While the preparations were in full swing, news of the missionaries’ imminent departure for Beijing reached Nanchang, and the imperial prince of Jian’an persuaded the eunuch tax collector to use his influence to secure an audience with Wanli. He also sent a servant bearing gifts to Nanjing to inform his friends of this, but the man was robbed and killed by bandits on the way. Despite the prince’s kind intentions, Ricci was determined to accept no help from the taijian and managed to obtain a permit to travel to Beijing from the censor Zhu Shilin. In his haste to set off, however, he then rashly accepted the offer of passage on the northbound junk of a eunuch with a cargo of silk to deliver to the imperial court, who hoped to derive some profit from the presence on board of important figures bearing gifts for the emperor. They embarked on May 19, 1600, and Zhu Shilin came to see them off, wishing them every success and holding the prism that Ricci had left him as a gift.
The eunuch treated the Jesuits with great respect during the first part of the journey because they were friends of the censor and because their presence on board did prove advantageous. During the stops at the lock gates, as soon as it became known that the junk was carrying passengers with gifts for Wanli, many asked to see the wonderful objects intended for the Son of Heaven, and the eunuch allowed the masters of the vessels in front of his to do so in return for letting him go first. Many days ahead of schedule, the junk arrived at Jining in the Shandong province, where it was to stop for some time in order to take on fresh provisions and complete the mandatory bureaucratic procedures for continuation of the journey as far as Beijing.
Ricci informed the provincial governor Liu Dongxing that he would be paying the customary visit of courtesy, and the guan, who was aware of his reputation, sent a litter to bring him and received him with great cordiality. It was in his house that Ricci had his second meeting with the philosopher Li Zhi, who was passing through the town. On hearing of the missionaries’ intentions, the two dignitaries inspected the gifts for Wanli and read the memorial. Finding it unsuitable, they had a new one written in a more elegant style, which the governor presented to the Jesuit free of charge.
It was early in July 1600 when they reached Linqing, an obligatory stopping point for merchants sailing along the Great Canal and the location of a tax-gathering office whose director Ma Tang was the eunuch most feared in the whole of China. Sick and tired of his unjust demands, the local merchants had rebelled the previous year and set fire to the mansion where he lived, killing many of his assistants. The eunuch managed to escape in disguise, however, and returned to exercise his powers as before once the storm had passed.
The eunuch transporting the Jesuits went to pay the required homage to Ma Tang but was refused admittance. Irritated and determined to use any means whatsoever to attract the tax collector’s attention, he informed him that his passengers were bearing articles for the emperor and invited him to inspect them. Ricci realized that he was in danger and rushed to ask for help from the military intendant Zhong Wanlu, an acquaintance from his period in Zhaoqing. Even though no state official or army officer could give orders to Ma Tang, the intendant did possess sufficient authority to try and curb his excesses. Zhong Wanlu counseled great prudence and promised to help as much as possible. In the middle of this conversation, however, the Jesuit was informed that Ma Tang was on his way to the junk to inspect the gifts. When he finally got back to his companions, he found a richly decorated vessel “as big as a palace” already moored alongside. The eunuch inspected the gifts and took delivery of the memorial, which he promised to dispatch to Beijing himself. When Ricci objected that he would prefer to rely on the help of his influential mandarin friends, Ma Tang laughed at his naïveté and asserted that no one had more power than he did at the court of Wanli. Ricci realized he had fallen into a trap. It was clear that the eunuch would hold the missionaries hostage until he found some way to take advantage of their presence, even by simply appropriating the gifts. The only guarantee of their safety was the protection of the military intendant Zhong Wanlu, with whom Ma Tang preferred not to cross swords, at least for the time being.
The missionaries’ fate was now in the hands of the most feared of the taijian, and they transferred to another boat while the eunuch responsible for their plight was authorized to continue to Beijing and was granted exemption from customs duties in exchange for his precious information.
