The Jesuit Mission in China

The earliest certain transmission of the telescope to Asia occurred in 1613, when a Dutch sea captain brought it to Japan. The question of whether the representatives of the king of Siam took a spyglass back to Thailand in 1610 when they returned is still unanswered, as their ship was wrecked in a storm somewhere along the coast of Indonesia. Nevertheless, telescopes were taken to Thailand by the Jesuits soon thereafter. As we shall see later, the British ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, brought a telescope to the Mughal court of Jahangir in 1615. In the same year, however, Chinese scholars could read a preliminary account of Galileo's celestial discoveries written and translated into Chinese by a Portuguese Jesuit. By 1619, a “Keplerian” astronomical telescope arrived in China with a new batch of missionaries. The Jesuit scientists Johannes Schreck (known among Jesuits as Terrentius) and Johann Adam Schall had arrived in China with firsthand experience using the Dutch or Galilean telescopes in Europe at the moment of Galileo's discoveries. But the Jesuit mission in China had already been launched before Matteo Ricci arrived in 1583.

For more than three decades, Ricci and his followers had been laying the groundwork for bringing European science and astronomy to China. That task, as it turned out, was far more complicated than anyone imagined. It was more complex than transmitting the telescope and related parts of Western astronomy to other parts of the world. Long-distance spying, as could be done with the Dutch invention, would surely raise issues in the Muslim world as well as in China. But China's intellectual walls were anchored in unique and highly articulated ancient patterns of thought that were always ready to be recovered and reimposed.