A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Astronomical Treatise
This illustrated treatise on the astrolabe represents one of the earliest systematic works on European astronomical knowledge by a Chinese author. It was produced in the latter portion of the Ming Dynasty through the influence of early generations of Jesuit missionaries to China and their efforts to impress, and ultimately to convert to Roman Catholicism, the native populace. This they pursued, in part, through sharing the best natural philosophical and technological knowledge Europe had to offer the wider world. The Hangzhou courtier, mathematician, and Catholic convert Li Zhizao constructed his treatise on the astrolabe after a decade of close collaboration with the celebrated Jesuit Matteo Ricci, seeking to reconcile Chinese and European teachings and beliefs. Ricci, one of the most famous of all Jesuit missionaries to China, was the first to set foot in Beijing in 1582 at the invitation of Emperor Wanli, who was interested in Ricci’s knowledge of the astronomical sciences. Ricci in turn helped with the translation of Euclid’s Geometry (1607) into Chinese, and of Confucian texts into Latin.
Printed on rice paper, the Hopkins copy of Li Zhizao’s work also preserves its original Asian paper binding. Its survival, after crossing oceans from China to Europe and, ultimately, to Baltimore, is almost certainly thanks to its having been bound in whole into a sturdier western binding structure. It is believed that Ricci sent copies of this book to the Father General of the Jesuits in Rome, and to his mentor Christopher Clavius, to celebrate these early intellectual and cultural attainments within the China mission. Though its subject matter invariably draws the reader’s gaze upwards into the night sky, this book nonetheless stands as a profound memorial to the truly global and worldly scope of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, the first fruits of erudite cross-cultural dialogue, and the transmission and fusion across languages and entire continents.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
R. Po-chia Hsia, “Beijing,” in A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford University Press, 2010), 202–23; Yu Liu, “The Spiritual Journey of an Independent Thinker: The Conversion of Li Zhizao to Catholicism,” Journal of World History 22:3 (September 2011), 433–53; Yuen-Sang Leung, “Towards a Hyphenated Identity: Li Zhizao’s Search for a Confucian-Christian Synthesis,” Monumenta Serica 39 (1990-91), 115–30.
