The Jesuit Missions in China, from Matteo Ricci to the Restoration (Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries)
Authors: Hosne Ana Carolina 
Published: May 2024

In the sixteenth century, through the right of royal patronage (Padroado), the Portuguese Crown summoned the Society of Jesus to spread Christianity beyond Europe, in non-Christian lands, previously divided between the Spanish and Portuguese Crown by the papal authority. Thus, tightly anchored in European colonial expansionism, the Society of Jesus projected itself into new spatial layouts. The Jesuit mission was the first one to be established on a permanent basis on Chinese soil in the late Ming period, allowing a continuous exchange between the European missionaries and their many Chinese interlocutors. The mission became official when Michele Ruggieri (b. 1543–d. 1607) and Matteo Ricci (b. 1552–d. 1610) set up a first residence in Guangdong Province in September 1583. Following instructions of the Visitor to East Indies’ missions, Alessandro Valignano (b. 1539–d. 1606), they took steps to accommodate to local culture, especially in its external aspects. Matteo Ricci went further, shaping an accommodation of Catholic Christianity to Confucianism, with the help of his Chinese interlocutors. This progressively entailed a harsh rejection of Buddhism and Daoism. In close collaboration with scholar-officials and literati (some also Christian converts), this accommodation accompanied knowledge production outside the religious and doctrinal spheres, like philosophy, cartography, mathematics, and astronomy, among others, which eventually materialized in a vast literature in Chinese. Consequently, Christianity as promoted by the Jesuit missionaries became a broader cultural phenomenon in China. This “elite proselytism” was capped with certain Jesuits’ official appointments to the Astronomical Bureau in early Qing China. However, scholarly studies in the twenty-first century have shown how Jesuit missionaries promoted other forms of Christian missionary work, especially in rural areas, far from Beijing. Italian historiography in the first half of the twentieth century presented Matteo Ricci as the main founder of the China mission, overshadowing Michele Ruggieri. This trend grew stronger during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), when the Jesuit China mission as shaped by Matteo Ricci was praised as a model of inculturation of the Christian faith. Accommodation to Confucianism has been generally placed at the core of what became known as the Chinese Rites Controversy, by which the Jesuit missionaries were denounced by other religious orders in China for their tolerance toward Confucian rites. The controversy also involved Chinese actors and local responses, especially during the reign of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722). According to Jesuit traditional historiography, this controversy played a crucial role in the proscription of Christianity in China, in 1724. However, later research relates this ban to internal factors and an expansion of state control. The final expulsion of the Jesuit missionaries from China and the suppression of the Society of Jesuits followed in the 1770s, until the restoration of the Jesuit mission in China in 1842. The effects of the anti-religious movement of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) on the history of Christianity in China were gradually reversed in the 1980s, strengthening an ongoing scholarly interest in the subject.