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Xu inherited his father’s reclusive tendencies. He had no interest in taking exams and becoming an official. He considered mountain climbing and travel a sufficient calling. Rejecting life at court in order to literally rise above the troubles of the late Ming, he clambered up many of China’s major mountains, always striving to reach the highest point. In 1616 he scaled Mount Huang, which became a popular destination around this time. (There was an explosion of paintings of the mountain during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Among the many who painted Mount Huang around this time were Ding Yunpeng, 1547–ca. 1621; Xiao Yuncong, 1596–1673; Zheng Min, 1607–after 1682; Hong Ren, 1610–1663; Kun Can, 1612–after 1674; Dai Benxiao, 1621–ca. 1694; Mei Qing, ca. 1623–1697; and Shi Tao, 1642–1718.)
For Xu the mountain was a living being that was always changing. Something of an early environmentalist, he regarded damage to the natural world as wounds to a living body, of which every part was unique. As he climbed Mount Huang, he wrote, “Looking around in every direction, every step brought new strangeness.” The attitude may owe something to Dong Qichang’s theory of painting. “If on a mountaintop you should chance to see an unusual tree,” the artist advised, “you should approach it from four different angles.”
Morning Sun over the Heavenly Citadel, 1614, by Ding Yunpeng. Ink and colors on paper. 212.7 × 55.4 cm. Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund, 1965.28.
Mount Huang, a focus of artistic attention and a travel destination during the late Ming, was actually a series of peaks, including one called Heavenly Citadel. Ding Yunpeng, a devout Buddhist, would have regarded his subject as a highly spiritual place.
But Dong Qichang was more interested in the essence of landscape than particular vistas. There was also a strain of thought in the late Ming that was more concerned with what Timothy Brook has called “the particularity of place.” Some artists were attempting to capture the specificity of subjects such as aspects of Mount Huang. Enabled in part by an explosion in printing, writers all over China were publishing route books (produced mainly by and for merchants) and gazetteers — sourcebooks of knowledge about local geography, customs, and events. Travel diaries were also becoming popular, though Xu carried the form to new literary heights. But his travel account would exist only in handwritten manuscripts until it finally saw print for the first time in 1776.
By Xu’s time some mountains had become popular tourist destinations. One traveler described staying at the base of Mount Tai, which received eight hundred thousand visitors a year. He stayed in a large inn that contained twenty kitchens. At the end of a day on the mountains visitors were entertained with operas or lute performances.
Regarded as a link between heaven and earth, mountains had been associated with spiritual qualities since ancient times. The Yellow Emperor, the legendary founder of Chinese civilization, was said to have acquired the secret of immortality on Mount Huang, which became home to many immortals. Many monks and hermits who withdrew from the Ming court retreated to mountain huts. Buddhist and Taoist temples were established on Mount Huang early on. By Xu’s time the mountain was not necessarily viewed in a strictly Buddhist or Taoist sense, but it could still fill visitors with what James Cahill has called a “quasi-religious sense of the sublime.” Xu’s friend who was a a student of Dong Qichang’s wrote a poem about Xu that concludes:
Neither a Buddhist
Nor a Taoist immortal
But half stubborn, half deranged
He stirs up Heaven and Earth, year after year
Until the mulberry groves wither
And the blue sea runs dry
Mountains were thought to contain “cave paradises” that provided a channel to the realm of the immortals. Many people were afraid to enter caves because of the spirits that inhabited them, but Xu, in whom some writers have seen the beginning of a new, more scientific experience of discovery, explored them thoroughly.
His rejection of travel companions was far from absolute. A friend wrote of him:
He would travel with a servant, or sometimes with a monk and just a staff and a cloth bundle, not worrying about carrying a traveling bag or supplies of food. He could endure hunger for several days, eating his fill when he found some food. He could keep walking for several hundred li, ascending sheer cliffs, braving bamboo thickets, scrambling up and down, hanging over precipices on a rope…. He used towering crags for his bed, streams and gullies for refreshment and found companionship amongst fairies, trolls, apes, and baboons, with the result that he became unable to think logically and could not speak. However, as soon as we discussed mountain paths, investigated water sources or sought out superior geographical terrain, his mind suddenly became clear again.
