Matteo Ricci

by Michela Fontana

  The Attempt to Reach Beijing:

  Shipwreck and the Abandonment of Buddhist Robes

  Recently summoned to Beijing as vice minister of war responsible for leading the Chinese army in the offensive against Japan, Shi Xing24 passed through Shaozhou at the beginning of May 1595. The guan was traveling with his eldest son, aged twenty-one, who was in a state of severe depression after failing the first-level imperial examinations. As Ricci was well aware, failure to meet the set standards constituted a humiliating setback for the candidate and a disgrace for the family, who expected to improve their social position on his entry into the state bureaucracy. Since the selection process was extremely rigorous and only a small percentage of students succeeded in passing, the competing candidates were under great psychological pressure, and the most fragile broke down beneath the weight of the responsibility they felt. Ricci’s friends who had been through this experience told him about the sheer toil of preparation, the fear of failure, and the obsession with auspicious signs portending success.

  The Chinese believed in the prophetic value of dreams, which they interpreted as messages from the world of spirits, and all the candidates endeavored to discover good omens in their nightly visions before the examinations. To this end, they consulted the various books on sale devoted to the interpretation of dreams, publications full of illustrations showing young students asleep at their desks with their heads resting on their books and their dreams represented in great white clouds. If the image in the cloud was of a victorious warrior or a conquering hero on horseback, success was guaranteed. The abundance of such publications showed the extent to which the examinations constituted a collective nightmare.25

  The disappointment of failure had shattered Shi Xing’s firstborn son and brought him to the brink of madness. Not knowing how to help, the mandarin sent Ricci gifts and a pressing invitation to visit him on his junk in the hope that the Westerner’s wisdom might suggest some remedy. The Jesuit realized that he was being presented with a golden opportunity to leave the town and reach Beijing. He asked the vice minister to take him to the capital so that they could discuss his son’s problems during the long journey by river. The mandarin agreed, the indispensable permit was obtained from the governor, and Ricci prepared to leave together with two servants and the two young catechists João Barradas and Domingos Fernandes, the sons of Christian families in Macao, who were in Shaozhou for the preparatory training required for entry into the Society of Jesus.

  The journey to Beijing along the system of rivers and canals connecting the south of China with the capital took at least two months. The small fleet of junks left on May 18, 1595.26 The first carried Shi Xing, the second his wife, concubines, children, and domestic servants, along with the others his retinue, now including the missionaries, together with a huge amount of baggage. The vice minister’s vessels enjoyed right of way with respect to all commercial craft and cleared their path when the canals and rivers were very crowded by beating drums during the day and illuminating the decks with red lanterns at night. There were supply stations along the way at which the convoy was provided with food, meat, fish, rice, fruit, vegetables, wine, and water at the expense of the provincial authorities. When the wind was not sufficient to swell the sails, the boats were hauled by the teams of men always waiting on the banks to offer their services.

  After a short stop in the city of Nanxiong, Ricci was accommodated on the mandarin’s junk and finally had the opportunity to travel in one of the richly decorated floating palaces he had seen passing on the river so often from the windows of his house in Zhaoqing. There were numerous bedrooms equipped with every comfort as well as a galley, a storeroom, and even a large hall for banquets containing about ten tables.27

  Shi Xing was kept busy at every stop by receiving the requisite courtesy visits of local dignitaries. As the vice minister was so occupied with his social commitments that he never found the time to discuss his son’s problems, Ricci preferred to hire a junk all for himself and to travel on it together with his companions.

  On proceeding northward, the vessels entered a tributary where navigation was made difficult by the presence of rapids and hidden rocks, particularly in a stretch known as “eighteen currents.” Before undertaking this risky passage, the guan stopped to burn sticks of incense in a Buddhist temple, thus showing that mandarins also became devout believers when faced with danger. The flagship managed to negotiate the rapids unharmed, but the smaller vessel carrying the women and children struck the rocks and started shipping water. On hearing the desperate cries of the passengers, Ricci ordered his helmsman to steer alongside and managed to get the women and children on board safe and sound by means of a daring maneuver. Having immediately moved to another junk in accordance with etiquette, he took the good news of the rescue to the vice minister who was waiting anxiously some distance upriver.

