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.
Zhang Yi (Bogong)
Zhang Yi (died 3 March 264), courtesy name Bogong, was a military general of the state of Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms period of China. Born in the late Eastern Han dynasty, Zhang Yi was a 10th-generation descendant of Zhang Liang. He started his career as a scribe under the warlord Liu Bei, who founded Shu later, and gradually rose to the positions of a county prefect and commandery administrator. In the early 230s, he served as an area commander tasked with maintaining the peace in Shu's southern commanderies. In 234, he led the Shu vanguard during the Battle of Wuzhang Plains against Shu's rival state Wei. From 238 to 259, Zhang Yi steadily rose through the ranks to become one of Shu's top generals. During this time, although he strongly opposed the Shu general Jiang Wei's aggressive stance towards Wei, he still accompanied Jiang Wei on his military campaigns against Wei. In 263, he surrendered to Wei forces along with the Shu emperor Liu Shan when Wei launched a large-scale invasion of Shu. In the following year, Zhang Yi was killed by mutineers during a rebellion by the Wei general Zhong Hui.