On the few occasions when the Jesuit was able to see women as a guest in private homes, he noted that they had tiny feet and walked with a stiff and unnatural gait. He had already observed this in Macao, and he learned that it was the custom to bind the feet of female babies so as to stunt their growth, a cruel practice that transformed these extremities into deformed stumps on which the adult women could barely stand. It had begun during the Song era around the tenth century, originally reserved for women of the highest rank but subsequently extended to all social layers. Peasant women wore footgear of padded cotton, and the wives of government officials wore tiny pointed shoes adorned with embroidery even more precious than the work embellishing the garments of Renaissance ladies. The practice seemed inhuman to Westerners but was considered natural in China, where tiny feet, likened to “gilded lilies” or “new moons” by poets, were regarded as one of the most important female attributes. Though not cruel like the binding of feet, another thing that Westerners found odd and distasteful was the way the richer women as well as many mandarins let their finger nails grow disproportionately long and used precious tapering cases to protect them.
It was, however, not only the differences that struck Ricci. He was also surprised at the Chinese use of tables, chairs, and beds, practices in which “all the world differs from them and us . . . as all the other nations eat, sit, and sleep on the ground.”8
The missionary soon realized that the town was a place not only of prosperity and abundance but also of widespread poverty leading to forms of social degradation, as in Europe. As he noted in his history of the mission, someone unable to buy a wife would agree to sell himself as a servant to a rich man in order to be wedded to one of the female domestics. Those able to afford a wife but not a family would even sell their male children with no concern about their fate and murder the females at birth. He also observed that prostitution was widespread.
Poor and rich mingled on the bustling streets, the former on foot and the latter with fitting means of transport. Since carriages were forbidden, merchants rode horses while important figures forced their way through the crowd in litters, covered for all except state officials. While the ownership of a palanquin with a large number of bearers, as many as eight for the most important mandarins, was considered a mark of social prestige, there were strict regulations governing the choice of color, red being forbidden and green allowed only for officials of the fifth rank and above.9 The most demanding had their litters fitted with a shelf making it possible to read and write during journeys. Still more luxurious were the junks of state officials seen passing on the river, some of which were spacious enough to accommodate a crowded banquet. Ricci once saw one bound for Beijing that he described as bigger to him than the church of the Roman College.10
The months passed, and the Jesuits’ home was finally completed. It was a comparatively small but cozy residence with four bedrooms and a verandah on the upper floor and the other rooms, including one used as a chapel, on the ground floor, as well as a large courtyard. In his rare moments of repose, Ricci could gaze from the windows upstairs at the junks on the river, enjoying “a beautiful view of the water, boats, mountains, and woods.” He described the house with some satisfaction in a letter as “the most pleasant place in the town.”11
Discovering Chinese Society
In order to safeguard the foreigners, Wang Pan sent them a permit authorizing them to visit Macao and to travel freely throughout the province, and he issued an edict proclaiming that the missionaries were living in China by permission of the authorities. It was with understandable satisfaction that the Jesuits exhibited this document over the entrance of their house.
Once the word had spread that the foreigners’ stay was authorized, the residence became a magnet for curious citizens, all eager to see the interior of such an unusual building and above all the wonderful objects it contained, which were the talk of the town, especially the “priceless precious stone” or “glass containing a piece of the sky,” as some Chinese called the prism that Ricci had presented to the prefect and that many officials had enjoyed the privilege of examining. When the Chinese saw the painting of the Virgin Mary hanging in the chapel, they were most surprised that the Westerners should worship a female god, and the missionaries hastily replaced it with an image of Christ so as to avoid misunderstandings.
Delighted to see his home visited by men of culture, Ricci placed his library of Western books on display together with the Chinese works he was studying with the aid of an interpreter. He wished to make it understood that he was the representative of a civilization as rich and as ancient as the Chinese, where “letters and sciences were held in esteem,” and that he was interested in the cultural achievements of his host country. The Chinese officials examined the works on religion and science with great interest as well as those with the illustrations showing European cities. While many confined themselves to admiring the elegant bindings, others realized that those books in an unknown language contained knowledge from distant countries and asked questions about their content.
In receiving their numerous visitors, the Jesuits soon learned the characteristics of Chinese society and the forms of behavior to be adopted during these encounters. The economic elite was represented by the great landowners and the ruling class by the guan, officials of the state bureaucracy selected through an extremely rigorous system of competitive examinations. The two social categories largely overlapped. On the one hand, the sons of rich landowners had the means to study and to sit the examinations offering access to the bureaucracy. On the other, officials appointed to positions of importance were able to purchase estates. The guan were cultured men whose studies focused primarily on Chinese history and the texts of Confucianism, the official state philosophy. Ricci realized that it was impossible to understand China without a knowledge of its most representative philosophy, and he vowed to study it in depth as soon as he had mastered the classical Chinese in which the ancient texts were written.
