The Chinese mission, however, met with misfortune, this time not from external pressures but from Dominican and Franciscan missionaries who argued that adaptation to Chinese ways had gone too far. Ricci had tried to avoid presenting Christianity to the Chinese as something new. He refused to consider these advanced and religious people as atheists, so he taught that traditional Chinese devotion reached perfection in the Christian faith. The “Lord of Heaven,” whom the Chinese had so long revered, was God. Ricci contended that the reverence for ancestors, so common in China, was not a religious act but a social one, and therefore acceptable to Christians.
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One pope approved, another disapproved, until after a century the whole mission in China fell into serious decline.
Ricci’s successor, Adam Schall, carried the scholarly work to an even higher level. He won the admiration of the Chinese scholar class by accurately predicting the time of an eclipse of the moon and became the director of the Imperial Astronomical Service. In 1650 Schall built a public church in Beijing and gained religious freedom for Christianity in the whole of the empire (1657). At Schall’s death there were almost 270,000 Christians in China.
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Ricci used two clocks to gain imperial favor. He brought the clocks with him as gifts to the emperor. They pleased the monarch very much, but when they ran down, the Chinese experts had no idea how to restart them. Ricci’s skill in keeping them in working order gained the emperor’s warm approval and allowed Ricci to remain in the capital for ten years as an astronomer and mathematician.
Ricci’s first task was to settle in Macao to learn the Chinese language and customs—and to wait for the Rock to crack. In 1583 he secured permission to settle in Chaoch’ing, the provincial capital. With their traditional respect for the scholar, the Chinese responded to a man who dressed in the garb of a mandarin, spoke their language, and was able to open to them new fields of learning. Ricci made a map of the world for them and introduced them to the new science of the calendar.
"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine . . . . All in my house, I'm gonna let it shine."
Alopen (c. 600) brought Christianity to China. His group of Syriac-speaking missionaries from Persia arrived in China around 635. Not much is known about him, but the Nestorian Stele—an artifact written in both Chinese and Syriac and dating to 781—identifies Alopen by name. Arriving during the foreigner-friendly Tang Dynasty, Alopen’s mission established a Christian presence in China that lasted more than two hundred years and included monasteries all over the country.