Julian Ward, author of a study of Xu Xiake, cites this passage as an example of “his bravery, his independence of thought and action and above all, his complete devotion to travel.”
Though not wholly either a Buddhist or a Taoist, Xu was respectful of both beliefs. In 1636 he undertook his greatest adventure, a three-year journey to southwest China — an area that had only recently come under Chinese control — in the company of two servants and a Buddhist monk named Jingwen, who was undertaking a pilgrimage to a sacred mountain called Mount Chickenfoot. Jingwen carried with him a manuscript of the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, which he had copied out in his own blood. Xu reports that other travelers kept their distance from him because when he was ill he refused to bathe in the river for fear of polluting it.
Banditry was a problem for Xu Xiake just as it was for travelers in Europe and West Asia, such as William Lithgow. Traveling by boat, Xu’s party moored in a remote spot on the Xiang River. Xu was sitting in the boat gazing at the moon. He heard the sound of sobbing on the riverbank, which continued for more than two hours. He began to compose a mournful poem, while the monk Jingwen went to see what was the matter — he learned that a teenaged boy was fleeing from his cruel eunuch master. Just then bandits attacked, hoping by hollering and waving swords to frighten away the travelers and seize their boat and possessions. To prevent this Xu threw the sail and his moneybox overboard, but his foot got caught in the towrope, dragging him down. As he struggled up for air a servant beat the bandits back.
Later Jingwen fell ill with dysentery and died. “We had a life-and-death pledge to go to the mountains,” Xu wrote in a poem. “Now gazing eastward alone, to continue brings pain.”
Xu became ill with malaria. “My head and limbs were covered in spots, which gathered up in piles in the folds of my skin,” he wrote, “while my left ear and left foot twitched.” Then his servant suddenly disappeared. “For a master and his servant to be three years away from home, their forms and shadows inseparable, only for me to be abandoned one morning ten thousand li from home,” Xu said, “is too much to bear.” A few days later Xu’s diaries come to an abrupt end. He was carried halfway home in a sedan chair, covering 2,550 kilometers in 150 days. He completed his journey by boat on the Yangtse River, covering 1700 kilometers in under a week.
At home he is said to have shown little interest in visitors. Instead he lay in bed, absently stroking oddly shaped rocks. He died at the age of fifty-four in 1641, fifteen months after his final diary entry. On his deathbed he said, “Life is a lodging, death a return. I now long in my journeying to be transformed.” Amid the chaos of the fall of the Ming dynasty Xu’s manuscript of his travels was lost. Fortunately, nearly complete copies preserved by friends survive.
In Surat, India, Pietro della Valle was, like Xu Xiake, considering the sanctity of nature. He toured the countryside, visiting a community of Jains, who “looked upon all nature, even lifeless objects, as animate, and took the most elaborate precautions to prevent the accidental death of even the smallest animalculae.” He was particularly impressed by an animal hospital where sick birds were nursed back to health.
From Surat he continued to Goa in a Portuguese vessel. He recorded his impressions of the city:
The city … is very big and is built partly on t
he level and partly on some charming hills, from whose summits can be seen in the distance the entire island and the sea, with the mainland all about, offering a delightful view. The buildings of the city are good, large and commodious, mostly arranged to capture the breeze, which is very strong (this is necessary because of the occurrences of great heat), and also to withstand the heavy rains of the three months of pausecal, June, July, and August…. The buildings, however, do not display much ornamentation, nor any fine craftsmanship, being rather plain and nearly all without decoration…. The population of Goa is numerous, but the greater part are slaves, black and wretched, mostly naked, or else so very ill-dressed, that they seem to me to spoil rather than enhance the city. The Portuguese are fairly few, and though they used to be rich, today, on account of many losses suffered following the incursions of the Dutch and the English into those seas, they do not possess great wealth.
