Ruggieri Pioneer in China

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The True Pioneer of the Jesuit China Mission : Michele RuggieriAuthor(s): Yu LiuSource: History of Religions, Vol. 50, No. 4, Jesuit Missionaries in China and Tibet (May2011), pp. 362-383Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658128 .

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Yu Liu

T H E T R U E P I O N E E R O FT H E J E S U I T C H I N AM I S S I O N : M I C H E L ERUGGIERI

Scholarship on the beginning of the early modern Jesuit China missionhas long focused almost exclusively on Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Apatient and ingenious practitioner of indirect evangelism, Ricci moldedhis small group of missionaries into what Lionel Jensen calls “a Chinesefundamentalist sect that preached a theology of Christian/Confucian syn-cretism.”

1

Whether he was blessed with what David E. Mungello terms“a brilliant insight which not only accorded with contemporary reality,but also melded with what little was known of high Chinese antiquityand appealed to the Chinese reverence of antiquity,”

2

he neverthelesspropagated Catholicism in the name of Confucian orthodoxy. Devoted tohis cause until the very end, he turned even his own death into an oppor-

1

Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civili- zation

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 34.

2

David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology

(Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1985), 18.

I am grateful to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their careful and construc-tive comments on earlier versions of this essay. In addition to recent short-term fellowshipsat the Warburg Institute of London University, the Clark Library of UCLA, and the PhillipsLibrary of Peabody Essex Museum, the research for this essay beneted greatly from a JohnSimon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a sabbatical leave grant of Niagara County Community College for the 2006–7 academic year, and from a National Endowmentfor the Humanities Summer Institute fellowship in 2010 at the University of Hawaii, Manoa,and the East West Center.








History of Religions

363

tunity for his confreres to gain permanent presence in the Chinese capitalby petitioning the Wanli emperor (1563–1620; r. 1572–1620) for a burialsite for him. However, Ricci did not start the Jesuit mission in China.Before him, there was someone who was senior to him both at their his-toric entry into the country on September 10, 1583, and in their subse-quent ve years together in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province. That personwas Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607). Though remembered today only assomeone who prepared the way for Ricci and then disappeared “from thescene in silence,”

3

Ruggieri deserves far more serious attention because,as much as Ricci, he believed in the adaptation of the Christian mes-sage to the Chinese cultural milieu, but he went about it in a very dif-ferent way.

Born in Spinazzola, Italy, Ruggieri spent twelve years of his youth asa law student. After earning doctorates in both civil and canon law, heworked for some time in the court of Philip II in Naples. While thus em-ployed in government service, he was traumatized by an unexpectedevent in which a judge who was a colleague of his was hung by the orderof Don John of Austria for having arrested a murderer whom Don Johnhad pardoned on condition that he would join a naval battle. That blatantmiscarriage of justice shocked Ruggieri into ending his legal careerand leaving the secular world, and his action in retrospect casts light onthe way he later thought and went about his missionary work in China.Amiable by nature, he never stopped being concerned about how to bewell received by others, but disciplined by his legal training, he wasalways exact and unwilling to bend on matters of principle. After enter-ing the Society of Jesus on October 27, 1572, he studied philosophy andtheology in Rome. Assigned to the Jesuit India mission, he left Lisbon onMarch 24, 1578, and arrived in Goa on September 13 of the same year.At the Malabar coast, where he was sent toward the end of November1578, he threw himself into the study of the Malava (i.e., Tamil) lan-guage and was able to hear confessions in the local tongue six monthslater. Then, in 1579, he was called to Macao for the founding of theJesuit China mission.

3

Pasquale M. D’Elia, Fonti ricciane: Documenti originali concernanti Matteo Ricci e lastoria delle prime relazione tra l’Europa e la Cina (1579–1615)

, 3 vols. (Rome, 1942–49),1.147 n. 2. In “Quadro storico-sinologico del primo libro di dottrina cristiana in cinese” (Ar-chivum Historicum Societatis Iesu [AHSI] 3, 1934), D’Elia also compared the relationshipof Ruggieri with Ricci to that of John the Baptist with Jesus (222). For similar treatments of Ruggieri, see Léon Wieger, “Notes sur la première catéchèse écrite en chinois, 1582–1584,”AHSI 1 (1932): 72–84; and Joseph Sebes, SJ, “The Precursors of Ricci,” in East Meets West:The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773

, ed. Charles E. Ronan, SJ, and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Chicago:Loyola University Press, 1988), 19–61.








Pioneer of the China Mission

364

The desire of the Jesuit Order to spread the Christian faith to themiddle kingdom began with Francis Xavier (1506–52). He was a member of the original Gang of Seven that included Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), planned in Paris in 1534 to go together on a mission toJerusalem and subsequently founded the Society of Jesus in 1540. Xavierstarted the Jesuit Far Eastern mission in 1549 by landing in Kyushu,Japan. The people he met there were not antagonistic, but he soon sawthe crucial need for evangelizing China, if only for the sake of Christian-izing Japan, because the Japanese constantly peppered him with the ques-tion: “If yours is the true faith why have not the Chinese, from whomcomes all wisdom, heard of it?”

4

To gain legitimate entry into China, heattached himself in 1552 to a Portuguese embassy arranged by him butnanced by the Portuguese merchant designated as the ambassador. AtMalacca, where his diplomatic mission was to be assembled, he met theunanticipated opposition of Don Alvaro de Ataide, who was the localPortuguese commandant and a son of Vasco da Gama (1460–1524).Undeterred, he went ahead with his travel without the planned entourageand got as close as the Chinese island of Shangchuan, which is less thanten miles from the southern coast of mainland China, near Taishan,Guangdong Province, and which was then a seasonal trading outpost forPortuguese merchants. Even though he succumbed to illness on De-cember 3, 1552, before he could secure any assistance from the Portu-guese or Chinese merchants for a trip to the Chinese mainland, his dreamof approaching the Chinese emperor directly for permission to spread theChristian faith lived on and became in time a major objective of not onlyRuggieri but also the early Jesuit China mission as a whole.

5

Soon after the death of Xavier, the efforts of the Jesuits to enter China resumed. In 1555, Melchior Nunes Barreto (1520–71), the Jesuit pro-vincial for the Indies and Japan, accompanied a group of Portuguesemerchants to Guangzhou (Canton) and managed to stay there for severalmonths, but at the conclusion of the biannual trade fair, he had to leavewith all the others. Following the Portuguese establishment of the cityof Macao at the mouth of the Pearl River in 1557, the Jesuits set uptheir residence in the Portuguese enclave in 1563. Like the Dominicans,Franciscans, and Augustinians operating from Macao or the Philippines,

4

A. H. Rowbotham, Missionary and Mandarin

(Berkeley: University of California Press,1942), 46.

5

For more information about Xavier, see Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times

, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe, 4 vols. (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973–82);the biography was published originally in German as Franz Xaver: Sein Leben und Seine

Zeit

(Freiburg: Herder, 1955–73).









