Chin-nama

Born in Macerata, Italy, in 1552, Matteo Ricci was a Catholic priest who was sent to the Jesuit representation to Macau in 1582. His assignment was to travel on to mainland China and seek to establish the first permanent Jesuit mission there. Ricci arrived in China in 1583, never to leave it again. He died there in 1610. Fluent in Chinese, he was very succesful, on good terms with people that mattered, much appreciated as a carthographer and astronomer, and given free access to the Forbidden City, which was quite exceptional. Ricci's account of his mission to China, called De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, was published posthumously in 1615. The present work is a Persian translation of the book's first fascicle made in India by a Persian convert to Christianity from the seventeenth century. The translation is significant in that it was made at the suggestion of a Jesuit priest, most likely from missionary ambitions.