Again he adapted to the local style, changing his drooping Persian mustaches into the upswept Portuguese style and adding a goatee and a single earring to complete a rather Bohemian look. He attended a masquerade party dressed in an outfit embroidered with tears to represent his grief at the death of his wife.
Altogether he stayed in India for more than two years. In December 1625 he sailed for Basra on the Persian Gulf. The city was a semi-independent part of the Ottoman empire; the Portuguese used it as their base on the Gulf following the loss of Hormuz. When della Valle arrived it was under attack from the Persians. Tense days followed, but the Persians suddenly withdrew, and at last he was able to make his way by caravan across Syria to Italy.
He arrived in Naples in February 1626, where he was welcomed by Dr. Schipano, and reached Rome that April. There he was hailed as “Il Fantastico.” But he still preferred “Il Pellegrino,” the pilgrim. While in Rome, awaiting the arrival of his wife’s casket, which he had shipped separately, he met the Basque “lieutenant nun,” Catarina de Erauso. “She is tall and broadly built for a woman; you could never tell by her stature that she was not a man,” he reported. “Her face is not deformed, though not pretty and rather worn with age. With her short black hair, cut in men’s fashion with a little lock, she looks more like a eunuch than a woman. Her clothes and sword are Spanish, and her waist is tightly laced. In brief, you would take her rather for a weather-beaten soldier than for an amorous courtier. Only her hands — which are rather plump and fleshy, though strong and robust — and the way she moves them, betray that she is a woman.”
At length Maani’s body arrived. Before burying her, he opened her casket for one last look:
I found the flesh of the head, which I could see through a tear in the shroud, to be wholly eaten away, nothing remaining but the bone; at this I was not surprised, for the brain had not been removed and this had caused the decomposition. The rest of the body appeared to be better preserved; but because the face was no longer to be seen, I would not unfold the linen to look further. Having renailed the amba wood coffin I enclosed it in a leaden one which I had well soldered. On this, near to the feet, I had placed a large plate engraved with a great cross and the following epitaph:
Maani Gioeridae heroinae
Praestantissimae
Petri de Valle peregrine uxoris
Mortales exuvae
Maani Gioeridae heroine
Most excellent
Wife of the pilgrim Pietro della Valle
Her mortal remains
Della Valle delivered a funeral oration for his wife in which he praised her as the epitome of feminine virtue. Her oratory, he said, surpassed that of Demosthenes and Cicero. Her beauty … at that point della Valle broke down in tears. There are two accounts of the reception to della Valle’s theatrical oration. One says that when he dissolved into tears the mourners began to sob along with him. The other reports that they broke into laughter.
Before long della Valle remarried. His wife was Mariuccia, the orphan girl Maani had adopted. Together they had fourteen sons, some of whom would publish the letters that their father had sent to Dr. Schipano during his years of travel. According to one writer, in later years a whiff of camphor could at times be detected in della Valle’s study. Its source was never located.
The Chongzhen Emperor Slays One of His Daughters (detail), 1655. From De Bello Tartarico by Martino Martini.
By midcentury the world had been transformed. Northern Europeans began to outpace southern Europeans for influence in the new world of maritime globalism. Developing their North American colonies through reliance on African slave labor, they would expand aggressively into both continents. Spain and Portugal would have increasing difficulty governing Latin America, whose share of the global economy would diminish.
The Ottoman empire would reach its greatest extent. The Mughals remained powerful, but the seeds of English colonialism were sown. European expansion in Southeast Asia would also lay the groundwork for later colonial history.
The last emperor of Ming China was the Wanli emperor’s grandson, whose reign name, Chongzhen, means “honorable and auspicious.” Facing the fall of his capital, he drew his sword and killed most of the members of his household. “Why must you be born in this family?” he shouted at his second daughter, who was sixteen and about to be married. She survived but lost her left arm.