365

they tried several times to penetrate China, but all attempts failed untilthe arrival of Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606). A native of Chieti,Italy, Valignano had a doctorate in civil law and worked for several yearsat the papal court before joining the Society of Jesus in 1566. After servingas the acting master of novices in Rome for two years, he was assigned toAsia in 1573. As visitor to all the Jesuit missions in the East Indies, hearrived in Macao from India on September 6, 1578. Seeing the inabilityof all the Catholic orders, including his own, to win a permanent footholdin China and attributing the problem to the Portuguese insistence onhaving the Chinese converts adopt Portuguese names, clothes, and cus-toms, he designed a new policy that required the opposite education of Jesuit missionaries in local customs and the Chinese language. To imple-ment this new policy, he wrote to the Jesuit provincial of India to sendone particular missionary to Macao to study Chinese. Since that personhad just been appointed rector of the Jesuit community at Cochin, India,and was therefore not available for the new assignment, Ruggieri wassent instead.

Ruggieri reached Macao on July 20, 1579. Even though Valignano hadalready set off for Japan on July 7, 1579, he left detailed instructions forRuggieri to study Mandarin (the dialect of the Chinese imperial court).

6

Over the next twenty-seven years, Valignano made ve more visits of vary-ing lengths to the Portuguese enclave at the doorstep of China. First, onhis trip from Japan back to India, he stopped in Macao on March 9, 1582,and stayed until December 31, 1582. Then, in transit from India to Japan,he was in Macao between July 28, 1588, and June 29, 1590. On his wayback from Japan to India, he once again stayed at the Portuguese tradingoutpost from October 24, 1592, until November 15 or 16, 1594. Whiletraveling again from India to Japan, he also stopped in Macao from July20, 1597, to mid-July of 1598. Finally, after his return from Japan, hestayed in Macao from 1603 until his death in 1606. Whether at the Por-tuguese enclave or during shuttle trips between Japan and India, he paida great deal of attention to China. By instructing China-bound mis-sionaries to study Chinese and by requiring the acquisition of Mandarin,the language of the scholar-ofcials who served the imperial court, ratherthan the Cantonese dialect used by the populations in Macau, and Guang-dong Province in particular, he started the evolution of a characteristi-cally Jesuit proselytizing strategy that aimed at building “in China a Church that was Christian but also Chinese, in stark contrast with the

6

The instructions to Ruggieri were later recorded by Valignano himself in a letter to thebishop of Evora, Dom Theotonio de Braganca, from Goa on December 23, 1585.









366

missionary policies of the previous ve hundred years of western Chris-tian history.”

7

Both organizationally and policy-wise, Valignano wassimply indispensable to the initial Jesuit China mission, but on theground, Ruggieri was the rst person to put his vision of cultural accom-modation into creative practice.

The task Ruggieri tackled immediately was language learning. In 1579,there were ve to ten thousand inhabitants of Macao, and these includednot only Portuguese merchants and the associated assortment of Catholicpriests and members of religious orders but also, usually in their service,Malays, Hindus, Africans, and Chinese servants, artisans, and merchants.Of the Chinese who were in Macao, few were well taught in the Chineseliterary and philosophical traditions, and few knew much Portuguese.There is a famous anecdote about one of Ruggieri’s Chinese-languageteachers, who is said to have been a painter. Whenever he needed to ex-plain a Chinese word or expression but lacked the related knowledge of Portuguese for it, he would resort to a number of symbols that he drew ona piece of paper. The difculty of learning Chinese in such circumstanceswas exacerbated by the cynicism of Ruggieri’s Macao-based Jesuit con-freres, who viewed his study as “a waste of time”

8

and made his stayin the Portuguese enclave into “a kind of martyrdom”

9

with their manyunprovoked petty abuses. In spite of all these challenges, Ruggieri per-sisted. In Macao and later in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, he was dili-gent in his Chinese-language study. Not only did he make quick progressmeasurable by, among other things, his writing of the rst Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, the rst Christian catechism in the Chinese language(

Tianzhu shilu

, or The True Record about the Master of Heaven), and a large number of ersatz Chinese poems he is known to have composed,but he apparently also helped the development of a viable Chinese-language program for later missionaries in the Jesuit China mission.

In the form of an unsigned, untitled, and undated manuscript, thePortuguese-Chinese dictionary associated with Ruggieri was discoveredin 1934 by Pasquale d’Elia, SJ, at the Archivum Romanum SocietatisIesu (The Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus) (Jap-Sin, I.198). Itcontains about 6,000 entries in Portuguese in one column and 5,461 corre-sponding entries in Chinese characters in another column. Between these

7

Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742

(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 43.

8

Matteo Ricci, Opere storiche

, ed. Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, S.J. (Macerata: Giorgetti, 1911–13), 2:397.

9

George H. Dunne, S.J., Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in thelast Decades of the Ming Dynasty

(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,1962), 19.









367

two, there are romanizations or European notations of pronunciation forthe Chinese words in one column. After the column of Chinese char-acters, there are Italian translations of the Chinese expressions in onecolumn on a few folio pages. Labeling the entire work Dizionario

portoghese-cinese

, D’Elia ascribed its authorship to Ricci and Ruggieribut considered the latter as the principal author because he wrote theEuropean phonetic notations and most of the Portuguese entries.

10

Sincethe dictionary is kept at the Jesuit archives in Rome with a number of folios containing miscellaneous linguistic, religious, and scientic notesbearing the handwriting of Ruggieri or Ricci and datable to the stay of the two missionaries in Zhaoqing between 1583 and 1588, Paul Fu-MienYang, SJ, concluded in a 1989 study that the compilation of the dic-tionary very likely took place during the same time period.

11

ChallengingD’Elia’s attribution of authorship and the compilation dating and plac-ing of Yang, Lufs Filipe Barreto has recently argued forcefully that thedictionary, which he characterizes as a vocabulary list, “was written byseveral Chinese and Portuguese, being coordinated by both M. Ruggieriand M. Ricci.”

12

Just as he rmly believes that “the majority of thevocabulary was written between 1580 and 1588,” so he is sure that “themanuscript was written in Macao and Zhaoqing.”

13

Barreto’s contention that Ruggieri and Ricci are the coordinators ratherthan authors of the dictionary is largely specious. For one, Barreto takesit for granted that “in the eighties [i.e., 1580s], Ruggieri and Ricci were

just starting their studies of the Chinese language in Macao and Zhaoqingand did not sufciently have the level of mastery of Chinese vocabularyand writing present in the Dictionary.”

14

In reality, Ruggieri already wellproved his aptitude for foreign languages during his brief stay in India,and as reported by Pedro Gómez in a letter to the General of the JesuitOrder on October 25, 1581, Ruggieri had by then already learned 12,000Chinese characters.

15

Just one year after his arrival in Zhaoqing, Ruggieripublished his Christian catechism in Chinese. While in Zhaoqing, healso composed a large number of poems in Chinese. Both the Christian

10

See D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane

, 2:32 n. 1.

11

Paul Fu-Mien Yang, SJ, “The Portuguese Chinese Dictionary of Michele Ruggieri andMatteo Ricci: A Historical and Linguistic Introduction,” in Proceeding of the Second Inter-national Conference on Sinology

(Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1989), 191–242; revised versionin Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary

, ed. John W. Witek, SJ (San Francisco: Ricci Institute,2001).

12

Lufs Filipe Barreto, “Review of Dicionário Português-Chinês

, ed. John W. Witek, SJ,”

Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese

Studies

5 (2002): 117–26, 118.

13

Ibid., 118.

