During the early Qing dynasty, the Jesuit Figurists were devoted to the translation of Chinese classics, especially the Yijing (Book of changes 易經), to demonstrate the existence of the same God in the East as theirs in the West. Their intralingual translations were characterized by the use of symbols and hexagrams from the Book of Changes, as well as their reconciliation of traditional Chinese and biblical chronologies. Past scholarship has criticized the associations made with Chinese history as implausible and baseless. Aware of such criticisms, this chapter will explore how the formation of proto-Figurism may be traced back to one former Jesuit missionary who focused on the similar trajectory for translating and retelling Chinese history. One contribution of this chapter is an exploration of the pathway from Kircher’s Hermeticism to the Jesuits’ Figurism. Martino Martini, a student of Athanasius Kircher, may be a proto-Figurist. Like the later Figurists, Martini embraced the strategy of Chineseness and focused on blending the Chinese and biblical chronologies by using elements such as numbers, hexagrams, as well as mythical figures. Martini and the Jesuit Figurists, including Joachim Bouvet and Joseph Henri-Marie de Premare, took on roles as historian-translators and conducted extensive studies of the Chinese classics. Based on the historical facts taken from the Chinese ancient classics, Martini and the Jesuit Figurists employed chronicles, numbers, and hexagrams to tell their own Chinese histories. Martini focused on validating Chinese history with facts he found in the Bible and Chinese classics, while the Figurists further employed Chinese characters as their exegetical method of retelling history, thus opening a new dimension to their European readers.