Friendship among literati. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) in Ming China

ANA CAROLINA HOSNE

Transcultural Studies

Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Lugar: Heidelberg; Año: 2014 p. 190 - 214

2191-6411

This article focuses on how friendship among the literati became one more characteristic that helped Ricci shape the portrait of the Chinese literatus that he would convey to his European audience. There is no doubt that the Jesuits -and Ricci among the very first of them- would disseminate, and act as the true interpreters of all the information about China of which learned Europeans made good use in the seventeenth century. The Jesuit missionaries to China often had direct and close contact with these savants-both on return visits to Europe and through correspondence from China. Matteo Ricci was among the first, if not the first, to understand the importance of ties of friendship among the Chinese literati, and this is how he communicated it to his potential European readers in his account on the history of Christianity in China and his correspondence. In sum, as I aim to show in this article, Ricci regarded friendship as an attribute of the Chinese literati, and the importance of this male bonding helped him shape the notion of "literatus" in Ming China that he communicated to a European readership.