Career
Foreign two years he laboured on the island of Celebes, and after 1660 was in the Chinese provinces of Shanxi and Henan. In 1671, he was called to the imperial court in Beijing as a mathematician, and was one of that group of scholarly Jesuits with whom the Kangxi Emperor surrounded himself. The last nine years of his life were spent as superior of the mission of Kiang-tcheon in Shanxi province.
The Kangxi Emperor himself wrote on Herdtrich"s epitaph (cf "Welt-Bott", Augsburg, 1726, Nos 16, 49).