the war, though, the Ming forces suffered significant casualties, and had spent a great deal of revenue sending troops on land into Korea and bolstering the Korean navy in battles such as the Battle of Noryang Point. The Japanese were finally defeated and withdrew. The decline of Ming China's economy by inflation was made worse by crop failure, famine, sudden plague, and agrarian rebellion led by those such as Li Zicheng (1606–1644), and the Ming dynasty fell in 1644. The Ming general Wu Sangui (1612–1678) was going to side with the rebels under Li, but felt betrayed when his concubine Chen Yuanyuan was taken by Li, and so allowed the Manchus, led by Prince Dorgon, to enter a northern pass and invade northern China from their base in Manchuria. The first Jesuit missionaries to visit China did so during the Ming dynasty. The most prominent one was the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Matteo Ricci is famous in China and the West for many reasons. He was the first to translate the Chinese classic texts into a Western language (Latin), and the first to translate the name of the most prominent Chinese philosopher Kong Qiu as "Confucius". Along with another Jesuit father, he was the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing during the reign of the Wanli Emperor. Matteo Ricci and his baptized Chinese colleague, the mathematician, astronomer, and agronomist Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), were the first to translate the ancient Greek mathematical treatise of Euclid's Elements into Chinese. Early Qing dynasty to 1800 The long-lasting Chinese Rites controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries led the pope in 1704 to reverse the Jesuit position and reject any recognition of traditional Chinese rituals regarding ancestors and Confucianism. The Emperor thereupon banished all missionaries who followed the pope's policy. The pope's decision was finally reversed in 1939. One issue facing Western embassies to China was the act of prostration known as the kowtow. Western diplomats understood that kowtowing meant accepting the superiority of the Emperor of China over their own monarchs, an act which they found unacceptable. In 1665, Russian explorers met the Manchus in what is today northeastern China. Using the common language of Latin, which the Chinese had learned from Jesuit missionaries, the Kangxi Emperor of China and Tsar Peter I of the Russian Empire negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, which delineated the borders between