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Hello, in 1582 the Jesuit priest Mateo Ricci disembarked at the port of Macau

when the mission to convert the people of China to Christianity.

He planned to target the Ming Emperor, believing that he adopted Catholicism, his subjects would follow.

Over the next 30 years Ricci became one of the first Westerners to enter the forbidden city.

He mixed with princes and mandarinns and founded the first Catholic cathedral in Beijing.

By sharing European knowledge with local scholars, he changed the way China saw the West

and his reports of China transformed the way Europe viewed China for centuries to come.

His approach to conversion though later caused outrage in the Vatican.

With me to discuss Mateo Ricci and the Ming are Mary Levin,

reader in early modern history at the University of Cambridge.

Craig Clunus, professor of the history of art at the University of Oxford

and Anna Garritz, reader in history at the University of Warwick.

Craig Clunus, how much did Europeans know about China at the end of the 16th century?

Well they knew that China was very big and they thought, they were right, that China was very prosperous.

We had Europeans had first arrived in Chinese waters at the very beginning of the 16th century.

The Portuguese arrived in China around 1513.

So by the end of the century by the time Ricci arrives in Macau,

there have been considerable numbers of decades of trade and interaction.

But this trade and interaction had all taken place at the very edges of the empire.

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