Nanjing was richly provided with vegetable gardens, lakes, parks, and wooded hills. The open-air markets offered an extraordinary abundance of meat, apricots, and all kinds of fruit, as well as peanuts, pine nuts, and vegetables at very economical prices. Ricci admired the sumptuous palaces, the great mansions, the towers, and the innumerable pagodas, but he judged the architectural style of the edifices as somewhat austere due to the absence of the triumphal arches of colored wood and stone that embellished the other towns he had visited, such elements being forbidden in an imperial city. Although the urban landscape was charming, Ricci noted a “vigilant and suspicious” atmosphere in the streets and thought it safer to continue his explorations in a covered litter. It did not take long for the Jesuit to find mandarins who had heard of him through friends that had made his acquaintance during their travels to Zhaoqing and Shaozhou. The guanxi, or network of social contacts based on common acquaintances, also worked in Nanjing, and the Jesuit was invited to numerous banquets where he presented himself dressed in silk as a daoren or “master of the Way.”
The basis for his stay in the second capital was very fragile, however. Without the intercession of an authoritative mandarin willing to vouch for him, it was impossible to obtain permission from the authorities to reside in the city. On the advice of friends, Ricci turned to Xu Daren, undersecretary at the ministry of public works. They had met when the mandarin was military supervisor in Zhaoqing, and he recalled making him the gift of a terrestrial globe and an hourglass and receiving an informal invitation to visit Nanjing.
The dignitary received Ricci with every honor but became hostile on learning of his desire to settle in Nanjing, as he had no wish to be accused of favoring the entry of foreigners into the city. Determined not to jeopardize his career, he cut their meeting short, promised another, and immediately ordered information to be gathered about the missionaries. When Ricci was admitted to the second audience, Xu Daren announced that he had been informed of the missionary’s expulsion from the town of Zhaoqing on charges of conspiring against China. He decreed that the missionaries could not stay in Nanjing and sent his men to threaten their landlord, forcing him on pain of torture to sign a document undertaking to hire a junk at his own expense and to make sure in person that they boarded it the following morning and left the city forever. The Jesuit had no choice but to obey and decided to fall back on Nanchang, as advised by the farsighted vice minister of war with whom he had left Shaozhou.
After the failure of his attempt to reach Beijing, this expulsion from Nanjing dampened Ricci’s customary optimism, and he succumbed to dejection during his journey to Nanchang. He tells us, however, that one night Christ appeared in a dream bringing consolation and assurances that his plans would eventually succeed, and he saw himself walking freely in a splendid imperial city. The memory of this vision made him feel stronger and more hopeful on awakening. Having regained his combative spirit, he succeeded in making friends with a dignitary from Nanchang that he met during one of his stops, who promised to help him find accommodation in the city through acquaintances.
China and the Cathay of Marco Polo
On his way back along the river, Ricci thought over the extraordinary similarities between Marco Polo’s descriptions and the cities and countryside of the provinces he was traveling through, and he began to wonder whether Cathay, which he called “Cataio,” and China were not in fact the same country. He knew that the kingdom visited by the Venetian merchant was considered a mysterious and mythical place whose immense riches fired many with the desire to travel there. He also knew that its exact geographic location was still unknown, as no one had since been able to retrace Polo’s journey to the outermost frontiers of Asia. Ideas about Cathay were still as confused in the sixteenth century as they had been in the fifteenth, when Columbus had attempted to reach the Indies by sailing westward on the celebrated expedition that led to his landing in the Americas in 1492. Well acquainted with the Travels, the Genoese navigator took with him a letter addressed to the Great Khan, or “Gran Cane,” as Marco Polo called the emperor of Cathay, and expected to be able to meet him on arrival at his destination. The search for Cathay was continued in the sixteenth century, particularly by the English, who were prevented from using the routes to the eastern markets that circumnavigated Africa, which were monopolized by the Portuguese, and who hence were eager to find new routes to the north of Europe. At the end of the century, however, Holland was also engaged in unsuccessful expeditions in search of a northeast passage to the East, above all with Willem Barents.
