CALENDAR REFORM PRIOR TO THE ARRIVAL OF MISSIONARIES AT THE MING COURT

The conventional wisdom seems to be that in late Ming, knowledge of astronomy and mathematics was in a “general decline” or somnolence, from which Chinese were awakened only by the arrival of Matteo Ricci and his cohorts. The impression is sometimes given in the secondary literature that prior to the seventeenth century, no one in the Ming government was competent in the technicalities of calendar making and that missionaries' commonplace knowledge was sufficient to catalyze recognition of inadequacies in the calendar. Without disputing here the merit of the relative judgment about a “decline,” I would like to review the continuing efforts at calendar reform in the sixteenth century to show the character of the discussions on the calendar and to show that the Jesuits were joining an ongoing debate rather than precipitating doubts perhaps in order to insinuate their expertise.