Maggs Bros.

Matteo Ripa (1682-1746) was an Italian priest who was sent as a missionary to China by Propaganda Fide, and between 1711 to 1723 worked as a painter and engraver at the Manchu court. He returned to Naples where he founded the ‘Collegio dei Cinesi’ a school to train Chinese novices as priests in order to send them back to China as missionaries. It survived well into the middle of the 19th century and interestingly it was from this institution that Staunton managed to recruit two native Chinese speakers who accompanied the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (see item above). The present account was posthumously published in Naples in 1832. The English version is slightly abridged from the original but nevertheless paints a fascinating and entirely authentic picture of life in Peking under the Kangxi Emperor. Ripa returned to Italy via London where he met with King George I. as well as directors of the East India Company.