Li M'Ha Ong

Who was Li M'Ha Ong?

Li Ma Li-hong or M'Hâ Ong was a Chinese scholar from Jiangnan, from a family of official clerks involved in tea transactions.

He is assumed to be the author of the translation of Christian texts into Chinese but also the transmission of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit. He was a member of the Library of corrections and embellishments of the Imperial Palace.

Only one piece of composition is definitively attributed to him. Although the original was lost, Treaty of Seeds and Stars is known through the copy and translation, unfortunately partial, done by Melchior Nuñez, possibly from a Sogdian original. Nuñez arrived in China in 1555 and had a sophisticated knowledge of Chinese. He gave this valuable work to Matteo Ricci which included, in addition, a half-dozen landscapes of the green and blue era - including a three mountains composition - a very popular motif in the Tang Dynasty.

Nuñez described him as a Nestorian monk but it is likely that the Jesuit used this trick to give the translation a Nestorian impression with impunity.

The early Christians arrived in China during the Tang Dynasty 618 - 907 and are indeed Nestorians of Iranian origin. They studied Chinese to better explain concepts of the Christian faith to the Chinese but their biggest challenge is finding a suitable vocabulary, which inevitably involves a long theory of proofreading and corrections. Among the 70,000 rolls discovered in 1909 in the Thousand Buddhas Cave, sealed in the tenth century, there are some Nestorian texts, a few of them in Sogdian.