Spring 1610, Beijing: As Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci lay dying, he consigned some of his private papers from twenty-eight years in China to the flames, thereby destroying truths that might have jeopardised his mission to convert China to Christianity at a time when the Inquisition’s gaze was everywhere.

Tian is a fictional retelling of the story Ricci could not share without risking his life’s work. It recounts his journey into the hermetically sealed world of Ming China by presenting himself as an Indian Buddhist monk. By the time he reached the Forbidden City in Beijing, nineteen years later, he was recognised as a celebrated Confucian scholar from the West. He impressed the Ming emperor with mechanical clocks and dazzled the scholar-officials with world maps, celestial globes, and Venetian glass prisms, which the Chinese believed to be priceless gems. But behind the triumphs lay trials and tribulations. Ricci had to navigate fierce rivalries between religious orders, jealousy between Portugal and Spain, and constant persecutions by suspicious locals.

Torn between the Counter-Reformation and Confucianism, Ricci sought to reconcile these conflicting truths by depicting God as Shang Di, the Sovereign on High, whom the Chinese worshipped in ancient times, and by introducing the concept of God the Geometer, drawing on his understanding of the Chinese interest in European mathematics and astronomy. Sometimes, these adaptations came at the expense of the truth, such as his portrayal of Christian Europe as a peaceful paradise rather than a continent torn apart by religious wars.

Faced with the orthodoxy of the two worlds he valued, Ricci resolved the dilemma late in his life by reconciling Tai Ji, the Supreme Ultimate, with God, the Absolute Maximum, for in Infinity, All are One.