The situation of comparative calm enjoyed by Macao for a few years began to deteriorate particularly when the Dutch arrived on the scene fired with determination to carve out a niche on the Asian markets. Having already attacked the Portuguese settlements in the Moluccas, Mozambique, and Malacca, they landed in the Chinese province of Fujian in the summer of 1604 in a bid to establish a trading outpost but were repulsed by the local population. Fearing a possible attack on Macao as well, the Portuguese built new fortifications, thus heightening tensions that led to manifestations of intolerance between the Chinese population and the missionaries. The most serious events, which also involved members of the Society of Jesus, were sparked off, however, by a dispute between Augustinians and Franciscans.
The Franciscan friars of the monastery of Our Lady of the Angels clashed with the vicar of the parish of Saint Lawrence and asked Valentim Carvalho, the rector of the Jesuit college, to arbitrate between the two sides. This choice angered the new bishop of Macao, the Augustinian Miguel Dos Santos, a former Jesuit expelled from the order, who felt that his authority had been slighted. After a reciprocal exchange of accusations, the bishop placed an interdiction on Macao and excommunicated a number of people, including Carvalho, and the city became the scene of a bitter struggle between the two rival factions. There was fighting in the streets, “not only with spiritual arms,” Ricci wrote in dismay, “but also at times with swords and harquebuses, which caused a great shock and confusion and was a scandal for nonbelievers and new Christians alike.”4
The clash between religious orders had serious consequences. A member of the faction hostile to the Jesuits took advantage of the turbulent situation to inform the Chinese authorities that members of the Society of Jesus led by Lazzaro Cattaneo were plotting to invade the Guangdong province and then penetrate the Chinese interior with a force of Portuguese and Dutch soldiers. News of these accusations reached Canton, and the provincial authorities took radical measures without bothering to ascertain the veracity of the accusations. The governor assembled the troops, and the haidao, the official in charge of the coastal areas, evacuated all the houses in Macao close to the Portuguese fortifications, thus causing panic among the population. All trade between Macao and Canton was forbidden, and the Chinese were ordered to receive no one with a tonsure into their homes. Rumors spread, and some even claimed that Cattaneo was really the famous Li Madou in disguise.
One innocent victim of this fraught situation was Francisco Martines, who arrived in Canton and was ready to continue to Macao with documents for Valignano when he was informed of the Visitor’s death and stopped in the city despite the danger. Confined to bed by an attack of malaria, he had been in Canton for a month when he was captured, along with some servants and his host, and imprisoned as a spy working for enemies of China. The prisoners were all tortured, and the youngest sought to save his skin by claiming that the Jesuit had transported gunpowder from Nanjing for the rebels. When the Chinese discovered a tonsure hidden beneath the Jesuit’s long hair and Western-style clothing in his baggage, his explanations were all rejected out of hand, and his permits were dismissed as forgeries. Subjected repeatedly to torture, he died in prison in March 1606 at the age of thirty-eight. The first Chinese to enter the order as a lay brother, Martines followed the Jesuit cause faithfully for fifteen years. Coming just two months after Valignano’s, his death was another serious loss for the mission.
Hostility toward the Jesuits spread to the town of Shaozhou, where Niccolò Longobardo, who had tried in vain to help Martines through the local authorities, was falsely accused of adultery with a married woman. Even though the charge was dismissed, the continued presence of the mission there was in serious doubt.
Just when everything seemed to be on the verge of collapse, however, an investigation ordered by Zhang Deming, the provincial inspector of Guangdong, on his return from Beijing, where he had met Ricci, proved that the accusations against the Jesuits were wholly groundless. The governor and the haidao, who were behind the false accusations made against the Society of Jesus, were removed from office and from the Guangdong province, and peace finally returned to Macao as well. The Jesuits had their brother’s body exhumed and transported first to Shaozhou for the funeral service and then to Macao for burial. Completely cleared of any wrongdoing, Lazzaro Cattaneo was able to enter China and proceed to the residence in Nanjing, to which he had been assigned. He traveled together with a thirty-one-year-old missionary from Lecce, Italy, named Sabatino de Ursis, who was to continue to Beijing, where he arrived in the first half of 1607.
