Re: China and Matteo Ricci Re: Japs can't pronounce L's (the Japanese convert L's into R's)

Tilde <invalide@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Peter Moylan wrote:

On 05/07/24 06:28, J. J. Lodder wrote:

bertietaylor <bertietaylor@novabbs.com.invalid> wrote:
>
[on the Dutch]

Amazing lot, going to the ends of the Earth to grab whatever they could.
Active!

>
As far as Nagasaki, anyway.
The Dutch didn't grab anything there, they traded.
They were succesful in that, precisely because
they did not try to grab anything.
(that's what the Spanish and the Portugese were kicked out for)

 
That was part of the reason. Another important part was that the Spanish
and Portuguese tried to convert people to Christianity.
 
One bit of information that the Dutch brought to Japan was the fact that
there was more than one Christian religion, and that the Christians did
not agree amongst themselves on religious questions.
 
(In the long term, the accumulation of more and more religions is a path
to atheism.)

 
 
Recently read "A Jesuit in the Forbidden City:
Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610". Worth plowing through.
 From the book and the wiki page on him, it
appears that China kept things pretty well
contained:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matteo_Ricci
"At the time, Christian missionary activity
in China was almost completely limited to
Macau..."
 
Ricci did an amazing amount of work learning
Chinese, both speaking and reading:
 
"Once in Macau, Ricci studied the Chinese
language and customs. It was the beginning
of a long project that made him one of the
first Western scholars to master Chinese
script and Classical Chinese. "
 
Not much mention of Ricci in this group
from what I see in google.

OTOH Ferdinand Verbiest has been mentioned here some time ago.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Verbiest>

Verbiest was a Jesuit astronomer and missionary of Belgian origin
who succeeded in surviving at the Chinese court
by being the superior astronomer in a contest of prediction
against the Chinese court astronomer.

He brought Copernican astronomy to China.
Those Jesuits didn't care about papal bans on it.
The bronze instruments he had cast still survive
in Beijing centre, on what was once the city wall.

Jan