Giulio Alenio
Giulio Aleni (; 1582– 10 June 1649), in Chinese , was an Italian Jesuit missionary and scholar. He was born in Leno near Brescia in Italy, at the time part of the Republic of Venice, and died at Yanping in China. He became a member of the Society of Jesus in 1600 and distinguished himself in his knowledge of mathematics and theology. Life. In 1610, he was sent as a missionary to China. While waiting at Macau for a favorable opportunity to enter the country he taught mathematics to local scholars and published his "Observation sur l'éclipse de lune du  8 Novembre 1612, faite a Macao" ("Mémoires de l'Acad. des Sciences", VII, 706.) He adopted the dress and manners of the country, was the first Christian missionary in Jiangxi, and built several churches in Fujian. One of his converts, a scholar name Li Jiubiao, recorded Aleni's and Andrius Rudamina's, one of his fellow Jesuits, responses to the questions and speculations of his parishioners and compiled them into a journal. Works. He published works in Chinese on a variety of topics. His cosmography, "Wanwu Zhenyuan" (The True Origin of the Ten-thousand Things), was translated into Manchu during the  reign of Kang-he as Wylie: Tumen chakai unengki sekiyen, Möllendorff: Tumen jakai unengki sekiyen. A copy was sent from Beijing to Paris in 1789. He completed the work of earlier Jesuit scholars to produce the "Zhifang waiji", China's first global geography. Among his most important religious works are a controversial treatise on the Catholic Faith, in which are refuted what he saw as the principal errors of the Chinese; and "The Life of God, the Saviour, from the Four Gospels" (Peking, 1635–1637, 8 vols.; often reprinted, e.g. in 1887 in 3 vols) and used even by Protestant missionaries . Legacy. The life and works of Giulio Aleni are the subject of several conferences in 1994 and 2010. Two of his books, "Life of Matteo Ricci, Xitai of the West" and "Holy images of the Heavenly Lord" have been presented to the public by "Fondazione Civiltà Bresciana" in two separate occasions, on 13 and 25 October 2010.