Chapter Two, The First Image: The Warriors Summary and Analysis

For his first image, Ricci uses the Chinese ideograph for war or "wu." Ricci cuts a representation of wu diagonally and uses the two pieces as their own ideographs, which mean "spear" and "to stop/prevent" for the top and bottom halves. This splitting is a Chinese practice dating back two thousand years. The two ideas are then recombined into a single image of a warrior who is ready to strike an enemy with his spear and a second warrior who grabs the first one by his wrist to prevent himself from falling from the blow. Ricci notes that the images must be "lively" and produce strong feeling. The differences in images should be exaggerated. Ricci next gives some rules for picking a location to store information—the...