhard spent substantial periods in China between 1923 and 1946, returning to Europe repeatedly but conducting his most significant scientific work in the field. His letters from the Ordos in 1923, preserved in the Teilhard–Dubalen Collection at Georgetown University Library, and his letter to Pierre Leroy SJ of 4 April 1955, held in the Pierre Leroy SJ Papers at the same institution, document both the intellectual vitality and the institutional frustration that characterised his Chinese years.[54] His participation in the discovery of Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) at Zhoukoudian in December 1929 placed him at the centre of one of the most significant palaeontological discoveries of the twentieth century; his composition in China of Le Milieu divin (1927) and Le Phénomène humain (completed 1938; published posthumously 1955) — both forbidden by his superiors to publish during his lifetime — demonstrated that the tension between accommodation to secular knowledge and institutional Catholic orthodoxy, which had been the central tension of the original Ricci mission, remained unresolved more than three centuries after Ricci’s death. The Holy Office’s 1962 monitum warning that Teilhard’s works were replete with errors offending Catholic doctrine stands as a structural repetition of the 1742 condemnation: in both cases, the Church’s institutional authority ultimately refused the terms on which the Jesuits had sought to reconcile Christianity with the intellectual prestige systems of their host cultures.
The long-term historical judgment on the Rites Controversy has not, however, sustained Rome’s 1742 position. A Vatican decree of 8 December 1939 — nearly two centuries after Benedict XIV’s condemnation — authorised Chinese Christians to participate in Confucian ancestor rites, reversing the central finding of the 1742 decision and implicitly vindicating the Jesuit position that had been condemned by it.[55] This reversal does not rehabilitate the first China mission: the institution it had condemned was long dead, and the Chinese Catholic community that benefited from the 1939 decree was the product of the restored mission rather than the Ricci-era enterprise. It does, however, confirm that the Jesuits’ fundamental analytical position — that Confucian rites were civic rather than religious in character, and could therefore be tolerated by Chinese Christians without theological compromise — was ultimately judged correct by the same institution that had condemned it. The irony is sharp: the accommodation strategy that Rome destroyed in 1742 was vindicated by Rome in 1939, in time to benefit a mission two centuries removed from the one whose destruction it had caused.
Conclusion
The Jesuit encounter with East Asia in the period c. 1549–1742 was one of the most consequential episodes in the global history of cross-cultural religious encounter, and its significance cannot be adequately captured by the categories of success or failure that the historiographical tradition has too often imposed upon it. The accommodatio strategy — the systematic adaptation of Christian practice, appearance, and intellectual content to the prestige systems of Chinese and Japanese host societies — was, as this text has argued, simultaneously the missions’ greatest achievement and their fatal structural contradiction. It generated intellectual products of world-historical significance: the translation of Euclid’s Elements into Chinese, the reform of the imperial calendar, the geodetic mapping of the Qing empire, the creation of a distinctively Sino-European tradition in the visual arts, and the cultivation of elite converts whose engagement with the mission produced a body of Chinese Christian literature whose depth and sophistication has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. Yet each of these achievements entailed an entanglement — with imperial patronage, with Iberian commercial infrastructure, with the aesthetic demands of Qing court culture — that made the mission permanently vulnerable to political shifts and that generated, within the mission itself, an instability about the boundary between inculturation and syncretism that Rome ultimately refused to allow the Jesuits to manage on their own terms.[56]
A central finding of this text is that the history of the Jesuit encounter with East Asia cannot be told adequately as a story of European initiative and Asian reception. At every stage of the mission’s history, Chinese and Japanese actors shaped, appropriated, and transformed the terms of the encounter in ways the missionaries neither anticipated nor controlled.[57] The Kangxi Emperor’s strategic deployment of Jesuit cartographic expertise in the service of Qing military expansion, Xu Guangqi’s active co-authorship of the Jihe Yuanben, the Qianlong Emperor’s redirection of Castiglione’s artistic practice towards imperial propaganda, and the Kakure Kirishitan‘s creation of the Maria Kannon — all are instances of Asian agency transforming the outputs of the accommodation strategy into something the Jesuits had not designed. To read the mission as a European achievement is to misread the historical record; to read it as a European imposition is to misread it equally. It was, in Mungello’s formulation, a genuine encounter — one in which the power differential between European missionaries and Asian elites was far less absolute than the standard narrative of colonial-era Christianity assumes.
