The Jesuits: Unexpected Allies in 1628 China
In a land where the transmigrators are the only people who understand calculus, the heliocentric model, and the principles of optics, the Jesuits represent something profoundly unsettling: competition. These European priests have been in China for decades, they speak the language fluently, they have connections at the imperial court, and they bring with them a tradition of European science that, while centuries behind what the transmigrators know, is centuries ahead of what anyone else in 1628 China can offer.
The Legacy Matteo Ricci Left Behind
To understand why the Jesuits matter so much to the transmigrators' situation, you have to understand what Matteo Ricci accomplished before his death in 1610. Ricci arrived in China in 1583, and over the course of nearly three decades he achieved something that no other European had managed: he earned the genuine respect of Chinese scholars and officials. He did this not through force or commercial leverage but through intellectual engagement. He learned to read and write Classical Chinese at a level that impressed literati who had spent their entire lives studying the Confucian canon. He dressed in the robes of a Confucian scholar. He presented European science and mathematics not as superior knowledge imposed from outside but as complementary learning that could enrich the existing Chinese intellectual tradition.
Ricci's masterpiece was his world map, the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, which for the first time showed Chinese scholars the full extent of the globe while diplomatically placing China near the center of the projection. He introduced Euclidean geometry through a Chinese translation of the first six books of Euclid's Elements, working with the scholar-official Xu Guangqi. He demonstrated European clockwork, prisms, and astronomical instruments. By the time he died, he had established a small but influential community of Chinese Christian converts, several of whom held significant positions in the Ming bureaucracy.
The Jesuits who followed Ricci inherited this extraordinary foundation. By 1628, the mission in China included men like Johann Adam Schall von Bell, a German Jesuit who had arrived in 1622 and was rapidly becoming one of the most technically accomplished Europeans in Asia. Schall was an astronomer and mathematician of genuine talent. He understood telescope construction, had studied under the intellectual heirs of Galileo and Kepler, and was already working on the calendar reform project that would eventually win him a position in the imperial Astronomical Bureau. He spoke Mandarin with increasing fluency and had cultivated relationships with influential Chinese officials who valued his astronomical knowledge.
Why the Transmigrators Cannot Ignore Them
The transmigrators in Illumine Lingao face a peculiar problem with the Jesuits. In almost every other encounter with seventeenth-century people, they hold an overwhelming advantage in knowledge and understanding. Local fishermen, Ming magistrates, even experienced merchants -- none of these people can look at the transmigrators' activities and fully comprehend what they are seeing. A blast furnace is just a very impressive forge. A telegraph wire is a mysterious curiosity. The gap between what the transmigrators know and what the locals can interpret is so vast that it functions as a kind of camouflage. People see what their existing frameworks prepare them to see, and seventeenth-century Chinese frameworks have no category for "time travelers from the future."
The Jesuits are different. They occupy a unique middle ground in the knowledge landscape of 1628. They understand European scientific methodology. They know Copernican astronomy, at least in broad terms, even if the Church's official position remains complicated. They understand mathematical notation, logarithms, and trigonometry. They are familiar with European advances in metallurgy, fortification design, and military engineering. When a Jesuit looks at a transmigrator's workshop, he does not see incomprehensible magic -- he sees recognizable principles pushed to inexplicable levels of refinement. And that recognition is dangerous, because it leads to questions that the transmigrators cannot safely answer.
Consider what Schall von Bell would think if he encountered transmigrator-produced glass of a quality that European glassmakers would not achieve for another century. He would recognize it as glass. He would understand the basic principles of its production. And he would be deeply puzzled by how a group of people in remote Hainan had surpassed the finest Venetian workshops. That kind of puzzle is precisely the sort of intellectual challenge that Jesuits were trained to pursue. The Society of Jesus selected for curiosity, intelligence, and persistence. These were not men who shrugged at mysteries and moved on.
The Art of Useful Friendship
Despite the risks, the transmigrators cannot simply avoid the Jesuits. The priests offer too many potential advantages to ignore. Their Chinese language skills, honed over years of immersion and study, make them invaluable intermediaries. Their connections at the Ming court provide intelligence about imperial politics that the transmigrators desperately need. Their established trade networks with Macau and the broader Portuguese colonial system offer commercial opportunities. And their technical knowledge, while inferior to what the transmigrators possess, is still sophisticated enough to make them genuinely useful collaborators on certain projects.