The origin of the mistaken belief in the existence of two different countries called China and Cathay is easy to reconstruct on the basis of the historical and geographic knowledge now available in a brief outline of the course of events from the time of Marco Polo to the Jesuits’ China mission.
Marco Polo left Venice with his father Niccolò and his uncle Matteo in 1271 and arrived in Cathay by way of the Silk Road in 1275. Having spent sixteen years at the imperial court of Kublai Khan32 in the capital Khanbalik, he returned by sea to Italy, where he was imprisoned by the Genoese three years later during the war between Genoa and Venice, and he dictated the account of his travels to his cell mate Rustichello da Pisa.
In Marco Polo’s day, Cathay was part of the immense Mongol or Tartar (from Tatar, the Turkish name for a Mongol tribe) empire, created from 1209 on by Genghis Khan and his successors, one of the most extensive empires in history, stretching west as far as Poland and Hungary and east through Russia and Central Asia to Korea. It was precisely the pax mongolica, the only form of control possible over such a vast territory, that made possible the interminable journeys along the silk roads traveled by the Polo family all the way into Asia. The Mongol empire had been divided up among Genghis Khan’s heirs, and it was Kublai who finally completed the annexation of China begun in his grandfather’s day. Kublai adopted the name Yuan—meaning “origin”—for the new imperial dynasty established in the Middle Kingdom and destined to reign there from 1271 to 1368. He also transferred the capital from Karakorum, the ancient heart of the Mongol empire, to Khanbalik, located on the plain where Beijing stood in the Ming era. After the Mongol conquest, the country was called Cathay, a name first introduced into the West by Marco Polo and deriving from the Kitan, a nomadic people of stockbreeders from southern Manchuria who founded the Liao dynasty in northern China.
While the Mongols had undergone partial sinization through contact with the conquered civilization and their haste to adopt the occupied country’s form of government, their rule had also changed the character of the Chinese empire, at least on the surface. They had transformed China into a multinational country that allowed people of different races from the countries under their rule to become state officials and had indeed appointed Marco Polo to perform imperial assignments. The court of the Mongol sovereign was a melting pot of ideas, civilizations, and religions in which the millennial Chinese culture enjoyed no primacy, as shown by the fact that no government official used Mandarin Chinese, nor was its use required of imperial guests like Marco Polo, who never even mentioned the typical characters of Chinese writing in his Travels.
Christian missionaries also presented themselves at the Mongol court in the shape of Franciscan friars or Minorites on papal missions to seek an alliance against the Muslims. Pope Innocent IV sent Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the author of the Historia Mongolorum, to Karakorum in 1245; Willem van Ruysbroeck from Flanders arrived in Mongolia a few years later; and Giovanni da Montecorvino reached Khanbalik in 1294. Made a bishop in 1307, he remained in the capital until his death. Another Franciscan missionary was Odorico da Pordenone, who returned in 1330. Temur, the last Mongol emperor, received the papal legate Giovanni dei Marignolli, an emissary of Benedict XII, in 1342.
As the papal legates learned only the Mongol language and were in contact primarily with non-Chinese figures, their missionary work had no impact on the native population.33
Like Marco Polo, the Franciscan missionaries described Cathay on their return to Europe as a multiethnic Mongol country, which seemed to have little in common with China. While the Franciscans’ manuscript reports had very limited circulation, and Ricci himself was almost certainly unacquainted with them, Marco Polo’s book was very well known indeed, but the information it contained proved insufficient to clarify the precise identity and geographic location of the country where he had lived. Moreover, Polo failed to mention not only the Chinese writing and many typical customs such as drinking tea, but also and quite inexplicably some of the most important technological developments like printing, which was already widespread in thirteenth-century China. Legend has it that he exclaimed on his deathbed, “I have told you only half of what I have seen.” Even so, the gaps in his account were so evident as to make some later historians doubt whether he had actually been to China at all.
