Teodorico Pedrini

On December 21, 1697, he received the Subdiaconate; on February 23, 1698, he joined the Congregation of the Mission of St. Vincent de Paul (known as the Vincentians or Lazarists), in March 1698 he was ordained a deacon and two weeks later – on the Easter night of 1698 – presbyter, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome.

Although selected as a member of the first papal legation of Patriarch Carlo Tommaso Maillard de Tournon, who had already left Spain for the Canary Islands, Pedrini never managed to join him, and, after waiting a year and a half, sailed from Saint Malo with other missionaries, on December 26, 1703, on a French ship heading to South America.

In Mariveles he joined five other missionaries of the Propaganda Fide, among whom was Matteo Ripa (who later founded the Chinese College in Naples, now Università degli studi di Napoli L'Orientale), and together they reached Macau in January 1710.

This contrast marked all his missionary life, and led him to the dramatic events of 1721 when, at the end of the second Legation of the Patriarch Carlo Ambrogio Mezzabarba, he refused to sign the final document called Mandarin's Diary, and was imprisoned in the residence of the French Jesuits in Beijing until 1723.

The Yongzheng Emperor set him free in February 1723 but the whole fact caused bitter polemics in Rome in the following years until 1730, which anticipated the final condemnation of the Chinese Rites, with the papal bull Ex Quo Singulari in 1742.

Pedrini died during the night of December 10, 1746, in his house at the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel without ever returning to Italy, and was buried in the Jesuits' Zhalan Cemetery in Beijing, at the expense of the Qianlong Emperor.

Pedrini was one of the few missionaries who kept to the directives of the Holy See in that regard, which had repeatedly forbidden (first with the Decree Cum Deus Optimus in 1704, then with the bullae Ex Illa Die in 1715, and Ex Quo Singulari in 1742) the mixture of Christian and Confucian practices.

Furthermore, Pedrini is the author of the only Western Baroque music compositions known in China in the 18th century: the Dodici Sonate a Violino Solo col Basso del Nepridi – Opera Terza whose original manuscript is still preserved in the National Library of Běijīng.

Dodici Sonate a Violino Solo col Basso del Nepridi – Opera Terza, in National Library of China; these scores were recorded in 1996 by the French group XVIII-21 Musique des Lumières[3] directed by Jean-Christophe Frisch, with the title Concert Baroque à la Cité Interdite.