page_title: Christian Herdtrich
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Christian Herdtrich / Life
caption_attribution_description: Latina: "Paradigma XV Provinciarum et CLV Urbium Capitalium Sinensis Imperij". Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. English: "A Map of the 15 Provinces and 155 Capital Cities of the Chinese Empire", with descriptive text below, from Confucius, the Philosopher of the Chinese, Bk III, between pages 104 &amp; 105. Note the southward course of the Yellow River (Croceus Flu.), which it followed for centuries before the 1850s floods.
context_page_description: Christian Wolfgang Herdtrich was an Austrian Jesuit missionary to the Qing Empire. As he wrote his works in Latin, he is also known as Christianus Herdtrich.
context_section_description: Christian Wolfgang Herdtrich was born at Graz, Styria, in the Austrian Empire on 25 June 1625.
  Herdtrich entered the Austrian province of the Society of Jesus on 27 October 1641, and in 1656 was chosen for the Chinese mission. For two years he laboured on the island of Sulawesi ("Celebes"). After 1660, he moved to the Chinese provinces of Shanxi and Henan. In 1671, he was called to the imperial court in Beijing as a mathematician; there, he joined a group of scholarly Jesuits with whom the Kangxi Emperor surrounded himself. The last nine years of his life were spent as superior of the mission of "Kiang-tcheon" in Shanxi.
  He died on 18 July 1684. The Kangxi Emperor himself wrote on Herdtrich's epitaph.
caption: The map of China in the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, with Couplet's notes about Chinese demographics.
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