Wise Man Of The West (Harvill Press Editions)

by Vincent Cronin

  Ruggieri had not altogether fulfilled his expectations. After almost three years’ study and several long stays in Canton at the semi-annual fair, he still could not speak or understand the language. Moreover, he lacked that presence and suave distinction which the Chinese mandarin class prized so highly. He could at times be intrepid but lacked the force to persevere for long on a bold course.

  Ricci, the Visitor soon discovered, possessed not only these qualities but untiring physical and mental energy and a prodigious memory which, in three months, enabled him to read Chinese at least as well as Ruggieri. Valignano arranged for the two men to live alone in a small house in the grounds of the Jesuit residence, devoting all their time to the study of Chinese, while he himself, drawing on his experience in Japan, imparted to them his principles of adaptation, equality and friendship with the governing class.

  But when, in December, Valignano boarded the annual carrack for Goa, China still remained a sealed empire. Occasionally an official had been bribed into permitting a short visit inland—Ruggieri had penetrated a hundred miles, as far as Shiuhing, only to be expelled after a few weeks—but even these sorties were stopped when the new viceroy of Kwantung and Kwangsi provinces, the most important mandarin in southern China, issued an edict threatening severe penalties against anyone who helped foreigners to enter the country. The older priests at Macao nodded their heads wisely. Time spent in learning so difficult a language was wasted; these zealous, gifted young men would be better employed helping to care for the Christian merchants. Easier to scrub an Ethiopian white, they claimed, than to convert the Chinese.

  Events continued to justify this attitude until midsummer 1583, when the utterly impossible seemed to happen. A Chinese soldier arrived at the Jesuit house of St. Martin with an official letter from the governor of Shiuhing, a mandarin named Wang P’an. He had heard from Ruggieri of Ricci’s skill as a mathematician, as well as of the maps, clocks and spheres he could make. His curiosity aroused, he invited the two men to Shiuhing, where he held out hopes of land on which they could build a house.

  At first the Italians suspected a trick, but after verifying the seal and questioning the soldier, they hastened to obtain the necessary money. Their own procurator could give them nothing. Jesuit missions in India and the Orient had since their inception been supported by the King of Portugal and when, three years before, Portugal and Spain had been united under the Spanish Crown, administrative changes had even further delayed the trickle of money from Goa to its dependency, Macao. Valignano had been obliged to invest in the annual carrack from Macao to Nagasaki, in order to raise an additional five thousand ducats a year for the growing Japanese and proposed Chinese missions. This sum was occasionally supplemented by donations and legacies from wealthy Portuguese. Only last year, however, the all-important carrack bound for Japan had foundered off the island of Formosa, causing a loss of 200,000 ducats to Goa and Macao, so that Ruggieri and Ricci, in their search for alms, found most of their supporters penniless. However, they finally persuaded a wealthy Portuguese trader to come to their rescue. Gaspar Viegas had already founded the novitiate at Goa, given a fortune to start a mission in Cochin-China and for several years paid the expenses of the house of St. Martin. Now, with certain friends, he came forward to provide money for their journey and stay in Shiuhing. The Chinese unit of currency was the tael, an ounce of silver, not minted in coins, but cut from bars and weighed on ivory scales. With one tael a European could buy his food for a week. The annual living expenses of a missionary were reckoned at about a hundred, and the cost of a house at five hundred taels.

