Matteo Ricci

by Michela Fontana

  The creation of the new capital in the north enabled the Son of Heaven to remain in the area where he had lived and built up his power before the civil war through which he usurped the throne. It also facilitated the defense of the northern frontiers against invasion by nomadic tribes, a historical threat to the Chinese empire. There were, however, considerable disadvantages too. On the one hand, the center of power was now detached from the economic and cultural heart of the country and from the major areas of agricultural and industrial production, situated mostly in the southeast. On the other, the transport of goods for the court along the Great Canal and the maintenance of that immense waterway entailed prohibitive costs for the state, which was now running a constant deficit.

  When Ricci entered Beijing, the survival of the dynasty was threatened by power struggles between state officials and eunuchs, by the empire’s dire financial straits, by pressure from the Manchurians on the frontiers, and by recurrent popular uprisings. Despite the crisis and decay of the Ming state, however, the country was prosperous and dynamic in other respects. Commerce and the crafts were thriving, and the cultural scene was characterized by development and revitalization. In point of fact, if the golden age was the Chinese Renaissance of the Song dynasty at the beginning of the first millennium, when China outstripped the rest of the world in the arts, sciences, and technology, then the last century of the Ming era can be regarded as a second renaissance by virtue of the powerful new ideas in circulation and the intensity and vivacity of its intellectual life.2

  While the official interpretation of the Confucian classics in the imperial examination system was dogmatic and unchanged by any recent revision, culture and philosophy were exploring new avenues outside the corridors of power. Unorthodox thinkers and scholars sought fresh stimuli in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions with a view to moving beyond the established Confucian conceptions. Moral, cultural, and metaphysical questions were freely and eagerly discussed in the flourishing academies of all the major cities, as Ricci had seen for himself in Nanjing and Nanchang. If sciences such as mathematics and astronomy were neglected, there was renewed interest in other sectors of knowledge, above all in what the Chinese called “practical studies,” as demonstrated by the immense production of books, manuals, and treatises about military, agricultural, and artisanal techniques, drugs and medicine, botany, geology, geography, and hydraulic engineering.

  The same years saw unprecedented growth in the sector of popular literature in the vernacular. Reading had become a popular pastime with the spread of elementary schools and the ever-increasing literacy of the poorer classes and women. Manuals and popular encyclopedias provided useful information, and novels covered a broad range of genres from romance and eroticism to crime and satire. Printing works capable of producing books with illustrations in five colors sprouted everywhere to meet the demand. The entrepreneur Mao Jin3 in Beijing employed twenty skilled craftsmen and used more than one hundred thousand wood blocks to print as many as six hundred different works a year. While manifesting disdain for mass literature in public, the shidafu read works of popular fiction and sometimes wrote them in secret to increase their incomes, like the anonymous author of Jin Ping Mei4 (“The Golden Lotus,” or “The Plum in the Golden Vase”), one of the most famous Chinese classics and considered the first ever novel of manners, which rumor attributed to the high-ranking official Wang Shizen. The book revealed the intrigues and debauchery of the ruling classes through the story of the rich, corrupt, and dissolute merchant Ximen and his six wives. Theater was also revitalized, and women, though traditionally marginalized in society, were given leading roles in two works of social satire, one of which tells how the young Mulan passes herself off as a man, takes her father’s place in the war, and leads the army to victory.5

  Beijing reflected the country as a whole to a greater extent than any other Chinese city. Matteo Ricci was soon to find responsive intellectuals eager to find out about “Western” knowledge in that environment with its wealth of new ideas and stimulating contradictions, where popular and official culture, and theoretical and practical knowledge, were apparently separate but actually influenced one another, and where the thirst for new forms of knowledge made itself strongly felt.

