Xu Guangqi in the context of "Guanzi (text)"

Matteo Ricci SJ (Italian: [matˈtɛːo ˈrittʃi]; Latin: Matthaeus Riccius; 6 October 1552 – 11 May 1610) was an Italian Jesuit priest and one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China missions. He created the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, a 1602 map of the world written in Chinese characters. In 2022, the Apostolic See declared its recognition of Ricci's heroic virtues, thereby bestowing upon him the honorific of Venerable.

Ricci arrived at the Portuguese settlement of Macau in 1582 where he began his missionary work in China. He mastered the Chinese language and writing system. He became the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing in 1601 when invited by the Wanli Emperor, who sought his services in matters such as court astronomy and calendrical science. He emphasized parallels between Catholicism and Confucianism but opposed Buddhism. He converted several prominent Chinese officials to Catholicism. He also worked with several Chinese elites, such as Xu Guangqi, in translating Euclid's Elements into Chinese as well as the Confucian classics into Latin for the first time in history.

The Chinese Rites controversy (simplified Chinese: 中国礼仪之争; traditional Chinese: 中國禮儀之爭; pinyin: Zhōngguó lǐyí zhī zhēng) was a dispute among Catholic missionaries over the religiosity of Confucianism and Chinese rituals during the 17th and 18th centuries. The debate discussed whether Chinese ritual practices of ancestor veneration and other formal rites qualified as religious, and thus incompatible with Catholic belief. The Jesuits argued that these Chinese rites were secular rituals that were compatible with Christianity, within certain limits, and should thus be tolerated. The Dominicans and Franciscans disagreed and reported the issue to Rome.

Rome's Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith sided with the Dominicans in 1645 by condemning the Chinese rites based on their brief. The same congregation sided with the Jesuits in 1656, thereby lifting the ban. It was one of the many disputes between the Jesuits and the Dominicans in China and elsewhere in Asia, including Japan and India. The conflict between the Jesuits and their opponents took on a historical dimension, with the former insisting that Europeans and the Chinese had a shared history, which was taken to legitimise the Jesuit "accommodation" of Chinese rites and names for the Christian God.

The Catholic Church (Chinese: 天主教; pinyin: Tiānzhǔ jiào; lit. 'Religion of the Lord of Heaven', after the Chinese term for the Christian God) first appeared in China upon the arrival of John of Montecorvino in China proper during the Yuan dynasty; he was the first Catholic missionary in the country, and would become the first bishop of Khanbaliq (1271–1368).

The Jesuit Matteo Ricci was successful in Catholic missionary work in China. His approach viewed certain Confucian and Chinese folk practices as non-religious in nature and therefore compatible with Catholic practice. Other missionaries objected to this approach and after the hundred year long Chinese Rites controversy, the Vatican ordered the Jesuits to abandon the culturally accommodating approach Ricci had developed.

The Chongzhen calendar (Chinese: 崇禎曆; pinyin: Chóngzhēn lì; Wade–Giles: Ch‘ung-chên Li) or Shixian calendar (Chinese: 時憲曆; pinyin: Shíxiàn lì; Wade–Giles: Shihhsian Li) was a historical edition of the lunisolar Chinese calendar from 1645 to 1913. It was developed by the lead of Xu Guangqi with the assistance of the Jesuit scholars Johann Schreck and Johann Adam Schall von Bell from 1624 to 1644, and was dedicated to the Chongzhen Emperor. When he died a year after it was released, it was propagated in the first year of the Qing dynasty by the Shunzhi Emperor, who changed its name to Shíxiàn calendar.

This calendar is notable for systematically introducing the concepts and development of European mathematics and astronomy to China for the first time, and constituted the first major collaboration between scientists from Europe and from the Far East. Documented in more than 100 volumes of books, It offered an encyclopedic account of Euclidean geometry, spherical geometry and trigonometry, with extensive translations and references to Euclid's Elements and the works of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Tycho Brahe, whose Tychonic system was used its main theoretical basis. In addition, a comprehensive set of mathematical tables and astronomical ephemerides was included.