The figure of the Virgin Mary crystallises this text’s central paradox with unusual precision. The Marian image was simultaneously the object of forced apostasy in Japan — the image the Tokugawa authorities required their subjects to trample under foot in the fumi-e test — and the secret object of veneration, preserved in the form of the Maria Kannon across two and a half centuries of underground practice.[58] The accommodation strategy that the Jesuits had designed as a means of controlling the terms of cross-cultural encounter generated, in the Maria Kannon, a devotional form that escaped their control entirely — shaped by Japanese Catholic communities in response to conditions the Jesuits themselves had not survived, and persisting long after the institutional mission had been destroyed. The Maria Kannon is not, therefore, merely a curiosity of Japanese religious history: it is the most concentrated expression of the accommodation strategy’s deepest paradox — the moment at which the attempt to translate Christianity into Asian cultural forms produced something irreducibly new that was neither European Christianity nor Japanese Buddhism, but a third thing that the encounter itself had generated.
Across all six thematic fields examined in this text, the same structural dynamic recurs. Accommodatio was a strategy for maintaining Christian distinctiveness while engaging with non-Christian intellectual and cultural traditions on their own terms; yet the deeper and more successful the engagement, the more the Christian distinctiveness it was designed to preserve became entangled with the cultural forms through which it was expressed. The translation of Euclid became a document at once mathematical and theological; service at the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy became at once evangelical strategy and political entanglement; the Kangxi Atlas became at once a scientific achievement and an instrument of Qing imperial expansion; the Castiglione paintings became at once cross-cultural artistic exchange and imperial propaganda; the Macau silk trade became at once the mission’s financial lifeline and the source of its most damaging accusations. In each case, the accommodation generated a product whose meaning could not be stabilised by those who had produced it, because that meaning was shaped as much by the contexts of reception as by the intentions of creation.[59]
The Vatican decree of 8 December 1939 constitutes the belated historical judgment on the controversy that destroyed the first Ricci-era mission.[60] It implies that the Jesuits had been, in broad terms, analytically correct and that Rome had been, in broad terms, analytically wrong — not merely about the theology of Confucian ritual but about the fundamental question of how Christianity could be sustained within non-European cultural frameworks. The mission that Rome condemned in 1742 was, by that judgment, conducting the kind of contextualised evangelical practice that the Second Vatican Council would endorse two centuries later under the rubric of inculturation. The irony of that retrospective vindication is acute: the instrument Rome deployed to destroy the accommodation strategy was the same instrument it would eventually use, two centuries on, to endorse what the strategy had been attempting.
The material survivals of the Jesuit encounter with East Asia — the Zikawei Library of Shanghai, the Palace Museum’s holdings of Castiglione’s paintings, the six surviving copies of Ricci’s 1602 world map, the Manchu cannon inscriptions at Castel Sant’Angelo and the Veste Coburg, the Maria Kannon figures in Japanese museum collections, the fewer than one hundred Kakure Kirishitan who remained on the island of Ikitsuki, Nagasaki, at the time of writing — are not relics of a failed mission.[61] They are the residues of an encounter that transformed both Catholic history and East Asian intellectual life, leaving behind a body of scientific knowledge, artistic achievement, cartographic innovation, and devotional practice that the institutional suppression of 1742 could destroy in its organisational form but could not erase from the historical record. The Jesuit mission in East Asia did not fail in any simple sense: it produced intellectual and cultural achievements that outlasted the institution by centuries. Its failure was, in the most precise sense, a measure of its ambition — the deeper the accommodation to East Asian civilisations, the more it exceeded the capacity of any single institution, including the Society of Jesus itself, to control what it had set in motion.
