Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Many officials at court supported the idea of taking advantage of European ballistics to help China defend its borders. The most spectacular evidence of the superiority of European gunnery occurred in Macao in 1622. In June of that year, a fleet of VOC ships descended on Macao in the hope of grabbing this lucrative trading station from the hands of the Portuguese and taking over the China trade. The assault might well have succeeded, had the Jesuit mathematician Giacomo Rho not been doing the geometry calculations for one of the gunners defending the town. The gunner Rho was working with managed to score a direct hit on the cache of gunpowder kegs that the Dutch attackers had brought ashore with them. Perhaps Rho’s shot had as much luck as aim in it, but that didn’t matter. Rho was honored ever after for his mathematical prowess for saving Portuguese Macao from the Dutch.

  Some Chinese officials took from this victory the complacent lesson that foreigners fought each other and China had only to manipulate them against each other, in this case by allowing the Portuguese to trade but barring the Dutch from doing so. “We don’t spend a penny,” declared Governor General Dai Zhuo in Canton, “and yet by employing the strategy of using foreigners to attack foreigners, our power extends even beyond the seas.”

  Lu Zhaolong did not agree that China should look to foreigners for a solution. Employing Portuguese gunners signified weakness, not strength. Others at court took a more aggressive view. For them, Rho’s victory proved that China had to acquire better technology to defend itself. The Chongzhen emperor thought so too, and had already sent an edict giving the go-ahead to the Portuguese artillery team even before Lu sent in his first memorial.2

  Gonçalo Teixeira Correa led the delegation of four gunners, two interpreters, plus two dozen Indian and African servants. One of the translators was Chinese, and the other was the senior Jesuit priest João Rodrigues, who had for years headed the mission to Japan. Rodrigues was already known to Chinese officials in the south, and not trusted. In Canton, Judge Yan Junyan, a friend of Lu Zhaolong, regarded Ro-drigues as a meddler in China’s internal affairs. He suspected that the old Jesuit was more than just an interpreter, but he had to respect orders from Beijing and allow him to pass through Canton.

  Despite the imperial authorization that the delegation should approach Beijing, officials who shared Lu Zhaolong’s opinion put up resistance at every turn. The team got stalled at Nanjing, just as the previous delegation had. Officials would not permit them to proceed farther without explicit confirmation from the emperor that they should do so. Rodrigues claimed in a report home that they were waiting for a favorable wind to carry them up the Grand Canal, but he was trying to save face all round. At long last, on 14 February 1630, the imperial edict arrived: proceed to the capital with all haste. Manchu raiding parties had been spotted moving in the vicinity of the capital. The services of the foreigners were needed.

  Sixty-five kilometers south of the capital, a band of Manchu raiders crossed the Portuguese gunners’ path. It was a chance encounter, but a piece of incredible good luck for the faction that advocated the use of European technology. The gunners retreated to the city of Zhuozhou nearby and mounted eight of their cannon on the city wall. The cannon fire did no real damage, but the effect was enough to persuade the Manchus to depart. No real battle ensued, and no real victory was earned. Still, it was all the supporters of the expedition at court needed to sweep aside the objections of opponents such as Lu Zhaolong.

  Once Teixeira and Rodrigues were in the capital, they realized that their party was too small to make much difference in a full campaign against the Manchus. Four gunners stood little chance of turning the military tide against the Manchus, who were superbly commanded and had rapid deployment capacity, to say nothing of capable Chinese gunners working on their side. The Portuguese decided to capitalize on the sudden boost to their reputation by proposing that another three hundred mounted soldiers be recruited from Macao. Perhaps, and this seems very likely, they were put up to it by the vice-minister of war. The vice-minister was Xu Guangqi, who happened to be the very official who spearheaded the first request for military support back in 1620. He wrote to the throne on 2 March 1630 explaining that European cannon were cast more adeptly and from better metal than Chinese cannon. They used more volatile gunpowder, and better sighting gave them greater accuracy. After much deliberation, the emperor asked the ministry of rites to submit a concrete proposal concerning these arrangements. In the intervening time, the vice-minister of war was transferred to the post of vice-minister of rites. From that position, Xu submitted a formal proposal to the emperor on 5 June to send Rodrigues back to Macao to place an order for more cannon, recruit more gunners, and bring the lot up to Beijing to stiffen the Ming border forces. The same month, no less a figure than Giacomo Rho, the Jesuit mathematician who saved Macao, arrived in the capital at the invitation of the same vice-minister.

