The Wise Man from the West: Matteo Ricci and His Mission to China Paperback – 12 Oct. 2016

A very good read, interesting and informative. Some prior knowledge of the topic helps a lot.

This book transports a reader to a world where it took years to get from one place to another by amazingly built wooden crafts. You were cramped into a vessel with at least 500 people and no food/guaranteed, and maybe you made it or maybe not.The Wise Man from the West shakes one out of complacency into a reality where a type communication is brought to an imaginative new level, which actually opened closed doors.I learned to appreciate the unknown world that Marco Polo and others entered and left us with their impressions, writings, maps, and descriptions, which in reality, planted the seeds that bloomed into a new world of which we now must explore and leave our impressions.

This was an absolutely fascinating narrative of the journey of the first Jesuit missionaries to China in the late 16th Century--full of novelistic, even though historical, detail.