The Search for Cathay: Confirmation of Ricci’s Conjecture
Less than a month before the end of 1606, Ricci received a letter from Suzhou in the present-day Gansu province, bordering Mongolia in the northwest. It was signed by the Jesuit lay brother Bento de Góis, who said that he had been traveling for years in search of Cathay and had asked the missionaries to send money to help him continue his journey and escape from the Muslims who had robbed him. All trace had been lost of “Brother Benedict” since he set off from India five years earlier, and Ricci had been waiting for a long time for news. He realized immediately from the tone of the letter that the situation was desperate and hastened to send help. Even though Gansu was a three-month journey away and it was inadvisable to set off in the freezing cold of winter, he instructed Zhong Mingli (called João Fernandes in Portuguese and simply Giovanni in Italian5), a Chinese lay brother in his early twenties who was about to begin his novitiate, to leave for Suzhou with another convert to act as a guide and enough money to cope with any eventuality.
Despite his concern for the life of De Góis, Ricci was pleased because his arrival provided definite proof that China and Cathay were the same country, as he had suspected at least since his first journey to Nanjing twenty years earlier. Even though his superiors in Europe and India had been informed of this conjecture and of all the evidence gathered since, they were still not convinced. The belief in the existence of another country to the north of China that could be reached by following the silk roads, as the Polo family had in the thirteenth century, was so deeply rooted in European culture that Ricci’s communications in sporadic letters that took years to reach their destination carried no conviction. Moreover, it was still commonly believed that Christian communities existed in Cathay, whereas Ricci claimed that there were only the “worshipers of the cross,” who could no longer be called Christians, in China.
The strongest believers in the presence of fellow Christians lost in the immense Asian continent, cut off from the Western world and in need of the Church’s support, were the Jesuit missionaries in India. The first to suggest that a mission should be sent beyond the Himalayas in search of Cathay was Rodolfo Acquaviva, one of Ricci’s companions on the voyage from Portugal to India. Jerome Xavier, the nephew of Francis Xavier, then organized an expedition to ascertain the existence of the country described by Marco Polo and establish whether Ricci was right or wrong. His idea was to send a representative of the order with the caravans of merchants traveling the silk roads to Cathay. If the brother found Ricci at the end of his journey, it would prove beyond all doubt that China and Cathay were one and the same. The task fell on Bento de Góis, a Portuguese lay brother aged forty, who spoke excellent Persian and was familiar with Muslim customs.
The Jesuit set off on his mission to discover the finis terrae orientalis, the indefinite location of Cathay according to the ancient sources, from Agra in India on October 29, 1602, bound for Lahore, the capital of the Mughal empire. It was from there that a caravan of merchants left every year for Kabul, the present capital of Afghanistan, the first stage of a long journey to the easternmost parts.
Ricci was informed of this initiative and confidently expected to see “Brother Benedict” turn up one day safe and sound in Beijing. As the years went by with no news, he began to feel apprehensive and to ask all the merchants from Central Asia that he met in the capital whether
they had come across a man called Bento de Góis in their travels. No information was forthcoming, however, until the arrival of the letter from Suzhou. Having sent out a rescue party, all he could do now was wait for them to return with De Góis.