  The Jesuits knew Xu Guangqi better by his baptismal name. Xu Guangqi was Paolo Xu, the highest-ranking court official ever to convert to Christianity. Like Lu Zhaolong, Paolo Xu was from a coastal family, but from much farther up the coast—Shanghai, where seaborne threats came from Japan rather than Europe. The peace of Shanghai had not been disturbed by either Macanese Foreigners or Red Hairs. It was too far north of the coastal zone in which they traded. Still, through a series of encounters orchestrated by chance—yet spurred by Xu’s powerful curiosity—this Shanghai native came to know many Europeans in the course of his life. The Europeans he knew, however, were neither Macanese merchants nor Dutch pirates. They were Jesuit missionaries from all over Europe, and they brought with them knowledge that Xu recognized could have enormous value for China.

  Jesuits had been entering China from Macao for less than a decade when Xu, struggling to make his way up the examination ladder, met one of them in a southern provincial town in 1595. He had a second encounter five years later with Matteo Ricci, the brilliant Italian Jesuit who led the Jesuit mission in China until his death in 1610. In the course of his third encounter in 1603, Xu received baptism and took the Christian name of Paolo. Xu became a close associate of the Jesuits, particularly of the scholarly Ricci, with whom he collaborated on a range of religious and scholarly projects designed to show the value of the new knowledge that the missionaries brought from Europe. Few Chinese converted to Christianity; their traditions of ritual and belief taught them to be dubious about adopting a faith that required them to renounce prior rites and beliefs. Xu was not troubled by the commitment this new religious knowledge demanded. He figured that Christianity was just as much a part of the larger European system of knowledge as metallurgy, ballistics, hydraulics, and geometry, and these were the subjects he was eager to learn and adapt to China’s use. He saw no reason to accept some branches of what came to be called Western Learning and reject others.

  Lu Zhaolong regarded Paolo Xu, correctly enough, as his chief adversary in the debate over the use of European technology in China. The only way to bring the emperor around to his view was to erode Xu’s considerable authority. The minor Portuguese victory at Zhuozhou made his task that much harder. He had to proceed carefully. Lu’s main argument was national security. “Inviting the distant foreigners will not only pose a risk to the interior, but it will give them a chance to detect our weaknesses and become familiar with our conditions, and so laugh at our Heavenly dynasty for lacking defenders.” The only way China could keep foreigners in proper awe of China was to hold them at a distance. The sight of three hundred mercenaries—“people of a different sort, galloping their horses, brandishing their swords, and letting arrows fly from their bows inside the imperial capital”—was too disturbing to allow. Putting China’s sovereignty in their hands was a crazy gamble. Besides, the cost of transporting and feeding such a horde was too high. For the same price, the government could afford to cast hundreds of cannon.