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Manchu cannon series. 1682 and 1689. Cast under Ferdinand Verbiest SJ. Surviving examples: Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome; Veste Coburg, Germany. Inscriptions transcribed and translated in Stary (1994).
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De la Servière, Joseph SJ. 1914. Histoire de la Mission du Kiang-Nan. 2 vols. Zikawei, Shanghai.
B. Secondary Sources
Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. 1999. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Boxer, C. R. 1951. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Hsia, Florence C. 2009. Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hsia, R. Po-chia. 2010. A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Journal of Jesuit Studies. 2023. ‘Converting Zi-ka-wei: Angelo A. Zottoli, S.J. (Chao Deli 晁德蒙, 1826–1902) and His Mission in Shanghai.’ Journal of Jesuit Studies 10 (4): 640ff.
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Mungello, David E. 2009. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
O’Malley, John W. 2016. ‘The Distinctiveness of the Society of Jesus.’ Journal of Jesuit Studies 3 (1): 1–16.
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Spence, Jonathan D. 1984. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Penguin Books.
Stary, Giovanni. 1994. ‘The “Manchu Cannons” Cast by Ferdinand Verbiest and the Hitherto Unknown Manchu-Chinese Inscription.’ In Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat, edited by John W. Witek, 355–370. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag. [Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 30.]
Svriz-Wucherer, Pedro Omar. 2024. Jesuits and Asian Goods in the Iberian Empires. Reviewed in Journal of Jesuit Studies 11 (1): 173ff.
Tang Kaijian. 2016. Setting Off from Macau: Essays on Jesuit History During the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Leiden: Brill.
Vishnevskaya, Elena. 2023. ‘The Early Modern Jesuit Mission to China: A Marriage of Faith and Culture.’ Education About Asia. Association for Asian Studies.
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C. Key Archival Repositories for Further Research
Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome: all Jesuit correspondence, including Ricci, Ruggieri, Valignano, Schall; Jap.Sin. and Sin. series.
First Historical Archive of China (中国第一历史档案馆), Beijing: Qing court records relating to Jesuits; Kangxi survey materials.
Bibliotheca Zi-ka-wei (上海图書馆徐家汇藏书楼), Shanghai: restored mission archives; Zottoli manuscripts.
British Library, London: IOR/X/3265 (Kangxi Atlas); Martini’s Novus Atlas Sinensis.
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: Kangxi Atlas versions; Chinese Christian texts.
Georgetown University Library, Washington, DC: Teilhard de Chardin collections; Ricci Collection.
Ricci Institute, Taipei: Chinese Christian texts; Standaert & Dudink project.
Torre do Tombo, Lisbon: Carvalho Apologia; Padroado documents.
Notes
[1]John W. O’Malley, “The Distinctiveness of the Society of Jesus,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 1–16, at 1–5.
[2]Ignatius of Loyola, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, composed c. 1540–1556, trans. George E. Ganss SJ (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), preamble. The principle of “finding God in all things” is the doctrinal foundation that licensed Jesuit engagement with secular learning — science, mathematics, cartography, and the arts — as legitimate modes of evangelism.
[3]Francis Xavier, Letters from Japan (1549–1552), in Monumenta Xaveriana, vol. 1 (Madrid: Typis Augustini Avrial, 1899). For Xavier’s death on Shangchuan Island, see Georg Schurhammer SJ, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, 4 vols. (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973–1982), 4:609–622.
[4]Tang Kaijian, Setting Off from Macau: Texts on Jesuit History During the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 42–44.
[5]Tang Kaijian, Setting Off from Macau, 58–61. On the creation of the Diocese of Macau in 1576 by Pope Gregory XIII, see ibid., 46–50.
[6]David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 1–18; Paul Rule, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in China,” in Jesuit Historiography Online, ed. Robert Aleksander Maryks (Leiden: Brill, 2016). For a foundational orientation to the mission period, see R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–12.
