Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Lu Zhaolong’s memorials appear in the Unedited records of the Chongzhen Era [Chongzhen changbian], 34.42a–44a, 35,41.13a–14b, and 43.29a–b; reprinted in Compendium of Archives and Documents on the Macao question in the Ming-Qing Period [Ming-Qing shiqi Aomen wenti dang’an wenxian huibian], ed. Yang Jibo et al. (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1999), vol. 5, pp. 41–45. See also Huang Yi-long, “Sun Yuanhua (1581–1632): A Christian Convert Who Put Xu Guangqi’s Military Reform Policy into Practice,” in Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi, ed. Catherine Jami, Gregory Blue, and Peter Engelfriedt (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 239–42.

  The account of Holland in the Veritable Records appears in the fourth lunar month of 1623, in Veritable Records of the Tianqi Reign [Xizong shilu], 33.3a–b.

  The quote from Dai Zhuo is recorded in the fourth chapter of Wang Linheng, The Swords of Canton [Yuejian pian], quoted in Tang Kaijian, Studies in the Early History of the Opening of the Port of Macao [Aomen kaipu chuqi shi yanjiu] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999), p. 113.

  On the recruitment of Portuguese gunners, see Michael Cooper, Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China (New York: Weatherhill, 1994), pp. 337–51. The composition of the 1623 party is described in the Veritable Records of that year, Veritable Records of the Tianqi Reign, 33.13a. Yan Junyan’s undated comment on Rodrigues appears in his Case Summaries from Mengshui Studio [Mengshui zhai cundu] (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2002), p. 704. Lu Zhaolong’s warm endorsement in his preface to Yan’s book shows they were friends. I am grateful to Alison Bailey for introducing me to Yan’s book. Rodrigues is mentioned in the Veritable Records of 1630 [Chongzhen changbian], ch. 44, reprinted in The Macao Question in the Ming-Qing Period, vol. 5, p. 45.

  On Xu Guangqi, see Jami et al., Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China. On Xu’s interest in Japan, see my “Japan in the Late Ming: The View from Shanghai,” in Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Norwalk, CT: EastBridge, 2002), pp. 42–62.

  The classic study of Shen Que’s attack on the Nanjing mission is Edward Kelly, “The Anti-Christian Persecution of 1616–1617 in Nanking” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971), key points of which have been revised by Adrian Dudink, “Christianity in Late Ming China: Five Studies” (Ph.D. diss., Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, 1995). The Jesuit assessment of Shen Que’s persecution as having failed is repeated in George Dunne, Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), pp. 128–45. Semedo’s description is taken from the 1642 English edition of his history of the Jesuit mission, Imperio de la Chinae [Empire of China], pp. 219–20; I am grateful to Gregory Blue for making this passage available to me.

  On the early Dutch trade with China, see Leonard Blussé, “The VOC as Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Stereotypes and Social Engineering on the China Coast,” in Leyden Studies in Sinology, ed. W. L. Idema (Leiden: Brill, 1981), especially pp. 92–95.

  The 1623 debate over whether the Japanese or the Dutch were the greater threat is discussed in the Veritable Records of the Tianqi Reign, 35.4a–b. For Li Zhizao’s argument in favor of Portuguese cannon, see op. cit., 35.3a–b.

  On the place of Macao in the Jesuit strategy to penetrate China, see George Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630–1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially pp. 25, 37, 195–98. Rodrigues’s letter of 1633 is reprinted in Cooper, “Rodrigues in China: The Letters of João Rodrigues, 1611–1633,” in The Path to a History of the National Language: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Doi Tadao [Kokugoshi e no michi: Doi sensei shōju kinen ronbunshū] (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1981), p. 242. Ricci’s popular reputation among educated Chinese as a spy for Macao is mentioned in 1609 in Li Rihua, Diary from the Water-Tasting Studio, p. 43. For subsequent charges of Jesuit spying in 1616 and 1623, see Dudink, “Christianity in Late Ming China,” pp. 151, 258.

  Pan Runmin is listed in the 1846 Comprehensive Gazetteer of Guang-dong [Guangdong tongzhi] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934), p. 375; and the Comprehensive Gazetteer of Guizhou [Guizhou tongzhi] (1741), 26.8b. Pan earned his presented scholar degree in 1607. Yan Junyan’s comments appear in his summary of an undated case he heard in Canton, collected in his Case Summaries, p. 702.