  The missionaries were lodged in a palace owned by the taijian in the inner city, near the entrance to the Imperial City, and they immediately set about preparing the gifts for presentation to the emperor while Ricci drew up yet another list of the items accompanied by a new memorial. This document, which has survived,6 is dated “the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth moon of the twenty-eighth year of the reign of Wanli,” or January 27, 1601. In it, Li Madou presented himself to the Son of Heaven as a foreigner from far away attracted by the fame of China. After residing in various Chinese cities, trusting in the emperor’s benevolence toward foreigners, he now came to offer the products of his country. Being a priest with no wife or children, he asked for no favors but would be delighted to place himself at his Majesty’s service as an expert in astronomy, geography, calculation, and mathematics. This was followed by a detailed list of the gifts7: two paintings of the Virgin Mary, a small painting of Christ, a breviary with a gilded cover, a cross studded with precious stones, two mechanical clocks (one larger and made of iron with weights and the other of gilded metal with springs), a copy of the Ortelius atlas, two glass prisms, eight mirrors and bottles of various sizes, a rhinoceros horn, two hourglasses filled with sand, a New Testament, four European belts of different colors, five lengths of material, four European silver coins, and a portable table harpsichord decorated with two psalms in Latin in gilded letters. The musical instrument presented by the missionaries was a comparatively recent innovation in Europe consisting of a rectangular sound box horizontally strung with metal wires and played by means of a keyboard.8

  Having delivered the gifts, the Jesuits were the guests of the eunuchs for three days while the request for an audience was processed through the requisite bureaucratic channels and the objects were transported into the Forbidden City. They then moved immediately into a rented house not far from the Imperial City to await a reply. Having arrived in Beijing and handed over the gifts, the missionaries hoped they had freed themselves of the unwelcome patronage of Ma Tang, but the eunuch was still determined to derive some benefit from their visit to the capital and kept them under the constant surveillance of a group of faithful servants. At the same time, in an effort to put an end to the stories of his avarice that had now reached the imperial court, he lavishly reimbursed the taijian who had provided the missionaries with accommodation.

  The Golden Prison of the Emperor Wanli

  The Forbidden City was surrounded by the Imperial City, a sort of shell separating it from the rest of the metropolis, which also produced everything necessary for the survival of the court. The square, walled citadel provided living quarters for twenty thousand eunuchs, divided into twenty-four departments, and the three thousand women employed in the palaces. Its inhabitants were all dressed in black, the color reserved for those connected with the life at court, apart from the bureaucrats closest to the emperor and the eunuchs of high rank, who were entitled to wear red.

  The main entrance facing south, the Tiananmen, or Gate of Heavenly Peace,9 was a great pavilion set on a platform of white marble with an imposing double-eaved roof that was covered, like every other roof in the imperial complex, with majolica tiles in the emperor’s own bright yellow color. The eastern part of the city housed the factories that produced articles for the imperial palaces, the warehouses of provisions and every other kind of material required for the life of the court, and the office of entertainment, whose personnel were capable of organizing banquets for as many as fifteen thousand people even at short notice. The western part was occupied by a huge park with temples, multistory towers, and ponds inhabited by cranes and crossed by bridges of white marble.10 The most luxurious villas were the homes of the most important taijian, surrounded by se
rvants and personal secretaries and differing little from the eminent guan of the bureaucracy in terms of lifestyle. It was not unusual for them to live with women of the palace like married couples and to adopt children, having none of their own, or to act as guardians to young eunuchs.

  At the heart of the Imperial City was the Zi Jin Cheng, or “Purple Forbidden City,” a name derived from the color of the walls and buildings. Commonly known as the “Great Within,” this was the home of Wanli, the fourteenth Ming emperor, now in power for twenty-eight years.11 It was to him that the Jesuits presented their gifts and on him that they pinned their hopes of spreading Christianity on Chinese soil.

