Matteo Ricci and the introduction of the alphabet to China
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Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-third issue:
“Xizi Qiji 西字奇跡The Miracle of Western Words: Matteo Ricci’s Innovations in Language and Faith,” by Zhaofei Chen.
https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp363_matteo_ricci_xizi_qiji.pdf
ABSTRACT
Matteo Ricci’s Xizi Qiji (The Miracle of Western Words), published in 1605, is a landmark text in the history of cross-cultural communication. Written in Classical Chinese and annotated with Roman letters, it enabled Western readers in late Ming China to pronounce Chinese texts for the first time. The work is divided into five sections: the first three adapt Biblical stories into Classical Chinese prose, aligning them with Confucian moral principles, while the last two record Ricci’s interactions with Cheng, a Chinese ink master, and their discussions on faith and the importance of writing. This project focuses on translating selected sections of Xizi Qiji into English, making this significant text accessible to modern readers. By preserving the elegance of the original Classical Chinese stories and incorporating Ricci’s Romanized annotations, this translation highlights the literary and linguistic innovations of Ricci’s work. Through this translation, the project aims to allow contemporary audiences to appreciate the aesthetic and intellectual value of Xizi Qiji.
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All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
- "The Miracle of Western Writing" (12/31/23)
- "Matteo Ricci's tombstone" (11/24/21)
- "Translating from Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic to Mandarin" (1/14/24)
- "Candida Xu: a highly literate Chinese woman of the 17th century" (7/7/20)
- "The invention of an alphabet for the transcription of Chinese characters half a millennium ago" (11/21/22) — based on Takata Tokio's detailed codicological study of Matteo Ricci's Jesuit colleague, Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), Xīrú ěrmù zī 西儒耳目資 (An Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati)
- "The past, present, and future of Sinography" (8/15/24)
- "Dramatic Transformations of Sinography,in East Asia and the World", Sino-Platonic Papers, 352 (August, 2024), 1-59.
- Victor H. Mair, "Sound and Meaning in the History of Characters: Views of China's Earliest Script Reformers", pinyin.info. From Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing, edited by Mary S. Erbaugh, copyright © 2002 by the National East Asian Languages Resource Center of the Ohio State University. Used by permission of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center.
wgj said,
September 3, 2025 @ 5:13 am
"Preserving the elegance of the original Classical Chinese stories" is a strong claim for any translation.
Rodger C said,
September 3, 2025 @ 9:22 am
How did Ricci Romanize "Xizi Qiji" in 1605?
xyz said,
September 4, 2025 @ 12:27 pm
Please see Master's Thesis of Hsin-Fang Wu 吳欣芳,「無聲的説法者」：利瑪竇的著書過程與讀者理解, for some information on the spurious Matteo Ricci note included in 汪廷訥's (1573-1619)《人鏡陽秋》which is the source of the "Passage Four" of the shared article. This note is presented in Chinese characters in Wu's thesis (p 36 note 49) though actually the original created by 汪廷訥 is in Ricci-style romanization (no characters). Wang's text copies and rearranges short fragments from Ricci's《西字奇蹟》and is clearly nonsensical. We can't "translate" it. There was much fascination with this script among Ming scholars and here it is used mischievously by Wang.
Bybo said,
September 6, 2025 @ 7:38 am
‘Sound and Meaning in the History of Characters: Views of China's Earliest Script Reformers’ is fascinating to read.
Is there any evidence that Chinese thinkers engaged in similar intellectual reflection on their script when they came into contact with the Arabic script? It, too, was used, by a minority with special needs, to write Chinese. As with the confrontation with the Latin script, it might have been a significant realisation that the Chinese language does not necessarily have to be linked to sinograms. (The relative advantages and disadvantages of the Arabic vs the Latin script are, in comparison, rather trivial.)
And another question, which has little to do with this topic, has been on my mind for some time: The Arabic script is obviously not a logographic system, but I find it fascinating that the form (gestalt?) of many (Arabic and Persian) words remains fairly constant in the different languages written in Arabic script. (It is a remarked-upon exception when languages such as Uyghur and Kurdish use the script differently.)
Perhaps the most obvious example is the word الله, but one could also mention words such as جمهوری, علم or بماز. I am aware that these are simply loan words and not grapheme borrowings, as is the case with kanji in Japanese, for example. But (thanks to characteristics of the Arabic script, in contrast to, for example, the Latin script) the cross-linguistic community is, if you will follow me, somehow even closer than in the so-called international scientific vocabulary in European languages. Is this a describable phenomenon? Or am I just imagining things?