The official doctrine originated with Confucius (Kong Fuzi, or Master Kong, in Chinese), a thinker traditionally held to have been born in 551 bc in the small principality of Lu in the present-day eastern province of Shandong. A scion of a decayed aristocratic family, Confucius held a series of positions, including minister of justice. But he resigned every post in the state administration due to disagreements with his lord, and he began his travels through the numerous Chinese states in the hope that his teachings might have a positive influence on the political practice of their rulers. Disappointed by his failure to achieve the task he had set himself, he abandoned all hope of a political career and returned when over sixty to his hometown, where he devoted himself to private teaching and was surrounded by numerous pupils until his death at the age of seventy-two.
The philosopher left no writings, but his ideas were collected by disciples in the Lunyu, or Analects, a series of aphorisms beginning with the formula “The Master said,” and fragmentary conversations between the philosopher and his pupils or between the philosopher and the rulers who came to him for advice on sound government. Ricci was repeatedly made aware that all educated Chinese knew this work by heart.
The Confucian philosophy consisted of a set of primarily ethical and political precepts and made no mention of metaphysics. It put forward a hierarchical and ritualistic conception of society and laid great stress on culture as a means of human improvement. The resulting ideology had a deep and lasting influence on Chinese culture and constituted the basis for the creation and perpetuation of the form of centralized, bureaucratic government existing in China since the birth of the empire.
The bureaucracy consisted of about twenty thousand officials stationed in every part of the country during the late Ming era. While 10 percent of these worked in the capital, the others—governors, prefects, and magistrates, whose respective areas of jurisdiction were provinces, prefectures, and districts—were appointed in Beijing and were sen
t to serve in provinces other than those of their birth so as to prevent favoritism. As they did not know the dialect of the cities in which they served, they were assisted in their relations with the population by the local administrative staff, who represented the second level of the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats were divided into nine ranks, the ninth being the lowest and the first the highest, which were in turn subdivided into two levels. The duties and privileges of the guan were minutely codified according to their rank. The color of their robe was red for officials of the fourth rank and above, and blue for all the others. The style of accessories, such as headgear and boots, also changed according to hierarchical position. The most immediately obvious insignia of rank was the embroidered birds, as Ricci had noted on the mandarin square of Wang Pan, starting with quail for the lowest level and rising through oriole, mandarin duck, heron, silver pheasant, wild goose, and peacock, to golden pheasant and crane. The xie zhai, a mythological creature of menacing appearance with a scaly body and a horn to gore miscreants, was instead the embroidered badge of the dreaded censors.
While hierarchies were unquestionable, duties precise, priorities absolute, and procedures implacable within the framework of the state machinery, corruption and the abuse of power, as Ricci was to observe on various occasions, were as widespread as in Europe, and many officials were all too ready to supplement their low salaries by making decisions in favor of those able to offer valuable gifts.
Not all of the shidafu, meaning the literati who had passed the imperial examinations at one or more levels, held posts in the state administration and were therefore guan. Some failed to obtain employment, some fell into disgrace and were removed from office, and some were on leave for the three-year period of mourning customary on the loss of a parent. Those holding no position in the bureaucracy devoted their energies to teaching in the state schools and to giving private lessons to prepare candidates to sit the imperial examinations, for which there was great demand. Commissions to draw up documents, memorials, and letters in the styles appropriate to different circumstances were another lucrative source of income. Those with no need to worry about money could simply cultivate their knowledge, dabbling in calligraphy, writing poems, and taking part in the countless shuyuan or academies of the late Ming era, where intellectuals and men of culture would gather to discuss philosophical, ethical, and political subjects. Only a minority devoted themselves to the study of technical disciplines such as mathematics and medicine, which were considered sciences of an inferior level in China. As a pastime, the shidafu enjoyed playing wuqi, a “war game” in which they could display their talent for strategy at the purely theoretical level.
While scholars and landowners were at the top of the social ladder, merchants were held in much lower regard, rich and poor alike, being preceded in terms of priority also by farmers and artisans. Commerce and economic activities were in fact despised by the Confucian ideology but nevertheless underwent a phase of explosive expansion in the late Ming era, especially in the southeast of the country. The most prosperous entrepreneurs, who made their money through the manufacture and sale of silk, cotton, porcelain, valuable wood, and every other kind of merchandise, even took the liberty of wearing precious silk garments like high-ranking officials, although this was prohibited.
It was immediately clear to Ricci and Ruggieri that their primary contacts in the variegated panorama of Chinese society should be with literati and state officials, as these were the most cultured classes and were the most closely connected with the imperial power structure. Once the linguistic barrier had been overcome, the shidafu and guan would be able to hear and understand the Jesuits’ message, grant them the indispensable permits required for residence on Chinese soil, and facilitate their relations with the local authorities. In order to communicate with them on an equal footing, Ricci studied Mandarin Chinese assiduously and practiced reading and writing the literary language every day. After nearly a year in Zhaoqing, he was already able to speak Chinese without an interpreter.
The Five Continents:
The First Edition of the Map of the World
Time passed. The two Jesuits had pawned the prism for the equivalent of twenty scudi to pay for the material needed to build their residence and were now in debt. Ruggieri decided to seek funds in Macao and left on a junk with thirty oarsmen placed at his disposal by the prefect Wang Pan, who asked him to bring back a clock, declaring his readiness to pay any price for one of the “bells that ring by themselves.”