  The comments from Zhang Xie and his preface author Wang Qizong appear in his Investigations of the Eastern and Western Oceans [Dongxi yangkao] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), pp. 14,19–20.

  “You don’t have to leave your house” is from Zhang Huang, Compendium of Pictures and Writings [Tushu bian] (1613), Ch. 29.

  CHAPTER 5. SCHOOL FOR SMOKING

  Yang Shicong’s remarks come from his Collected Writings from Jade Hall [Yutang wenji] (repr. Taipei, 1968), p. 80. Fragments of his biography appear in Gazetteer of Jining Subprefecture [ Jining zhouzhi] (1672), 5.19a, 56a; 8.49b; and Zhang Tingyu, Standard History of the Ming Dynasty [Ming shi] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), pp. 3658,7942. For the cost of tobacco on the Beijing price list, see Shen Bang, Miscellaneous Records from the Wanping County Office [Wanshu zaji] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), pp. 134,146.

  On the history of tobacco, besides Kiernan, Tobacco: A History and Vigié and Vigié, L’Herbe à Nicot, see Sarah Augusta Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane: Tobacco in Sixteenth-Century Literature (New York: New York Public Library, 1954); Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge, 1993); Bernhold Laufer, “Introduction of Tobacco into Europe,” Anthropology Leaflet 19 (Field Museum of Chicago, 1924). On the Dutch experience, see Georg Brongers, Nicotana Tabacum: The History of Tobacco and Tobacco Smoking in the Netherlands (Amsterdam: H. J. W. Bechts Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1964).

  On Native smoking practices, see Ralph Linton, “Use of Tobacco Among North American Indians,” Anthropology Leaflet 15 (Field Museum of Chicago, 1924); Johannes Wilbert, Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). On tabagies, see Morris Bishop, Champlain: The Life of Fortitude (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), p. 39.

  On the association of tobacco with witches, see Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane, pp. 161–62; regarding the papal bull of 1642, see pp. 153–54.

  For the English commentator’s remark that tobacco was “gretlie taken-up and used in England,” see Laufer, “Introduction of Tobacco into Europe,” p. 7, quoting William Harrison’s Great Chronologie; the quotes from Camden and James I appear on pp. 10–11,27–28. The quote from Thomas Dekker comes from the foreword to The Guls Horne-Book (London: R.S., 1609).

  For the observation that “this herb prevaileth against all apostemes,” see John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Histories of Plantes, quoted in Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane, p. 43. Gerard based his claims on the earlier herbal of Rembert Dodoens.

  On the role of the Dutch in the tobacco and slave trade, see Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), conveniently summarized in his Dutch Republic, pp. 934–36,943–46. On the place of slavery in the economics of tobacco, see Goodman, Tobacco in History, pp. 137–53; also Kiernan, Tobacco: A History, pp. 13–19.

  I have written about the culture of smoking in imperial China in two other essays: “Is Smoking Chinese?” Ex/Change: Newsletter of Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies 3 (February 2002), pp. 4–6; and “Smoking in Imperial China,” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander Gilman and Zhou Xun (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), pp. 84–91. Still the best survey of Chinese smoking practices is Bernhold Laufer, “Tobacco and Its Uses in Asia,” Anthropology Leaflet 18, (Field Museum of Chicago, 1924).

  The expression “as fond of smoking as the Turks” is used by Julia Corner in her anonymously published China, Pictorial, Descriptive, and Historical (London: H. G. Bohn, 1853), p. 196.

  Regard
ing Las Cortes’s encounter with tobacco, see Girard, Le Voyage en Chine, p. 59.

  Fang Yizhi’s observations on tobacco are quoted in Yuan Tingdong, A Popular History of Smoking in China [Zhongguo xiyan shihua] (Beijing: Shangwu, 1995) p. 35. The account of tobacco in Shanghai is from Ye Mengzhu, A Survey of the Age [Yueshi bian] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), p. 167.

  On the history of smoking in the Ottoman Empire, see James Grehan, “Smoking and ‘Early Modern’ Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East,” American Historical Review 111 (2006), pp. 1352–77.

  A Japanese origin for the term yan is proposed by Li Shihong in his Jottings from the Hall of Benevolence [Renshu tang biji], quoted in Yuan Tingdong, A Popular History of Smoking in China, p. 52.

  The “Great Western Ocean” is mentioned in Xiong Renlin, The Woof of the Earth [Di wei], quoted in Chen Cong Tobacco Manual [Yancao pu] (1773; 1 repr. Shanghai: Xuxiu siku quanshu, 2002), 1.2b. Chen’s comment, “It originally came from beyond the borders,” appears on 1.5b.