  They all set off again the following morning, with Ricci and João Barradas now on one of the vessels carrying the retinue. A strong wind started blowing as soon as they got underway and threatened to capsize the junks, which were flat-bottomed like all river craft, with comparatively tall masts and sails of matted rushes instead of the canvas traditionally employed in the West. Ricci’s boat overturned on being caught by a violent gust, and the Jesuit found himself in the water. Being unable to swim, he commended his soul to God and struggled to keep afloat. He managed to grasp a rope and catch his breath before clambering onto a spar and clinging to it as well as to a piece of wood tossed up by the waves. With the aid of a servant, he finally found refuge on the overturned hull. All the passengers had survived the peril except João, who knew how to swim but had disappeared beneath the water. Ricci did not give up hope. Tied to a rope and helped by some of the servants, he dived repeatedly in search of his companion but with no success.

  The death of Barradas was a serious blow for the Jesuit, who would have given up at that point if he had not felt that it was his duty to carry out his mission in the capital. The mandarin tried to comfort him and provided silver to pay for the funeral, which was very generous of him, as another vessel had been wrecked in the meantime, with the loss of nearly all the baggage.

  On arriving at the town of Ji’an, the junks were met by a gale, and the vice minister began to see these events as bad omens. Frightened and intent only on reaching Beijing as soon as possible, he decided to continue overland with the women and part of his retinue, leaving some servants to resume the journey by river with the rest of the surviving baggage when the weather improved. Changing means of transport was no problem for a guan of his rank, who was entitled to provisions, fresh horses, and bearers at the expense of the local authorities at every stage of his journey. This privilege did not, however, extend to Ricci, who did not have sufficient money with him to pay for further transport. Given this state of affairs and his growing conviction that taking foreigners to Beijing had not been such a good idea, Shi Xing advised Ricci to turn back.

  The Jesuit had no intention of giving up. His thirteen years in China had taught him to insist in order to obtain what he wanted. He offered the mandarin’s secretary a prism in return for securing a permit for him to continue at least as far as Nanjing, but the gift was declined with the explanation that the vice minister had yet to receive the indispensable seal of office, without which such documents had no validity. Ricci then went straight to Shi Xing and, finding him still greatly upset at the loss of his baggage, tried to console him by explaining that misfortunes were sent by the Lord of Heaven to test the strength of one’s faith, a concept that the mandarin, being wholly unacquainted with Christian morality, unquestionably found it hard to understand. He refused Ricci’s request for a permit but suggested in view of the Jesuit’s determination not to return to Shaozhou that he should stay in Nanchang, the capital of the Jiangxi province, a peaceful city where he had friends to whom he could write letters of recommendation. He advised him most earnestly against going to Nanjing, a c
ity too strongly connected with the imperial court, where a foreigner would be very unlikely to find a warm welcome due to the suspicion aroused by the war with Japan. Ricci was not to be convinced, however, and left the prism as a gift in order to make the guan feel indebted. This move proved effective, and the vice minister finally helped him to obtain a permit to proceed to Nanjing from the local authorities. Shi Xing left the following morning in a convoy of at least thirty litters with mounted guards and servants. Ricci resumed the journey by river with part of the retinue.

