Matteo Ricci the Daoist

When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in China in the 1580s, he had to invent an identity for himself: he and his doctrine were unknowns. That would soon change as Ricci became a Ming-dynasty celebrity through his writings in Chinese and personal contacts. From an examination of contemporary writings about Ricci in Chinese, a constellation of references emerges that depict him, through repeated references to the Zhuangzi and associated texts, as a kind of Daoist sage, a hermit in the midst of the secular world, perhaps a wonder-worker or envoy from a transcendental realm. Ricci’s own role in creating this legend is unclear, but his admirers and interlocutors developed and extended the reference, as a means of giving early-modern Christian theology a purchase on the Chinese political and intellectual situation of the time.