  Ricci’s studies on arriving in China told him that immense power was concentrated in the hands of the emperor, including the life and death of his subjects, which led him to conjure up the ideal image of a cultured and enlightened monarch, the personification of Confucian ethics, the supreme leader and source of inspiration for state officials and army officers. On closer acquaintance with the reality of Chinese life, however, he soon discovered that the Son of Heaven was the eunuchs’ puppet and had no interest in handling the affairs of state, even though he still had no idea of the extent to which the monarch had relinquished authority and lived a segregated existence in the imperial palaces. Like other emperors before and after him, Wanli was very far from the ideal. Having withdrawn from public life long before, he lived in seclusion in his private apartments, where he met only the empress, the concubines, and the palace eunuchs, playing no part whatsoever in the government of the country. He had stopped attending the general audiences with members of the government at least ten years earlier, took no part in public ceremonies, no longer met the grand secretaries and ministers, glanced absentmindedly at the memorials brought to his attention, and seldom bothered to give an answer even when the documents contained requests for the authorization of new bureaucratic appointments. Years of neglect had brought the state machinery to the brink of paralysis.

  Wanli has gone down in history as an idle, apathetic, irresolute emperor interested only in pleasure and collecting works of art. According to more recent historical studies,12 however, he was an intelligent and able young man but too sensitive and submissive for such a dehumanizing role as that of emperor, which left no room for the expression of personality and feelings. The power of the Chinese emperor was in fact absolute only in principle. In reality, he performed above all a symbolic function and was strongly influenced and controlled by a bureaucracy in which honest, upright individuals still existed but alongside increasingly large numbers of corrupt figures, and where everyone was concerned above all to preserve their power and ensure survival against the ever-greater threat of the eunuchs’ influence. Due to the organizational structure of the Chinese state, the Son of Heaven was in fact isolated, the prisoner of his role and of superfluous, energy-consuming rituals. When he was not endowed with a strong personality, he easily became the puppet of the dishonest bureaucrats and eunuchs in a court torn apart by internal power struggles.

  Wanli lacked determination and had been exposed to the influence of court life since childhood. His youthful enthusiasms, desires, and manifestations of cultural interest, including a passion for calligraphy, had all been frustrated and repressed by the officials at his side ever since he came to the throne. Having become emperor when still a child, he was entrusted for nine years to the guardianship of his powerful tutor and grand secretary Zhang Juzheng, to whom he formed a strong attachment in the belief that he was an irreproachable servant of the state. When the mandarin was discredited after his death by a group of hostile bureaucrats, who accused him of having amassed an enormous fortune through corruption, and all his family fell into disgrace, Wanli was deeply disillusioned. Confused, upset, and wholly unable to establish who was telling the truth, the emperor began to feel increasing distrust for the guan, who were always ready for betrayal and intrigue and were far too busy writing memorials accusing one another to think about the good of the country. A weak emperor like him had few weapons against the bureaucracy, which could instead subject the decisions and conduct of the Son of Heaven to criticism, albeit indirectly, through memorials circulated among the most important mandarins or through calculated allusions during government meetings. The greater the emperor’s fragility and passivity, the more ruthless the struggle for predominance between groups of officials. Added to this was the growing ambition of the eunuchs, a class even more corrupt than the bureaucrats, to which the monarch ended up delegating his power.

  Wanli had never been free to decide if and when to leave the capital. His last journeys, which never lasted more than a week, had been allowed so that he might inspect the construction work on his mausoleum, situated a short distance from the capital and completed thirteen years before. Any ideas of further short trips had since been nipped in the bud on various pretexts, and the now resigned emperor no longer even moved outside the Forbidden City, where he was to live in segregation until his death. Wanli had eight wives, who gave him eight sons and ten daughters, and numerous concubines. In 1586, he made his favorite, the concubine Zheng, who enjoyed a reputation for intelligence, learning, and determination, the imperial consort, second in rank only to Empress Wang, and decided to designate his third son Zhu Changxun, Prince Fu, whose mother she was, as heir to the throne. This event, which was the talk of the whole country, gave rise to strenuous opposition on the part of the officials at the court. Wanli was finally forced to yield after a power struggle of fifteen years with the guan, but his already difficult relations with the bureaucracy had deteriorated still further. As a last, stubborn act of defiance against the mandarins, he waited for many years before deciding to exile his favorite son Prince Fu to the provinces in accordance with the dictates of dynastic law.

