Matteo Ricci: Jesuit at the beginning of modern Chinese history

At the end of the 16th century, a Westerner who had come from afar, and his superiors, after several twists and turns, arrived in Zhaoqing, the governor's palace of Liangguang at that time, in the humid and hot air of Lingnan. The day was September 10, 1583. He is the 31-year-old Matero Ricci, also known as Matteo Ricci in China.

We all know that Matteo Ricci occupies a pivotal position in the history of cultural exchanges between China and the West, and he and Luo Mingjian established themselves in Zhaoqing and were approved by Wang Pan, the then prefect of Zhaoqing. In fact, it was Chen Rui, the governor of Liangguang, who instructed Wang Pan. Counting down, during the Zhaoqing period, two of the "small things" that Matteo Ricci did in his eyes were quite important, and their importance was even seriously underestimated.

First, he presented Wang Pan with a map of the world, and with Wang's support (rather, request), Matteo Ricci, based on the suggestions of the officials and in accordance with Chinese long-term habits of thinking, engraved the first Chinese world map in modern significance in history with Chinese annotations. It can be said that this is the first time that Chinese has examined the world from a modern and scientific perspective, and has obtained a completely different spatial concept of traditional Chinese culture.

Second, he not only brought from Macao a self-chiming bell that Chinese had never seen before, but also organized Indian craftsmen to cooperate with local skilled craftsmen in Zhaoqing to create China's first self-chiming bell. We believe that the mechanical clock cannot simply be regarded as a timer, in essence, it is the most intuitive expression of the modern mechanical view of time, and time has been divided since then, which is a new philosophical view of time. This view of time is directly linked to modern social connections.

From these two aspects alone, we seem to have enough reasons to make the following judgment: This disseminator of heterogeneous culture cannot be regarded as a lonely person standing at the starting point of China's modern history. Since then, China's modern history has slowly set sail and begun to be involved in the tide of world history. Unfortunately, the equal cultural exchange between China and the West still did not work under the ignorant and brutal resistance of the self-imposed Manchu Qing Dynasty. In the end, the extreme arrogance of the Qianlong Emperor finally buried the bitter seeds of 1840.