Sustained by rich archival and published material, this paper describes the experience of Father Matteo Ricci in China in the perspective of the general evolution of the Church and European Catholicism between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Father Matteo Ricci's missionary works are re-read in the light of the more complex urgencies of re-launching a new universalism of the Church, stemming from Catholic Reform and the Council of Trent in which the Society of Jesus was both protagonist and interpreter not only in a cultural and educational role but also in a missionary one. In this way, a new missionary strategy was inaugurated in the East Indies: a strategy, which was aware of the conviction that the work of evangelisation should take root in local culture, attitudes and traditions. This was a strategy that Father Ricci applied in a creative and original way, laying the foundations for the start of a real process of inculturalisation of the Gospel in China. (Contains 118 footnotes.)