The missing elements in the Travels were not, however, the primary cause of the persistent confusion about the identity of Cathay and China. The mystery had lasted through the ages because relations between China and the West came to an end when the Chinese Ming dynasty drove the Mongols out in 1368, after a rule of under a century, and regained control of the empire. The Franciscan mission was swept away after nearly a hundred years, and no trace of Christianity remained in the Middle Kingdom. Having reasserted its strength and national identity, and sure of its self-sufficiency and cultural and material superiority, the Chinese empire erased all traces of the recent past, withdrew into isolation, and forgot the outside cultural influences to which it had been exposed in the Yuan era. The Muslim world seized control of Central Asia and established a monopoly over trade between the East and the West. The silk roads became impracticable and China inaccessible and impenetrable. The cessation of direct communications and the lack of interest in the world outside shown by nearly all of the Ming emperors—with the exception of Yongle and Xuande, who sent out the expeditionary fleets led by the eunuch Zheng He in the first half of the fifteenth century—had prevented exploration and the transmission of knowledge. The only way left to arrive in China, the country of silk and porcelain, was by sea, a route that was not opened up until early in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese sailed around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Ideas in the West were further confused by the fact that the name Cathay, now forgotten in some countries of South Asia, was instead still used in Central Asia and by the Muslim peoples.34
Wholly unaware of events in the Middle Kingdom subsequent to Marco Polo’s visit, Ricci traveled through the heart of China with the spirit of an explorer, believing himself the first Christian missionary to penetrate so far and certain that his observations would prove invaluable for Westerners. Reflections on the similarities between China and Cathay did not, however, distract him from planning his journey back along the river, which was at the center of his thoughts as the junk approached Nanchang. The Jesuit was determined to stay in the town for only as long as it took to obtain the indispensable backing for residence in Nanjing, after which he would again seek to reach Beijing, the heart of the empire. On disembarking in Nanchang at the end of June, he discovered that the shidafu he had met during the trip had kept his word. Some of the dignitary’s servants were waiting to deal with his baggage and take him in a litter to a house prepared for his accommodation.
Notes
1. Letter to Claudio Acquaviva, December 10, 1593; OS II, p. 116.
2. Letter to Girolamo Costa, October 12, 1594; OS II, p. 120.
3. Letter to Fabio de Fabii, November 12, 1592; OS II, p. 95.
4. FR, book III, ch. II, pp. 289–90, no. 3.
5. Three letters written to Ricci’s father Giovanni Battista have survived, and four of those sent to his brothers, two to Orazio and two to Antonio Maria.
6. Letter dated December 10, 1593; OS II, p. 113.
7. Letter dated November 12, 1592; ibid., p. 96.
8. The missionaries were to present themselves as shenfu, “spiritual fathers,” after 1605 (FR, book III, ch. IX, p. 335, no. 2).
9. FR, book III, ch. VII, p. 327.
10. For the idea of reforming the Chinese calendar, see the letter to João Alvares (or Giovanni Alvarez) dated May 12, 1605; OS II, p. 285.
11. See chapter 8 (“Astronomy and the Emperor”) and chapter 18.
12. His name in Chinese is Meng Ke (c. 372–289 bc). “Mencius” is derived from Mengzi, meaning “Master Meng.”
13. Confucius is traditionally accredited with the authorship of the Annals of the State of Lu (Chunqiu) and the editing and publication of the Book of Documents (Shujing), the Book of Songs (Shijing), the Book of Rites (Liji), and the Book of Music (Yuejing). He is also thought to have written the appendices to the Book of Changes (Yijing or I Ching). The Book of Music was lost during the Han era, and the others subsequently became known as the Five Classics. It was during the Song era that the Neo-Confucian school selected the Four Classics regarded as the primary sources of Confucian doctrine, namely the Analects (Lunyu) of Confucius and the Mencius (Mengzi) together with the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong) and the Great Learning (Daxue), both drawn from the Book of Rites.