  In the end, Lu Zhaolong rested his appeal on ad hominem attacks on Paolo Xu by targeting the point where Xu was most vulnerable, his Christianity. �
�The Macanese Foreigners all practice the teachings of the Lord of Heaven,” he complained in the final section of his first communication with the emperor on this matter. “Its doctrines are so abstruse that they easily delude the age and confuse the people,” and he gave instances of Christian cults that had appeared in several places in China. The charge went beyond concerns about how badly three hundred Portuguese soldiers might act. There lay a much deeper anxiety about foreigners infecting the core beliefs of Chinese culture. Lu even quietly suggested that a foreign religion might sway Chinese minds against the dynasty’s authority. Millenarian Buddhist sects had recently been active in the capital region, on one occasion inciting an uprising inside the city. Might not secret Christian congregations get up to the same thing? Even worse, Chinese Christians would have secret connections to the foreigners, which meant secret connections to Macao, and who knew what such connections might bring? “I know nothing about there being such a thing in the world as the teachings of the Lord of Heaven, ” Lu declared, wanting to know why the emperor would listen to someone such as Xu who preferred them over the writings of Confucius. “How is it that he is so resourceful and keen in doing everything he can to guarantee the preservation of the Macanese Foreigners and plan for their long-term prospects?”

  Xu’s Christianity was not his only weak spot. His tie with Macao was another. Anxiety about what the foreigners got up to in Macao runs like a red thread through all Chinese complaints about Europeans in this period. This was the anxiety that lay behind the persecution of Christianity in Nanjing in 1616, when a very different vice-minister of rites, Shen Que, expelled two missionaries. Alfonso Vagnone and Álvaro Semedo were transported back to Macao in—to quote an English rendering of Semedo’s later account—“very narrow cages of wood (such as are used in that Country to transport persons condemned to death, from one place to another) with Iron Chaines about their necks, and Manacles on their Wrists, with their haire hanging down long, and their Gownes accoutred in an odde fashion, as a signe of a strange and Barbarous people.” Says Semedo, writing about himself and Vagnone in the third person, “In this manner were the fathers carried with an inexpressible noise, which the Ministers made with their ratling of Fetters and Chaines. Before them were carried three tablets, written on with great letters, declaring the Kings Sentence, and forbidding all men to have any commerce or conversation with them. In this equipage they went out of Nankim.” For thirty days they were transported in these cages southward to Canton and from there dispatched to Macao with severe warnings to return to Europe and never come back.

  Paolo Xu had been the lone voice defending these two Jesuits back in 1616, though even then he had warned another missionary that the Jesuits should take care to hide their contacts with Macao. “All of China is scared of the Portuguese,” he stressed, and Macao was the place on which they focused their anxieties. Hostile officials regarded it not as an innocent trading post, but as a base from which the Portuguese were running a network of agents inside China to foment religious disturbances, smuggling, and espionage. The missionaries were seen as its spies. This is why Shen Que charged Semedo and Vagnone with being “the cat’s paw of the Franks.” A report from the Nanjing Ministry of Rites concurred. Macao was the base from and to which the Jesuits traveled, the port that provided them with passage anywhere in the world, and the funnel through which the ministry understood Vagnone received the 600 ounces of silver annually to distribute among the missions in China (the ministry later revised that number down to 120 ounces). Macao was not just a base for foreign trade, notes a report by the Nanjing Censorate three months later, but the base for Portuguese infringements on Chinese sovereignty: “their religion makes Macao its nest.” The Jesuits eventually grasped the liability of their relationship with Macao, though they could never do without the colony. It was essential to their entire operation in China, and to give it up was to forego the organizational and financial support that kept the mission going.

  Paolo Xu insisted on drawing a distinction between the Red Hairs and the Macanese Foreigners, exactly as his Jesuit friends would have instructed him to do. The Macanese Foreigners supported their mission and provided them with the base from which it was possible to send missionaries into China. If the Dutch took Macao from the Portuguese, the Jesuit mission in China would come to an end. Their friends and enemies had to be Paolo Xu’s friends and enemies. Lu Zhaolong was not persuaded that any foreigners could be trusted, Portuguese or Dutch. “Rites official Xu has collected arguments he has heard and turned them into a memorial that chatters on for hundreds of words,” Lu complained, “the gist of which is to argue that the Red Hairs and the Macanese Foreigners be distinguished, the one as obedient and the others as refractory.” Xu needed to make this distinction in order to protect his connections with the Jesuits against the charge that there was no difference between Portuguese priests and Dutch pirates. Lu would have none of it.

