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| Martino Martini (1614–1661) | ||||||||||
| An Italian Jesuit missionary, geographer, and sinologist, Martini was born at Trento and in 1631 entered the Society of Jesus in Rome, studying at the Roman College until 1634. Ordained in 1638, he set out for the Indies and arrived in China in 1643, taking the name Wei K’uang-kuo. He worked in Hangzhou and Nanjing, becoming superior of the Hangzhou mission in 1650. After the Ming collapse in 1644 he fled, but was later permitted by the Manchus to return. Alongside his religious duties he studied Chinese geography, and in 1650 travelled to Rome to report on the missions, reaching the city in 1654 after being briefly imprisoned by the Dutch in Batavia. In Europe he published his History of the Tartar Wars and contributed maps and provincial accounts of China to Joan Blaeu’s Novus Atlas Sinensis, which gained wide interest and advanced Catholic aims in China. He also produced the first translation of a Chinese historical work into a Western language. Returning to China in 1658 with seventeen missionaries, of whom only one survived the journey, he built a college and a church at Hangzhou in 1660. He died there and was buried in the city. | ||||||||||
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Art