Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Pan began his examination by scrutinizing the shipwrecked, even to the point of examining the soles of the barefooted to check whether they had been force marched. It was soon abundantly clear to him that the foreigners had suffered at the hands of his officers. He called the commander from Jinghai and put him through questioning. The commander stuck to the story he had told in Chaozhou: these were Red Hairs and Dwarf Pirates, not the innocent merchants from Manila and Macao they claimed to be, and his men had apprehended them accordingly. Some may have suffered injuries, but their injuries occurred on the day they were shipwrecked, before they came into his custody. He was not responsible for their condition.

  The commander urged the commissioner to focus on the main issue, which was that the shipwrecked were foreigners, including Japanese, who had entered the country illegally.

  According to Las Cortes’s account of their day in court, Commissioner Pan wanted to know whether any cargo came ashore with the foreigners. If so, that property would be treated as contraband, and any Chinese who handled such goods would be guilty of smuggling. (As Lu Zhaolong’s friend, Judge Yan, noted in a case involving illegal trade between Cantonese soldiers and Dutch traders, “Those on board [foreign ships] are not permitted to bring goods ashore and those on shore are not permitted to go on the boats and receive goods.”) The Jinghai commander insisted that the survivors came ashore with nothing but what they were wearing. The Guía carried no silver, he insisted, and no one under his charge had taken a thing from the foreigners. Pan had enough judicial experience to know this was probably nonsense, but he lacked evidence to the contrary and had to give up trying to extract the truth from his subordinates.

  Commissioner Pan then turned to Las Cortes. He posed a series of carefully phrased questions designed to pry out the truth. Trusting Las Cortes over his own officers, Pan soon determined that these people had indeed been maltreated, that the ship was carrying a cargo of silver, that its owners had been prevented from recovering it, and that some of it had been salvaged later. Pan expected as much, but knowing that the commander would not present any evidence that silver had been taken, he could do nothing. He then turned to the decapitations, the evidence for which—the severed heads of Ganpti and the others—was sitting in a row of baskets in the courtroom.

  “Did you see anyone from Jinghai kill the people whose heads have been presented before this court?”

  “In truth,” declared Las Cortes, “we saw them decapitate seven of our people, but cannot say whether they cut off their heads while they were still living or after they had already died, whether from drowning or exposure or the injuries they suffered during the shipwreck.”

  Commissioner Pan was trying to get at the issue of whether any of the foreigners had died at Chinese hands, but Las Cortes chose to prevaricate. He suspected that nothing would be achieved by filing accusations of murder—other than delaying their departure. Pan seems to have understood Las Cortes’s testimony for what it was: an agreement to compromise in order to close the case and allow everyone to go home. Having only the mute evidence of the heads, he dismissed the charge of murder with the platitude, “The dead cannot be brought back to life by us.”

  The problem of the missing silver had to be handled in the same way. Foreign ships were known to carry as much as ten thousand ounces (taels) of silver, as Judge Yan notes in another case, yet not a single ounce was reported lost or gained by either side. Pan had to dismiss the matter. “As for the silver the ship was carrying,” he declares in his final judgment, “let it be deemed lost at sea, as nothing about its recovery can be determined.” Pan also declined to order compensation be paid for the foreigners’ losses, adding the observation that “it does not seem likely that so small a number of Europeans could have been in possession of any great quantity of silver.” The observation assumed that the silver used in trade was in the possession of individuals, not of corporations. This was either an odd prevarication, an excuse for doing nothing, or a sign of Pan’s lack of knowledge regarding foreign commerce.

  Was Commissioner Pan duped? I think not. From Las Cortes’s account, he seemed to know exactly what was going on, and even more clearly to understand the limits of his powers to prosecute when no evidence had been brought forward from a crime scene three hundred and fifty kilometers away. He had to close the proceedings with the finding that the shipwrecked had arrived in China by misadventure, not by intention, that they were not engaged in piracy, and that they should be allowed to return to Macao. All charges were dismissed.