14

Ibid., 119.

15

Pedro Gómez, “Letter to the General of the Jesuit Order, October 25, 1581,” in Monu-menta Historica Japoniae

, ed. Josef F. Schütte, SJ, vol. 1 (Rome, 1975), 116–17.









368

catechism and the poems evince a sophisticated command of not only theChinese language but also Chinese literary and philosophical traditions,while the dictionary is merely a collection of words and phrases mostlyabout everyday life. Anyone capable of writing the rst two in situationslike this can be safely assumed to be capable of the last one, though notvice versa. Barreto also questions the authorship of Ruggieri because themain European language used in the dictionary is Portuguese rather thanItalian, which is Ruggieri’s mother tongue. However, neither at Macaonor in Zhaoqing is Ruggieri known to be closely associated with anyPortuguese who could have been his Chinese-language teacher,

16

and thereason why Portuguese rather than Italian was used in the dictionaryseems obvious given the fact that the lingua franca Ruggieri very likelyused to communicate with any Chinese who had had contact with Euro-pean merchants and who could teach him Chinese was Portuguese.

Much more persuasive and much more important than his argumentabout the authorship issue is Barreto’s contention about the compilationdates and places of the dictionary. Rather than 1583 to 1588 as Yangspeculated, the dictionary could have been compiled, as Barreto believes,between 1580 and 1588. Rather than Zhaoqing alone as Yang also hy-pothesized, it could have been written, as Barreto thinks, in both Macaoand Zhaoqing. At Macao, Ruggieri’s Chinese-language teachers were byall accounts not scholarly, while his teachers in Zhaoqing were reputedlymuch better educated and credentialed. As Yang pointed out in his 1989study, the dictionary contains tangible signs of Hakka, Cantonese, andFujian (Amoy) dialect inuences, which clearly have to do with the edu-cational background of Ruggieri’s Chinese-language teachers and theirlevels of familiarity or unfamiliarity with Mandarin. Among other things,this doubtlessly lends support to Barreto. Barreto’s claim about thecompositional history of the dictionary is important because if the dictio-nary was indeed started before the Christian catechism and the Chinesepoems, that sequence of events would indicate a particular progression of Ruggieri’s Chinese-language study, which started with speaking or collo-quial expressions in the Mandarin dialect having to do with everyday lifeand then progressed to rened scholarly reading and writing involvingand indeed necessitating a fairly advanced knowledge of the Chinese lit-erary and philosophical traditions.

In the early seventeenth century, the Jesuit China mission instituteda rigorous ratio studiorum

, or plan of studies, in the Chinese language

16

The only signicant Portuguese member of the early Jesuit China mission is António deAlmeida (1557–91), but he arrived in Macao only at the end of July 1585.









369

and thought for newly arrived missionaries.

17

Consisting of four yearsof methodical work, the plan was divided into three phases. Lasting sixmonths, the initial phase was a period of time during which a Europeanmissionary or a Chinese coadjutor used Portuguese to teach the new-comers how to speak Mandarin and how to read and write characters.Under the direction of the same Portuguese-speaking European mis-sionary or Chinese coadjutor for the next year and a half, the studentsthen went through the second phase of the language program, studyingthe canonical Four Books of the Confucian tradition, or Sishu

(

Great Learning/Daxue

, The Doctrine of the Mean/Zhongyong

, The Analects/ Lunyu

, and Mencius/Mengzi

) plus The Book of Documents

(

Shujing

) and

The Book of Changes

(

Yijing

) from the Confucian Five Classics or

Wujing

, which also included The Book of Odes

(

Shijing

), The Record of Rites

(

Liji

), and The Spring and Autumn Annals

(

Chunqiu Zuozhuan

). Fi-nally, during the third phase, lasting two years, a native speaker usedonly the Chinese language to teach the missionary students not only stylesof writing but also the Chinese perspective on the Confucian classics.The ratio studiorum

of the Jesuit China mission is today thought to havebeen designed between 1622 and 1624 by Manuel Dias the elder (1559–1639) when he inspected all the stations of the Jesuit China mission onbehalf of the Jesuit Visitor Gabriel de Matos (1572–1634). Even thoughRuggieri is never mentioned in this connection, his trailblazing progressfrom the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary to the Christian catechism inChinese and the Chinese poems can be seen in retrospect as the experi-mental blueprint for the later Jesuit plan of study.

As a study tool, Ruggieri’s Portuguese-Chinese dictionary was crude,especially because his romanizations or European notations of pro-nunciation for the Chinese characters did not indicate tones. About tenyears after Ruggieri left China, in fact, Ricci was nally able in 1598–99to provide tonal marks for his new dictionary, with the help of his Jesuitconfrere Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640), who was a talented musician. Inspite of this and other defects, Ruggieri’s dictionary clearly served himwell in his initial experience with the Chinese language. Since Ruggieriwas a missionary, it was not surprising that the vocabulary included therst Chinese expression for the idea of the Christian God, Tianciu

or

Tianzhu

, and contained words or phrases signifying “to sin,” “sin,” and“sinner.” However, terms bearing Christian connotations were relativelyfew and not necessarily religious in the Chinese context (“to sin,” “sin,”

17

For a detailed description of this study plan, see Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2007), 256–68.









370

and “sinner” in Chinese, for instance, were merely references to commoncrimes and criminals). Instead, most of the words and phrases in the dic-tionary, as mentioned before, were useful in or informative about everydaylife on the Chinese southern coast. Hence, there were various identi-cations of people (man, woman, boy, girl, foster child, drunkard, beggar,dead person, trader, ofcial, judge, student, foot soldier, general, pris-oner, foreigner, and so on), appellations indicating family relationships(grandparents, father, mother, stepmother, son, daughter, uncle, aunt,brother-in-law, sister-in-law, grandchildren, guest, and so on), and verbsdescribing a wide range of interpersonal activities including but not—as Barreto contends in his study—limited to nautical and commercialtransactions (to welcome, to go with, to buy, to sell, to explain, to nego-tiate, to agree, to consult, to mediate, to teach, to pay back, to sue, topunish, and so on).

As an aid to his study, Ruggieri’s dictionary is also peculiar because itis from Portuguese to Chinese rather than the other way around. In a common foreign-language learning situation, the dictionary a student con-sults most likely translates from the unfamiliar or target language intothe familiar or source language of the student. The fact that Ruggieri’sdictionary translated from a language with which he was already some-what familiar to a language with which he was in comparison unfamiliarin the early 1580s obviously has to do with the simple unavailability of someone equally procient in the two languages involved. The necessityof learning through Portuguese translation, however, enabled Ruggieri tostudy Chinese characters in combination and in some immediately mean-ingful minimal context rather than individually and in isolation from anyhelpful context, as was done in many Chinese-character-learning primersknown to Ruggieri.

