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This book contains quite yarn: an Italian man comes of age during the Counter Reformation of the sixteenth century, when the Ming ruled China. He joins the Jesuits, studies in Rome, and then leaves Europe permanently to missionize India (Conchin, Goa) and China (Macao, Bejing)
The title refers to Ricci's interest in the mnemonic systems that associated facts with imaginary spaces (cities, neighborhoods, buildings, individual rooms). These systems were an inheritance from European antiquity (spuriously attributed to Cicero) that Jesuits in particular used for scholarly and devotional purposes.
Ricci was the first to describe these systems in Chinese, hoping to impress elites with European study tips of general application and thereby pique their interest in Roman Catholicism. He partened with a Chinese scholar to produce the first Chinese edition of Euclid, as well as translating Confucian classics into Latin.
As a missionary gambit, these activites were fruitless. Roman Catholicism did not catch on in any appreciable way.
Muslim and Jewish communities had long existed in China by the late sixteenth century, and were referred to as "huihui". In a moment of dark comedy, we learn that the Wanli emporer, on receiving many gifts from the Jesuits including writing about their theological beliefs, referred to them as simply another kind of "huihui". The Jesuits, having dedicated to their lives to the task of converting the emporer, apparently were unable to impress upon him that their Abrahamic monotheism was meaningfully different from those he was already familiar with.
It is difficult put oneself in the shoes of these men who cut themselves off from their society of origin in order to spread its worldview. For Ricci, a letter might take eight years to make the trip from the Italian peninsula to his mission in China or vice versa. The voyages required to get to India, much less China, were often fatal and invariably miserable.
Spence gives us some glances at the political and economic conditions the Jesuits labored under.
In Goa/Macao they directly employed enslaved persons (some African) in their households. They reached India on boats carrying enslaved people.
For many years, the Jesuits of Macao were financially dependent on the tithing of Portuguese merchants. Perhaps as a result, priests were often dispatched into the Chinese interior to arrange for the return of slaves who had fled there (the enslaved were told that a Christian master would look to their eternal salvation).