Story of China

In august 1582 a visitor arrived in the tiny Portuguese trading post of Macao on the South China Sea. It was an event of no apparent significance in the greater scheme of things. But its repercussions would be world shaking. The visitor was an Italian jesuit called Matteo Ricci, and his mission, unbelievably, was to convert China to Christianity. The founding of Macao had been part of the extraordinary expansion of European powers in the few decades since Columbus discovered the New World. Small maritime states on the Atlantic seaboard, they were nothing compared with the greatness and antiquity of China. But with their new knowledge and propelled by Chinese inventions, it was the Europeans, not the Chinese who would seize the time. And it all began with a simple trading deal. This is the old fortress on the top of Macao. Portuguese had made their earliest explorations of the Chinese coast 1513-14, and then in 1557 the Ming government allowed them to actually settle on this peninsula and to live here. Not a formal treaty, and the Ming government looked after them very carefully. They had a landward wall with garrisons to make sure that they didn't come out of here except at the allotted times, twice a year, when they could sail up to Canton to trade. It was the Europeans first foothold. Here in the south, Ricci worked for 15 years learning to speak Chinese like a native. And then, in 1598, he set off overland to Beijing. The China he traveled through, he wrote, was the best-governed state on earth and a deeply moral civilization. But Christianity, he thought, would be the completion of their fate. To achieve that, his idea was to go to the very top to find a Chinese emperor like Constantine, who'd converted the Roman empire to Christianity. He's an honorary Chinese person. Yeah, a great person. He didn't succeed in that, but astonishingly there are 70 million Chinese Christians today, and, in a sense, you could say their story begins with Ricci.