  At the beginning of September final arrangements were complete. Ricci stood ready to undertake the work for which all his past life he had been preparing. From Macao, prison rather than fortress, he was at last setting out, with neither precedent nor model, to enter the least known country in the world, closed, so it seemed, from all ages to the word of God, the most extensive mission field since the days of St. Paul, its territory unmapped, the full limit of its frontiers uncertain, the latitude of its capital undetermined. If he were not at once sent scurrying back, he would be attempting to win men of a civilisation older than his own, whose language he had not yet mastered, to a religion founded in a country of which they had never even heard. The undertaking appeared folly at its most fantastic. Yet it was precisely from this conclusion that hope could be drawn of great achievement.

  chapter two

  Breaking the Seal

  Ricci and his companion installed themselves with their baggage, early one September morning, in places requisitioned by the soldier from Shiuhing on the junk which plied between the enclave and Canton. They were changed men. Their hair and beards were shaven smooth and they had replaced their black soutanes with the grey cloth cloaks worn by Buddhist bonzes, as the best way of making clear that they were men of God. Presently they were joined by their interpreter, Philip, a Christian born of Chinese parents at Macao, by the crew and other passengers, baggage and scanty possessions slung from their shoulders, ochre bodies bare to the waist, heads shaded by wide, limpet-like hats. As goats, hogs and baskets of poultry were hauled on board, a lout stumbled against the cowled figures. With a gesture of respect he sheered away and stretched out beside the bronze gods in the stern. The nut-brown matted sail was swung squeaking to the wind, ropes cast off and the junk glided past the familiar Portuguese-style houses, double-tiled and plastered over, the church spires built low against typhoons, into the wide waters of the Western River. The small, hilly peninsula, a forbidding fist thrust out at the entrance to China, was reluctantly unclenched and at last released them.

  Eagerly Ricci observed the lie and colour of the land, its crops and trees, sifting them for signs which would help him to understand the people. Across an immense brown delta stretched fields of silt divided by raised earthen dykes and bounded northwards by terraced hills. Peasants were hoeing fields of reeded ginger, rice, sugar-cane and cassia, others deepening part of the network of irrigation canals. One feature was particularly obvious. Every scrap of ground belonged and was under intense cultivation. It offered no place for the intruding foreigner, even for his grave. The river was as diligently worked by innumerable sampans and sea-going junks. Near the banks were moored houseboats, each with its miniature garden, crowded with poor families, young and old herded to the number of fifty or sixty, rearing ducks for a living.

  The missionaries kept their faces hidden and did not speak. If they were recognised, they would either be subject to contempt and abuse, such was Chinese loathing of hairy devils and ugly demons, or else—should one or more of the passengers bear a particular grudge against the Portuguese—be turned off the ferry as aggressive spies, bent on seizing Canton.

  All day the junk continued its course northwards. As the sun went down, paddy fields, tepid water and treacly air were with a single thrust dipped and dyed in blackness: fireflies, lamps of fishing boats and stars united in a wheeling, blinking dance to the beat of cicadas and frogs, the occasional leap of a white porpoise, the intermittent bamboo drumming of night-watchmen on shore. The last conversation, meaningless to the missionaries as the duck boats’ clangour, came to an end: apart from the crew only the grey cowled figures remained awake, shades being ferried across the Styx.

  At dawn, they sailed past warehouses and docks under towering walls. Even here the river was wider than the Po, as though distended by the press of boats which almost covered its surface. Canton was not one of the noblest Chinese cities, yet it seemed to Ricci larger than Lisbon, larger even than Rome. Here they must obtain leave to proceed on the final stage of their journey from the Haitao, or Vice-Commissioner, a mandarin known to be favourable, for Portuguese trade brought wealth to Canton merchants and tangible forms of gratitude to himself.

  Escorted always by the soldier, they disembarked and, drawing their cowls close, passed through massive brick walls laid on freestone foundations, crenellated at the top, forty feet high, by way of large folding
gates plated with iron and protected by portcullises, yet a further sign how foreigners were feared. Once within the city Ricci discovered the reason for its vast extent: all the houses consisted of a single storey. There were other causes for wonder. The wide, straight streets, better far than any in Europe, were paved with stone and intersected at right angles. They were lined with shops, their goods displayed in front on bamboo tables, and contracted by booths offering bowls of wine, fruit and steaming rice. Before each store stood a large wooden pillar, higher than the eaves of the houses, bearing an inscription in gilt characters and hung from top to bottom with coloured flags, streamers and ribands. The two strangers had to fight a way past coolies carrying loads on bamboo poles, sedan chairs, men on horseback and a dense throng of half-naked buyers and sellers, shouting their wares, arguing, haggling—a mass made molten and hissing by the sun.

