by Roberto Ribeiro 

Matteo Ricci (or Li Madou) died in Beijing on May 11, 1610. Since his death, almost four hundred years ago, much has been researched and published about his life. Though he was only 57 years old at the time of his death, he had spent more than half of that life in China.

Ricci arrived in Macao on August 7, 1582. The city was the base for all missionary activities at the Extreme Orient, but little progress had yet been achieved concerning the Chinese territory. Ricci was not the first to try. Before he arrived, Michele Ruggiere had already achieved some success studying the Chinese language. In fact, learning the language was an essential part of the method of “adaptation” to the local cultures proposed by Alessandro Valignano, the Visitator to the Jesuit missions to the Extreme Orient. At the same time, the idiom was one of the main obstacles for those first westerns in the Ming China, due to its complexity. In his first letter sent from Macao dated of February 13, 1583, Ricci commented how, after recovering from a period of sickness, he immediately started studying the Chinese language, adding that “regarding the spoken language, it is so ambivalent that many words can have more than a thousand meanings”.

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