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Chronicle of Foreign Lands
The Zhifang waiji (Chronicle of foreign lands) is a concise geography of the world, the first of its kind written in Chinese. The Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci produced a map of the world in Chinese in 1584. The map, which followed Western principles of cartography then unknown in China, underwent several revisions between 1584 and 1602. Ricci’s fellow priests Diego de Pantoja and Sabatino de Ursis were instructed by imperial order to compose a book explaining the map. Pantoja died in 1618 and the work eventually was completed ...
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Library of Congress
On Aristotle’s “On the Heavens”
In collaboration with the Chinese scholar Li Zhizao (1565–1630), Portuguese missionary Fu Fanji (Francisco Furtado, 1587–1653) translated two Western works into Chinese. They were Huan you quan (On heaven and Earth), a translation with scholarly commentaries of Aristotle’s De Coelo et Mundo, and Ming li tan (Inquiries into the principles of names), a partial free translation of Aristotelian logic. A work of cosmology rather than of religion, the first book originally was a part of the eight-volume Commentarii Collegii Conimbrincensis Societatis Iesu, in quator libros De Coelo ...
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National Central Library
Treatise on Geometry
Yuan rong jiao yi (Treatise on geometry) is an 1847 edition of a work dictated in 1608 by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to official and scholar Li Zhizao (1565–1630). Ricci, whose Chinese name was Li Madou, was one of the founding figures of the Jesuit mission in China. Li Zhizao was baptized by Ricci in 1610 and took the name Leo. He studied with Ricci and wrote prefaces to a number of his books. Ricci dictated several works to Li, who put them into acceptable Chinese ...
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National Central Library