Abstract:

The Jesuit missionary to the Wanli Emperor, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), is renowned as the first European Christian to command classical Chinese literature, history and philosophy, which he studied as part of an effort to understand late-Ming culture and spread Christianity in the vast empire. Yet, the overall contours of his reliance on classical Chinese texts have not been studied rigorously. This article identifies relevant examples of text reuse in Ricci’s eight surviving works (two of which show particularly high patterns of reuse), while in the process also comparing three current approaches to automatically detecting text-reuse in sinographic (classical Chinese) texts. We then explore the possible historical factors behind these patterns and subject the reuse frequencies of particular classical works, historical periods and genres to analysis using linear and nonlinear regression models. In the end, we conclude that Ricci’s oeuvre borrows heavily from works generally categorized as “Confucian” from the Warring States period, as well as poetic texts of various sorts. This reflects the existing consensus in the historiography, while adding important granular detail. This article is the result of an interdisciplinary summer research project undertaken by undergraduate students majoring in history, computer science, statistics and the natural sciences.