[7]Michele Ruggieri SJ, letter to Claudio Acquaviva, 14 December 1582, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu [ARSI], Jap.Sin.101, published in Pietro Tacchi Venturi, ed., Opere storiche del P. Matteo Ricci S.I. (Macerata: Tipografia Pontificia, 1913), 407; Ruggieri, letter to Acquaviva, 7 February 1583, ARSI, Jap.Sin.101, in Tacchi Venturi (1913), 414.
[8]Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 51–53. On the Tianzhu shilu (1584), of which only two of the original 1,200 copies survive, see Tang Kaijian, Setting Off from Macau, 64–65.
[9]R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 42–46. On Ricci’s training under Christopher Clavius SJ at the Collegio Romano, see also Michela Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court, trans. Paul Metcalfe (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 18–24.
[10]Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 89–102. The transition from Buddhist monk’s robes to mandarin dress was not a single event but a gradual strategic repositioning that Ricci undertook between roughly 1594 and 1601, culminating in his adoption of the dress and mores of the Confucian literati class.
[11]Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu (Augsburg: Christoph Mangium, 1615); English translation: China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, trans. Louis J. Gallagher SJ (New York: Random House, 1953).
[12]Alessandro Valignano SJ, Advertimentos e avisos acerca dos costumes e catangues de Jappão (1583), ARSI, Jap. Sin. 64. On the strategic rationale — positioning Jesuits at the level of Zen Buddhist monks as the highest-prestige religious class — see Joseph Francis Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth-Century Japan (London: Routledge, 1993), 67–80.
[13]Alessandro Valignano SJ, Sumario de las cosas que pertenecen a la provincia de Jappon (1583), in Documentação para a história das missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, ed. António de Silva Rego (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1955). On the Tenshō Embassy (1582–90), see Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits, 101–125; and Laura Madella, “Japanese Manners Through the Eyes of a Late-Renaissance Jesuit: Alessandro Valignano’s Advertimentos of 1583,” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., 1, no. 2 (2025): 295–312.
[14]Chicheng Ma, “The Jesuits and Chinese Science” (working paper, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Hong Kong, 2019), 3. Ma’s figures derive from a systematic survey of missionary translation records held in the ARSI and the First Historical Archive of China.
[15]Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi, Jihe Yuanben 幾何原本 [Elements of Geometry] (Beijing, 1607), manuscript held in the Beijing National Library. On the theological and mathematical intertwining — the sphere as an emblem of divine perfection — see Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24–31.
[16]Johann Adam Schall von Bell SJ, Historica Relatio (1672), Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu series (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1672). The eclipse prediction of 1 September 1644 and Schall’s appointment as director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy are narrated in this first-person Latin account, which Schall composed while imprisoned in 1665. For the comparative precision figures — surpassing Chinese and Muslim astronomers by thirty minutes and a full hour respectively — see Ma, “The Jesuits and Chinese Science,” 4.
[17]Schall von Bell, Historica Relatio. On Verbiest’s revision of the astronomical treatise Lingtai Yixiang Zhi (靈台儀象志, 1674) and the casting of the Manchu cannon series (1682–1689), see Giovanni Stary, “The ‘Manchu Cannons’ Cast by Ferdinand Verbiest and the Hitherto Unknown Manchu-Chinese Inscription,” in Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat, ed. John W. Witek, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 30 (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994), 355–370. Surviving cannon are held at Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, and the Veste Coburg, Germany.
[18]The six surviving rice-paper copies of the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (坤舆萬國全圖, 1602) include one held in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. For the map’s introduction of the spherical Earth and geographic co-ordinate system to Chinese readers, see Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 132–140.