  The French missionary who thought the Manchus had imposed smoking was Régis-Évariste Huc (1813–1860); see Huc and Joseph Gabet, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, trans. William Hazlitt (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1928), p. 123.

  The idea of tobacco as native to Korea is mentioned in Liu Tingji, Miscellaneous Notes from Zai Garden [Zaiyuan zazhi], quoted in Chen Cong, Tobacco Manual, 1.3a. On the Manchu conduit, see L. Carrington Goodrich, “Early Prohibitions of Tobacco in China and Manchuria,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 58:4 (1938), pp. 648–57.

  Yao Lü’s account comes from his Dew Book [Lu shu] (repr. Shanghai: Xuxiu siku quanshu 1999), 10.46a. On the quality of tobacco in Fujian, see Zhang Jiebin, The Complete Works of Master Jingyue [ Jingyue quanshu] (repr. Shanghai: Renmin weisheng chubanshe 1991), 48.44b.

  Wu Weiye’s comment referring to the biography of Li Deyu in New Dynastic History of the Tang [Xin Tang shu] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), p. 5330, is approvingly cited in Wu Xinli, Notes on Rare Historical Sources from the Ming-Qing Period [Ming Qing xijian shiji xulu] (Nanjing: Jinling shuhua she, 2000), p. 225.

  Zhang Jiebin’s comments are from his Complete Works, 48.42b–45a; his entry on betel nut appears on 49.30b–32b. One poet in Chen Cong’s collection testifies that his taste for betel nut led him to smoking; Chen Cong, Tobacco Manual, 9.5a. On the Chinese medical understanding of tobacco in the mid-seventeenth century, see Laufer, “Tobacco and Its Uses in Asia,” pp. 8–9. The idea that smoking counteracted environmental cold or dampness was popular also in the Philippines, where it was used to explain why children also smoked; Juan Francisco de San Antonio, The Philippine Chronicles of Fray San Antonio, trans. D. Pedro Picornell (Manila: Casalina, 1977), p. 18.

  For the references to women smoking, see Yuan Tingdong, A Popular History of Smoking in China, p. 129, quoting Shen Lilong, Pharmacopoeic Compendium of Edible Foods [Shiwu bencao huizuan] (1681); John Gray, China: A History of the Laws, Manners, and Customs of the People (London: Macmillan, 1878), vol. 2, p. 149. On Suzhou women getting their hair done while asleep, see Chen Cong, Tobacco Manual, 3.3b. “Making Fun of my Long Tobacco Pipe” is quoted in Yuan Tingdong, A Popular History of Smoking in China, p. 71.

  The poems appear in Chen Cong, Tobacco Manual, 5.8a, 9.3b. Chen Cong’s family background is sketched in the Gazetteer of Qingpu County (1879) [Qingpu xianzhi], 19.43b–44a.

  The quotes by Lu Yao are from his Smoking Manual, [Yanpu] (repr. Shanghai: Xuxiu siku quanshu, 2002), 3b–4b. The advice on writer’s block is taken from Yuan Tingdong, A Popular History of Smoking in China, p. 128.

  On the introduction of opium into China, see Jonathan Spence, “Opium Smoking in Ch’ing China,” in Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, ed. Frederic Wakeman and Carolyn Grant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 143–73. For the references to opium in Ternate and the Philippines, see E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson, eds., The Philippines Islands, 1493–1803 (Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1905), vol. 16, p. 303; vol. 27, p. 183; see vol. 29, p. 91 for the doped assassin. Chen Cong deals with the early history of opium in China in his Tobacco Manual, 1.12b–14a, 3.4a. On the broader political impact of opium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, coedited by Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  For the poem beginning “Swallowing dawn mist,” see Zhao Ruzhen, The Condolence Collection [Zhuai ji] (1843), 4.13b.

  Laufer’s paean to tobacco appears at the end of his “Tobacco and Its Uses in Asia” on p. 65. The tobacco ballet of Turin is mentioned in Vigié and Vigié, L’Herbe à Nicot, p. 56. An illustration of a tobacco dance that could have influenced this ballet may be found in Theodore de Bry’s Americae tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1593), reprinted as fig. 1 in Jeffrey Knapp, “Elizabethan Tobacco,” Representations 21 (Winter, 1988), p. 26.

