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Updated: July 25, 2025
He pockets the money given him to repair an embankment and thus inundates a province, and he deplores the land lost to the cultivator of the soil." Du Halde tells us that "the first Chinese cannon were cast under the directions of Père Verbiest in 1682, who blest the cannon, and gave to each the name of a saint." "A female saint!" says Huc.
In 1875 the writer saw and photographed, on that part of the wall of Peking used by the Mandarins as an observatory, the six instruments handsomely designed by Father Verbiest, copied from the instruments of Tycho Brahe, and embellished with Chinese dragons and emblems cast on the supports.
They visited also the magnificent observatory built by Father Verbiest, a Jesuit, for the emperor You-Ching, in the seventeenth century. The instruments are of bronze, and mounted upon fantastic dragons, and are still in good condition, though they have been exposed to the open air all this time.
Fathers Mendoza, Ricci, Trigault, Visdelou, Lecomte, Verbiest, Navarrete, Schall, and Martini, deserve especial mention for having carried to China the arts and sciences of Europe, while they diffused in the west the first accurate and precise information upon the unprogressive civilization of the Flowery Land.
My ambition was to work myself up at Court, and only to take the command if forced on me as a provisional matter, and as a stepping-stone to my real object, which was, when my knowledge of the language was perfected, to acquire at Peking some such influence as that possessed by Verbiest and the other French missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
And, strangely enough, although they are thus directly tied to the Manchu dynasty, and that some of them may be even Red Girdles or lineal descendants of collateral branches of the Imperial house, they are still more tightly tied to the foreigner because they are Roman Catholic dating from the early days of Verbiest and Schall, when the Jesuits were all supreme.
In 1669, a Flemish Jesuit Father from Courtrai, named Verbiest, was placed upon the Board, and was entrusted with the correction of the calendar according to more recent investigations. Christianity was officially recognized in 1692, and an Imperial edict was issued ordering its toleration throughout the empire.
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