Li Zhizao

Li Zhizao a Chinese scholar, official and convert of the late Ming dynasty (1565-1630) who became one of the most important intermediaries between European learning and the Confucian world. With his teacher Matteo Ricci and his colleague Xu Guangqi he translated Western works on astronomy, mathematics and geography into Chinese, and he helped to introduce the science of the Jesuits into the intellectual life of late Ming China.

Early Life and Career

Li Zhizao was born in 1565 in Renzhou, in the province of Zhejiang, into a family of modest scholarly standing. He received the classical education expected of a candidate for the civil service and passed the provincial examinations, entering the imperial bureaucracy after further study. Like many of his contemporaries he was trained above all in the canonical writings and in the arts of government, and his early career was spent in the ordinary round of official appointments.

He became known as a careful administrator and a man of serious moral temper. During his years in office he served in several regions of the empire and acquired a reputation for probity and for attention to the practical needs of the districts under his charge. His official career, however, was repeatedly interrupted by the factional struggles that troubled the late Ming court and by periods of mourning and retirement.

A turning point came when he fell gravely ill and, according to the accounts of the mission, was nursed back to health by Jesuit physicians in Beijing. This encounter drew him toward the small community of European missionaries and toward the religious and scientific learning they brought with them, and it set the course of the rest of his life.

Conversion and the Jesuit Mission

Li Zhizao was baptised a Christian in 1610, receiving the name Leo, and became one of the three pillars of the early Chinese church, together with Xu Guangqi and Yang Tingyun. The three scholars, all of them high officials, gave the mission the standing and the literary authority it needed to survive in a hostile environment, and they defended it in memorials and prefaces against the charge that it was a subversive foreign sect.

He worked closely with Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who had mastered the Chinese language and won the respect of the literati by presenting European science as a complement rather than a rival to Confucian wisdom. Where Ricci supplied the mathematical and astronomical knowledge, Li Zhizao supplied the polished classical prose in which it was expressed, and their partnership produced some of the most influential scientific books of the period.

When persecution threatened the mission in the 1610s and 1620s he used his position to shelter the missionaries and their converts. He wrote defences of the Christian teaching and helped to organise the translation programme that made the mission a vehicle of cultural exchange as well as of religious instruction.

Scientific Translations

Li Zhizao is chiefly remembered for his translations and editorial work on the sciences. He collaborated in the Chinese version of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, the first six books of which had been rendered by Ricci and Xu Guangqi, and he assisted in the preparation of further mathematical and astronomical texts. These books gave Chinese readers for the first time a systematic account of European geometry and its methods of proof.

He translated and adapted works on arithmetic, on the astrolabe and on the celestial sphere, and he helped to introduce European knowledge of world geography. He was associated with the celebrated world map prepared by Ricci, which placed the Americas and the great oceans before the Chinese public and expanded the image of the world that scholars had inherited from the older cosmographies.

His most original contributions lay in astronomy. He argued for reform of the calendar, whose predictions had visibly failed, and he promoted the introduction of European techniques of observation and calculation. He prepared tables and instruments and took part in the debates over the reform of the imperial calendar that would occupy the best astronomers of the dynasty.

Religious and Philosophical Writings

In addition to his scientific work Li Zhizao wrote a number of religious books in Chinese. He composed a preface to the Chinese translation of the Ten Paradoxes, a collection of arguments defending the Christian understanding of God and the soul, and he produced expositions of Christian doctrine in a style calculated to appeal to readers trained in the classics.

His method was to present Christian teaching as consonant with the moral core of the Confucian tradition, appealing to the ancient veneration of Heaven rather than attacking Chinese custom. He argued that the worship of Shangdi, the Lord on High of the ancient classics, agreed with the Christian doctrine of the creator, a position that later became a matter of bitter controversy within the church.

He also engaged with Buddhism and Daoism, which he criticised for what he regarded as superstition and for the ways in which their doctrines of emptiness and rebirth were incompatible with the Christian teaching he had adopted. His polemics, written in vigorous classical prose, give a vivid picture of the intellectual combat of the age.

Death, Influence and Legacy

Li Zhizao died in 1630 in Hangzhou, where he had retired in his later years and where he had supported the building of churches and the printing of books. He left his library and his manuscripts to the mission and his descendants continued for a time to support the Christian community that he had helped to found.

His family became one of the notable Catholic households of the late Ming and early Qing, and the works he had overseen remained in circulation among scholars who wished to learn something of Western mathematics and astronomy. The translation programme in which he took part helped to prepare the way for the Jesuit astronomers who would reform the imperial calendar after the fall of the Ming.

He stands today as a representative of the first broad encounter between Chinese and European learning. Neither a mere transmitter nor a passive convert, he was a scholar who sought to assimilate the sciences of the West within the framework of Chinese letters, and his example continues to be studied by historians of the cultural exchange between the two civilisations.

See also

• Matteo Ricci
• Xu Guangqi
• Yang Tingyun
• Chinese Rites controversy