  The soldier led them through a triple triumphal arch like a huge ideogram, crowned with tiles, to a long low building standing in its own grounds near what seemed the centre of the city. Girded by columns without capitals, its dominant feature was the glazed tile roof, looped up at the sides like an awning. The only architrave was the horizontal beam supporting the roof rafters, the entablature a broad screen of wood fastened between the upper part of the columns and painted vivid blue, red, green and gilt.

  After a considerable delay they were led into the audience hall, at the far end of which, behind a table draped like an altar with brightly coloured damask, sat a mandarin, dressed in black, ankle-length sarsenet, a tight, black silk brimless cap on his head, trailing two wide horizontal wings like laurel leaves. The missionaries, their interpreter and the soldier prostrated themselves a stone’s throw from the table. Presently the Haitao spoke; Philip replied and at length informed his masters that the mandarin graciously allowed them to stand. Rising, they proffered Wang P’an’s letter which the Haitao, having first examined the seal, carefully read. Ricci glanced at the decorative lattice-work of the hall, at its tiled floor and flat ceiling painted with squares, circles and polygons and hung with gilded, inscribed tablets, at the furniture covered with glossy varnish which for all its grandeur seemed decidedly flimsy. The Haitao, who seemed in no hurry, continued to address Philip, but at last he called an assistant to lead the visitors away. Having prostrated themselves three times, the missionaries left the hall.

  While Philip explained that they had been assigned lodgings until passports could be issued and a boat arranged for Shiuhing, the Haitao’s assistant led them once more across the city out into the suburbs, stopping finally at an enclosure where a group of buildings in poor repair stood amid a garden gone to seed. Unlocking the courtyard gate the assistant led them into the main building. Rats scurried away at their entrance; an owl flapped heavily through the gaping roof. The place was little better than a cattle barn, dirty, without furniture, holes in the bamboo walls. After a word of explanation the assistant took his leave.

  This, Philip explained, was the Palace of the Ambassadors from the King of Siam to the Emperor of China. Here they were lodged every three years, on their arrival by sea, until word came from Peking authorising them to complete their journey. It was evident from the state of the buildings how little respect China felt for her neighbours, and their own presence there showed that she made no more distinction between other nationalities than did the Portuguese at Macao between the different Oriental nations.

  Imposing temporary order on the tumbledown building, they lodged the night. Next morning they discovered that the necessary authorisation had not yet been issued and that they would be obliged to extend their stay at the palace. Already the impatient missionaries were growing conscious of a new, exasperatingly slow rhythm, of a world of officials, seals and counter-seals. But at length their passports arrived and they continued their journey up-river, through undulating country, to Shiuhing, which they reached a week after leaving Macao. The walled town lay in the loop of two rivers, picturesquely situated between the low mountains. Ricci reckoned it somewhat smaller than Macerata, but instead of soaring, its horizontal buildings seemed to hug the earth.

  The soldier led them through bazaars which showed every sign of prosperity to a hall like that at Canton, where the governor was holding audience. Here they were forced to kneel down with all the other Chinese who had business there that day. Ricci looked about him. The governor, a man of about forty-five, wore the same black silk gown and winged hat as the Haitao. The wild goose embroidered on his girdle and its worked gold clasp showed he ranked fourth in the nine grades of Chinese officials. Huge parasols behind him were bespangled with gold. On his desk, its damask covering fastened at the corners with buttons and loops, lay brushes on a grooved rest, an inkstand, one side black, one red, with two partitions for water, beside which the inevitable fan lay folded.

