Matteo Ricci

by Michela Fontana

  On hearing this story, Ricci visited the guan in prison, and the two men soon came to know and respect one another. Having ascertained Feng Yingjing’s readiness to learn about the Christian religion and feeling sure that he would be able to secure his conversion one day, Ricci asked him to read the manuscript of his catechism, which was still in progress. Feng Yingjing was so convinced of the value of Ricci’s works and the importance of their circulation that he gave orders from prison that the treatises on friendship and the four elements and some of the maps were to be reprinted at his expense. He also penned an introduction for each work and referred to Ricci in all of his writings as a jinshi, the title used for scholars who successfully completed the third level of the imperial examinations. This decision influenced the other literati, and Ricci was customarily attributed this qualification henceforth. The Jesuit was flattered to have become an honorary metropolitan graduate and regarded this prestigious title as conferring added luster on the Society of Jesus, even though it had not been earned by sitting the examinations.

  Ricci’s friend, who did so much from prison to foster the circulation of the Jesuit’s works, was never to convert. On being released three years later, when a general amnesty was granted for the appearance of a comet in the sky (October 10, 1604), he moved to Nanjing and died there without meeting the missionaries again. This provided further evidence that many Chinese intellectuals were as sincerely interested in Ricci’s works on ethics and science as they were suspicious of his religious teachings, and that most of them preferred to take the prudent course of avoiding or delaying such a great commitment as the decision to convert to Catholicism.

  The stream of visitors increased steadily, and not a day went by without a minister, vice minister, or military commander calling on the Jesuits. Ricci made them all gifts of globes, sundials, and small clocks, and engaged in lengthy discussions on philosophical and moral subjects with figures like the minister of personnel Li Dai and the scholar Feng Qi, who was soon to be appointed minister of rites.

  The missionaries’ social position was definitively established by a meeting with the grand secretary Shen Jiaomen, who called on Li Madou at home as a sign of respect and graciously accepted the gift of a precious ebony sundial. The guan then held a banquet in Ricci’s honor and asked him a great many questions about the European way of life. According to the Jesuit’s account, he was impressed above all by the fact that Westerners had only one wife. Being well aware that polygamy was one of the main obstacles to the conversion of mandarins, Ricci always laid great stress on this aspect of life in the West.

  Many dignitaries followed the grand secretary’s example and organized banquets in honor of Xitai, who seemed to have received more invitations during the first few months of his stay in Beijing than in all his previous years on Chinese soil, sometimes as many as two or three in the same day. The missionaries tired themselves out rushing from house to house in an effort to keep everyone happy and avoid giving offence, but they were obliged even so to decline some invitations due to the absolute lack of time. Now that they were treated as equals by the ruling class, Ricci was sorry to see that they received no visits from the poor in Beijing, who were unquestionably intimidated by their popularity with the rich and privileged.

  One day they received a visit from the taijian responsible for the emperor’s clocks, who had not called in a long time. Being very worried because the large clock had stopped working despite regular winding, they had brought it with them to make sure that Ricci would examine it immediately and left it with the Jesuits for repair.

  The stream of visitors increased enormously as soon as it was known that an object belonging to the emperor was to be found in Li Madou’s house. The opportunity to admire a unique work of art temporarily removed from the heart of the palace was something that happened only once in a lifetime.

  Wanli was annoyed when he heard about this and ordered the eunuchs to take the clock back to the court immediately. It was never again to be taken out of the Forbidden City on pain of dire punishment. In the event of a breakdown, the Jesuits would be allowed to enter the imperial palace to repair it. Moreover, to ensure that these orders were always obeyed, Ricci decided to authorize the Jesuits in advance to enter the Forbidden City four times a year to service the clocks. Combined with the freedom already acquired to go in and out of the Imperial City at will, this right of access to areas kept strictly off limits to other subjects increased Ricci’s prestige to the point that the wholly groundless rumor began to spread that the Jesuit had enjoyed the privilege of meeting the emperor.

  Li Zhizao and Geography:

  The Third Edition of the Map of the World

  Friendship with the prisoner Feng Yingjing preceded a meeting that was to prove still more significant for the future of the mission. This came about in the customary way, when a young guan from Hangzhou in the southeastern province of Zhejiang called one day and asked to see Li Madou. Having worked in Nanjing as assistant to the minister of public works there, Li Zhizao had recently been called to Beijing to take up an analogous position.7 Now aged thirty-six, thirteen years younger than Ricci, he had graduated as a jinshi three years before the Jesuits’ arrival in Beijing, ranked eighth out of three hundred candidates. In the course of their long conversation, Li Zhizao examined the Jesuit’s books and above all his map of the world. Geography was one of his own particular areas of interest, and he had in fact drawn a map of China with a description of the provinces of the empire some years earlier.

  From geography, the two men went on to discuss other subjects in an exchange of ideas that continued over the next few days. Ricci realized that the guan was open to every new form of knowledge, and Li Zhizao that Li Madou was not only a sage who would tell him about faraway countries but also a man of great spiritual conviction willing to introduce him to an interwoven universe of mathematics, geometry, and moral values.

