 He was received into the Society of Jesus on 14 September 1683, or 13 September 1679, and in 1698 went on the Chinese mission, where he served science and the Catholic religion for forty years, and took the chief share in the making of the general map of the Chinese Empire.The early Jesuit missionaries had already endeavoured to make known to Europe the true geography of China, of which at the end of the sixteenth century even the best cartographers were utterly ignorant.Their achievements up to the middle of the seventeenth century are summed up in the "Novus Atlas Sinensis" published by Father Martin Martini (Amsterdam, 1655).