The calendar reform project illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The Ming court had recognized for decades that its official calendar was growing inaccurate. Eclipses were being predicted incorrectly, which was not merely an astronomical embarrassment but a political crisis in a culture where the emperor's legitimacy derived partly from his role as mediator between heaven and earth. Getting the calendar wrong meant the emperor was losing heaven's favor. The Jesuits had positioned themselves as the solution to this problem, offering European astronomical methods that could produce more accurate predictions. The transmigrators, who carry knowledge of celestial mechanics that makes Schall's astronomy look quaint, could in theory offer even better solutions -- but doing so would raise exactly the questions they need to avoid.
Instead, the transmigrators adopt a strategy of selective engagement. They share knowledge that is advanced enough to be useful but not so advanced as to be inexplicable. They present themselves as fellow travelers in the world of European learning, perhaps members of some obscure scholarly tradition that the Jesuits have not encountered. This cover story is thin, but it is assisted by the genuine difficulty of communication in the seventeenth century. The Jesuits cannot simply write to Rome and ask whether anyone has heard of this group. A letter takes months each way, and the information networks of the era are full of gaps and delays that the transmigrators can exploit.
Schall von Bell: The Most Dangerous Friend
Johann Adam Schall von Bell deserves particular attention because he embodies both the promise and the peril of the Jesuit relationship. Schall was brilliant, ambitious, and deeply committed to both his faith and his scientific work. He would eventually rise to become the director of the imperial Astronomical Bureau under the Qing Dynasty, a position of extraordinary influence for a foreigner in China. In 1628, he is still building his career, but his trajectory is already clear to anyone paying attention.
For the transmigrators, Schall represents a potential asset of enormous value. His astronomical knowledge, while not at their level, is genuine and well-regarded by the Chinese court. His understanding of cannon casting and military engineering, which he had studied before entering the priesthood, gives him practical technical skills that complement the transmigrators' theoretical knowledge. His political instincts are sharp, honed by years of navigating the treacherous factional politics of the late Ming court. And his personal network includes some of the most powerful officials in the empire.
But Schall is also the person most likely to see through the transmigrators' deceptions. He has the scientific framework to recognize anachronistic technology when he encounters it. He has the linguistic skills to conduct detailed conversations that might expose inconsistencies in the transmigrators' cover stories. He has the intellectual drive to pursue anomalies until he understands them. And he has the institutional backing of the Society of Jesus, with its global intelligence network and its tradition of detailed reporting to Rome. If Schall were to write a letter describing the strange group on Hainan with their impossibly advanced technology, it would eventually reach people in Europe with the knowledge and resources to investigate further.
The novel handles this tension with considerable sophistication. The transmigrators neither fully trust nor fully exclude the Jesuits. They maintain a relationship of calculated ambiguity, sharing enough to maintain the friendship while concealing enough to protect their secrets. It is a diplomatic balancing act that mirrors the Jesuits' own approach to their relationship with Chinese culture -- a parallel that the novel draws with evident relish.
The Xu Guangqi Connection
One of the most historically grounded aspects of the Jesuit subplot involves Xu Guangqi, the scholar-official who had collaborated with Matteo Ricci on the translation of Euclid's Elements and who remained one of the most prominent Christian converts in the Ming bureaucracy. Xu was a genuine polymath -- interested in agriculture, hydraulic engineering, military technology, and mathematics as well as classical scholarship. He had written extensively on agricultural reform, producing works on irrigation, crop selection, and famine prevention that demonstrated exactly the kind of practical, evidence-based thinking that the transmigrators value.
In 1628, Xu Guangqi is an elderly but still influential figure at court. His connections to the Jesuits give him access to European knowledge, while his position in the Ming bureaucracy gives him political weight. For the transmigrators, Xu represents a potential patron whose intellectual openness might make him receptive to their modernization agenda, even if he cannot be told the full truth about their origins. Through Xu, the transmigrators can potentially influence imperial policy on agriculture, military reform, and calendar revision without exposing themselves to the court's direct scrutiny.
But Xu's very openness to new ideas makes him dangerous in the same way the Jesuits are dangerous. A man who has already helped translate Euclid into Chinese, who has experimented with European farming techniques on his own estate, who has advocated for the adoption of Western cannon in the Ming military -- such a man is precisely the sort of person who would notice if a group on Hainan was producing steel of a quality that no European nation could match, or printing books with machinery that exceeded anything in Gutenberg's tradition. Xu's combination of scientific literacy and political influence makes him both the transmigrators' best potential ally and one of their most significant potential threats.