  This new friend thus called assiduously at the missionaries’ house in his free time to learn the secrets of Western knowledge. Ricci tells us that Li Zhizao studied with him for a year, making every effort to understand the Ptolemaic model of the universe and performing calculations for hours on end. On observing his determination to grasp the new concepts and verify the consistency of the geocentric system, Ricci realized that he had found an enthusiastic collaborator, and a fruitful intellectual relationship soon developed. It was now evident that many shidafu were aware of the importance of science and technology and were eager to explore new worldviews and philosophies other than the narrowly specialized and dogmatic knowledge required for success in the imperial examinations.

  Li Zhizao was interested above all in geography and had little difficulty persuading Ricci to prepare a new edition of his map of the world. The Jesuit set to work at the beginning of the summer of 1601 and produced the Kunyu wanguo quantu (“Complete Map of the Countless Countries of the Earth”) in the space of a year. It was printed between August and September 1602 on six panels of Chinese paper that could be mounted side by side on a screen measuring approximately four meters by two. As in the previous maps, the countries of the world were shown inside an oval to indicate the spherical nature of the earth, and China was placed in the middle, but there were also many new details. In addition to the equator, this new version showed the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, which appeared here for the first time on a map in Chinese, and divided the globe into five climatic zones in relation to variations in latitude: the torrid zone cut by the equator, the two subtropical zones, and the two polar regions. Following the atlas of Ortelius, Ricci placed the zero meridian in the Fortunate Isles, the present-day Canaries, and drew the lines of latitude and longitude every ten degrees.

  While employing the techniques introduced by European cartography, Ricci followed the Chinese tradition of combining the map with a large section of written text, as in the two previous editions. This version provided geographic, astronomical, naturalistic, and his
torical information in still greater detail, as well as descriptions of the ways of life and customs of the different peoples. The maps of Petrus Plancius, Mercator, and Ortelius were used as a basis for the characteristics of the Western countries, and the content of Chinese maps, probably with the help of Li Zhizao, were used for the description of China and other regions of Asia. Ricci is thought, for example, to have drawn on local cartography for the use of a series of dots to represent the desert, a convention unknown in the West at the time but commonly used in Chinese maps.8

  Ricci, whose mastery of Chinese was now considerable, managed to include one thousand place names as against the thirty of the previous edition. He used the Chinese names found on the maps drawn during the voyages of discovery undertaken by the eunuch Zheng He at the beginning of the Ming era for some localities on the coast of Africa. As in the previous editions, Ricci used characters related to the meaning of the words or constituting phonetic transcriptions of the same in devising Chinese names for places unknown to the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom. As Ricci’s birthplace, the Marche was the first Italian region to have a Chinese version of its name. Ricci had the opportunity to create Mandarin names for the world, and many of his toponyms are still used in Chinese atlases today.

  The text was closely written in small, neat characters on either side of the map, and in some panels text was inserted in the oceans or in the Antarctic region, where no names appeared. The descriptions of the countries are a curious mixture of objectivity and approximation. In presenting Italy, Ricci wrote that the pope, the head of the Catholic Church, lived in Rome, observed the vow of celibacy, and was revered by all of the other European nations. He noted that “there are no poisonous snakes and other types of insects” in England. He described China as “the land of the Great Ming Dynasty,” “famous for its culture and its products,” and gave details of its latitude.9 All of the empire’s tributary countries were included, and a great deal of space was devoted to Japan, emphasizing the warlike nature of its inhabitants. As usually happened when the imagination was still called upon to compensate for a lack of direct evidence, his description of the characteristics of various countries combined historical fact with fantastic details and bizarre legends of both Western and Chinese origin. He described people with bovine hooves or just one eye; races of dwarves preyed upon by cranes and obliged to take refuge in caverns, who gave birth at the age of five and reached old age at eight; and a land of spirits in northern Asia, whose inhabitants had mouths in their necks and fed on snakes and deer.

  Ricci also endeavored to supply written lessons in astronomy and applied mathematics. Together with a representation of the Ptolemaic universe in the four corners of the panel, he included a drawing of an armillary sphere and added two small drawings of the southern and northern hemispheres as well as two diagrams to explain the mechanism of solar and lunar eclipses. He described the movement of planets, illustrated the method for measuring the size of the earth and the moon, provided a comparative table with the dimensions of the planets and their distance from the earth, and presented two methods for determining the altitude of a locality.

  In the customary preface presenting the map to the Chinese public, Ricci paid tribute to his hosts by claiming that it was admiration for the greatness of China that had brought him from the West, but he did not forget to stress the magnificence of God, the Lord of Heaven and Earth. This was followed by presentations written by Li Zhizao and three other scholarly friends as well as the preface of Wu Zuohai for the Nanjing edition of the map of the world.

  The new map was a great success, and Li Zhizao had countless copies printed for friends. The work proved so popular and the demand so great that the printers duplicated the wood blocks and ran off an unauthorized version that circulated at the same time as the official one. The map of 1602 was the most famous and had the greatest number of reproductions made, even outside of China. Five complete copies have survived, one of which is now in the Vatican Library.