[19]Martino Martini SJ, Novus Atlas Sinensis (Amsterdam: Joan Blaeu, 1655), held in the British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
[20]Mario Cams, “Not Just a Jesuit Atlas of China: Qing Imperial Cartography and Its European Connections,” Imago Mundi 69, no. 2 (2017): 188–201, at 188–190. The principal editions of the Kangxi Atlas (皇舆全覽圖) — a Chinese woodblock copy (1718), a revised copperplate copy (1719), and a revised Chinese and Manchu woodblock copy (1721) — are held in the British Library (IOR/X/3265), the First Historical Archive of China (Beijing), and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
[21]Cams, “Not Just a Jesuit Atlas of China,” 196–198. On the broader relationship between Jesuit technical expertise and Qing imperial power, see Qi Han, “Cartography during the Times of the Kangxi Emperor: The Age and the Background,” in Jesuit Mapmaking in China: D’Anville’s Nouvelle Atlas de la Chine (1737), ed. Roberto M. Ribeiro and John W. O’Malley SJ (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2014), 51–62.
[22]Matteo Ricci, Fonti Ricciane (the Italian manuscript of Ricci’s journals, edited posthumously by Nicolas Trigault), ARSI, Rome. The chapel at Zhaoqing, the Xianhua Si (仙花寺, “Fresh Flowers Temple”), is the first documented site of sustained Jesuit missionary practice on the Chinese mainland.
[23]S. Gang, “The Many Faces of Our Lady: Chinese Encounters with the Virgin Mary between 7th and 17th Centuries,” Monumenta Serica 66, no. 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2018.1534355.
[24]Gaspar Ferreira SJ (費奇規, 1571–1649), Song Nianzhu Guicheng 念珠規程 [Rule for the Recitation of the Rosary], in Roman Malek, Collectanea Serica (2017), 234–235; Diego de Pantoja SJ (龐迪我, 1571–1618), Tianzhu Yesu Shounan Shimo 天主耶穌受難始末 [The Passion of the Lord Jesus], in Malek (2017), 421–422.
[25]On the Tokugawa ban of 1614 and the forms of persecution that followed — including crucifixion, dismemberment, and the ana-tsurushi (hanging by the feet over a pit) — see C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 316–345.
[26]The fumi-e test — the annual requirement to trample images of Christ or the Virgin Mary — was institutionalised by the Tokugawa shogunate from the 1620s onwards and administered routinely until the 1850s. Refusal constituted proof of Christian identity and was punishable by death. See Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 330–335.
[27]Junhyoung Michael Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary: The Jesuit Adaptation and the Visual Conflation in Japanese Catholicism after 1614,” Church History 80, no. 1 (2011): 1–39, at 14–22.
[28]Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary,” 26–35.
[29]Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 388–395. On the revelation of approximately 20,000 Kakure Kirishitan following the completion of Ōura Cathedral (Nagasaki) in 1864–65, see Ross, A Vision Betrayed, 218–222.
[30]Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 1–18.
[31]Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 132–136. Ricci’s Fonti Ricciane (ARSI, Rome) records the presentation of clocks and Western images as diplomatic gifts to Chinese officials from the mid-1580s; the clavichord gift to the Wanli Emperor is documented in Ricci and Trigault, De Christiana expeditione (1615), bk. 4.
[32]Elena Vishnevskaya, “The Early Modern Jesuit Mission to China: A Marriage of Faith and Culture,” Education About Asia (Association for Asian Studies, 2023). The Kangxi Emperor’s request for Jesuit specialists in “optical perspective, painting, mechanics, clock making, medicine, enamelling and topographical projections” is cited and contextualised in Vishnevskaya’s survey of the mission’s cultural dimensions.
[33]Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 97–118. On Castiglione’s training in Milan and Rome, his entry into the Society of Jesus in Genoa in 1707, and his arrival in Macau in August 1715, see also Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 215–218.
[34]Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 105–112. The major works — One Hundred Horses, Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor in Court Robes, Ten Fine Hounds, The Qianlong Emperor’s Grand Military Review, and Ten Complete Military Achievements (十全武功圖) — are held in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and the National Palace Museum, Taipei.
