Italian sinologist Dario Famularo explains how Matteo Ricci’s vivid accounts of China’s lantern celebrations helped shape Europe’s early understanding of China.
Italian sinologist Dario Famularo believes Matteo Ricci’s writings did more than document life in China. They also offered many Europeans their first vivid glimpse of the country.
Dario Famularo recently recalled a story recorded in De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, Matteo Ricci’s celebrated account of China. The episode, he said, reveals not only how the Jesuit missionary viewed China, but also how his writings helped introduce the country to Europe.
Ricci described China’s lantern celebrations as the “Festival of Lanterns”. He wrote about lanterns made of glass, paper and silk hanging so densely that “with so many lanterns lit both inside and outside, the whole house seemed to be on fire”. At night, dragon dance performances filled the streets as crowds celebrated together.
“Ricci was a serious scholar,” Famularo said. “Still, he could not hide his excitement. He even compared those taking part in the celebrations to followers of the wine god Bacchus. That sense of wonder feels completely genuine. It almost sounds like a child seeing something extraordinary for the first time.”
Ricci was not alone. Other missionaries who travelled to China during the late Ming period also left detailed accounts of Chinese festivals and folk customs alongside their observations of court ceremonies and ancestral rites.
“They wrote about imperial rituals and ancestor worship,” Famularo said. “But whenever they wanted European readers to understand China’s prosperity and the scale of its festive life, they always turned to the Lantern Festival. It was their strongest example.”
According to Famularo, those descriptions stood out because anyone could understand them.
“They were not difficult philosophical ideas or classical texts,” he said. “They were filled with light, colour and celebration. Anyone who saw them would have been moved by thousands of lanterns lighting up the night, and by the countless families those lights represented.”
As a result, these stories helped shape Europe’s early image of China.
“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most Europeans had never been to China,” Famularo said with a smile. “They knew little about Confucian thought or Chinese history. Yet they knew there was a distant country where, on one night each year, thousands upon thousands of lanterns lit up the night.”
For Famularo, Ricci’s sense of wonder still feels familiar today.
“When I stood beside West Lake in Hangzhou and watched lanterns reflected on the water, I felt much the same amazement that Ricci described more than 400 years ago,” he said.
Having also crossed continents to build a life in China, Famularo believes he shares something with the Italian missionary.
“Ricci and his companions built a bridge between China and Europe in their own way,” he said. “More than four centuries later, that bridge is still helping people understand each other.”
By Chenhui.
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