  Some of the printed copies were painted in different colors to differentiate the five continents. In addition to the printed copies, with or without coloring, hand-painted copies were also made, often by the eunuchs of the imperial palace. The Chinese continued to reproduce Ricci’s map of the world over the years, and the copies painted by hand were embellished from the end of the seventeenth century on10 with depictions of ships sailing across the oceans; denizens of the deep like whales, sharks, and walruses; and more or less fantastic land animals like ostriches, elephants, rhinoceroses, and dinosaurs. Of the six surviving copies of the complete map made by hand, one displays an extraordinarily good state of preservation. Of undetermined date, it is painted on paper with great delicacy in light colors and is decorated with sailing ships and animals. Found in the Liulichang district of Beijing in 1923 and held in the museum of the Forbidden City until 1936, it was then transferred to the archives of the Nanjing Museum, where it still remains. After passing through the hands of various collectors, the only part of a hand-painted copy surviving in the West, the third of the six panels containing a depiction of a whale, is now in a small museum of whale hunting at Sharon, Massachusetts, eighty kilometers south of Boston.11

  Constellations, Arithmetic, and Christian Doctrine

  Fully convinced of the importance of disseminating the knowledge he was acquiring in his studies among the other scholars and literati, Li Zhizao offered to help Li Madou translate some of the works in the Jesuit’s possession, as Qu Taisu had done years earlier with the first book of Euclid’s Elements. Ricci accepted gladly, and together they translated the “Treatise on the Constellations”—a poem of 420 septenary verses that the missionary had found the time to write in the early months of his residence in Beijing—into Chinese as Jingtian gai. The work described the major Chinese constellations together with the names, relative positions, and brightness of the most important stars situated in the zodiac, the region of the sky around the pole star, and the intermediate area between the two. The use of the poetic form, something unusual for Ricci, may well have been a device to aid memorization.

  The decision to devote the first book of astronomy in Chinese to the constellations was by no means fortuitous. Identifiable among the countless dots of light in the heavens by virtue of their characteristic conformations, these clusters of stars were in fact indispensable points of reference for any study of the celestial vault.

  The Chinese astronomers of antiquity had already identified a larger number of constellations and stars than the Greeks. In the case of the Plow or Big Dipper, an asterism known to all the ancient peoples, the configuration was the same as described by the Greeks. Its name, Bei Dou, or “Northern Dipper,” refers to a large wooden ladle that served as a unit of measurement for grain. In China as in the other countries of the world, peasants had learned to determine the period of the year by the angle of its handle to the horizon.

  Having completed the translation of this small volume, Li Zhizao decided to continue with the study of Clavius’s Epitome arithmeticae praticae (1583) under Ricci’s guidance, and he began work on a translation of certain sections that was finished in 1608 and published in 1613 as the Tongwen swanzhi or “Treatise on Arithmetic.” Aimed at all literati interested in learning the art of “calculation with the brush,” it gave the rules for performing the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division as well as the extraction of roots in writing so as to dispense with the traditional Chinese abacus.

  As Ricci wrote in his history of the mission, Li Zhizao “translated all of Father Clavius’s Practical Arithmetic without omitting anything and indeed with the addition of the way to extract roots, square, cube and so on usque to infinitum, a source of great wonder in China. . . . And all this with pen and ink, something quite new in this land, where people can only count with a certain instrument [the abacus] made for that purpose.”12

  Even though Chinese mathematics was less backward in the Mi
ng era than Ricci believed,13 as we have seen, it is a fact that the Chinese had been outstripped by Westerners in the search for general theories for the solution of equations and had not yet begun to use symbols rather than words in writing mathematical expressions, as is commonly done today. Europe had already begun to introduce symbols into mathematics, and some recently adopted forms of modern notation were exported to China first by Ricci but above all by the Jesuits who were to come after him.

  It was precisely during that period in Europe that rhetorical algebra, where a mathematical expression was described in words, gave way to syncopated algebra, where symbols and words were mixed as the first step toward the totally symbolic algebra that was to dispense entirely with words and use only letters of the alphabet. The process was gradual but unstoppable, as the adoption of symbols simplified calculations and made it possible to develop mathematical theories of an increasingly general character. While the Latin term res was still commonly used in the sixteenth century for the unknown in an equation (like cosa in Italy and Coss in Germany), Clavius had already adopted a sign analogous to the “x” generally employed today, together with other symbols that have since fallen into disuse, as outlined in his Algebra, published at the beginning of the seventeenth century, whose content may have been partially known to Ricci. The symbols + and − used today to indicate the operations of addition and subtraction were introduced in Germany halfway through the previous century, while the letters p (for più: plus) and m (for meno: minus) were used in Italy. The equals sign (=) appeared for the first time in the West in The Whetstone of Witte, written by the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde (1510–1558) in 1557, but was not used in Clavius’s work on algebra and was therefore probably unknown to Ricci, being introduced together with the other algebraic symbols by the Jesuits who arrived in China in later years. It is worth noting that Recorde also wrote a book on mathematics and astronomy entitled The Castle of Knowledge which he dedicated to English travelers intent on reaching the mythical land of Cathay.