Imprisonment and Liberation
All too predictably, Ma Tang offered to safeguard the gifts for the emperor, whereupon Ricci strenuously objected that the clocks required winding and the religious paintings were used by the missionaries to say their prayers. The eunuch did not insist and sought to demonstrate his good intentions by inviting them to a splendid banquet followed by entertainment. It was an evening worthy of a European court with a rich and elaborate show of jugglers, acrobats, and mimes.
Ma Tang forced the missionaries to remain in Linqing for nearly a month under the constant surveillance of his guards and then decided to take them to Tianjin, where he had to go to deposit the revenues he had collected. Before leaving, the taijian thought it prudent to send a memorial to the emperor and notify him that the missionaries and their gifts were in his safekeeping. Like every other administrative transaction, the preparation and dispatch of a document to the court had to comply with the established procedures in every detail. The eunuch spent a few days in his palace drafting a preliminary version, during which time he received no visitors, and then had two copies made in the requisite calligraphic style by a specialist scholar. He then placed the memorials between two yellow panels of wood covered with a cloth of the same color, entrusted them to a courier, and accompanied the same all the way to the outermost gate of the palace. If he had wished to accord the maximum prominence to the event, Ma Tang would also have been entitled by protocol to have a bombard fired to mark the messenger’s departure for Beijing.
When a memorial reached the Imperial City, together with the thousands and thousands of other documents that poured in every day from all the provinces of the empire, it was subjected to a long process of sorting through all the relevant offices before reaching the Son of Heaven, if judged worthy of attention. The documents that reached the Forbidden City differed in style and length and were examined by specific offices in accordance with the content and the type of request addressed to the emperor. Petitions, reports from provincial officials, and memorials such as the one from Ma Tang were sent to the office of transmission, which then forwarded a duplicate to the supervisors of the South Gate, an office that took its name from one of the entrances to the imperial palace.
The procedure was slightly different for documents submitted in a personal rather than official capacity to draw the emperor’s attention to various matters, which had to be delivered by the author himself into the hands of the eunuchs in the offices of the Gate of Polar Convergence. Few documents of either kind actually reached the emperor, and none in the form in which it had been received. Most were subjected to numerous readings and revisions before being finally rewritten in the Pavilion of Literary Profundity by the grand secretaries or the eunuchs closest to the Son of Heaven. Needless to say, many documents were caused to disappear somewhere along the way, deliberately manipulated to further some palace intrigue, or made public before delivery to Wanli in order to discredit their authors. The reigning emperor was known to detest all bureaucratic tasks, even though he could not get out of examining the dozens of documents brought to his attention every day. The salient parts were often summarized by the secretaries or eunuchs, and the emperor confined himself to approving or refusing requests with a sign in vermilion ink. The use of this shade of red ink for annotations on documents was reserved exclusively for the Son of Heaven, and the orders in this case were so binding that anyone writing on a document in ink of that color without authorization would be put to death.
At the beginning of August, having sent the document that deliberately omitted a detailed l
ist of the gifts for the emperor, Ma Tang moved to Tianjin with the missionaries and his retinue. Ricci felt imperiled and was very concerned about the possible reaction to the eunuch’s intercession at the imperial court, as he knew that by law, and with no exceptions, all cases regarding the presentation of gifts to the Son of Heaven by foreigners were to be handled through the ministry of rites. Ma Tang’s unorthodox initiative could have unforeseeable consequences. The reply to the eunuch’s memorial arrived just over a month later with the foreseeable request for a detailed list of the Jesuits’ gifts. The eunuch summoned Ricci, who was required to show his submission by presenting himself in clothes of ordinary cloth and kneeling. After yet another painstaking inspection of the gifts, Ma Tang decided that it would be appropriate to add the copy of Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum that he had found in the missionaries’ baggage. He dispatched the list as required and immediately had the Jesuits locked up in a military fortress, as was customary for all those who requested an audience with the emperor, until such time as permission was granted.