  The Jesuits well understood how vital their connection to Macao was to the success of their mission. In 1633, a year after João Rodrigues returned to Macao from his stint with the gunners, he sent a letter to the head of his Society in Europe.3 In the letter he underlines the need to protect the colony and its reputation, “for on this depends the trade so vital for His Majesty’s Two Indies [the East Indies and the West Indies—the latter meaning the Portuguese possessions in what is now Brazil] and also the mission to convert China, Japan, Cochinchina, Tonkin, and other countries to our holy religion.” Macao was the financial and strategic heart of the Jesuit enterprise in the East. Rodrigues’s language uncannily echoes the language of a statement issued by the Nanjing Ministry of Rites. “This city of Macao is the narrow entrance through which subjects and all the necessary supplies for Masses and temporal upkeep enter these countries.” Had Rodrigues’s letter fallen into Lu Zhaolong’s hands, it would have bolstered his suspicions about Macao being a beachhead of foreign penetration into China. So too, had he learned that both the priests transported out of China in a cage in 1617 were back inside in the 1630s, defying Chinese laws and converting people to their suspect creed, his worst fears about Macao’s threat to the authority of the dynasty would have been confirmed.

  Macao’s position as the financial clearinghouse for the Jesuit mission into China was the very reason why Las Cortes, the Jesuit chronicler of the wreck of the Guía, was on his way from Manila to Macao when the ship went down. In his memoir, he says only that he had business to transact in Macao and reveals nothing further. When he finally got to Macao, he transacted it with none other than João Rodrigues. What their business involved, Las Cortes does not say, but within two months he was on the next ship back to Manila.

  On his return voyage, Las Cortes had the misfortune once again to sail through a storm. In a convoy of five ships that crossed the South China Sea together, only four reached Manila. In his memoir, Las Cortes expresses great concern for the loss of that ship’s cargo, which he notes included Chinese silks purchased in Macao for three hundred thousand pesos. Sumptuous brocades and feather-light gauzes in a dazzling array of colors, these fabrics were of a sort that no European could weave or buy anywhere else, but Las Cortes was not interested in the beauty of the silks. He was interested in what they were worth. “If one took account of what it would have fetched once it was sold in Manila,” he writes of the lost cargo, “one would without doubt have to add two hundred thousand pesos, which drives the loss up to half a million pesos.” Being the last substantive entry in his account of his yearlong adventure in China, the calculation draws attention to itself. The lost cargo may reveal Las Cortes’s own purpose in going to Macao: to buy Chinese silks that the Jesuits could then sell for a profit in Manila, generating proceeds that would fund their mission in the Philippines. Perhaps this also tells us that he was bringing a load of silver to buy such silks when he crossed to Macao on the Guía. If the missing silk was Jesuit property, Las Cortes’s mission to Macao was a severe loss in both directions.

  THE CONSEQUE
NCES OF SAILING OFF course and getting stranded on the China coast were just as huge for the people on board the Guía as for the owners of the cargo in the hold. An entire year passed before passengers and crew received a final judgment at Canton. The deliberation was handled by the provincial surveillance commissioner, whose position combined the responsibilities of chief prosecutor and provincial governor. Las Cortes does not record the commissioner’s name, but it was probably Pan Runmin.

  Pan Runmin had just stepped into the post of surveillance commissioner in 1625. Within a few months he would leave for a promotion elsewhere, but he was likely still in Canton when the case of the Guía came up. Little is known of Pan, other than that he was from Guizhou Province, deep in China’s southwest interior, a tribal region where few ever got the education needed to become an official and the only foreigners were the tribespeople living in the mountains. Las Cortes may have been the first European Pan ever dealt with. The Jesuit sensed that Pan was intrigued by the foreigners and observant of details. Indeed, he seemed more interested in learning about the foreigners than in prosecuting the case.