  CHAPTER 6. WEIGHING SILVER

  On Dutch coinage, see Posthumus, Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland, vol. 1, pp. liv–lvii, civ–cxv. On the VOC trade in silver, see Bruijn et al., Dutch Asiatic Shipping, vol. 1, pp. 184–93,226–32.

  On the high price of Virginian tobacco and the satire of Thomas Dekker, see Knapp, “Elizabethan Tobacco,” pp. 36,42. The quote from Paolo Xu is cited in Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 199.

  Fluctuation in the population of Potosí is noted in Enrique Tandeter, L’Argent du Potosi: Coercition et marché dans l’Amérique coloniale [The Silver of Potosi: Coercion and Market in Colonial America] (Paris: EHESS, 1997), p. 96. On the riot of 1647, see Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, Historia de la villa imperial de Potosí, trans. Frances López-Morillas, in Tales of Potosí, ed. R. C. Padden (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1975), pp. 49–50.

  On the volume of silver flowing to China from Japan and Spanish America, see von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, pp. 124–41; the current best estimates are summarized in the table on p. 140. For studies of silver production in Spanish America, see the chapters by Harry Cross, John TePaske, and Femme Gaastra in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. J. F. Richards (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1983).

  The first contact between Chinese and Spaniards is described in Margaret Horsley, “Sangley: The Formation of Anti-Chinese Feeling in the Philippines: A Cultural Study of the Stereotypes of Prejudice” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1950), p. 106.

  Information on Spanish-Chinese relations in Manila has been taken from Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands: for Francisco Sande’s remark, see vol. 4, p. 67; “all that the human mind can aspire or comprehend,” vol. 6, p. 198; “all of this wealth passes into the possession of the Chinese,” vol. 12, p. 59; descriptions of the Parián, vol. 22, pp. 211–12; vol. 29, p. 69; the obligation of Chinese Christians to wear hats, vol. 16, p. 197.

  The description of Fujianese sailors comes from Zhou Qiyuan’s preface to Zhang Xie, Investigations of the Eastern and Western Oceans, p. 17; “cramming winter” (yadong) appears on p. 89. “Cramming winter boys” appears in a poem by You Tong, in Yin Guangren and Zhang Rulin, Brief Account of Macao, 2.8a.

  On the massacre of 1603, see Antonio de Morga’s 1609 account in Philippine Islands, vol. 15, pp. 272–77;also vol. 16, pp. 30–45, pp. 298–99. The event is covered, with willful misunderstanding of the Chinese side, in Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 85–90; see also p. 258 on the galleon sinkings. More reliable, though still incomplete, is José Eugenio Borao, “The Massacre of 1603: Chinese Perception of the Spanish on the Philippines,” Itinerario 22:1 (1998), pp. 22–39. Zhang Xie, Investigations of the Eastern and Western Oceans, p. 92, gives a higher estimate of twenty-five thousand killed. The figure of thirty thousand is cited from a 1637 report in Schurz, Manila Galleon, p. 81. The minister of war’s estimate of the number of Fujianese going abroad appears i
n Unedited Records of the Chongzhen Era, 41.2b. The dynastic history simply says “tens of thousands”; Zhang Tingyu, Standard History of the Ming Dynasty, p. 8368.

  Schurz’s Manila Galleon is the authority on the galleon trade; the quotes come from pp. 265 (scurvy and starvation) and 91 (the 1643 comment on the lack of business causing the uprising). Regarding thirty ships arriving in 1639, see Souza, Survival of Empire, p. 84, table 4.8.

  For the comment on the arches in Chaozhou, see Girard, Le Voyage en Chine, p. 103.

  On pearl diving in south China, see Gu Yanwu, Advantages and Disadvantages, 29.126a–b.

  Feng Menglong mentions the guarding of silver mines in his Provisional Gazetteer of Shouning County [Shouning daizhi] (1637) (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1983), pp. 36–37.

  For “one man in a hundred is rich,” see Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, p. 238. On the price of rice in Shanghai in 1639–47, see Ye Mengzhu, A Survey of the Age, p. 153; on selling two children for a peck of wheat, see Zhang Lixiang, Supplement to the Agricultural Treatise, annotated edition [Bu nongshu jiaoshi] (repr. Beijing: Nongye chubanshe, 1983), p. 174.

  On junks, see Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Vanishing Jong: Insular Southeast Asian Fleets in Trade and War (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries),” in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 197–213.