  During a stop for supplies in a small port, Ricci discovered that the magistrate Liu Wenfang, an acquaintance from Shaozhou, was stopping there on his way back from Beijing after the customary journey made every three years to pay homage to the emperor. Having arranged to make a formal visit of courtesy, the Jesuit decided that this would be a good opportunity to show off his new garments of silk made for him shortly before leaving, which had been stored in a leather trunk. Now sporting a long beard and flowing locks, Ricci donned for the first time the robe of dark red silk with blue borders and the customary long, wide sleeves; a belt in the same colors; new embroidered slippers of black silk; and a tall, stiff, black square hat that reminded him so much of a bishop’s miter. As he wrote a few months later to his fellow Jesuit Girolamo Benci, “We had all adopted Chinese dress, retaining the square biretta in memory of the cross, but this year I have even dispensed with that for an outlandish hat, pointed like a bishop’s, so as to become totally Chinese.”28 He also prepared the indispensable book of visits, entrusted it to the servant who was to accompany him, and had himself borne in a litter to the door of the magistrate’s temporary residence, where he waited for the master of the house to greet him on the threshold in accordance with ceremonial etiquette.

  While not surprised by the change in dress, this acquaintance displayed greater respect for Ricci than he had on their previous meetings, when the Jesuit was dressed as a monk. He bowed with his hands and sleeves joined in the customary greeting and repeated the phrase qing qing, (“please, please”). Ricci returned this greeting with the same gestures but remained standing instead of kneeling down. The mandarin then took a chair, positioned it in the place of honor facing north, dusted the seat symbolically, and invited his guest to be seated. The missionary took a chair in turn and placed it before Liu Wenfang with the same gestures. During the learned conversation that followed, Ricci spoke in Chinese with no difficulty whatsoever, quoting various passages from Confucius and Mencius from memory. It was a duet performed on an equal footing by a Confucian scholar and a missionary who acted just like a Confucian scholar.

  When the time came for Ricci to take his leave, the master of the house accompanied him to the door insisting that he should stay, in accordance with ritual. After a series of bows, Liu Wenfang withdrew and appeared to have gone back definitively into the house before reappearing on the threshold for the last farewell, as custom required, just when Ricci was about to enter his litter.

  Expulsion from Nanjing

  The party encountered no further obstacles as they continued along the river. The Jesuit wrote down the latitudes of the towns they passed through, using a small astrolabe to make rough calculations of the position of the sun and the stars with respect to the horizon. He took note of the mountains, lakes, and rivers, as well as of changes in the landscape and crops, with the intention of drawing a detailed map of the vast territory he was discovering little by little, well aware that he was the first European to penetrate into the heart of the China of the Ming dynasty.

  The convoy made a brief stop in Nanchang, where news of the presence of a foreigner soon spread and a crowd gathered. Ricci decided to stay on board in order to avoid incidents. After setting off again, the party stopped to visit a Taoist temple in front of which a market had been set up with an abundance of local produce. Prompted by curiosity, Ricci entered the picturesque building full of believers, but his presence soon attracted attention. When it was clear that the Jesuit displayed no reverence before the statue of the saint, a group of the faithful insisted on his kneeling down and resorted to force when he refused. One of the vice minister’s servants intervened to extricate him from this awkward situation and took him back to the junk with no further incident. Ricci decided that he would never again enter a temple without previously declaring his religious convictions.

  The junks continued on their way and entered Lake Boyang, an immense river basin more than one hundred kilometers in length. A short distance from the northwest shore was Mount Lushan, its peak always hidden by stormy clouds and whose slopes were said to be dotted with over three hundred Buddhist temples visited by thousands of pilgrims. On reaching the town of Jiujiang on the far side of the lake, the junks entered a bend of the mighty Yangtze, or Yangzijiang, the longest and most important river in the empire. Called the “Blue River” or “Long River” (Changjiang) by the Chinese and actually the fourth longest in the world, the Yangtze starts at the foot of the Tibetan plateau in the western province of Qinghai and runs a distance of 5,800 kilometers before flowing into a majestic estuary on the Yellow Sea north of present-day Shanghai in the Jiangsu province. A great and pulsating artery of the empire, the Yangtze runs the entire width of China and constituted for centuries the only channel of communication between the innermost regions of the country and the eastern coast.

