Michele Ruggieri’’s Tianzhu Shilu (the True Record of the Lord of Heaven, 1584)

The True Record of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shilu, 1584) by the Jesuit missionary Michele Ruggieri was the first Chinese-language work ever published by a European. Despite being published only a few years after Ruggieri started learning Chinese, it evinced sophisticated strategies to accommodate Christianity to the Chinese context and was a pioneering work in Sino-Western exchange. This book features a critical edition of the Chinese and Latin texts, which are both translated into English for the first time. An introduction, biography, and rich annotations are provided to situate this text in its cultural and intellectual context.

Daniel Canaris received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 2017 and is an Associate Research Fellow at Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou). He has published widely on Sino-Western cultural exchange, including Vico and China (Voltaire Foundation, 2020).