18

The fundamental lack of competent and suitablebilingual teachers evidently also determined the particular direction of

18

Among the Ruggieri-related Chinese-language materials kept at the Jesuit Rome archives(Jap-Sin, 1.198), there are four pages (numbered 24, 25, 25v, and 26) of collected single Chi-nese characters, totaling 306. Written very likely by one of Ruggieri’s Chinese-languageteachers, the characters are related to each other phonetically. The rst ve characters onpage 24, for instance, are long

(dragon), lai

(come), ying

(win), li

(inside), and lü

(shoes).Except for ying

(win), these words all begin with the lateral consonant sound “l.” However,between these characters there is no immediately clear relationship of meaning or contexthelpful for the memorization of the characters. Vocabulary lists like this could have beenused by young Chinese children for oral recitation and rote memory in the traditional Chi-nese system of childhood education, but they were obviously inappropriate for an adultforeign learner of Chinese like Ruggieri, who needed the assistance of meaning to gain a sense of control in the study. In contrast, using meaningfully related Portuguese expressionsto group together similarly associated Chinese characters (such as Dia d’ onté [Dia de on-tem], “zo ge,” yesterday; Dia da monson [Dia de amanhã], “min ge,” tomorrow; and Dia se-quinté [Dia sequinte], “heu ge,” the day after tomorrow on page 83 of the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary), Ruggieri made it easier for himself to remember the involved Chinesewords.









371

Ruggieri’s program. Rather than a situation in which a teacher designedand controlled the progress of the student, his situation was one in whichthe student arranged for the teacher to provide what the student needed orwanted to learn. Even though Jesuit missionaries after Ruggieri and Riccihad in their ranks personnel who were well-versed in both Portugueseand Chinese and in the related literary and philosophical traditions, theynevertheless retained the procedure rst developed by Ruggieri and driveninexorably by goals set entirely from the perspective of the students. Asmuch as his missionary successors, Ruggieri was thoroughly utilitarianin his Chinese-language studies, but he never limited himself to basic lan-guage prociency and a few Confucian political and philosophical texts.

With his quick progress in Chinese, Ruggieri was soon able to validatethe foresight of Valignano about the special need of China-bound mission-aries to adapt to the indigenous culture. In 1552, Xavier failed to enterChina, not only because the Ming government’s prohibitive policy onforeigners made the Portuguese and Chinese merchants fearful of takinghim, but also because he had no knowledge of the local tongue. With himhe had one young Chinese convert named Antonio, who knew Latin fromthe seven or eight years of study at a Jesuit college in Goa but who unfor-tunately did not know Mandarin and had already forgotten his native ver-nacular. After the failure of his missionary efforts in 1555, MelchiorNunes Barreto instructed one of his companions, Estavão de Gois (1526–88), to study Chinese in Guangzhou, but Gois fell ill and was compelledto leave for Goa. Before Ruggieri arrived in Macao in 1579, nearly twodozen Jesuits had been active at one time or another in the China area,but none had learned the speech of the country. Ruggieri’s command of Chinese was never perfect, but he made good use of what he knew, andit at once paid off for him. During his very rst visit to Guangzhou fromMacao with a group of Portuguese merchants in 1580, as he recalled in a 1583 letter, he secured the unusual permission to stay on land throughoutthe trading season rather than having to return to a boat every night as thePortuguese merchants had to do.

19

When a Chinese rufan broke into hishouse one day and then falsely accused him of causing various injuries,Ruggieri was able to convince the investigating Chinese ofcial of hisinnocence.

On each of his subsequent trips from Macao to Guangzhou, Ruggieriwas better and better received. The intricately made clocks and otherEuropean objects of curiosity that were much marveled at in China andthat he took with him and discreetly distributed to various ofcials as

19

Michele Ruggieri, “Letter from the City of Chao ch’ing, February 7, 1583,” in Jesuit Letters from China, 1583–84

, ed. and trans. M. Howard Rienstra (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1986), 15–19.









372

gifts no doubt helped, but his ability to speak some Chinese and his will-ingness to observe local customs clearly went a long way to play thingsin his favor. The viceroy or governor-general of Guangdong and GuangxiProvinces, Chen Rui, who was appointed to the post in November 1581,was at rst hostile, but Ruggieri soon assuaged his antagonism with hisEuropean presents, his gentle but dignied personal conduct, and hisChinese-language skill. When Chen Rui invited him and a Jesuit com-panion, Francesco Pasio (1554–1612), to Zhaoqing, the governing seatof the viceroy at the end of 1582, Ruggieri took advantage of the oppor-tunity to request a residence inside China for the purpose of learning theChinese language and culture and sharing the European language andculture in return. Even though the rare permission he gained at that timequickly became invalid and meaningless in early 1583 in the wake of thesudden fall of Chen Rui from power on charges of corruption, the friendlyrelationship that Ruggieri had already cultivated with other ofcials quicklyenabled him to obtain a new permission from Guo Yingpin, who replacedChen Rui. Reaching Zhaoqing on September 10, 1583, with Ricci, who hadarrived in Macao from India on August 7, 1582, at the order of Valignanoand at his prior request, Ruggieri set up the rst permanent Jesuit missionstation on mainland Chinese soil.

If he was no more than a faithful and effective enactor of Valignano’sinstructions before 1583, Ruggieri proved to be a true pioneer in his prepa-ration for the historical trip to Zhaoqing. While in transit from Japan toIndia, as mentioned before, Valignano was in Macao between March 9and December 31, 1582. Even though he was not on hand when Ruggieriand Ricci left Macao for Zhaoqing in September 1583, he left instruc-tions for them “to introduce themselves in China as men of letters (

homesletrados

) . . . [and to dress themselves] in the Chinese fashion, in capeswith long sleeves and four-cornered hats, in the same way as some of their literati (

letrados

).”

20 Just before they set out, however, Ruggieritook the suggestion of a local Chinese ofcial and decided that it wouldbe better for him and Ricci to cut off their beards, shave off their hair,and put on the robes of Buddhist monks. Not until 1594 or 1595 didRicci switch the seemingly ideological afliation of the Jesuit China mission in dress and personal appearance from Buddhist monks to Con-fucian scholar-ofcials, as originally ordered by Valignano. Not only didhe then reject any association of Christianity with Buddhism in publicperception, but he later also phrased his proselytizing strategy pointedly

20 Alessandro Valignano, “Letter to the Bishop of Evora, Dom Theotonio de Braganca,from Goa, 23 December 1585,” quoted in Paul A. Rule, K’ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit

Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 3.








History of Religions 373

as supplementing Confucianism and repudiating Buddhism ( buRu yiFo ).Because of Ricci’s antagonism toward them, Buddhist monks and scholar-ofcials sympathetic to them would become the most vocal and redoubt-able opponents of Christianity in the early seventeenth century.

