Matteo Ricci, born in 1552 in Macerata, today a city in the Italian region of Marche and then part of the Papal States, had studied theology and law in a Roman Jesuits' school, entered the religious order in 1571, and in 1577 had applied to be a member of a missionary expedition to India.
Departing from Lisbon in March 1578, he had arrived in Goa, a Portuguese Colony, in September 1578, and four years later had been dispatched to China, arriving at Macau, a Portuguese trading post on the South China Sea coast, in August 1582.
Christian missionary activity in China was at the time almost exclusively limited to Macau, where a certain number of the local Chinese people, who converted to Christianity, were expected to live in Portuguese ways, and, until 1579, no one among the Christian missionaries there would even seriously learn the Chinese language.
It was only in July 1579 (just three years before Ricci's arrival) that Michele Ruggieri, invited by Alessandro Valignano, had arrived from Portuguese India to apply himself to the study of Chinese, and to prepare for spreading the Jesuits' missionary work from Macau into Mainland China.
Once in Macau in 1582, Ricci had started learning the Chinese language and Chinese customs.
This was the beginning of a long project that would eventually make him one of the first Western scholars to master Chinese script and Classical Chinese.
Together with Ruggieri, Ricci had traveled a number of times to Guandong's major cities, Canton and Zhaoqing (then, residence of the Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi), in order to find a way to establish a permanent Jesuit mission house outside Macau.
Ricci and Ruggieri had in 1583 obtained permission to settle in Zhaoqing from that city’s governor, Wang Pan, who had heard of Ricci's skill as a mathematician/cartographer.
Ricci stayed in Zhaoqing from 1583 to 1589 before having to leave after a new viceroy decided to expel him.
It was in Zhaoqing, in 1584, that Ricci had composed the first European-style map of the world in Chinese, now called the "Impossible Black Tulip" on account of its rarity.
No versions of the 1584 map survive, though surviving It is thought that during this time, Ricci, together with Ruggieri, compiled their Portuguese-Chinese dictionary - the first ever European-Chinese dictionary, for which they developed a consistent system for transcribing Chinese words in the Latin alphabet.
Unfortunately, the manuscript was misplaced in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and not re-discovered until 1934.
This dictionary was finally published in 2001.
Ricci had managed to obtain permission to relocate to Shaoguan (Shaozhou, in Ricci's account) in the north of the province, and reestablish his mission there.
Further travels in China had seen Ricci reach Nanjing and Nanchang in 1595.
Alessandro Valignano, his superior, had in August 1597 appointed him as Major Superior of the mission in China, with the rank and powers of a Provincial, a charge that he is to fulfill until his death.
He had moved to Tongzhou (a port for Beijing) in 1598 and then first reached Beijing on September 7, 1598.
Because of the ongoing Japanese invasion of Korea, however, Ricci could not reach the Imperial Palace.
After waiting for two months, he left Beijing first for Nanjing and also stopped at Suzhou in Jiangsu Province.
With the help of his Jesuit colleague Lazzaro Cattaneo during the winter of 1598-99, Ricci compiles another Chinese-Portuguese dictionary, in which tones of the romanized Chinese syllables are indicated with diacritical marks.
This work has been lost, and, unlike Ricci's and Ruggieri's earlier Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, has never been found.