  VERMEER’S CALM GEOGRAPHER IS A world away, physically and intellectually, from the arguments in Pan’s courtroom. He is not a coastal villager threatened by pirates; nor need he fear the ocean, as his compatriots controlled it anyway; nor does he have an interest in the profits VOC merchants are making by traveling overseas. What interests him is the information they are bringing back: information he will collect, analyze, and synthesize into sea charts and maps, which the merchants can then take back into the wider world that is now better understood. And if that useful knowledge fails, then new knowledge will be collected and incorporated. The geographer’s task in the seventeenth century was to engage actively in this endless loop of feedback and correction. This is exactly what Hondius had requested in the cartouche on the curve of the globe we see over the geographer’s head. Would those embarking on the “very frequent expeditions” going “every day to all parts of the world” please report their positions back to him, so that he can produce a new edition that will improve upon the one that stands before them?

  Through this sort of feedback mechanism (which involved a lot of heavy borrowing if not outright plagiarism from the work of others), European cartographers were constantly revising their maps during the seventeenth century. New knowledge replaced old, and then was replaced in turn by newer, and hopefully better, information. The process was not always perfect: many maps of North America showed a transcontinental channel well after the time when there was any hope that one would be found. Still, the cumulative effect was correction and elaboration, so that gradually the map of the world was filled in.

  A few blank spaces tenaciously resisted this knowledge-gathering process—the African interior, the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the northern end of North America, the two poles—and explorers duly rose to the challenge of filling them in, often simply for the sake of doing it and not because anyone needed this knowledge. What merchants needed was precise information about the routes on which their ships traveled so as to lower the chance of shipwreck and increase the speed at which ships could go and return—and thereby increase the rate at which their capital turned over. This is not the story that Vermeer’s Geographer tells, however. Leeuwenhoek poses as a man of science, not a man of business. Yet without scholars like him who devoted their energies to the accumulation of useful knowledge, the merchants would not have had their maps. The two impulses—knowledge and acquisition—worked together.

  Chinese geographers were in a different situation. There was no feedback mechanism in operation and little impetus to alter what was already laid down. Even if knowledge of regions beyond their borders could have been acquired from coastal mariners, Chinese scholars tended not to take a great interest in it. An exception was the geographer Zhang Xie, who made a point of talking to mariners who had sailed into the waters of Southeast Asia when compiling his Investigations of the Eastern and Western Oceans. As he states in his introductory notes, “all the places recorded in this book are places merchant ships have gone.” Zhang was scathing toward authors who write history by simply repeating ancient facts and dismissing recent developments. Such people perpetuate ignorance rather than produce knowledge. His goal was instead to record information on recent developments, including the Red Foreigners, because of the effect they were currently having on maritime commerce.

  The book had no appreciable impact among those who actually traveled, however; but nor, to be fair, would any of Zhang’s readers have thought it should. T
he material in the book, as the invited contributor of a preface writes, “was selected to provide material for historians of another day,” not for mariners and merchants in Zhang’s day, the very folk from whom Zhang gathered his materials. His book was not for this readership, but for other curious scholars such as himself who had no expectation of ever going abroad and simply wanted to know more about the lands beyond their shores. Zhang Xie knew that Chinese should now expect ships like the Guía to show up at China’s edges, but it was not an idea that more traditionally minded readers would have known how to deal with.

  Matteo Ricci, Paolo Xu’s Jesuit collaborator and the senior missionary in China until his death in 1610, eagerly shared European knowledge of the natural world, as he assumed this would impress the Chinese and help him prove the truth of Christianity. What clearer form had he to present new geographical knowledge than maps? European world maps by this time came in several forms, and Ricci copied and revised examples of them, adding place names and explanations in Chinese in the hope of engaging the intellectual attention of the scholars he met. Chinese viewers in the late Ming liked maps. Commercial wall maps were not as popular as they were in Holland, but they existed and were hung. Seeing these European maps, Chinese viewers were unsure of what to do with the information they provided, for the simple reason that most lacked an experiential basis from which to interact with Ricci’s images.