For Ruggieri, the transformation of his dress and personal appearancebefore his 1583 trip to Zhaoqing was apparently impromptu and expedient:a quick decision in the moment rather than a result of careful considera-tion or a deliberate disobedience of Valignano’s instructions. As much ashis study of Chinese in Macao and his adoption after his arrival in Zhao-qing of Luo Mingjian as his ofcial Chinese name ( ming ) and Fuchu asthe term ( zi) for others to call him according to the Chinese custom, hisself-refashioning in the image of a Buddhist monk was merely part of hiscultural accommodation. By nature, as mentioned before, he was amia-ble. Since he knew he had to sinicize himself in order to preach hisChristian faith in China, he was more than willing to do what would in-cline others kindly to him. In time, however, he evidently grew to likethe visual, if not ideological, afliation with Buddhism. The similarity of his dress and personal appearance to a Buddhist monk made him liable tobe mistaken for what he was not, but it also helped in the Chinese contextto establish his desired identity as a religious teacher. Without any elab-orate explanation at all, for instance, he made clear right at the beginningof his Christian catechism, written in Chinese and kept now in the JesuitRoman Archives (Jap-Sin, I.189), who he was and what he was trying todo by calling himself a seng or monk, and by presenting his work ascompiled and edited by a monk from India (Tianzhuguo seng). In the col-lection of his thirty-four Chinese poems, also kept at the Jesuit RomanArchives (Jap-Sin, II.159), he clearly took pride in introducing himself as a monk ( seng ) who, as he wrote in Poem No. 3.1, “came from Europe[ Xizhu ] to India [ Tianzhu ]/and took three years to travel the distance,/inorder to transmit to the laity the teachings of past masters/whom [he] hadread over and over again.” 21

As much as his change of dress and personal appearance in 1583,Ruggieri’s serious and markedly successful effort at writing Chinesepoems in the last few years of his stay in China shows the extent towhich he was willing to go in order to blend in. Jesuit missionaries inChina in the seventeenth century were utterly utilitarian in their Chineseeducation, keeping largely away from the poetry of the country and

21 For Ruggieri’s Chinese poems, see Albert Chan, SJ, “Michele Ruggieri, SJ (1543–1607) and His Chinese Poems,” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 129–76, and Chinese Booksand Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome: A Descriptive Catalogue; Japonica-Sinica

I–IV (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), esp. 90–96, 254–56, and 444–45. For the Englishrendition, I have consulted Chan’s version but opted to use my own translation.








Pioneer of the China Mission374

contenting themselves with the basic political and philosophical worksof Confucianism. Unlike them and somewhat like Ruggieri, Ricci paidattention to Chinese literary traditions, and in his major proselytizingwork written in Chinese, Tianzhu shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), he even cited verses from The Book of Odes to help contend fora dubious monotheistic interpretation of Confucianism. However, thereis no evidence anywhere in his extensive Chinese works that he ever triedto write poems in Chinese. Ruggieri did not have to learn to write poemsin Chinese, but knowing how Chinese literati, including well-educatedBuddhist monks, all studied poetry and aspired to be considered as poets,he was apparently motivated to include the difcult art in his Chinesestudy. For his textbook, he could have used something like Qianjiashi(An anthology of poems by one thousand authors), a work compiled byLiu Kezhuang (1187–1269), a Sung dynasty scholar and poet, as AlbertChan, SJ, speculates in his preliminary analysis of Ruggieri’s Chinesepoems. 22 As indicated by the occasional lexical changes or corrections inhis poetic texts, Ruggieri must have had the editorial or tutorial assis-tance of some Chinese scholars. However, with his Chinese poems, aswith his Christian catechism written in Chinese, no native help wouldhave been of much use if he had not already achieved a high facility inthe use of the Chinese language and the related literary and philosophicaltraditions. 23

More than anything, Ruggieri’s poems marked the advanced level hereached in Chinese. In addition to a traditional Chinese rhyming book that is now kept in one of the Ruggieri-related les at the Jesuit RomanArchives (Jap-Sin, II.162) and that Ruggieri may very well have consultedin Zhaoqing, there is a collection of idiomatic expressions handwrittenwith a Chinese brush and including phrases such as shiren (bystanders),touxian (taking or stealing a moment of leisure), and shaonian (time of youth), which Ruggieri actually used in imitation in Poem No. 11. Notonly did Ruggieri clearly use the writing of the poems to improve hisChinese, but he evidently also utilized the poetic exercises to memorial-ize his diverse experiences in China. Poems No. 1 to No. 4, for instance,chronicled his 1585–86 itinerary from Zhaoqing to Hangzhou via Meil-ing and back, while Poems No. 10 and No. 19 recorded his trips at other

22 Chan, “Michele Ruggieri, SJ (1543–1607) and His Chinese Poems,” 137.23 As Chan points out in his study, the similarity of the rhyming scheme and the particular

phrase luan ying ti (restless orioles sing) in Poem No. 10 to a poem written by the Sungdynasty poet Xu Yuanjie (1245–94), and the near identical wording of the last two lines of Poem No. 11 to a poem written by the Sung Dynasty scholar Cheng Hao (1032–85), showRuggieri’s familiarity with various individual authors of the Tang and Sung dynasties.









times to Guangxi and Huguang. Several of the poems were about his re-lationships with various people. Poem No. 17, for example, featured a friendly doctrinal discussion between him and a Chinese scholar; PoemNo. 7 depicted the belated congratulations sent to a provincial surveil-lance commissioner ( xiansi ) on the occasion of the birth of his son; PoemNo. 5 expressed his gratitude to a Chinese doctor for the effective treat-ment of an illness, and Poems No. 4 and No. 19 served as his invitationsto friends for a desired reunion after his travels away from Zhaoqing. Asmentioned before, Ruggieri must have received stylistic assistance fromChinese scholars in the writing of his poems, but unless he already knewhow to express himself, could anyone simply write his poems for him?

In order to be well received in China, Ruggieri was willing to changeand adapt. However, all his changes and adaptations were for the pur-pose of having the opportunity to propagate his Christian faith. Since theBuddhist dress and appearance could ease his penetration into Chinesesociety, he endorsed the use of the visual and sartorial resemblance tohelp establish his religious identity, but he never accepted the simpleconfusion of him with the practitioner of the much sinicized Indian re-ligion. Whenever questions were asked about who he was and why hewas in the middle kingdom, he was always quick and forthright about hisreligious afliation and his evangelical mission. In Poem No. 3.2, writtenapparently after his return from Hangzhou in 1586, for instance, he toldhis Chinese friends that so long as they allowed him to stay, he could re-gard as his home wherever he was at the moment, but if they wanted tolearn about the Western paradise, he would have to remind them that histeaching was “not that of Buddha Sakya” (feishi Rulaifo Shijia). Inanswers to similar queries about why he brought sacred writings toChina, he explained that he did so in order to spread the name of God(Poem No. 2) and to be compassionate in the salvation of souls (PoemNo. 16.4). Even though he expressed in Poem No. 24 the regret that thedifference of his native tongue from Chinese made it difcult for him toteach his doctrine, he did not just wait, as he said he would in the samepoem, for the time of his becoming comfortable with the speech of thecountry to begin his proselytizing work. In poetic refrains familiar toevery educated Chinese, he boldly told what must have sounded to hisChinese audience like an unfamiliar fable of Christianity, including theImmaculate Conception (Poem No. 6), the birth of Christ (Poems No.16.4 and No. 16.5), and the death of Jesus on the cross (Poem No. 16.7).