[35]Vishnevskaya, “The Early Modern Jesuit Mission to China.” On the posthumous conferral of the title of Vice Minister upon Castiglione — an honour without precedent for a Jesuit lay brother in China — see Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 113.
[36]Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 88–92.
[37]Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 157–160; Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 80–85.
[38]Tang Kaijian, Setting Off from Macau, 42–47. On the structural role of the Padroado agreement in embedding the Jesuits within Portuguese commercial and imperial infrastructure, see also Ross, A Vision Betrayed, 22–30.
[39]Manoel Dias SJ, Informação da armação ou contrato da companhia em que os moradores de Amacao mandão a sua çeda ao Japão, 18 April 1610, ARSI, Rome.
[40]Pedro Omar Svriz-Wucherer, Jesuits and Asian Goods in the Iberian Empires, rev. Benjamin Newth, Journal of Jesuit Studies 11, no. 1 (2024): 173–175.
[41]Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 98–115.
[42]Tang Kaijian, Setting Off from Macau, 88–96. On Zhang Juzheng’s Single Whip Law (一條鞭法, 1581) and the consequent Ming silver demand that made the Portuguese-Jesuit trade position structurally indispensable, see also Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 28–33.
[43]Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 68–72.
[44]Ma, “The Jesuits and Chinese Science,” 8–9, for the figure of approximately 130,000 Japanese Christians within thirty years of Xavier’s arrival. For estimates approaching half a million by the early seventeenth century, see Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 321.
[45]Thomas Kozaki, letter to his mother, 1596–97 (held in Japan; translated into multiple languages). On the Twenty-Six Martyrs, see Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 162–170. On Mitsunari’s intervention on commercial grounds, see Ross, A Vision Betrayed, 98–102.
[46]Ross, A Vision Betrayed, 103–108.
[47]Rule, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in China,” in Jesuit Historiography Online, ed. Robert Aleksander Maryks (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
[48]Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 104–118; Ross, A Vision Betrayed, 155–175.
[49]Rule, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in China.” The sequential Roman decisions — siding with the Dominicans in 1645, then with the Jesuits in 1656, then issuing the definitive ban under Clement XI in 1704 (reinforced by papal bull in 1715) — are documented in Rule’s survey with citation to the original papal instruments.
[50]Rule, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in China.” Rule’s formulation — that Benedict XIV’s 1742 condemnation “put to a definitive end not only the century-long controversy, but also the China Mission initiated by Matteo Ricci” — captures the decree’s double significance: simultaneously a theological judgment and an institutional termination.
[51]Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 119–122.
[52]“The Years of Jesuit Suppression, 1773–1814,” Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies 2, no. 1 (2020), ed. Sabine Pavone and Niccolò Guasti. The political pressures from the Bourbon monarchies of France, Spain, and Portugal that contributed to the suppression are treated comprehensively in this volume.
[53]Joseph SJ de la Servière, Histoire de la Mission du Kiang-Nan, 2 vols. (Zikawei, Shanghai, 1914). On the figure of 1,100 or more foreign Jesuits in China between 1852 and 1950, see Nicolas Standaert and R. G. Tiedemann, “China,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 10, no. 4 (2023): 640–658.
[54]Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, letter to Leontine Zanta from the Ordos, China, 1923, Teilhard–Dubalen Collection, Box 1, Folder 10, Georgetown University Library, Washington, DC; letter to Pierre Leroy SJ, 4 April 1955, Pierre Leroy SJ Papers, Georgetown University Library.
[55]The decree of 8 December 1939 authorising Chinese Christians to participate in Confucian ancestor rites is discussed in Rule, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in China,” and contextualised in Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 125–128.
[56]Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 3–15.
[57]Cams, “Not Just a Jesuit Atlas of China,” 198–201; Rule, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in China.”
[58]Shin, “Avalokiteśvara’s Manifestation as the Virgin Mary,” 35–39.
[59]Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1–18, 133–140.
[60]Rule, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in China”; Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 125–128.
[61]Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 395–400; Ross, A Vision Betrayed, 218–225.