Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung in Jacobite England

The portrait above, by Godfrey Kneller, which hung in the bed chamber of King James II, depicts the "young Jesuit convert from Nanking called Shen Fu Tsong, [who] arrived at the court of James II and became the first recorded instance of a Chinese person in Britain," whose tale is fascinatingly told by Sinologist Jonathan Spence — “When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century”.

"By completing a careful and accurate translation into Latin of Confucius’s surviving words, the Jesuits hoped not just to find a readership for Confucius in Europe, but also to demonstrate to the papacy and leading Catholic theologians that Chinese thought had a firm and morally strong grounding, on which a project of mass conversion could be based.