João Fernandes returned to Beijing on October 29, 1607, with the news that Bento de Góis had passed away in Suzhou on April 10. Having buried him there, Fernandes had finally overcome a series of obstacles and had succeeded in leaving for the capital together with the Armenian servant Isaac, who had accompanied Bento all through his travels. He handed over to Ricci the gold cross that Bento had worn on his breast, the permits, and the letters from Jerome Xavier, jealously preserved to the very end. He then took from his bag a bundle of torn and crumpled sheets of paper that he had collected around the lay brother’s deathbed, which proved to be fragments of his travel journal. Isaac explained through an interpreter that the journal in which De Góis kept a record of his long journey had been torn up by a group of Muslim merchants in order to eliminate all trace of the sums they owed the Jesuit. Ricci patiently reconstructed the writings and filled in the gaps with the help of Isaac, who stayed with the missionaries for a month to help them retrace the steps of the journey, of which he was the sole surviving witness.
The Armenian said that they had traveled four thousand kilometers in three years on foot and horseback, proceeding through the Mughal empire and the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts. He spoke of crossing some of the world’s highest and least hospitable mountain ranges, frozen expanses of ice and snow, bleak, torrid steppes, and barren, burning deserts, and of scrambling across stony ground, up and down slopes of sheer rock, negotiating steep paths, and wading across raging torrents. He told of meeting peoples with bizarre customs that spoke incomprehensible languages, of fighting with bloodthirsty bandits, and of audiences with the sultans of kingdoms hidden in the innermost depths of Asia. During the journey they had encountered some Persian merchants returning from Cathay who had told them about a Christian missionary living in the capital and enjoying privileges unheard of for any foreigner, such as traveling in a litter and being admitted to private audiences with the Son of Heaven. Having recognized Ricci from the description, De Góis realized that China and Cathay were certainly the same country. He reached Suzhou on December 22, 1605, and tried to contact Ricci for the first time but with no success, not least because he did not know Ricci’s Chinese name. After waiting three months for an answer in vain, De Góis sent a second letter, which is the one that Ricci finally received.
Having relived the events of the mission through Isaac’s words and every surviving shred of writing from the journal, Ricci wrote a detailed report reconstructing his fellow Jesuit’s travels from the beginning to the tragic end and sent it in two copies to Superior General Acquaviva. One was addressed to the superiors in India to be forwarded “by way of the West Indies” to Portugal and then Rome, and the other to the Jesuits in Japan for forwarding to Italy “by way of the East Indies,” through the Philippines and Mexico. While the original document in Portuguese has been lost, a second version written in Italian has survived. The three chapters of the history of the mission that Ricci then devoted to his Portuguese brother’s mission provide a unique account of a daring and dramatic endeavor. Despite its hagiographic overtones and some inevitable omissions and inaccuracies in the names of localities traveled through, the sequence of stages, the calculation of distances, and the documentation of dates, Ricci’s painstaking account has prevented De Góis and his expedition from falling into oblivion.
Despite the definitive proof provided by this expedition, the myth of the existence of a country other than China called Cathay still lingered on. In 1624, less than twenty years after Brother Benedict’s death, the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Andrade, superior of the mission in Agra, decided to set off again in search of the Christians of Cathay, crossing the Himalayas and entering Tibet from the south. The record of his journey was published in Rome in 1627 with a title that once again contradicted Ricci’s thesis: “The Discovery of Great Cathay, the Kingdom of Tibet, by Father Andrade of Portugal.”6
Mathematics at the Service of the Empire
Meanwhile, Paul Xu continued his assiduous collaboration with Ricci in Beijing. Like Li Zhizao and many other intellectuals of the day, he was dissatisfied with the state of scientific studies in China and realized that the almost exclusive focus of the imperial examinations on the mastery of literary style and the knowledge of history and Confucian philosophy was far too narrow.
Xu Guangqi understood that Li Madou’s learning was the product of an ancient and developed culture that it would be useful to share. When Ricci illustrated his knowledge and displayed the European books he had brought with him, he never failed to refer appreciatively to the great thinkers of Western antiquity, whose works had been translated into Latin and the vernacular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after the oblivion of the Middle Ages, and were becoming the foundation and heritage of European culture. In China, the most ancient books of science and mathematics had instead been lost, and those still available proved almost incomprehensible because they were based on knowledge that was now all but forgotten. It was a fate similar to the one that had befallen the astronomical instruments constructed by Guo Shoujing in the thirteenth century, which Ricci had found lying abandoned on the terrace of the astronomical observatory in Nanjing, far too advanced for the imperial astronomers of the Ming era to use.
