Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci landed at Macau in 1582, a Jesuit with a brief to crack China. He learned the language down to the characters, then spent two decades working his way inland. The Wanli Emperor summoned him to Beijing to fix the imperial calendar and explain the stars. Ricci didn't preach conquest; he translated Euclid into Chinese with scholar Xu Guangqi, rendered the Confucian classics into Latin, and argued that Catholicism and Confucian thought weren't enemies. He converted high officials, built a foothold for the faith, and died in Beijing in 1610. In 2022 the Vatican named him Venerable for h…