The Western Pages of Yulong
Part II — The Monastery at the Edge of Rain
The messenger led them out of Yulong at dawn.
The rain had thinned to a silver mist, and the road wound upward between terraces of rice and stone. The air smelled of pine and charcoal; from time to time, the sound of a gong rolled down from the mountains, as if the peaks themselves were breathing.
Charlotte rode ahead, the brass astrolabe slung at her side. She had not slept. The stranger’s message haunted her—not only for its mystery, but for the familiarity of the words the stars told him you would come.
In the Jesuit observatory at Leiden, where she had once studied under an aging scholar who traced orbits in candlelight, she had first heard such phrasing. It had always unsettled her—the way faith and mathematics could share the same voice.
Paul rode beside her, squinting at the path. “You trust him?”
“The messenger? I trust what he doesn’t say,” Charlotte replied. “Besides, there are places in these mountains where old books survive better than men.”
Daan laughed softly. “You sound like an oracle.”
“Or a bookseller,” she said.
Paul smiled, though his eyes stayed on the road. He knew where it led.
For years he had heard rumors—whispered in Canton warehouses, copied from faded Dutch travel notes—of a monastery in the Yulong highlands where Jesuit astronomers had once sought refuge. A place where fragments of Western science were kept alongside Buddhist scriptures, safe from both humidity and empire. He had never dared to believe it was real. Until now.
By noon they reached a stone archway half-swallowed by vines. Above it, a worn plaque bore faint Latin—Ad Astra per Asiam. To the stars, through Asia.
Paul brushed away the moss, his heart quickening. The Jesuits had used that motto two centuries earlier.
Beyond the arch lay the monastery: quiet, terraced, its roofs black with rain. Prayer flags fluttered between cypress trees. Monks moved silently under the eaves, their saffron robes darkened to rust.
Inside the hall, an old abbot awaited them. His hands were folded, his gaze unhurried. Behind him, a mural covered the wall—a map of the heavens painted in both Chinese and Latin script, the constellations twinned like mirrors.
Charlotte stepped closer, breath shallow. There, among the characters for the Azure Dragon and the Vermilion Bird, was a notation she recognized: Keplerus Novus, written in faded ink.
Someone had translated Johannes Kepler into Chinese.
The abbot spoke softly through the messenger:
“These were painted by a man named Li Fang, who studied under Western monks long ago. He said the stars belonged to everyone who could read them.”
Paul’s voice trembled. “And the books?”
The abbot smiled, faintly. “Some we kept. Some we buried.”
Daan glanced toward the courtyard, where a stone basin overflowed with rainwater. He could just see, beneath the surface, the edge of a half-submerged wooden chest.
Charlotte looked upward, tracing the constellations that bridged Latin and Chinese names, and whispered, “Heaven is a library without walls.”
The abbot turned his gaze to her astrolabe. “You brought one of their stars back,” he said. “Perhaps it is time you returned another.”
Outside, thunder gathered again among the peaks, and the rain began anew—soft, deliberate, and endless.
Historical Afterword: Jesuit Astronomy and the Borderlands of Knowledge
By the 17th century, Jesuit missionaries in China had established observatories in Beijing and Macau, introducing European astronomical instruments and translating works like Euclid’s Elements and Tycho Brahe’s star tables into Chinese.
Their collaboration with Chinese scholars produced hybrid celestial maps—texts that combined constellations from both traditions.
By 1800, remnants of these cross-cultural exchanges still lingered in monasteries and border provinces like Yunnan, where trade routes carried not only silk and tea but also fragments of Western science. Some of these maps survive today, faintly annotated in Latin and classical Chinese—a testament to a time when sky and scripture met at the same horizon.