However, in traveling to Europe, he was preceded by Michael Shen Fu-Tsung, Arcadio Huang, and Rabban Bar Sauma, all of whom died abroad before returning to China.
[1] Little is known of his early life and family, but at some point, he appears to have met the Piedmontese Jesuit missionary, Antonio Francesco Giuseppe Provana, who converted him to Roman Catholicism and baptised him as "Luigi" or "Louis".
In January 1707, the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard De Tournon presented Pope Clement XI's decree Cum Deus Optimus... to the Kangxi Emperor, forbidding Catholic converts from participating in such rituals.
[4][5] The journey allowed Fan to observe Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia) and Bahia in Brazil,[4] probably making him the first Chinese person to return and write about the Americas.
[4] Unable to change Clement's mind on the issue of the Chinese rituals, Fan toured Italy, studied Latin and theology, and was able to make many first-hand observations of aspects of 18th-century Europe, which very few Asians had had the opportunity to do before him.