  Paolo Xu delighted in Ricci’s maps, as he was persuaded by the theory of a round earth and believed that maps could communicate this idea more forcefully than a written explanation. Ricci’s European world maps were taken up by other scholars as well, for they made it into the two great encyclopedias of the era, the Compendium of Pictures and Writings and the Assembled Pictures of the Three Realms (the three realms being heaven, earth, and humanity). The compiler of the first was delighted to note that these new maps meant “you don’t have to leave your house and yet you can have complete knowledge of the world.” Yet the step from inside the house to outside the house did not happen. The publication of these maps in popular encyclopedias could have started a feedback loop, inspiring Chinese readers to go out, maps in hand, to test this knowledge. But it didn’t. These maps were not subsequently refined and developed for other publications, as they were in Europe, nor did they dislodge the traditional cosmology. The problem was simply that almost no Chinese mariners had the opportunity to test and develop this knowledge. No Chinese merchant was circumnavigating the earth and finding it round. The only people bringing this information from the wider world were foreigners, who were not always to be trusted. Nor, accordingly, was there anyone like Vermeer’s geographer who wanted, or was able, to incorporate endless data from the outside world, constantly revising the body of useful knowledge that someone actually needed.

  For Europeans, the outside world was entering their lives in the forms of ideas and objects, some of which we see in the room Vermeer has painted. For most Chinese, the outside world remained outside. It may have infiltrated the mind of Paolo Xu; even Commissioner Pan sensed there was something to learn from the people whom the outside world had thrown into his custody. But if the Jinghai commander and Lu Zhaolong had their say, and they did, outside was where this world should stay.

  5

  SCHOOL FOR SMOKING

  AMONG THE COLLECTORS of local exotica in nineteenth-century Delft, Lambert van Meerten was the most obsessed. The heir of a family that made its fortune in the liquor trade, Lambert devoted his life and fortune to amassing a vast collection of art objects, statues, ceramics, curios, and whatever architectural detritus he could pick up from buildings undergoing renovation. He acquired more objects than he could possibly afford to house, but had the good luck to have in Jan Schouten a wealthier and more sensible friend. Schouten came to his rescue and agreed to help pay for a massive three-story house, which now sits farther up the Oude Delft canal on the side on which the Delft Chamber of the VOC sits, where Van Meerten could store all his treasures. When Van Meerten died, Schouten converted the house into a museum, which it remains today.

  When I visited the museum, I happened upon a large blue-and-white plate in a cabinet in a back room on the upstairs floor. The plate, forty-three centimeters in diameter, depicts a busy Chinese garden scene stocked with immortals, scholars, servants, and mythological creatures (see plate 5). The Portuguese were the first Europeans to try their hand at making dishes that looked Chinese, but Delft potters were the first to manage reasonable imitations. On this one, a faux-Chinese style of illustration has been accomplished with dramatic flair, but there is no chance of mistaking it for a real Chinese plate. Numerous little details betray its Dutch origins. The chips around the edge show the clay to be European, and the glaze lacks the hardness and evenness of Jingdezhen ware. The fatal giveaway is the three-character inscription on the tablet being carried by a Confucian official in the middle of the plate. A valiant attempt to make Chinese characters, it is entire nonsense. So the plate is a fake, though that sentence judges it too harshly. The decoration was never intended to fool a buyer. The Chineseness was simply there to please the eye and amuse the imagination. It is a happy, innocent fake.