Time passed, and no reply was forthcoming. It was now November 1600, and the cold was already making itself felt in the missionaries’ incommodious lodgings inside the fortress. Ma Tang began to fear punishment from the emperor for flouting customary procedures and became openly hostile to the missionaries, seeing them by now as nothing other than a source of trouble. Determined to derive at least some benefit from their presence, he burst into their rooms one day with a captain and a squad of soldiers and ordered a search on the pretext of having received information that the Jesuits were concealing precious jewels. The discovery of a wooden crucifix showing the blood dripping from Christ’s wounds frightened the soldiers, and Ma Tang was convinced that it was a fetish constructed in order to cast an evil spell on the emperor.
Ricci promptly explained that the image was of a holy man who had suffered in order to defend his faith and that its realism served to imprint his sacrifice in the memory. The captain only believed him on being shown other crucifixes of the same kind kept in the trunks, but commented that it was not a good idea to keep a sculpture of a wounded man in the house. The eunuch confiscated everything that had been found, including the reliquaries and the silver chalices for the Mass, but not the silver ingots, as he could hardly commit blatant theft in front of the captain. Ricci asked for the chalices to be returned on the grounds that they were religious objects, and Ma Tang agreed, contenting himself with seizing all the other articles of value and nearly all the gifts for the emperor. The soldiers stole as much as possible and locked up the Jesuits’ remaining possessions in wooden crates, including their books. Ma Tang returned to Linqing immediately afterward.
Confined to the fortress together with his companions, Ricci was afraid for the first time of seeing everything he had built up over his seventeen years in China destroyed. December arrived, and he wrote to Ma Tang, urging him to request a reply to the memorial, and also to his military friend Zhong Wanlu in Linqing, asking for advice on what to do. The intendant sent a servant with an answer, but the man was beaten and refused admittance when he turned up at the prison gate. Zhong Wanlu succeeded in having another letter delivered secretly to inform his friends that Ma Tang wanted to have them expelled from China in chains. His advice was to escape, make for the Guangdong province, and return to Europe as fast as possible. The situation was so serious that Ricci sent Sebastião to Beijing to seek assistance from all the mandarins they knew, but not one of them had the courage to stick his neck out by coming to their aid.
In January 1601, more than six months since Ricci had fallen into the hands of Ma Tang, the reply to the memorial arrived unexpectedly in Tianjin when all hope had been lost. By order of the emperor, the prisoners were to be taken to Beijing with their gifts immediately, and the ministry of rites was to take charge of them in accordance with the customary procedure for ambassadors from foreign kingdoms.
Nobody ever found out how the situation changed in favor of the missionaries after so long. According to the explanation Ricci subsequently heard from some friends in Beijing, the emperor simply forgot to reply to Ma Tang’s second memorial but remembered one day about the gifts to be presented by some foreigners. On expressing his desire to see the object described to him as a bell that “rang by itself,” he was informed that the missionaries had not been granted permission to present themselves at court, whereupon he hastened to sign the authorization.
Faced with the imperial injunction, Ma Tang could only comply and gave orders that the missionaries were to be accompanied to Beijing at the expense of the state, in accordance with the law for visiting ambassadors. The Jesuits were hurriedly reunited with their baggage, and an imposing escort was assembled with over thirty bearers and eight horses led by an imperial official specially sent from Beijing. The former prisoners, now treated with the greatest respect, were ready to leave on January 20, 1601, eight months after their departure from Nanjing.
Ricci was already on his way when he noticed that the crate with his books of mathematics and astronomy was missing, and he immediately sent a servant back to Tianjin on the assumption that it had simply been forgotten in the haste of departure. He had no intention whatsoever of abandoning his scientific library, which he considered as essential to the success of the mission as the religious and moral works. His plan was in fact to go on teaching Western science in Beijing in order to acquire the authority needed to secure acceptance of the Christian religion by the Chinese elite. Ricci knew that the possession of mathematical and astronomical works without the emperor’s permission was forbidden on pain of death by Chinese law, but also that this was seldom applied. He never imagined that Ma Tang had had the books placed in a special crate clearly labeled as containing prohibited material with the intention of using them as evidence against the Jesuits at the right moment.
