Jesuit and astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest was a star of the imperial court during the Ming Dynasty

In a lecture theatre on the 36th floor of an office building in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, a group of academics and interested amateurs from China, Europe and North America came together this week to remember one of the most remarkable men who ever lived. This was the Yale Center Beijing, an outpost of the university, and we were marking the 400th anniversary of the birth of Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit who spent much of his life at the Chinese imperial court during the Ming Dynasty.

Verbiest came to China as a missionary but it was as an astronomer that he gained the confidence of the Kangxi Emperor after he won a contest against the chief court astronomer. The accuracy of Verbiest’s prediction of the length of a shadow at noon, the positions of the planets on a certain date and the time of a lunar eclipse persuaded the emperor of the superiority of European astronomy.

He put the Jesuit in charge of the calendar, allowing him to remove a 13th month and commissioned him to build astronomical and mathematical instruments. Verbiest oversaw the construction of large instruments, including a quadrant, a sextant, an azimuth compass and a celestial globe.

He designed an aqueduct and cast 132 cannons for the emperor that were more powerful than any in China and built a new gun carriage. Verbiest may also have built the world’s first automobile, a steam-propelled trolley just 65cm long which could move for more than an hour with one filling of coal.

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Verbiest’s talents helped to protect his fellow Jesuits, some of whom had been jailed and others tortured and executed under a regency before the young emperor took charge. A few decades earlier the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci had been an adviser to the Wanli Emperor, becoming the first westerner to be invited inside the Forbidden City.

Ricci began a Jesuit tradition of engagement with Chinese language, thought and culture that survives today, and a number of the speakers at this week’s symposium on Verbiest were Jesuit sinologists. Nicolas Standaert described how Verbiest was shaped by his interaction with the Chinese and through his strikingly informal relationship with the young emperor.

Thierry Meynard, a French Jesuit who is professor of philosophy at Sun Yat-Sen University in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, said Verbiest was following in China the policy pursued by Jesuits in Europe “who combined scientific work, engagement with European courts, and renewed form of Christian life”.

But missionaries like Verbiest also transported ideas from China back into Europe, where the Chinese model of a normative, ethical system not bound to a religious worldview may have influenced the Enlightenment.

“Of course, it was not the purpose of the missionaries to promote secularism in Europe but when Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire realised that there was a society like China that did not rely on the church, for them it became a model to follow. Some scholars in China also claim some ideas of modernity like equality as well as secularism originate from China, and that the idea of political freedom also comes from China,” Meynard said.

The Verbiest symposium, which was co-hosted by the Jesuit-run Ricci Institute at the University of St Joseph in Macau, was held against the background of a shifting relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the Vatican. Five years ago envoys from Pope Francis signed a “provisional agreement” in Beijing on procedures for the appointment of new Chinese bishops.

The details of the deal have never been made public but it is understood to have seen Beijing agree that all new bishops should be approved by the Pope but selected from a shortlist drawn up by the party. The agreement was hailed by supporters as ending the division between the communist-approved “Patriotic Catholic Church” that operated independently of the Vatican and the underground church that remained loyal to Rome.

Critics said Pope Francis was abandoning the underground church and pushing Rome’s most courageous adherents into an alliance with those who compromised with the party. The agreement’s advocates admit that religious freedom in China remains severely restricted, with priests only allowed to minister in recognised places of worship which are only open to those over 18.

New official measures that came into force last month stipulate that “places of religious activity shall uphold the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system [and] thoroughly implement Xi Jinping’s ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics for the new era”.

Beijing welched on the deal over bishops in April when Shen Bin was installed as Bishop of Shanghai without referring his appointment to the Vatican. In July the Holy See announced that the pope had appointed the bishop to the position he had already occupied for three months, adding jesuitically that he had “rectified a canonical irregularity”.