Xu Guangqi
Xu Guangqi was born in Shanghai, China on May 4th, 1562 and is the Ming Dynasty Chinese Politician. At the age of 71, Xu Guangqi biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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In 1596, he moved to Xunzhou (now Guiping) in Guangxi to assist its prefect Zhao Fengyu, a Shanghai native who had passed the juren exams in 1555. The next year, he traveled to Beijing in the spring and passed its provincial exam, becoming a juren. He seems to have stayed there for the imperial exam the next year, but failed to pass. He then returned to Shanghai around April, turning his attention to the study of military and agricultural subjects. The next year he studied under Cheng Jiasui.
He first met Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit, in Nanjing in March or April 1600. He collaborated with Ricci in translating several classic Western texts—most notably the first part of Euclid's Elements—into Chinese, as well as several Chinese Confucian texts into Latin. Ricci's influence led to Xu being baptized as a Roman Catholic in 1603. His descendants remained Catholics or Protestants into the 21st century..
From 1607 until 1610, Xu was forced to retire from public office and returned to his home in Shanghai. It was during this time that he experimented with Western-style irrigation methods. He also experimented with the cultivation of sweet potatoes, cotton, and the nu zhen tree. He was called once more to serve the Chinese bureaucracy, where he rose to a high rank and became known late in his career simply as "The Minister". Yet he continued to experiment and learn of new agricultural practices while he served his office, promoting the use of wet-rice in the Northeast China. From 1613 until 1620 he often visited Tianjin, where he helped organize self-sufficient military settlements (tun tian).
In 1629, memorials by Xu successfully moved the court to permit the Portuguese captain Gonçalo Teixeira-Correa to bring 10 artillery pieces and 4 "excellent bombards" across China to the capital to demonstrate the effectiveness of Western artillery. An earlier demonstration in 1623 had gone disastrously, with an exploding cannon killing one Portuguese artillerist and three Chinese observers, but on this occasion the pieces were accepted and directed to Dengzhou (now Penglai) in Shandong. The Christian convert Ignatius Sun, a protégé of Xu's, was governor there and had also been a strong advocate of modernizing China's military. Together with Captain Teixeira and his translator João Rodrigues, Sun used the pieces to train his troops to oppose the ongoing Manchu invasion. However, Sun's lenient treatment of a 1632 mutiny under Kong Yude and Geng Zhongming permitted them to successfully capture Dengzhou, seize the artillery, and establish an independent power base that eventually joined the Manchus. Xu's memorials for clemency were unsuccessful and Sun was court-martialed and executed.
He held the positions of Minister of Rites (禮部尙書), overseeing government programs related to culture, education, and foreign affairs, and Deputy Senior Grand Secretary (內閣次輔), effectively a deputy premier for the imperial cabinet.
Johann Adam Schall von Bell stayed with Xu during his final illness in 1633 and oversaw the return of his body to his family in Shanghai. There, it was publicly displayed at his villa until 1641, when it was buried "in a time of hardship".