[7] Xu was a colleague and collaborator of the Italian Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Sabatino de Ursis and assisted their translation of several classic Western texts into Chinese, including part of Euclid's Elements.

[9] On April 15, 2011, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi announced the start of a beatification process for Xu Guangqi,[10] which has stalled.

In Chinese, its transcription is employed as a kind of courtesy name (i.e., Xu Baolu) and the Jesuits sometimes referred to him as "Siù Pao Lò"[12] or Ciù Paulus.

Xu Guangqi was born in Shanghai in Southern Zhili's Songjiang Prefecture on April 24, 1562,[1] under China's Ming dynasty.

Guangqi's branch of the Xu clan were not related to those who had passed the imperial examinations and joined Shanghai's local gentry.

[18] His father Xu Sicheng (died c. 1607)[19] had been orphaned at age 5 and seen most of his inheritance lost to "Japanese" pirate raids and insolvent friends in the 1550s.

[18] By the time Guangqi was 6, the family had saved enough to send him to a local school, where a later hagiographer records him piously upbraiding his classmates when they spoke of wanting to use their education for wealth or mystical power.

[23] In 1596, he moved to Xunzhou (now Guiping) in Guangxi to assist its prefect Zhao Fengyu, a Shanghai native who had passed the juren exams in 1555.

[14] An earlier demonstration in 1623 had gone disastrously, with an exploding cannon killing one Portuguese artillerist and three Chinese observers, but on this occasion the pieces were accepted and directed to Dengzhou (now Penglai) in Shandong.

Together with Captain Teixeira and his translator João Rodrigues, Sun used the pieces to train his troops to oppose the ongoing Manchu invasion.

However, Sun's lenient treatment of a 1632 mutiny under Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming permitted them to successfully capture Dengzhou, seize the artillery, and establish an independent power base that eventually joined the Manchus.

Johann Adam Schall von Bell stayed with Xu during his final illness in 1633 and oversaw the return of his body to his family in Shanghai.

[30] Xu Guangqi put forward the concept of a "Rich Country and Strong Army" (富國強兵), which would be adopted by Japan for its modernization in the end of the 19th century, under the name Fukoku Kyohei.

[7] It's notable for systematically introducing the concepts and development of European mathematics and astronomy to China for the first time, including 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.

[24] His main interests were in irrigation, fertilizers, famine relief, economic crops, and empirical observation with early notions of chemistry.