Besides reforming the calendar and teaching geography and science in general, he made a fierce attack upon Buddhism, at the same time wisely leaving Confucianism alone.

He was the first to become aware of the presence in China of a Jewish colony, which had been founded in 1163.

It was from his writings that truer notions of Chinese civilization than had hitherto prevailed, began to spread in the West.
"Mat.

Riccius the Jesuite," says Burton in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (1651), "and some others, relate of the industry of the Chinaes most populous countreys, not a beggar, or an idle person to be seen, and how by that means they prosper and flourish." In 1625 an important find was made.

A large tablet, with a long inscription in Chinese and a shorter one in Syraic, was discovered in central China.