Missionaries from India penetrated Ceylon and Thibet, but they were expelled after a few years. The Chinese mission continued to prosper, and by 1620 claimed to have made a hundred thousand converts. One of the missionaries, Adam Schall, an expert in mathematics and mechanics, was employed by the Emperor to correct the Chinese calendar, make guns for his army, and construct fortifications. He received in return permission for his colleagues to preach throughout the Empire, and hundreds of churches were built. Presently, however, the rival Dominican missionaries reported to Rome that the Jesuits owed their success to a scandalous compromise with the native religion. There is no doubt that the Christianity they set before the Chinese was a very different creed from that which Xavier had intended to bring. They did not obtrude the crucifix on the notice of their converts, and they looked leniently on the worship of ancestors and the veneration for Kung-fu-tse. When the Dominicans and Franciscans insisted on the drastic purity of the faith, and characterised the pagan moralist with all the vigour of mediæval intolerance, the Jesuits persuaded the Chinese to expel them, and a spirited struggle, which will engage us at a later stage, took place in regard to their "Chinese rites."
The Japanese mission, on the other hand, was totally extinguished under the generalship of Vitelleschi. For a time after 1616 the new Emperor Xogun was indifferent to the labours of the Jesuits, who entered the country in disguise, and the converts were once more gathered into the Church. It is said that they numbered 400,000, and the record of the persecutions which followed shows that at least a large proportion of them were fervent and convinced Christians. In 1617, however, Xogun ordered all missionaries to leave the country, and a long and bloody persecution set in. The English and Dutch merchants had now supplanted the Portuguese, and they fed the animosity of the Emperor. Large numbers of the Jesuits and their followers were brutally tortured and executed; yet with signal heroism they continued to enter the land and lay down their lives for their work. But the fierce persecution was sustained by Xogun II. and his son, and by the time of the death of Vitelleschi, Christianity was extinct in Japan.