Religion as Tool and Obstacle
The religious dimension of the Jesuit presence adds another layer of complexity. The transmigrators are overwhelmingly secular, products of a modern Chinese society where religious observance is not a central organizing principle of daily life. The Jesuits, by contrast, are defined by their faith. Everything they do in China -- the science they teach, the friendships they cultivate, the hardships they endure -- serves the ultimate purpose of converting Chinese souls to Christianity. This fundamental difference in motivation creates both opportunities and friction.
The transmigrators can appeal to the Jesuits' scientific interests without engaging with their religious mission, at least up to a point. But the Jesuits will inevitably want to understand the spiritual lives of these mysterious people who share their European knowledge but show no interest in Christian faith. The absence of religious practice among the transmigrators would itself be noteworthy to a Jesuit observer. In seventeenth-century Europe, atheism was almost unthinkable -- virtually everyone existed within a framework of Christian belief, whether Catholic or Protestant. A group of apparently European-educated people who displayed no religious affiliation whatsoever would be deeply strange, perhaps even suspicious.
The novel explores how different transmigrators handle this issue. Some adopt a performative Christianity, attending services and mouthing prayers to maintain their cover. Others try to deflect religious conversations entirely, claiming to be too busy with practical work for theological discussion. A few find themselves genuinely interested in the Jesuits' perspective, not as potential converts but as students of intellectual history who have the extraordinary opportunity to observe one of the great cultural encounters of the early modern period from the inside. The range of responses reflects the diversity of the transmigrator group and the genuinely complicated ethics of their position.
The Intelligence Problem
Beneath the surface of scientific collaboration and diplomatic courtesy lies a hard-edged intelligence problem. The Jesuits maintain one of the most sophisticated information networks in the seventeenth-century world. The Society of Jesus operates on four continents. Its members write detailed letters -- the famous Jesuit Relations -- that circulate among the order's houses and colleges across Europe and Asia. Information about unusual events in China could, through these channels, reach Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, or Paris within a year or two.
The transmigrators' Political Security Bureau takes the Jesuit information network very seriously. They monitor contacts between their people and the Jesuit mission carefully. They develop protocols for what can and cannot be shared. They cultivate their own sources within the Jesuit community, seeking to understand what the priests know and what they suspect. This counter-intelligence effort against a friendly organization captures one of the novel's recurring themes: that the transmigrators' need for secrecy creates moral compromises that sit uncomfortably alongside their modernizing mission.
The irony is not lost on the novel's characters or its readers. The Jesuits came to China with the genuinely benevolent intention of sharing knowledge and saving souls. The transmigrators came with the genuinely benevolent intention of preventing the catastrophes of the seventeenth century -- the Manchu conquest, the famines, the wars that would kill tens of millions. Both groups believe they are acting for the good of the people around them. Both groups practice deception to achieve their goals. The parallel is uncomfortable and illuminating, and the novel is wise enough to let it resonate without resolving it into easy moral clarity.
A Mirror Held Up to the Project
Ultimately, the Jesuits serve a narrative function that goes beyond their practical role as allies or threats. They hold a mirror up to the transmigrators' entire enterprise. Like the transmigrators, the Jesuits are outsiders who have inserted themselves into Chinese society with the intention of transforming it. Like the transmigrators, they use superior knowledge as their primary tool of influence. Like the transmigrators, they navigate the tension between genuine respect for Chinese culture and an unshakeable conviction that they know better. The Jesuits' successes and failures in China prefigure the transmigrators' own, and the novel uses this parallel to ask questions about cultural contact, technological superiority, and the ethics of intervention that have no easy answers.
The Jesuits spent two centuries in China. They made converts, they influenced imperial policy, they built lasting institutions -- and in the end, they were expelled when the cultural contradictions of their presence became untenable. The transmigrators have more power and more knowledge, but they face the same fundamental challenge: how do you change a civilization without destroying what makes it worth saving? The Jesuits' experience suggests that this question is harder than any problem of engineering or economics, and the novel's willingness to engage with it through the lens of the Jesuit relationship is one of its most intellectually ambitious moves.