  When their turn arrived, the governor asked them who they were, whence they came and what they wanted. Philip translated the questions and transmitted Ruggieri’s answer. “We are religious who serve the King of Heaven, and come from the farthest parts of the West—that is, from India. Our journey has taken three or four years. We have heard of the good government of the Middle Kingdom, and all we ask is a piece of land away from the commercial distractions of Macao, where we can build a small house and pagoda. There we will remain serving Heaven until we die. We beg your Excellency to help us. We shall give no trouble. We intend to seek alms for our food and clothing and shall remain indebted to your Excellency for the rest of our lives.”

  When the often rehearsed petition had been translated to Ricci in Macao, he had asked why no mention was made of their intention to preach Christianity. Ruggieri had explained that such a claim would be taken as an unpardonable insult. The Chinese believed they possessed a monopoly of the world’s wisdom, all foreigners being considered illiterate barbarians. The idea was present in the names—Chung-kuo, Middle Kingdom or Chung-hua, Middle Flower—by which they had called their country since the second millennium before Christ, when China, restricted to the region of the Yellow River Basin, had everywhere been surrounded by more primitive peoples. Because rebellions and seditions had often originated from the diffusion of revolutionary new ideas, it was essential, and Ricci had accepted the point, that they win entrance and acceptance before proclaiming their doctrine.

  The governor appeared satisfied with this speech. “You seem virtuous men,” he replied, “so I will help you. You may look about the town for a piece of land that pleases you. I shall see that the viceroy lets you have it. Meanwhile, pray to Heaven for me.”

  Bowing their foreheads to the ground three times, the missionaries withdrew.

  That afternoon they made a tour of Shiuhing and surrounding country. Although extraordinary sights on the river journey had made surprise his usual attitude, it was a shock for Ricci to walk, unheeded in his disguise, about the small town, with time now to observe the low wooden dwellings, their roofs wind-swept waves of a brown river, verandahs landscaped with miniature rock gardens and dwarf cedars, past the flat round faces, eyes set obliquely, black hair worn shoulder length, voices high-pitched and nasal. There were children playing, a single tuft on their shaven heads—but not a woman to be seen. There was every sign of order—maintained from a tribunal, unmoated and unwalled, by a soft-voiced scholar with no sword at his side. There was every sign of religion—in the fat-bellied idols of clay or metal at house door and street corner. Beyond the town gate, hung with edicts, vertical columns of sabre-slashing characters, Ricci found more at which to wonder: banyans with vast rooting branches and mulberry trees, their shadow splashed as though with blood; the silt-laden river, where black cormorants, throats fastened with cord below the pouch, darted underwater and returned to disgorge fish at their master’s feet; rich men, androgynous creatures dressed like women in ankle-long coloured silk, being carried in sedans like holy statues to or from the town. Gryphons and headless creatures might have startled him more, but for a short while only. Because they could be
dismissed as another species, their monstrosity was not reciprocal. These were men, his own sort, yet their totally different ways bewildered and challenged. He had been prepared for the marvellous, the unique—and these he had found—but not for this all-pervading music in an alien mode, setting everything within him off-key. It was his own accepted truths which began to appear curiosities, and he himself a creature outlandish in body and mind.

  The part of Shiuhing which best pleased the two Italians lay to the east, outside the walls, where the first storey of a brick and stone building was under construction. They learned that the graduates of the town, having collected three thousand taels from Shiuhing and its eleven dependencies, had obtained the viceroy’s permission to start erecting an octagonal tower of nine storeys, its purpose being to prevent good luck flowing away from Shiuhing in the waters of its two rivers. Close by stood the residences of the governor and viceroy, more than a mile outside the walls, among trees and gardens, commanding a pleasant view across the Western River. They agreed on what seemed an ideal site and, calling on Wang P’an, asked whether they might have land there. “Your presence,” he replied, “will prove an added adornment to the Tower of High Fortune. I shall write at once for the viceroy’s permission.”