In the absence of continuity with the achievements of the past, it was difficult for Chinese intellectuals to link up constructively with the scientific tradition and take significant steps forward. Mathematics and its applications were, however, more necessary now than ever before. On the one hand, more advanced mathematics would make it possible to describe the movement of the celestial bodies with greater precision and create a more accurate calendar. On the other, progress in arithmetic and algebra was indispensable to meet the needs of commerce, cartography, engineering, and every other sector of human activity.
Xu Guangqi wanted to understand how Ricci’s knowledge could help him revitalize Chinese mathematics and above all use it in the fields in which he had taken an interest for many years now, namely the technical and scientific disciplines that were referred to as “practical” or “concrete” studies in Chinese and would be called “applied” today. These included military sciences, agriculture, hydraulics, and geography, but also the techniques of surveying and calendrical calculation. A large number of intellectuals took an interest in these practical studies in the late Ming era and considered them important to the empire’s development and prosperity.
Before his conversion and contact with Ricci, Paul Xu wrote a number of works identifying the problems to be addressed and solved by the imperial administration. The first was the inadequacy of the army, equipped with obsolete weapons and led by generals with no technical training. Even though the Chinese had invented gunpowder at least three hundred years before the Europeans and had developed rockets and grenades as well as land and underwater mines much earlier, they had never been interested in wars of conquest and had failed to develop either their military skills or the associated technologies. The defense of the empire was an absolute priority, however, and Xu Guangqi knew that it was essential to be ready to repel any possible new invasion from the north, like the Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century. The danger was real, and the Great Wall, a barrier of more symbolic than effective character, would not be enough to avert it.
The second unresolved problem was control over the always precarious waterways. The two greatest Chinese rivers, the Huang He and the Yangtze, and the system of smaller watercourses connected by the Imperial Canal were arteries connecting the remote provinces of the vast empire and served as precious reservoirs for irrigation, but they were also the cause of catastrophic floods. After studying the problem for a long time, Xu Guangqi submitted a plan for reorganization of the waterways to the au
thorities in Shanghai, and he wrote a treatise on the Great Canal suggesting possible improvements to China’s main artery.7 The ideas put forward were those of a truly innovative thinker. He urged government officials to put an end to the superstitious view of floods as the vengeance of Heaven on human or imperial wrongdoing and to take a pragmatic approach, explaining that floods could only be prevented by addressing the problem in methodical and global terms, which meant measuring the width, depth, and capacity of rivers and canals, studying the lay of the land, carrying out precise surveys, and drawing good maps.
Xu Guangqi took the same systematic approach to the study of agricultural technologies, using his in-depth knowledge to write an encyclopedia in which, among other things, he analyzed methods to improve the yield of land and ensure better harvests. His suggestions were invaluable in a vast country like China with a huge population that was constantly threatened by starvation through recurrent famines.
Contact with Li Madou was a unique and unrepeatable opportunity for an intellectual with an interest in technical matters like Paul Xu, not least because he was convinced that learning science and embracing the missionaries’ moral doctrine were two complementary aspects of the self-improvement that it was the duty of every Confucian official to pursue.
Finding a convert of such intelligence and dynamism ready and willing to study with him was also an extraordinary opportunity for Ricci and one that he thought would prove very conducive to the progress of the mission. The Jesuit was right. Having formed an idea of the content of the scientific books shown to him, Xu Guangqi suggested with support from Li Zhizao that they should be translated into Chinese and published. He was well aware not only of the intrinsic value of the works presented to him by Ricci but also of the fact that their publication was the best way to enhance the Jesuits’ prestige and facilitate the spread of the moral and religious doctrine they taught.
Matteo Ricci Page 35