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.

Ricci was born on 6 October 1552 in Macerata, part of the Papal States and today a city in the Italian region of Marche.

Ricci remained employed in teaching and the ministry there until the end of Lent 1582 when he was summoned to Macau to prepare to enter China.

[5] No prints of the 1584 map are known to exist, but, of the much improved and expanded Kunyu Wanguo Quantu of 1602,[6] six recopied, rice-paper versions survive.

[7] It is thought that, during their time in Zhaoqing, Ricci and Ruggieri compiled a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, the first in any European language, for which they developed a system for transcribing Chinese words in the Latin alphabet.

During the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of his Jesuit colleague Lazzaro Cattaneo, compiled another Chinese-Portuguese dictionary, in which tones in Chinese syllables were indicated in Roman text with diacritical marks.

This honor was in recognition of Ricci's scientific abilities, chiefly his predictions of solar eclipses, which were significant events in the Chinese world.

Diego de Pantoja made a special plea to the court, requesting a burial plot in Beijing, in the light of Ricci's contributions to China.

Longobardo entrusted another Jesuit, Nicolas Trigault, with expanding and editing, as well as translating into Latin, those of Ricci's papers that were found in his office after his death.

This work was first published in 1615 in Augsburg as De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas and soon was translated into a number of other European languages.

[25] With his superior Valignano's formal approval, he aligned himself with the Confucian intellectually elite literati,[26] and even adopted their mode of dress.

Some contemporary authors have praised Ricci as an exemplar of beneficial inculturation,[28][29] avoiding at the same time distorting the Gospel message or neglecting the indigenous cultural media.

[33][34] Bishop Claudio Giuliodori, the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Macerata, formally closed the diocesan phase of the sainthood process on 10 May 2013.

Pope Francis issued a decree on 17 December 2022 that Ricci had lived a life of heroic virtue, thus conferring on him the title of Venerable.

Subsequently, the Marche Regional Government purchased the work, while the original model is now permanently exhibited at the main entrance of the Italian Consulate in Shanghai.

[50] The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (天主實義) is a book written by Ricci, which argues that Confucianism and Christianity are not opposed and in fact are remarkably similar in key respects.

In the Chinese Rites controversy, some Roman-Catholic missionaries raised the question of whether Ricci and other Jesuits had gone too far and changed Christian beliefs to win converts.

[51] Peter Phan argues that True Meaning was used by a Jesuit missionary to Vietnam, Alexandre de Rhodes, in writing a catechism for Vietnamese Christians.

[52] In 1631, Girolamo Maiorica and Bernardino Reggio, both Jesuit missionaries to Vietnam, started a short-lived press in Thăng Long (present-day Hanoi) to print copies of True Meaning and other texts.