ABSTRACT
Candida Xu was the granddaughter of Xu Guangqi, one of the foremost of Chinese converts to Christianity in the late Ming dynasty. The generations of the Xu family before Xu Guangqi stretch back over four hundred years to the close of the Northern Song dynasty. The Xu family, for all their economic ups and downs through the generations, belonged at least to the lower levels of the elite of Suzhou and later Shanghai. The Xu family, then, belonged to the local level of people who were often without official rank but held status in the community. On his way back to Shanghai in the spring of 1600, Xu Guangqi traveled through Nanjing and sought out the Christian mission in that city. Xu Guangqi passed the local exam in 1581 at age twenty, and it appeared that he was off to a good start on the examination path to success.
