Ricci exhibition shows lost age of cultural vitality

For those of us who believe the balance of power is shifting to the East, and an era of Chinese power is coming, it might be worthwhile to look back a lengthy trip 400 years ago.

Matteo Ricci, an Italian missionary, first set foot on the Chinese mainland in 1583 after years in Goa and Macao.

He came from a continent going through the Renaissance, and where nascent capitalism, in the form of the Italian banks, was beginning to develop. He was about to meet a country that was determined to shut itself off from the rest of the world.

In a sense, Ricci's trip brought the first clashes of civilizations between the West and China. The ongoing exhibition "Matteo Ricci: Messenger of Science, Technology and Culture between East and West" at the Capital Museum of Beijing offers a glimpse of this landmark encounter.

Born into a noble family, Ricci received solid education in math, geography and astronomy while going through seminary. It was this new knowledge that helped Ricci won the acceptance of local officials. The Chinese, possessed of a profound cultural arrogance at the time, received these novel ideas with curiosity.

Ricci impressed scholars with his superb memory skills. He translated six books of Euclid's Elements of Geometry into Chinese. His gift clock fascinated the Wanli Emperor (1563 -1620). Many Chinese learned from the map of the world he drew and the globe he constructed that China was not the center of the world, but a part.