While he was still in Macao, Ruggieri already wrote out the fundamentaldetails of the Christian faith in Chinese, with the help of some Chinesetranslators. In 1582, Alonso Sánchez, a Spanish Jesuit operating fromManila, met Ruggieri in Guangzhou and saw him present his Christian









catechism to a Chinese ofcial. 24 After settling down in Zhaoqing in 1583,Ruggieri apparently reworded this work, which, after further modica-tions, evolved eventually into Tianzhu shilu (The True Record about theMaster of Heaven), which was published in 1584. In one of the Ruggieri-related les kept with the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary at the JesuitRoman Archives (Jap-Sin, I.198), there is an eight-page essay clearlywritten by Ruggieri about Christianity. 25 At the beginning of the essay,Ruggieri pointed out that China was far away from his country and theChinese did not therefore know anything about the Christian God. Heidentied himself as a monk admiring the teaching of the middle king-dom and traveling ten thousand miles by sea from Europe to China. Afterdescribing himself as arriving three years ago in Zhaoqing and establish-ing a temple called Xianhua Si (Divine Flower Temple) at the permissionof Viceroy Guo, he went on to tell the story of Adam and Eve; the birth,life, and death of Christ; the creation of the world and all the plants andcreatures by the Christian deity; and the necessity of worshipping God.Even though the time frame he mentioned at the beginning of the essay(i.e., his identication of himself as arriving in Zhaoqing three years ago)dates the document to 1586 or 1585, there is strong reason to believe thatthe substance of the proselytizing work was written at the start of his stayin Zhaoqing, if not earlier. The internal textual evidence for this is theabsence of any reference to Chinese philosophical or religious traditions,except a vague differentiation of the Christian doctrine from the exorcismof Buddhism ( bingfei woluo dengzhi jimie chanyu 26).

In contrast, Ruggieri’s 1584 Tianzhu shilu shows his fairly sophisti-cated awareness of Chinese philosophy and religion. Toward the end of his eight-page essay, he had justied divine worship by depicting the re-lationship with God as that of children to parents or of subjects to royal-ties. The Master of Heaven was like a parent, he said; if sons and daughtersdid not respect their parents, who else would they respect? In the prefaceto Tianzhu shilu , Ruggieri employed the same hierarchical relationship tocontend for a seemingly natural and logical belief in theism, but he alsoset the entire argument within the parameters of Confucian ethics. Just asren (humanity) and yi (righteousness) always came rst in the often dis-cussed sequence of the ve constant Confucian virtues ( wuchang ; theother three virtues being li, zhi , and xin , or propriety, wisdom, and faithful-

24

Sánchez’s report of this is included in Francisco Colín, SJ (1592–1660), Labor Evan-gélica: Ministerios Apostólicos de los Obreros de la Compañía de Jesús, Fundación y Pro-gressos de Su Provincia en las Islas Filipinas (Barcelona: Imprenta y Litografía de Henrichy Compãnía, 1900), 1:280.

25 This text is now included in Zhang Xiping, Ouzhou Zaoqi Hanxue Shi [The early his-tory of European sinology] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2009), 55–57.

26 Ibid., 56.









377

ness) he pointed out, so the loyalty of subjects to the sovereign was themost important of the ve Confucian relationships (

wulun

; the other fourrelationships being those of the father to the son, the husband to the wife,the elder brother to the younger brother, and friends to friends). In thesame preface, he claimed that, after he translated the true record of theChristian deity into Chinese (

Tangzi

), it became much easier to studythan Buddhism, because no one needed to fast or give up one’s worldlyprofession so as to search far away for a teacher. In the main text, he alsocoached the ethical teaching of Christianity in terms of the famous Con-fucian principle of reciprocity (

Ji suo buyu, wu shiyu ren

, or Do not do toothers what you do not want done to yourself),

27

while contrasting the justice of the Christian God in the distribution of rewards and punish-ments in the afterlife with the Confucian attribution of worldly fortune todestiny (

ming

) and the Buddhist idea of karma-determined reincarnationfrom heaven or hell to the human world, or from animals to human be-ings, and vice versa (

lunhui

).Whenever possible, Ruggieri related the teaching of his Christian faith

in The True Record about the Master of Heaven

to Chinese philosophicaland religious thoughts. Wherever there were no easy points of correspon-dence between the conceptual systems of the Far East and the West, hedid not, as Ricci later did in his similarly titled Tianzhu shiyi

(The TrueMeaning of the Lord of Heaven), mince his words or hold back thingsthat he knew were unfamiliar to the Chinese. In sixteen chapters runningto eighty pages in total, he discussed the usual ontological, cosmological,and physical-theological proofs of European theism; the immortality of the human soul and the related contrast of human beings with plants andanimals; the biblical stories of Adam and Eve, of the birth, life, and deathof Christ, and of noted wrathful divine interventions in the fallen humanworld (the ood and so on); and the Ten Commandments and variousChristian ceremonies. In addition, he took great pains to explain the fourpossible destinations for the human soul as the appropriate rewards orpunishments in the afterlife: heaven above and the three layers of hellbelow. The souls of innocent Christians, he said, could expect to enjoylife with the Christian deity and various angels in heaven while the soulsof lightly sinful former Christians, the souls of children dying in child-hood before knowing good and evil, and the souls of atheistic, recalci-trant, and incorrigible human beings would respectively suffer in different

27

Confucian Analects

, 12.2 in Confucian Analects: The Great Learning and the Doctrineof the Mean

, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1971). In Tianzhu shilu

, included in

Chinese Christian Texts from the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus

, vol. 1 (Taipei:Taipei Ricci Institute, 2002), Ruggieri’s words were: “Ruo buyu ren yi wuli jiazhu wo, ze yibugan yici jiazhiyu renzhilei” (Since I do not want others to impose their discourtesy on me,I will not dare to force this on others) (52).









degrees in the three layers of hell below. 28 With apparent relish, he de-tailed the fourteen punishments in hell, including being burned, beingfrozen, being hungry, being thirsty, being sick in the most painful way,being assaulted by terrible smells, being tormented or downtrodden bydevils, and so on.

Before the arrival of Ruggieri, as mentioned earlier, members of theJesuit Order in Macao had been obsessed with turning the small numberof Chinese converts into Portuguese in dress, manners, and way of life.Serving the monarch of Spain, their brethren operating from the Philip-pines thought likewise about the expansion of Catholicism in terms of anexpansion of Iberian political authority and Iberian culture. The SpanishJesuit Alonso Sánchez, whom Ruggieri met in Guangzhou in 1582, inparticular, believed rmly in the imposition of the European religion byforce. Traveling from Manila in March 1582, he arrived in early May of the same year in Guangzhou. Even though he knew nothing about theChinese language or culture, he brazenly attempted the mass conversionof the local population. After being arrested by the Chinese authoritiesand then bailed out of prison by the Macao-based Portuguese secular andreligious organizations, he began an inuential propaganda campaign fora modeling of the Christian China mission after Spanish endeavors inMexico and Peru. Upon hearing his report, the archbishop of Manila,Domingo de Salazar (1512–94), wrote to Philip II (1527–98) on June 18,1583, recommending the dispatch of an expeditionary force to the FarEast so as to facilitate and safeguard Christian evangelism in the middlekingdom. Under the similar inspiration of Sánchez, the Spanish authori-ties in the Philippines sent to Philip II in 1586 a plan for the conquest of China that envisioned ten or twelve thousand troops from Spain and asmany Japanese and Filipinos. In time, Sánchez also infected the Jesuitsin Macao with the same conquistador spirit. As late as June 25, 1584,Francisco Cabral (1529–1609), rector of the College of Macao, wrote a long letter to Philip II detailing the advantages of a military solution tothe evangelical issue in China. 29

As a result of the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, anyhope of a Spanish military invasion was soon dashed. Much more than

28 Ruggieri named the three places of punishments as bugeduolüe , linmo , and yanfuruo ,and these three names are obviously Chinese transliterations of medieval European notionsof purgatory, limbo, and inferno. Strictly speaking, neither purgatory nor limbo is a part of hell; Ruggieri apparently kept away from the ner distinctions to avoid any unnecessary

complication.29 For a more recent discussion of Sánchez and the plan of conquering China by force, seeJohn P. Doyle, “Two Sixteenth-Century Jesuits and a Plan to Conquer China: AlonsoSanchez and Jose de Costa; An Outrageous Proposal and Its Rejection,” in Rechtsdenken:Schnittpunkte West und Ost; Recht in den gesellschafts- und staatstragenden Institutionen

Europas und Chinas , ed. Wegmann Konrad and Holz Harald (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2005),253–73.









