early in the seventeenth century, the Roman Catholic Jesuit order was required to adhere to geocentrism and ignore the heliocentric teachings of Copernicus and his followers, even though they were becoming standard in European astronomy. Thus, the Jesuits initially shared an Earth-centered and largely pre-Copernican astronomy with their Chinese hosts (i.e., the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian views from Hellenistic times). The Jesuits (such as Giacomo Rho) later introduced Tycho's geoheliocentric model as the standard cosmological model. The Chinese often were fundamentally opposed to this as well, since the Chinese had long believed (from the ancient doctrine of Xuan Ye) that the celestial bodies floated in a void of infinite space. This contradicted the Aristotelian view of solid concentric crystalline spheres, where there was not a void, but a mass of air between the heavenly bodies. Of course, the views of Copernicus, Galileo, and Tycho Brahe would eventually triumph in European science, and these ideas slowly leaked into China despite Jesuit efforts to curb them in the beginning. In 1627, the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym (Bu Mige) introduced Johannes Kepler's Copernican Rudolphine Tables with much enthusiasm to the Ming court at Beijing. In Adam Schall von Bell's Chinese-written treatise of Western astronomy in 1640, the names of Copernicus (Ge-Bai-Ni), Galileo (Jia-li-lüe), and Tycho Brahe (Di-gu) were formally introduced to China. There were also Jesuits in China who were in favor of the Copernican theory, such as Nicholas Smogulecki and Wenceslaus Kirwitzer. However, Copernican views were not widespread or wholly accepted in China during this time. Ferdinand Augustin Hallerstein (Liu Songling) created the first spherical astrolabe as the Head of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau from 1739 until 1774. The former Beijing Astronomical observatory, now a museum, still hosts the armillary sphere with rotating rings, which was made under Hallerstein's leadership and is considered the most prominent astronomical instrument. While in Edo Japan, the Dutch aided the Japanese with the first modern observatory of Japan in 1725, headed by Nakane Genkei, whose observatory of astronomers wholly accepted the Copernican view. In contrast, the Copernican view was not accepted in mainstream China until the early nineteenth century, with the Protestant missionaries such as Joseph Edkins, Alex Wylie, and John Fryer. Astronomy during Ming China The Ming dynasty in China lasted from 1368 until 1644 and experienced a decrease in astronomical expansion. The occupation of astronomer during these times relied less on discovery and more on the use