Matteo Ricci
The first Jesuit missionaries to visit China did so during the Ming dynasty. The most prominent one was the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Matteo Ricci is famous in China and the West for many reasons. He was the first to translate the Chinese classic texts into a Western language (Latin), and the first to translate the name of the most prominent Chinese philosopher Kong Qiu as "Confucius". Along with another Jesuit father, he was the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing during the reign of the Wanli Emperor. Matteo Ricci and his baptized Chinese colleague, the mathematician, astronomer, and agronomist Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), were the first to translate the ancient Greek mathematical] treatise of "Euclid's Elements" into Chinese.