By a stroke of luck, however, the servant sent to look for the books found the crate in the fortress and brought it straight back to the Jesuits because he was unable to read and therefore to understand the writing indicating its content. Ricci gave thanks to Divine Providence on receiving his books and reading the attached label. In any case, the work of spreading European knowledge that he was to perform in Beijing would have been impossible if that unwitting and illiterate servant had not restored Euclid’s Elements and the other works of mathematics and astronomy by Clavius to the missionaries.
Notes
1. Il Mappamondo cinese del Padre Matteo Ricci S.I., cit., pp. 77–80.
2. Cit. in J. Gernet, Chine et christianisme, p. 304.
3. FR, book IV, ch. VIII, p. 81.
4. The emperor alone was to be wished “ten thousand years of life.”
5. For the relations between Wanli and Feng Bao, see R. Huang, op. cit.
6. FR, book I, ch. IV, p. 32.
7. OS II, p. 243.
8. Theodor N. Foss, “La cartografia di Matteo Ricci,” in Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi Ricciani, Macerata-Roma, 22–25 October 1982, ed. Maria Cigliano (Macerata: Centro Studi Ricciani, 1984), p. 181.
9. No copy of this map has survived.
10. See also R. Smith, op. cit., p. 29.
11. FR, book IV, ch. IX, p. 94.
12. Letter dated August 14, 1599; OS II, pp. 246 ff.
Chapter Twelve
v
In the Heart of the Empire
Beijing, 1601
My hope for those in high places.
—Matteo Ricci, Xiqin quyi bazhng (“Eight Songs for
the Western Harpsichord”)
The Master said, “To quietly persevere in storing up what is learned, to continue studying without respite, to instruct others without growing weary—is this not me?”
—Confucius, Analects (7, 2)
The Solemn Entrance into Beijing
The picturesque cavalcade of Western missionaries dressed as Confucian literati traveling with
gifts for the emperor made its solemn entrance into Beijing on January 24, 1601. Li Madou was preceded not only by his reputation as a sage from a distant land and author of an extraordinary map of the world, but also by rumors about the outlandish objects he was bringing, bells that rang by themselves, stones that produced all the colors of the rainbow, splendid paintings, and instruments for observation of the heavens. The event was recorded by the historians of the Ming dynasty.1
Ricci was now forty-eight. Thirty-three years had gone by since his arrival in Renaissance Rome, the capital of the Papal State. While it had never been his intention to stay for long in the city that molded him in cultural and religious terms, he was instead determined not to leave the Chinese capital and was confident that he would be able to meet the emperor and ask his permission to preach the Christian religion freely.
Ricci entered with an escort of the Imperial Guard after traveling at the expense of the Chinese state like a foreign ambassador. After the brief and ill-fated experience of two years earlier, it was like seeing the city for the first time.
Beijing was the political center of the Ming, the last great Chinese dynasty, which had reigned for nearly three centuries over a country of glaring contrasts whose population of two hundred million had more than doubled over that time.
It was Yongle, the third Ming emperor, who decided to transfer the capital from Nanjing to Beijing after taking the throne in 1402. The new political hub of the empire was built not far from the site of Khanbalik, the capital of the Yuan dynasty, as a modernized version of the old Mongol city and its system of walls.
Considered the greatest Ming ruler after Hongwu, the founder of the dynasty, Yongle wanted a grand, orderly, and imposing capital to reflect the qualities he desired for his empire. The building work involved a quarter of a million craftsmen and a million peasants and took twenty years. The hundreds of thousands of bricks required were produced on the spot in ovens constructed in the northern part of the city, and the timber arrived in a constant flow from the southwest provinces by river. On completion of the work in 1421, the city was officially proclaimed the new capital with the name of Beijing and became the symbol of total power in terms of its structure as well. In order to increase its population, the emperor ordered the resettlement of ten thousand families from the Shaanxi province, whose capital Xi’an had also been one of the historical capitals of the Chinese empire.
Matteo Ricci Page 26