on nearby Chongming Island in early October 1688 and reported great success by August 1689: 120 baptized converts in Shanghai, 300 on Chongming, and 800 in regions dependent on Chongming. From there, he travelled to Huai'an and Nanjing in Jiangsu; Wuhe in Anhui; Nanchang, Ganzhou, Jianchang (now Fuzhou), and Nanfeng in Jiangxi; and Nan'an in Fujian. A 1703 report to the Jesuit General shows that Noël's work was primarily among the lower and working classes, especially to women and abandoned children, which left open the problem of how to pay for church construction and mission work without resorting to begging for alms in the manner of the Buddhist monks. First Roman embassy On 9 November 1701, he was selected—probably through the influence of his compatriot, the vice-provincial Antoine Thomas—to act as the procurator for the China mission in an embassy concerning the Chinese Rites Controversy. He was to argue on behalf of the Jesuits and four Chinese bishops that the Catholic Church should continue to permit the Chinese practice with Confucian and ancestral veneration after their conversion to Christianity. Thomas's letter reached him in Nanchang on the 25th; he left on 6 December and reached Guangzhou on 1 January. He was originally to travel with José Ramón Arxó and Claude de Visdelou, but Arxó suffered accidental delays. Visdelou, meanwhile, was delayed first owing to reticence by the French mission to allow him to leave and then under various pretexts because the visitor Carlo Turcotti (correctly) suspected his position on the question of the rites. Since there was already an English ship ready to sail, Turcotti replaced the pair with the Bavarian mathematician Caspar Castner, who was already working nearby. The English ship departed on 14 January 1702 for Macao, which it reached on the 21st and left on the 24th. It traveled to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia), where unbalanced cargo and heavy weather required a 17-day delay. On the journey around the Cape of Good Hope, it was again held up for almost a month because of unfavorable winds. After a 43 day wait on Saint Helena owing to fear of a new European war, the ship passed through two storms to the Azores and through a collision off Calais to London, which it reached on 4 October. The Jesuits met and presumably lobbied various ambassadors while in London, as well as the directors of