14. FR, book II, ch. XI, p. 250, no. 1. Cf. also P. Rule, op. cit., p. 7.
15. OS II, p. 118.
16. Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1977, pp. 114, 121).
17. Letter to Claudio Acquaviva, December 10, 1593; OS II, p. 117.
18. FR, book I, ch. V, p. 39.
19. Confucius, Analects, 7, 1
20. Confucius, Analects, 6, 27.
21. Confucius, Analects, 15, 24.
22. Cf. the letter to Girolamo Costa of October 12, 1594; OS II, p. 122.
23. Letter dated November 15, 1592; OS II, p. 105.
24. There is some dispute over the identification of this figure. See FR, book III, ch. IX, p. 339, no. 1.
25. For dreams regarding the imperial examinations, see A. B. Elman, op. cit., pp. 326–45.
26. For an account of the journey, see the letter to Duarte de Sande of August 29, 1595, OS II, p. 126.
27. Letter to Claudio Acquaviva, November 4, 1595; OS II, p. 191.
28. In a letter dated October 7, 1595; OS II, p. 163.
29. Roughly 1,500 meters across at the point where Ricci entered it but narrowing to about 60 meters in the gorges.
30. Letter to Duarte de Sande, August 29, 1595; OS II, p. 141.
31. Now largely restored, these are the longest city walls surviving from ancient times.
32. For the original terminology used by Polo, see the editions of Il Milione, the Italian title of the Travels, published by Einaudi (1954) and Mondadori (1990).
33. Cf. FR, introduction.
34. Still used for China today in the Slav languages and many others.
Chapter eight
v
The Strength of Friendship
Nanchang, 1595–1596
Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun.
—Cicero, Laelius de amicitia (Laelius on Friendship) (45–47)
The Master said, “Governing with excellence can be compared to being the North Star: the North Star dwells in its place, and the multitude of stars pay it tribute.”
—Confucius, Analects (2, 1)
A Courteous Welcome to Nanchang
Ricci spent his first few days in Nanchang at home thinking over his unsuccessful attempt to settle in the second capital. He was bitterly disappointed, as he would never have expected such an abrupt volte-face from Xu Daren, a dignitary he had considered his friend. As he wrote in a letter the following August to his superior Duarte de Sande, “This, Father, was how our great friendship with this mandarin came to an end.”1
The Jesuit reconsidered his relationships with the Chinese literati. With the exception of Qu
Taisu, whose support and affection he believed to be sincere, the dignitaries that Ricci called friends were in reality superficial acquaintances eager to meet him because they were attracted by his gifts and curious about his learning, but they were ready to ditch the “foreign devil” rather than stand by him in adversity. None of them could take the place of his companions at the Roman College, who were constantly in his thoughts and to whom most of his melancholy letters were addressed. These were the sentiments expressed during that period to Girolamo Benci: “How far apart we are now, brother, and how little hope there is of meeting again in this life. But the love within me increases with the distance between countries and I trust in God, so that the less hope I have of seeing my beloved friends again in this world, the greater my certainty of seeing them in glory in the next.”2
On recovering from his initial dejection, Ricci decided to explore the town and look for people capable of helping him obtain a residence permit. Once again, it was essential to establish good relations with the local dignitaries, and he had to do this on his own, as his young traveling companion Domingos Fernandes was somewhat lacking in the social graces. Ricci did not fail to point this out to De Sande: “But since Domingos Fernandes, who I brought here with me, did not possess the talent required . . . .”3 Facilitated as he was in personal relations by his sociable character and mastery of Chinese, Ricci certainly had no lack of this aptitude.
He judged Nanchang to be twice the size of Florence and found it much more beautiful than Canton, the other provincial capital he knew so well. It was orderly and elegant with wide streets and a large number of brightly colored celebratory arches carved in wood. Its wealthier inhabitants were not predominantly merchants, as in Canton, but were mostly literati and officials. Ricci divided these into four main groups.
Matteo Ricci Page 17