As the first great age of European naval exploration came to an end in the late sixteenth century, merchants and missionaries began to travel to the Far East in search of new markets and new harvests of souls.

One of the most extraordinary of these travellers was Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit who left his native Italy in 1577 and journeyed first to India and then to China, where he lived and worked from 1583 until his death in 1610.

To capture the complex emotional and religious drama of Ricci's life, Jonathan Spence has shifted away from conventional biographical techniques and has placed his subject in a structure of images that Ricci himself composed. One set of these images derives from four crucial moments in the Bible, which Ricci introduced to China by means of wood engravings with his appnded commentaries, one set is found in a book on the art of memory, which Ricci composed in Chinese and circulated among members of the Ming dynasty's elite.

The result is not only a rich and compelling narrative about Ricci's life in Italy, India and China, but also a significant work of global history, in which intellectual, social, military, maritime and religious themes are drawn together, juxtaposing the world of Counter-Reformation Europe with that of Ming China. The Memory Palace that Ricci attempted to describe in print is transformed in Spence's extraordinary book into a frame for Ricci's life and a metaphor for the hopes and fears of a largely forgotten world.