Confucius
During the Song dynasty, the scholar Zhu Xi (AD 1130–1200) added ideas from Daoism and Buddhism into Confucianism. In his life, Zhu Xi was largely ignored, but not long after his death, his ideas became the new orthodox view of what Confucian texts actually meant. Modern historians view Zhu Xi as having created something rather different and call his way of thinking "Neo-Confucianism". Neo-Confucianism held sway in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam until the 19th century.
The works of Confucius were first translated into European languages by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century during the late Ming dynasty. The first known effort was by Michele Ruggieri, who returned to Italy in 1588 and carried on his translations while residing in Salerno. Matteo Ricci started to report on the thoughts of Confucius, and a team of Jesuits—Prospero Intorcetta, Philippe Couplet, and two others—published a translation of several Confucian works and an overview of Chinese history in Paris in 1687. François Noël, after failing to persuade ClementXI that Chinese veneration of ancestors and Confucius did not constitute idolatry, completed the Confucian canon at Prague in 1711, with more scholarly treatments of the other works and the first translation of the collected works of Mencius. It is thought that such works had considerable importance on European thinkers of the period, particularly among the Deists and other philosophical groups of the Enlightenment who were interested by the integration of the system of morality of Confucius into Western civilization.
Zhu Xicai
Little is known about Zhu Xicai's background, and it is not known when he was born. According to the Tang Dynasty historian Ping Zhimei (平致美), whose "Jimen Jiluan" (薊門紀亂) is no longer extant but is often cited in other works, he served under Shi Chaoyi, the final emperor of the state of Yan during the An Shi Rebellion against Tang Dynasty rule, and, after Shi Chaoyi had become emperor after assassinating his father Shi Siming in 761, the Yan general remaining at the major city of Fanyang (范陽, in modern Beijing) went through major bloody infighting, at the end of which Li Huaixian emerged the victor. Zhu Xicai was then serving under Li, and he remained at Fanyang to continue to serve under Li after the disturbance. After Li submitted to Emperor Daizong of Tang in 763 and turned against Shi Chaoyi (leading to Shi Chaoyi's committing suicide, ending Yan), Zhu continued to serve under Li.