  The figures on the Van Meerten plate are busily doing the sorts of things Europeans expected Chinese to do in pictures, like floating in clouds, crossing bridges, and catching cranes. Among the quirks and inconsistencies you would never see on a “real” Chinese dish is a bald immortal riding a mythological tiger-dog and sucking fiercely on a long-stemmed pipe. No smoke issues from his mouth or pipe, but the swirling clouds of heaven through which he flies stand in for the fumes. No porcelain painter in China ever put a smoker on a dish, so far as I have seen. Not until much later in the eighteenth century would a Chinese artist even be willing to include someone smoking in his repertoire, and then only for sketches or woodcuts (we will see an early example later in this chapter). New practices take time to be culturally absorbed, and smoking was never absorbed well enough to be allowed into the realm of fine art before the twentieth century. Chinese painting is conservative on such cultural matters.

  This is not the only piece of Dutch porcelain to depict a smoker. Delft tile painters had been putting smokers on their wares for some decades. Nor were porcelain painters the only artists to paint smoking. Delft painters had been doing this on canvas for just as long, using smoking to signal sociability and conviviality. The Delft “merry company” painter Jan Steen delighted in crowding his satirical scenes with smokers of all ages. The more genteel Pieter de Hooch and Hendrik van der Burch put pipes in the hands of male figures to give them something to do with their hands while they were engaged in conversation. Johannes Vermeer never painted anyone smoking, so no Vermeer painting gives us a ready door that we can open onto the global spread of tobacco. But this plate—which may be the earliest depiction of a Chinese smoker by a European artist—does.

  Where did the painter get the idea that Chinese smoked? He was not copying a Chinese original, as no Chinese painter would have put a smoking scene on porcelain. If he was inventing his own image, it had to have been because he had heard that Chinese smoked. Some bit of global information had come his way. Europeans were used to smoking by this time, having become schooled in the pleasures of tobacco through the latter part of the sixteenth century. That Chinese, or all Asians for that matter, were joining them through the seventeenth, and doing so on their own without business or cultural elites telling them to do it—indeed, almost without anyone noticing it was happening—is one effect of global mobility in the seventeenth century that no one could have predicted. Tobacco smoking was not fated to go global, but it did. The smoking immortal on the Delft plate opens for us another door, and through it we will find our way back into the world as it was becoming in the seventeenth century.

  BEIJING WAS THE CITY to which all educated young men in China went to make their reputation and fortune. Cold in winter, clogged with Mongolian dust in the spring, parched in the summer, pleasant only in the fall, it w
as nonetheless the emperor’s home and the center of power. Its examination halls drew the ambitious few up through the exam system and into state service. The ladder of advancement was not to be scampered up quickly. Every candidate had to start on the same bottom rung down in his home county; a tiny few got to the ultimate degree of “presented scholar,” and even fewer found themselves serving at court. To be from a presented scholar’s family helped in preparing for the ordeal of scaling the ladder, but family made no difference once you went into your exam cubicle and wrote papers for three days, unless of course your family knew an examiner to bribe, but that was a capital offense and difficult to arrange. If you passed, being from a family of degree holders meant you had the social skills and political connections to get a decent appointment in the capital rather than being sent out to the provinces as a county magistrate and having to work your way back to the center. The ascent up the examination ladder to Beijing was forbiddingly steep. So too, the re-ascent from a posting as a county magistrate to an appointment in the capital was nearly as tough, and most magistrates never made it.

  Yang Shicong came from a good family, but he did not pass the presented scholar exams until 1631, when he was already in his thirties. Family connections allowed him to make up for lost time. Yang was posted right into the Hanlin Academy, a policy think tank and secretarial agency in Beijing for Emperor Chongzhen, and he rose to the post of vice-minister of rites. He got the coveted post of instructor to the heir apparent when the prince came of age in 1637, which segued into the position of adviser to the prince in the 1640s. The emperor committed suicide when rebels captured Beijing in April 1644, a few short weeks before the Manchus invaded and took over. The heir apparent, who came under Jesuit influence, sent a desperate appeal to the pope to send an army to drive the Manchus out of China, but what could the pope do about an invasion half a world away?