  The Dialogue at a Distance with the Son of Heaven

  The first indications of the emperor’s reaction to the missionaries’ gifts began to filter through from the Imperial City a few days after their delivery. According to rumor, the Son of Heaven had admired the religious images and said that the divinities looked like living beings. These words fired the popular imagination, and the Jesuits began to be pointed out as the people who had presented a “living god” at the court.13 The overly intense expressions of the figures portrayed soon began to have a disquieting effect on Wanli, however, and he decided to get rid of them by presenting them in turn to the empress dowager on the assumption that being greatly devoted to the Buddhist and Taoist divinities, she would accept the presence of sacred images in her rooms more readily. Once the initial curiosity wore off, however, she also tired of those sternly staring faces, and the paintings were definitively consigned to the imperial treasury.

  Wanli was instead captivated by the mechanical clocks. None of the ambassadors of the tributary countries had ever brought him anything that amazed him as much as those timepieces capable of making sounds like a musical instrument. To his great dismay, however, they ran down and stopped working. Not long after their last chime, a group of eunuchs arrived on horseback to take the missionaries back with them to the Imperial City immediately by order of the emperor. Ricci and Pantoja rode with them for the first time through the massive wall into a world forbidden to common mortals and found themselves in a huge courtyard. At the far end, by the second great gate of the Imperial City to the south of the Forbidden City, which Ricci describes as a “second wall,” they saw the large clock on the ground surrounded by a group of eunuchs dressed in black.

  Their leader, an authoritative member of the office of protocol, asked the reason for their presence in Beijing. Ricci put his mind at rest by answering that he was a priest who wished to live in peace in Beijing, honoring the Lord of Heaven, and that he had no intention of asking anything of Wanli in exchange for his gifts. The eunuch explained that it was his task to find out why the clock that so enchanted the Son of Heaven no longer chimed and asked for an explanation of the mechanisms that made the hands
move and rang the hours. Ricci told him that they stopped working if the spring was not wound every two or three days. Summarily instructed on how to do this, the eunuchs disappeared into the Forbidden City to report. A taijian messenger called on the Jesuits a few days later with the news that the emperor had appointed four eunuch members of the court board of mathematicians to take charge of the clocks and wished the missionaries to teach them everything they needed to know in order to take care of the instruments and wind them whenever necessary.

  Ricci and Pantoja were lodged in the Imperial City for three days to give the eunuch mathematicians a crash course on the working principles of mechanical clocks. Since there were no Chinese words for mechanisms and techniques devised in such a different culture, Ricci coined a specific vocabulary in Mandarin for the occasion. Terrified lest they might let some essential detail slip, the eunuchs paid the utmost attention and took meticulous notes on everything he said.

  Once the lessons were over, the clocks were taken back to the imperial apartments. Wanli rewarded the eunuchs who had learned how to wind them with promotion to a higher rank and allowed them access to his private rooms every day to check on the smaller clock, from which he could never bear to be parted. The Jesuits’ visit proved a godsend to these four taijian, who thus acquired greater influence at court and began to receive gifts and manifestations of deference from their colleagues. No object was as dear to Wanli as his clock, as demonstrated by an episode that someone related to the missionaries in violation of the rules of discretion. Intrigued by talk of the “bells that rang by themselves,” the Empress Mother asked for the small clock to be brought to her rooms one day. Fearing that she might seek to appropriate it, the Emperor ordered the eunuchs to take it only after it had run down. Hearing no bells chime and being given no explanation as to how the device worked, the Empress found it most disappointing and sent it back to her son, as Wanli had hoped.