where he rose to a high rank and became known late in his career simply as "The Minister". Yet he continued to experiment and learn of new agricultural practices while he served his office, promoting the use of wet-rice in the Northeast China. From 1613 until 1620 he often visited Tianjin, where he helped organize self-sufficient military settlements (tun tian). In 1629, memorials by Xu successfully moved the court to permit the Portuguese captain Gonçalo Teixeira-Correa to bring 10 artillery pieces and 4 "excellent bombards" across China to the capital to demonstrate the effectiveness of Western artillery. An earlier demonstration in 1623 had gone disastrously, with an exploding cannon killing one Portuguese artillerist and three Chinese observers, but on this occasion the pieces were accepted and directed to Dengzhou (now Penglai) in Shandong. The Christian convert Ignatius Sun, a protégé of Xu's, was governor there and had also been a strong advocate of modernizing China's military. Together with CaptainTeixeira and his translator João Rodrigues, Sun used the pieces to train his troops to oppose the ongoing Manchu invasion. However, Sun's lenient treatment of a 1632 mutiny under Kong Yude and Geng Zhongming permitted them to successfully capture Dengzhou, seize the artillery, and establish an independent power base that eventually joined the Manchus. Xu's memorials for clemency were unsuccessful and Sun was court-martialed and executed. He held the positions of Minister of Rites (), overseeing government programs related to culture, education, and foreign affairs, and Deputy Senior Grand Secretary (), effectively a deputy premier for the imperial cabinet. Johann Adam Schall von Bell stayed with Xu during his final illness in 1633 and oversaw the return of his body to his family in Shanghai. There, it was publicly displayed at his villa until 1641, when it was buried "in a time of hardship". Legacy Xu Guangqi's tomb remains the centerpiece of Shanghai's Guangqi Park on Nandan Road (), just south of Xujiahui Cathedral. The 350th anniversary of his death in 1983 was celebrated very publicly, both with ceremonies in Shanghai and a laudatory article in the Beijing Review. The vocal Communist support for these memorials has been seen as signaling support for Deng Xiaoping's policies of opening up and modernizing China. Most Chinese treatments of his life and legacy, however, focus upon his desire for scientific, technological, and political progress and its effect upon Chinese development, whereas western treatments nearly universally