“an illustration of the temper of the Spaniards of that day,” 30 however,the desire of Alonso Sánchez to propagate the Christian faith on Euro-pean terms lived on, especially in the older Catholic orders that, unlikethe Jesuit organization, were closely afliated with the royal family of Spain. The mendicants were among the very rst Europeans to arrive onthe Far Eastern scene, but they were largely kept out of the middle king-dom in the sixteenth century by the Spanish Patronato Real or the Portu-guese Padroado , which marked China as part of the Portuguese sphere of inuence according to the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. As soon as theysucceeded nally in establishing a permanent foothold on the Chinesemainland in the early 1630s, they began to push their Eurocentric agenda with a vengeance. Not only did they spurn any possible adaptation to theChinese situation, but they also ercely attacked the Jesuit policy, leftbehind by Ricci, of allowing the Chinese converts to continue the wor-ship of ancestors and Confucius. For the troubles they caused the followersof Ricci, the mendicants have often been vilied as quasi-sinister char-acters. In reality, the most effective ammunitions they used against theJesuit China mission were supplied by Jesuits who were closely associatedwith Ricci but who disagreed with him on missionary strategies. Ques-tioning his cultural adaptation of Christianity soon after his death, it wasthese former colleagues of Ricci, such as Nicolò Longobardo (1565–1655) and Sabatino de Ursis (1575–1620), who paved the way for the so-called terms and rites controversies that led in the eighteenth century tonot only the Vatican’s suspension of the Jesuit accommodation policy butalso the papal suppression of the Jesuit organization.

Insofar as he was uninchingly frank about his religious afliation andevangelical mission, Ruggieri could come across as resembling the Euro-centric mendicants and those Jesuits who disagreed with Ricci. But inso-far as he was at the same time sensitive and respectful about Chinesecultural traditions and sensibilities, however, he obviously differed fromthose missionaries bent on forceful conquest. In a reverse way, he was alsosimilar to and different from Ricci, who became the de facto leader of theJesuit China mission in 1588 after Ruggieri left for Europe for a possiblepapal embassy to the Chinese imperial court. The fact that Ruggierienacted his noticeably different cultural adaptation and proselytizingstrategy in Zhaoqing is signicant, because Zhaoqing was an ancient cityof culture and was close to the birthplace of Huineng (638–713), the sixthand last patriarch of Chan Buddhism, who played a most crucial role inthe sinication of Buddhism. Ruggieri may not have known of the adapta-tions which Huineng and others made to the originally Indian doctrine

30 Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: Mac-millan, 1929), 101.









about samsara and nirvana. However, his ambiguous afliation withBuddhism enabled his Catholic faith to get into the same relationship of rivalry and mutual accommodation that Buddhism already had with Con-fucianism and Daoism.

Ricci must have been dissatised with Ruggieri’s leadership, and thatwas very likely why he prompted Valignano to move Ruggieri out of thecountry. However, after Ruggieri left in 1688, he continued his visualand sartorial resemblance to a Buddhist priest. Only before his trip northfrom Shaozhou in May 1595 did he change into the dress and personalappearance of a Chinese scholar-ofcial who, because of the educationand examinations he went through, was by denition a person inculcatedin Confucianism. Ricci’s tactical realignment from Buddhism to Con-fucianism and his verbal presentation of his proselytizing strategy as“buRu yiFo ” (supplementing Confucianism and repudiating Buddhism)would soon provoke erce antagonism from Buddhists and their sup-porters among the scholar-ofcials. In addition, his very different cul-tural adaptation from Ruggieri made it difcult for him to differentiatehis religious doctrine from the teachings of the dominant Chinese philo-sophical tradition. Because of his emphasis on the similarities between theChristian Deus ( Zhu ) and the Confucian Heaven ( Tian ), it became pos-sible for his well-educated Chinese converts to see Catholicism from a Confucian or Neo-Confucian ecumenical perspective. Inevitably, there wasdoubt within the Jesuit China mission about the very authenticity of con-version for Ricci’s most famous Chinese disciples. As this doubt helpedthe mendicants to gain Papal support against Ricci’s legacy of culturaladaptation, European religious ideas became less and less attractive to theeducated Chinese, especially after the dynastic change from the Ming tothe Qing in 1644.

Had Ruggieri stayed in China, he would or could very likely haveavoided the pitfall that Ricci and his supporters suffered within theCatholic Church. However, could his distinctively different proselytizingstrategy have worked better? Back in 1588, Valignano apparently thoughtno. Pinning his hope then on an apostolic delegation to the Chinese im-perial court, he sent Ruggieri away from China to Europe to arrange it.Rather than Ruggieri, he could have given the task to Ricci, who after allwas a junior member of the Jesuit China mission, but he did not. He didwhat he did, not only because as the acting master of novices in Rome hehad welcomed Ricci into the Society of Jesus on August 16, 1571, andtherefore probably had always had a special affection for Ricci, but evi-dently also because he was dissatised with Ruggieri’s work. In his post-humously published ofcial history of the Jesuit enterprise in the middlekingdom, Ricci respectfully explained Valignano’s 1588 selection of Ruggieri for the European assignment as a recognition of the latter’sknowledge about the Jesuit China endeavor from the very beginning, but









in retrospect Ricci clearly had much to do with the negative assessmentof Ruggieri that has persisted until today. Even though Ruggieri was onlyforty-ve years old in 1588, Ricci was known to have referred to himas “already old.” 31 Even though Ricci could not have been much moreprocient then in the Chinese language, he doubtlessly contributed to theimpression about Ruggieri as having “a not too retentive memory [which]had prevented him from really mastering it.” 32 Even though Ruggieri didwhat he could about the recruitment of Chinese converts and the expan-sion of the Jesuit effort to other areas of the country, Ricci implicitlyblamed him for several notable setbacks of the Jesuit mission.