  Ricci was struck by the width29 and depth of the river as well as by the countless junks of all sizes crowding its waters. He saw four-masted vessels with the customary sails of rush matting and noted that groups of smaller junks traveled side by side in small fleets for protection against the frequent attacks of pirates lurking in ambush along the banks. He observed strange groups of two-story bamboo rafts and realized that they were houseboats moored to the bank and used as temporary dwellings by the merchants who stopped there to conduct their transactions. Proceeding northeast along the Yangtze and generally sailing close to the strong north wind, the junks cut diagonally across the southern part of the present-day province of Anhui.

  The Jesuit admired the towns and houses erected along the banks of the river, and the small temples built on the peaks of rocky islands, from which the monks emerged to ask the passing vessels for offerings, and he observed how the vegetation and climate changed before his eyes. With the Guangdong province now behind them, the rice paddies had begun to give way to fields of grain with rows of windmills alongside them. Isolated willows and pines grew in place of the luxuriant bushes and trees that lined the banks to the south. Ricci was glad of a break from the rice-based diet and enjoyed the oatcakes bought very cheaply from sellers along the banks, together with an abundance of freshly caught fish.

  The Jesuit realized during stops that firewood was a rare commodity in that part of China and was sold at high prices by those who built up stocks for the winter. He was told that for heating during the coldest months, the peasants burned the canes that grew along the banks or a fuel that he had never seen before, a dark substance that he described as “a sort of bitumen-like mineral or stone that they extract from mountains, which produces heat for a long time but no flame and has a smell similar to sulfur.”30 It was coal, widely used in China at the time but practically unknown in Europe.

  Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who had traveled to Cathay three centuries before Ricci, also spoke with wonder in his Travels of the “black stones” burned in winter for heat. Ricci was well acquainted with Polo’s work, which had enjoyed very large circulation in Europe, and he began to think over what he had read there during the long journey along the river, noting many similarities with what he was now discovering. He remembered that Marco Polo had also described a great river flowing from east to west and separating the nine kingdoms in the south of Cathay from the six in the north, as wide as a sea and used by a quantity of vessels of such size as to cause amazement. Polo called this the Chian, Chiansui, or Quian, but Ricci began to think it might actually be the Yangtze. The Jesuit
was greatly struck by these similarities because everyone in sixteenth-century Europe was convinced that the Cathay where Marco Polo had lived and the China that traded with the Portuguese and where Ricci was now living were two different countries, the former shown on all the maps of the time as located in an unspecified area northwest of the latter.

  It was nearly a month since the beginning of the journey and eleven days since the departure from Ji’an when the group of junks entered the province of Jiangsu. They reached Nanjing on the western bank of the Yangtze on May 31. Ricci was most curious to see the second capital, which the Chinese considered the most beautiful city in the world, and he resolved to settle there.

  Nanjing covered a very large area, it had a population of one million inhabitants, and it was protected by three rings of city walls. The outermost, which ran for a distance of sixty kilometers, enclosed the village in which Ricci took temporary lodgings. The second,31 thirty kilometers in length, encircled the city proper and had thirteen gates. The third, situated in the heart of the metropolis, protected the Imperial City, the location of the palace where the Son of Heaven had lived when Nanjing was the capital. This was subsequently used as a model for the Forbidden City, the imperial residence in Beijing. China’s second city was guarded by a contingent of fifty thousand soldiers.

  As soon as he had settled in, Ricci entered the city for a short exploratory visit. On observing the system of rivers and canals with stone bridges running through the center, he was reminded of the description in Marco Polo’s Travels of a beautiful town called Chinsai (or Quinsai) full of canals crossed by “twelve thousand bridges.” The city mentioned by Polo was in fact almost certainly Hangzhou in the Zhejiang province, which had even more canals than Nanjing, but Ricci, who had no way of knowing this, confined himself to noting the surprising similarities between what he saw and Polo’s words.