(I am a complete layperson when it comes to these matters. Please excuse my probably confused thinking.)
David Marjanović said,
September 6, 2025 @ 11:56 am
No. Very generally speaking, vowels are more labile than consonants, and short vowels usually more so than long ones; if you only have three graphemes for long vowels and none (in usual practice) for short ones, then a lot of words that are pronounced similarly (e.g. in different languages) will look exactly the same.
Bybo said,
September 6, 2025 @ 2:32 pm
@DM
Thank you. What you say is of course correct. I was afraid I didn't phrase my point clearly, though. My question is: Do speakers (readers) of those languages—say, Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, and Persian—experience the similarity/identity in written form as something special, perhaps remotely like, supposedly (?), a Japanese person might see written Chinese as 'close' to their own language (and vice versa) because of the shared set of symbols. And if this is a thing, is there a name for it?
Victor Mair said,
September 7, 2025 @ 11:36 am
From Nathan Vedal:
To be honest, I don't know much about this – I never worked with the text much.
For 西字奇蹟 (and title page etc.), I would check the version of the text held at the Vatican and facsimiled in 梵蒂岡圖書館藏明清中西文化交流史文獻叢刊, which I don't have at hand.
As for what is printed in the SPP article as Passage 4, the Chinese text does not seem intelligible to me. I don't think that means parts of 西字奇蹟 are spurious. According to the MA thesis, the passage simply does not exist in 西字奇蹟, and a later Ming author took a jumble of Ricci's transcriptions and put them together randomly without corresponding Chinese characters (as suggested by the commenter). It is unclear from the SPP paper where Chen found a transcription in Chinese characters and why it is included here as a part of 西字奇蹟.
If all that is so, although again I haven't independently corroborated this against the relevant texts, then "Passage 4" was a) never written in Chinese characters, b) never meant to be intelligible, and c) not a part of Ricci's original 西字奇蹟.
Victor Mair said,
September 8, 2025 @ 9:42 am
From Zhaofei Chen:
The original 1605 edition of Xizi Qiji has not survived, so no title page or direct evidence remains about Ricci’s romanization of the title. Our knowledge derives mostly from 程氏墨苑.
The three illustrated biblical stories are widely accepted as the core of Xizi Qiji. Additionally, 述文贈幼博程子 is included there with Romanized annotations, indicating Ricci likely intended it as part of the project. As for 外且相問答談論, while it appears in compilations—including the CTEXT database Xizi Qiji entry (CTEXT link) (Wu Hsin-Fang’s thesis) argues that it likely derives from Wang Tingna’s Renjing Yangqiu, where Ricci’s romanizations were reassembled in a nonsensical fashion. For this reason, I have treated it as supplementary rather than core to the original text, and I will take this into account in my future work.
Victor Mair said,
September 8, 2025 @ 9:47 am
From Nicolas Standaert at KU Leuven (Catholic University in Belgium):
I would recommend you to have a look at the notes and the articles mentioned in our (free online referential) CCT-database.
Chinese Christian Texts Database : Source : 西字奇跡 [000002703]
The Chinese Christian Texts Database (CCT-Database) is a research database of primary and secondary sources concerning the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (from 1582 to ca. 1840). The cultural contacts comprise documents in the various fields of cultural interaction: religion, philosophy, science, art …
Victor Mair said,
September 16, 2025 @ 6:25 am
From Ling-chia Wei:
I must admit this is the first time I read Wu's thesis and I also check some possible resources. In essence, the passage in 《人鏡陽秋》 is not a "lost" or "hidden" work by Ricci. Instead, it stands as a cultural artifact, revealing the intrigue and creative, sometimes mischievous, reception of Western knowledge and writing systems among the late-Ming intellectual elite. It highlights that the fascination was not just with the content of what the Jesuits wrote, but with the very form of their writing.
It is transcribed as follows:
此文收在汪廷訥，《人鏡陽秋》一書，轉引自朱維錚，《利瑪寶中文著譯集》，頁282-285。此文據陳垣翻譯如下：外且相問答談論。涯則日倘是天主/信道之/行天命火/無疑我信無/行道之人踵/解兆眾之/日在船恍惚/何人而以此文/九州棼/其士宜物產曾不/多則聲/誌臥坐不言者再三修/大乎立/幸得與幼博程/廓助作者吾/異吾乃諗/也。歐羅巴利瑪寶撰。參見陳垣，《西字奇蹟陳垣跋》《利瑪資中文著譯集》，頁289。