In 1587, a Chinese convert named Martin came from Macao or Guang-zhou to Zhaoqing and used his familiarity with Ruggieri to defraud twoother new local converts, a father and a son. Knowing the father andson’s prior interest in alchemy, he tricked them into giving him large sumsof money by pretending he could pass on the secret of turning mercuryinto silver from the European missionaries who were then widely reputedfor being knowledgeable about the art. After his treacherous schemewas exposed, he not only stole things from the missionary station beforerunning away but also spread malicious rumors about the misconduct of Ruggieri with a certain woman. Before the outbreak of this scandal, fromwhich the missionaries extricated themselves only with difculty, Ruggierihad visited Hangzhou at the invitation of an ofcial in Zhaoqing who wasfriendly to the Catholic mission. Hoping to take advantage of the oppor-tunity to open another missionary station in Zhejiang Province, Ruggierioverstayed his welcome and consequently antagonized the Zhaoqingofcial who originally sent him the invitation. Soon after the debacle inHangzhou, Ruggieri also visited Guangxi Province. At the provincialcapital, Guilin, he tried to develop a special relationship with a royalrelative whom he called upon without any required ofcial permission.Even though the royal relative refused to accept his European presentsand declined to see him, he persisted in his effort to arrange a meetingagainst the normal protocol. As a result, he was expelled from the cityand barred from ever entering again.

For the various setbacks the Jesuit China mission suffered in the lasttwo or three years of his stay in the middle kingdom, Ruggieri was re-sponsible to some extent, but to blame these entirely on him, as Ricciimplicitly did in his chronicle of these events, is undoubtedly unfair and

31 Dunne, Generation of Giants , 30.32

Ibid. Ricci was very well known for his prodigious memory and his phenomenal foreign-language-learning ability. However, even in his account of events at Zhaoqing, Ruggieri wasalmost always much more visible and active than him in the public and private interactionswith Chinese scholar-ofcials. If he really had a much better command of the Chinese lan-guage than Ruggieri, then it is hard to see why, for instance, he could not have developed a close personal relationship with any noted Chinese scholar-ofcial, which Ruggieri appar-ently did with the prefect of the city, Wang Ban.









unjust to all the facts. After all, it is not clear whether Ruggieri was theone who brought Martin into the Christian church in Macao, and when hetried his best to open up new space for Christian evangelism in Zhejiang,Jiangxi, and Huguang in 1586–87, he actually acted upon the prior orderof Valignano to attempt the expansion of the Jesuit China mission beyondthe coastal foothold of Zhaoqing. Even though Ricci could excuse him-self from the various scandals of the mid-1580s, he later experiencedvery similar difculties in the mid- and late 1590s. In spite of a friend-ship of more than ten years with him, for instance, Qu Taisu (1549–1612), whom Ricci regarded as one of his most cherished converts, wasknown to have rekindled a Daoist interest in alchemy only two or threeyears after entering the church and to have even attempted to persuadeRicci into the devious practice. After venturing north from Shaozhou in1595, Ricci also befriended some royal relatives, especially the Prince of Jian’an Commandery Zhu Duojie, who was enfeoffed in 1573 and diedin 1601, in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, and at least for some time, heharbored the same misguided illusion as Ruggieri once did of using a royal connection to get to the emperor of China. After his failure to takehis trip all the way to Beijing in 1595, he tried without any ofcial per-mission to establish a missionary station in Nanjing and, reminiscent of what happened to Ruggieri in 1586–87, he was summarily expelled. Eventhough he had already started to dress and appear like a Confucianscholar-ofcial, he did not then gain any advantage from his visual andsartorial change.

To evaluate the potential of Ruggieri’s very different proselytizingstrategy, it seems important to remember his whole stay of almost tenyears in the Jesuit China mission. Even when operating from Macao, healready gained the friendship of several civilian and military ofcials inGuangzhou with his respect for the Chinese culture, on the one hand, andhis clear identication of his European religious identity, on the other. InZhaoqing, as reported by Francisco Cabral, one of Ruggieri’s very rsttwo converts was an educated Chinese who apparently became interestedin Christianity while helping to translate Ruggieri’s catechism into theChinese language. As soon as he got permission in 1583 to open up a missionary station in Zhaoqing, Ruggieri also began a long and morethan supercial friendship with the prefect of the city Wang Ban, who inretrospect was perhaps as important to him as Qu Taisu later was toRicci. It was very likely Wang who advised Ruggieri and Ricci to dressand appear like Buddhist monks before their historic 1583 trip. In addi-tion to helping them settle down in Zhaoqing, Wang sent them plaquesnaming the rst Christian missionary station in China Xianhua Si(Divine Flower Monastery) and calling it Xilai Jingtu (Pure Land fromthe West). In 1585, Wang invited Ruggieri to visit his hometown, Hang-zhou. Even though he was displeased by Ruggieri’s behavior as a guest,he nevertheless made it possible for the missionaries to stay on in Zhao-









qing. Not only was he a patron and protector, but he was also a sincereadmirer. In a poem to Ruggieri, he wrote about how the Jesuit father didthe unthinkable in the Chinese context by leaving the place of his birthfor the middle kingdom to offer his prayers to God. “How rare the manwith strong and resolute mind,” as Ruggieri recorded Wang as sayingabout him, “who would spread forth an odor far and wide.” 33

As much as Ricci, and indeed much earlier than him, Ruggieri saw thekey to the success of the Jesuit China mission in the Confucian scholar-ofcials whom he considered his most favorite proselytizing targets. Asin the case of Ricci, what made Ruggieri so attractive to the educatedChinese were his many-sided European knowledge, including the art of mapmaking, 34 his austere lifestyle, ethical behavior, and unusual dedica-tion to his religious cause, and his sensitivity about and respect for thelocal culture. Ruggieri very likely never learned to speak Chinese aswell as Ricci, but as Knud Lundbaek points out in an analysis of an ex-cerpt of Great Learning translated by Ruggieri and included in AntonioPossevino’s 1593/94 Bibliotheca Selecta , Ruggieri was the rst Euro-pean translator of a Chinese classical text, and “Ruggieri’s reading and‘understanding’ of this ancient Chinese text was not very inferior to thatof the translators of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus ,” who publishedtheir translation of the same text in 1687. 35 As a missionary, Ruggieri didnot have much to show for his ve or six years in Zhaoqing, but neitherdid Ricci for his subsequent two years in Zhaoqing and the next six yearsin Shaozhou. As willing as Ricci to adapt his Christian message to theChinese culture but more frank in his quasi-Buddhist dress and appear-ance about his religious identity and purpose, would he have done betterthan Ricci once the Jesuit mission moved from the coastal area to theheartland? We will never know. However, given the intrinsic problemsconnected with Ricci’s fateful decision “to make the teaching of Westernlearning into his main job and to reduce the propagation of Western re-ligion into an undertaking that was not only secondary but also half-underground,” 36 it seems only too necessary and important to take seriouslywhat Ruggieri did as the true pioneer of the Jesuit China mission andwhat he might have done had he not been sent back to Europe in 1588.

Niagara County Community College

33 Ruggieri, “Letter from Chao ch’ing, the Thirteenth of May, 1584,” in Rienstra, Jesuit

Letters from China, 1583–84 , 23.34 See Michele Ruggieri, Atlante della Cina di Michele, S.J. , ed. Eugenio Lo Sardo(Rome: Instituto Poligraco e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1993).

35 Knud Lundbaek, “The First Translation from a Confucian Classic in Europe,” China Mission Studies (1550–1800) Bulletin 1 (1979): 2–11, 9.

36 Zhu Weizheng, “Introduction,” in Li Madou Zhongwen Zhuyi Ji (The collected Chineseworks and translations of Matteo Ricci), ed. Zhu Weizheng (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chu-banshe, 2001), 26.

Ruggieri Pioneer in China

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