How often does an important life decision call for years of waiting, not out of indecision, but out of seriousness? So it was with one of the most respected scholars in sixteenth century China: it took him seven years of studying a foreign faith before he was baptized.
Xu Guangqi was born in 1562 in Shanghai, into a family that had lost nearly everything in pirate raids. He studied the Confucian classics for the imperial examinations, the only path to social advancement in Ming China, and faced failures before finally passing.
In 1596, in Guangzhou, he met the Italian Jesuit Lazzaro Cattaneo, his first contact with the Christian faith. In 1600, in Nanjing, he met the famous missionary Matteo Ricci. Xu spent several more years studying Christian doctrine with the priests before deciding to be baptized.
In 1603, at age 41, he was baptized with the name Paul. The following year, having passed the empire’s highest examination, he entered the prestigious Hanlin Academy. With Ricci, he translated into Chinese the first books of Euclid’s Elements, the first Western geometry in the Chinese language.
When a Buddhist official in Nanjing launched a persecution against the Jesuits in 1616, Xu risked his career and wrote a memorial to the emperor in defense of the missionaries, declaring himself ready to be punished if the accusations proved true. This was no armchair Christianity: it carried a real cost.
His faith did not remove him from the world: he tested irrigation and new crops on his land, the seed of an agricultural encyclopedia of some seven hundred thousand characters, and advocated the adoption of Western cannons for the empire’s defense. This blend of Christian zeal and statecraft did not always bear good fruit: he could not save a protege of his from execution after being accused following a military mutiny.
He rose to Grand Secretary, one of the highest posts in the Ming government, and spent his final years leading the reform of the Chinese calendar together with Jesuit astronomers. He died in Beijing in 1633, leaving unfinished the agricultural work that would be published six years later.
Xu Guangqi’s life is a reminder that faith can grow slowly, within a culture and a calling, without requiring a person to stop being who they are. Science, agriculture, and public service became, in his hands, places where the gospel put down roots that his own granddaughter would still be watering decades later.