Ruggieri reached his destination only to find that the coffers of the Jesuit college were empty, and he was forced to stay there for a few months awaiting the arrival of ships from Japan with silver for the missions. As he had not even managed to find a clock for the prefect, he sent an expert craftsman of Indian origin to construct one in the Jesuits’ residence in Zhaoqing. Ricci describes the man in his history of the mission as a very dark-skinned “canarino,” the term used for the inhabitants of the Canary Islands, who were similar in complexion to Indians.
During the absence of his companion, Ricci realized the true extent of the hostility felt by a section of the population, who used injurious epithets like “foreign devils” to refer to the missionaries. Rumors had long been spread that the building of the tower was secretly financed by the Portuguese with the intention of entering China in the wake of the Jesuits, and the building was now known with contempt as “the foreigners’ tower.”
The mounting tension reached a climax when stones were thrown at the missionaries’ house one night. A servant rushed out and caught the youngster responsible but wisely decided to let him go for fear of making matters worse. Sometime later, the boy’s parents reported Ricci to the authorities for having used a magic potion to paralyze him and hold him captive for three days with the intention of selling him in Macao. The charges were immediately brought to the office of Wang Pan, who summoned Ricci to an audience. The interpreter spoke in his defense and showed the prefect the stones thrown at the house, which he had taken with him as evidence. Wang Pan ordered the Jesuits to send the clockmaker, whose presence was seen as a danger by the population, back to Macao and decided to hear the other witnesses. Three officials involved in the construction of the tower who were present at the time unexpectedly spoke up for the missionaries, and the short trial came to an end. The accuser was beaten “very cruelly” on the legs with wooden sticks, a traditional form of Chinese punishment that could be continued to the point of causing the death of the guilty party. The following day, the prefect presented the missionaries with a new edict to be hung in their entrance forbidding any further molestation.
Peace returned to the residence, and the local dignitaries resumed their regular visits. The objects that the mandarins observed with the most curiosity included a planispheric map of the known world12 that Ricci had hung on the wall of the room in which he received guests in order to show them his country and to teach the Chinese some geography.13 The Jesuit had in fact noted that the local maps presented a Sinocentric view of the world, with China shown as occupying practically all of the known lands. While Europe and America did not even appear, countries like Japan, Korea, the tributary states of Southeast Asia, the regions to the north of China, and India were so small that the surface they occupied all together was less than a single Chinese province. America and Europe were instead clearly marked on Ricci’s map, and China was shown in its correct size.
In actual fact, not all of the Chinese maps totally ignored the rest of the world, as some drawn in the past included countries of Central Asia and the regions of Africa reached by the seafaring expeditions of the eunuch Zheng He. It is, however, a fact that the existence of the five continents was not known to the Chinese in the Ming era.
Ricci was convinced that ignorance of geography was one of the causes of the hostility felt by the Chinese toward foreigners:
Their conception of the greatness of their country and of the insignificance of all o
ther lands made them so proud that the whole world seemed to them savage and barbarous compared with themselves; it was scarcely to be expected that they, while entertaining this idea, would heed foreign masters.14
While pleased to be able to show the Chinese something they did not know, the Jesuit noted that their reactions to the European map were by no means unanimous. Some took offense on seeing their country so diminished; some concealed their perplexity in laughter, a ploy the Chinese often used to cover up embarrassment; and some took the representation to be a sort of Taoist amulet. There were a few literati who believed that that map was accurate and who displayed an interest in discovering everything Ricci knew about the faraway countries shown there. One of these was the prefect, who was eager to learn everything the newcomers had to teach him and who was so impressed by the European map of the world that he asked the missionary to make him a copy with the Western names translated into Chinese.
Ricci thus realized that with the aid of an image—something far more effective than an explanation in his still-halting Chinese—the distant world from which he came had found a place in the scholars’ imagination, and meaningful contact had been established between Chinese and European culture.
The Jesuit set to work in response to the prefect’s request. Being obliged to cut China down to size but afraid of giving offence, he hit on a way of making his more realistic representation of the earth easier to accept. Diplomatically abandoning the Eurocentrism of Western maps of the world, he placed Asia in the center, with the Americas on the right and Europe and Africa on the left, thus granting China a privileged position while showing its true proportions with respect to the other countries. He also took care to include information from the Chinese sources he had been able to examine. The Yudi shanhai quantu, or “complete map of the mountains and seas,” has not survived, even though Ricci also sent copies back to his superiors, but historians have managed to reconstruct it on the basis of reproductions and descriptions found in documents of the period.15 The Jesuit indicated the five “zones” into which the world was divided with Chinese names—North and South America, Asia, Libya (Africa), and Magellanica, meaning the Antarctic area with its still indefinite boundaries—and did the same for the oceans, the major seas, the Nile and the Plate (the only two rivers shown), and China, with Beijing and all the provinces of the empire. He indicated the cardinal points and drew the lines of latitude and longitude and the equator but not the tropics.16
Matteo Ricci Page 8