ALENI, GIULIO. — Jesuit missionary and sinologist, born in Brescia in 1582; entered the novitiate at Novellara in 1610. Having departed for the missions, he arrived in Macao at the end of 1600, observing eclipses at Goa and Macao (his letter on the subject to G. A. Magini in Favaro, Carteggio inedito di Ticone Brahe... con Magini, Bologna 1886, p. 349; other observations of the lunar eclipse, Goa 1612, in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Sciences, VII, Paris 1729, pp. 705-706). In 1613 he succeeded in entering the Empire and worked there for more than 35 years, in the province of Shansi and, from 1625 onward, in that of Fokien, with an interruption in 1638, when he was exiled to Canton during the persecution provoked by the decisions concerning the Chinese rites. He died on 3 August 1649 at Fuchow (Fuceu).
A., after Ricci, was the most eminent of the learned Italian missionaries in China and earned from Chinese literati the nickname “Confucius of the West.”
With the assistance of Christian literati, he composed many works in Chinese (a detailed list in Streit). Those of a religious nature went through numerous reprints, down to our own day; the Life of Jesus according to the four Gospels, with woodcuts in the Chinese style, is of interest for the history
of indigenous Christian art. Among the scientific works, noteworthy is the Cosmographical Description of All the Kingdoms of the Earth. A. also wrote in Chinese the biographies of the first great Christians of China and that of Fr. Matteo Ricci; the latter was published in French translation in Revue d'histoire des missions, 1 (Paris 1924), pp. 52-70.