Tāng Ruòwàng 湯若望 / Adam Schall von Bell, S.J.
German Jesuit. Born Cologne (Free Imperial City, Holy Roman Empire), 1 May 1591; died Beijing, 15 August 1666. The Chinese name Tāng Ruòwàng renders “Adam” approximately (Tāng = surname, Ruòwàng = “[Adam] of the Schall household” or possibly a phono-semantic rendering of “Johann Adam”); his Chinese style-name Dàowèi 道未 (literally “Way-Not-Yet” or “Way-of-the-Future”) was given him by the Chóngzhēn emperor.
Joined the Society of Jesus 1611; trained at the Collegium Romanum in mathematics and astronomy. Sent to Asia 1618 with the Trigault recruiting mission, arriving Macao 1619 and Beijing 1622–1623. Survived the 1622 Manchu siege of the city. Stationed in Xī’ān (Shǎnxī) until summoned to Beijing 1630 to join the Chóngzhēn lìshū calendar-reform project after Schreck’s death.
Schall’s career has three distinct phases:
(1) Calendar reform under the Míng (1630–1644): as one of the four Western collaborators (with 龍華民 Longobardo, 鄧玉函 Schreck, 羅雅谷 Rho) on the Chóngzhēn lìshū (KR3f0013 Xīnfǎ suànshū), Schall completed substantial portions of the eclipse-prediction tables, the planetary-motion treatises, and the instrumental-construction chapters. He oversaw the casting of new-style cannons for the besieged Míng (Sòngshān 1641 — an episode that would later be cited against him in the 1664 Qīng anti-Jesuit prosecution).
(2) Director of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau under the early Qīng (1644–1664): when the Manchus took Beijing in May 1644, Schall — alone of the senior Western Jesuits, the others having been deported or having fled south — remained at his post. He presented the Chóngzhēn lìshū materials to the new Shùnzhì regime, demonstrated the new method’s superior eclipse-prediction accuracy to the regents, and was appointed Director (Qīntiānjiān jiānzhèng 欽天監監正) — the first European to hold this office. Under his tenure the reformed calendar was promulgated 1645 as the Shíxiàn lì 時憲曆, the official calendar of the Qīng dynasty until the 20th century. Schall enjoyed extraordinary personal favor with the young Shùnzhì emperor (1638–1661), who honored him with the title Tōngxuán Jiàoshī 通玄教師 (“Teacher of the Penetrative-Mystery”) and frequent personal audiences.
(3) Persecution and rehabilitation (1664–1666): in the regency-period anti-Christian backlash following Shùnzhì’s death and the rise of the Sì Fǔzhèng dàchén 四輔政大臣 (Four Regents) under the young Kāngxī, Schall was prosecuted by Yáng Guāngxiān 楊光先 (an anti-Western polemicist) on charges of treason, false astronomy, and sorcery (the choice of an inauspicious burial date for an imperial son). Convicted, condemned to death by língchí (slicing), he was reprieved after a Beijing earthquake on the day of his sentence — an apparent celestial sign read as divine intervention. He died under house arrest a year later, August 1666. The young Kāngxī, after taking personal power in 1669, formally rehabilitated Schall and reinstated his successor Ferdinand Verbiest 南懷仁 to the Bureau directorship; Yáng Guāngxiān was disgraced and exiled.
Schall’s contribution to the Sìkù-preserved KR3f0013 Xīnfǎ suànshū extends beyond his Míng-period work. The 提要 records that the work as transmitted includes two appendices added by Schall in the early Qīng: the Lìfǎ Xīchuán 厯法西傳 (Western Transmission of the Calendrical Methods — Schall’s account of the project’s European mathematical-astronomical sources) and the Xīnfǎ biǎoyì 新法表異 (Differences-Tabulated of the New Method — a comparative table demonstrating the new system’s superior accuracy). These two Schall texts — written in literary Chinese for the post-Míng audience — are documents of the Jesuit narrative-construction of the calendar-reform project’s intellectual history, as well as the principal Chinese-language sources for the post-Tycho post-Kepler European astronomy of the early-to-mid 17th century.
Schall’s Beijing tomb, in the Catholic cemetery at Zhalan 柵欄 (modern central Beijing), survives intact: it carries an inscription in Latin, Chinese, and Manchu — one of the very few trilingual inscriptions of the early Qīng. He is buried alongside Matteo Ricci, Sabatino de Ursis, Ferdinand Verbiest, and a long sequence of later Jesuit astronomers — the principal physical monument of the 17th-century Catholic mission to China.