The Chongzhen emperor hanged himself from a tree. China would not again be governed by its native people until its Manchu rulers were overthrown in 1911.
Epilogue: Christmas, His Masque
On Christmas Day in 1616 the English royal court gathered in Whitehall to watch a masque by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson called Christmas, His Masque. It is remembered today mainly for marking the first appearance of a character called Father Christmas.
He is attir’d in round Hose, long Stockings, a close Doublet, a high crownd Hat with a Broach, a long thin beard, a Truncheon, little Ruffes, white Shoes, his Scarffes, and Garters tyed crosse, and his Drum beaten before him.
In January, the masque The Golden Age Restored had portrayed James’s court as ushering in a new era of peace, justice, and wisdom, marking a return to an imagined idyllic past. In June, James gave a speech that he considered of special importance: it is the final item in his Collected Workes, published the same year. In it he concluded that “As every fish liues in his owne place, some in the fresh, some in the salt, some in the mud: so let euery one liue in his owne place, some at Court, some in the Citue, some in the Countrey, especially at Festiual times, as Christmas and Easter.”
Both the masque and the speech expressed the wish to staunch changes taking place in a world in motion. Every day more people came to London, a development James deplored and blamed on the influence of women:
To dwell in London, is apparently the pride of the women: For if they bee wiues, then their husbands; and if they be maydes, then their fathers must bring them vp to London; because the new fashion is to bee had no where but in London: and here, if they be vnmarried they marre their marriages, and if they be married, they loose their reputations, and rob their husbands purses….
Christmas, His Masque completed James’s 1616 agenda calling for return to the simple, unchanging virtues of the supposedly glorious past. Father Christmas embodied revival of innocent rural festivals of mummers and morris dancers in the face of London’s wicked temptations. But the clock could not be turned back. The world was changing too fast. Civil war would break out during the rule of his son Charles, whose beheading foretold a coming age of revolutions. The golden age was not restored.
Some Significant Dates
POLITICS AND RELIGION
Events
1351–1767 Kingdom of Ayutthaya (Siam/Thailand)
1368–1644 Ming dynasty, China
1392–1910 Joseon dynasty, Korea
1405–1421 Zhang He leads voyages of Chinese treasure fleets
1450s Movable metal type printing reengineered in Europe
1453 Ottomans capture Constantinople, rename it Istanbul
1491 Treaty of Tordesilla
s divides the world
1497 Vasco da Gama reaches India by sea
1501–1722 Safavid dynasty, Iran
1545–1563 Council of Trent
1550 Portuguese allowed to trade in Japan
1555 Peace of Augsburg
1555 First Jewish ghetto established in Venice
1567–1609 Netherlands provinces unite, revolt against Spain
1571 Ottomans defeated at Battle of Lepanto
1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, France
1573–1620 Reign of the Wanli emperor, China
1575–1580 Cervantes is held as a slave in Algiers
1580–1640, Spain and Portugal are merged in Iberian union
1587 Mary Queen of Scots is executed
1588–1648 Reign of Christian IV of Denmark
1589 Battle of Mombasa
1590s Irish rebel against English
1598 Henri IV of France issues Edict of Nantes
1603–1617 Ahmed I is Ottoman sultan
1605–1621 Paul V is Roman Catholic pope
1605–1627 Reign of Mughal emperor Jahangir
1607–1618 War between Burma and Siam
1608 French settle at Quebec
1608–1623 Reign of Gwanghaegun (Yi Hon) of Korea
1609 Moriscos (converted Muslims) expelled from Spain
1610–1643 Reign of Louis XIII of France
1613 Marriage of Frederick, Elector Palantine, and Elizabeth of England
1615–1618 Giovanni Bembo is Doge of Venice
1615–1868 Tokugawa (Edo) shogunate, Japan
1616–1619 Tepehuanes Revolt, Mexico
1616–1620 Smallpox epidemic strikes New England tribes