Schall’s influence at the imperial court and with the emperor declined over the years, and Shunzhi turned to Buddhism toward the end of a reign that lasted just under twenty years. This decision gave new strength to the Jesuits’ opponents, who sought revenge for being ousted from the astronomical office. The Muslim astronomer Wu Mingxuan accused the missionaries of making false predictions, and the literatus Yang Guangxian wrote a defamatory pamphlet against them. These charges would have had no serious consequences if Shunzhi had not died in 1661 and been succeeded by Kangxi, a child of just seven, under the tutelage of four regents, one of whom, Oboi, turned against the Jesuits. It was 1664, and the seventy-three-year-old Schall had just been struck by partial paralysis when formal charges were submitted to the minister of rites accusing the Jesuits of professing subversive doctrines and being involved in suspicious relations with the merchants of Macao. Schall in particular was accused of the serious crime of indicating an inauspicious day for the burial of Shunzhi’s third son, who died in 1658 when still a child. The old missionary was imprisoned together with Ludovico Buglio, Gabriel de Magalhães, the young Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) who had assisted him for four years in his astronomical work, and some Chinese assistants. The ensuing trial lasted six months.
Charged with treason, spreading a false religion, and teaching a false astronomy, Schall was sentenced to death. While the Jesuits were released after the empress mother made a plea for clemency, their Chinese collaborators were executed. The wave of persecution had extended in the meantime to the other missionaries on Chinese soil, many of whom were held in prison in Canton until 1671. Severely weakened by his long imprisonment, Schall died on August 15, 1666, a year after his release. Ferdinand Verbiest, an engineer, mathematician, and man of eclectic culture, was ready to continue his work together with the other brethren.34
The Jesuit Verbiest, Emperor Kangxi, and Ricci’s Geometry
The situation returned to normality for the Jesuits in 1667, when Kangxi decided, on turning thirteen, to get rid of the regent Oboi and take control of the empire. Unlike his father, the new emperor was endowed with capacity, energy, an open mind, and an interest in culture, science, and mathematics. His relations with the Jesuits were to be close and fruitful for a long period.
One of Kangxi’s first decisions regarded the calendrical office, where Schall’s main adversary, Yang Guangxian, had been appointed director after his removal from office. The new Chinese calendar brought out at the end of 1688 contained errors in calculation, however, which Ferdinand Verbiest brought to the emperor’s attention and offered to correct. On proving his skill, the missionary became the second Jesuit to direct the calendrical office. He also secured the rehabilitation of Schall von Bell, whose remains were finally laid to rest on Ricci’s right in the Jesuit cemetery in Zhala.
A relationship of mutual esteem and consideration was soon established between Verbiest and the sovereign, thirty-one years his junior. Considered one of the great Chinese emperors, Kangxi was to reign for sixty years as an authoritative and enlightened monarch. One of the things the missionary and the emperor shared was an interest in science. Starting in 1670, Verbiest went to the court every day for four years to give the Son of Heaven lessons in mathematics. The first book that Kangxi asked to study was the translation of Euclid’s Elements by Li Madou and Xu Guangqi, a work still renowned sixty years later.
With the emperor’s support and encouragement, Verbiest continued the dissemination of European culture in which his predecessors had so distinguished themselves. He drew maps of the world that continued the tradition inaugurated by Ricci, he translated Western works into Manchu, and he wrote about forty books on scientific, moral, and religious subjects.
The Jesuit left his most significant imprint on the study of the heavens. He produced a calendar containing predictions for the next twenty years, published “The Astronomical Laws of the Reign of Kangxi,” and constructed at the emperor’s request six great pieces of astronomical equipment in bronze that can still be seen today on the terrace of the ancient observatory in Beijing. Combining Chinese aesthetics and the sophisticated art of metallurgy with Western astronomical conceptions,35 these instruments took the place of the ancient ones produced four centuries earlier by Guo Shoujing for the Great Khan, which were very similar to the ones seen by Ricci on the terrace of the observatory in Nanjing.36
Verbiest’s work also became invaluable in the military field when Kangxi had to deal with revolts that broke out in some parts of the empire and he asked the missionary to organize a foundry, as Schall had done many years earlier, capable of producing hundreds of light cannons. The Son of Heaven was so pleased with the help received that the Jesuit was made honorary vice minister of public works. When the Flemish missionary died in 1688 at the age of sixty-five, he was given a solemn state funeral with the participation of the most important government officials.
Collaboration between Kangxi and the Jesuits continued after the death of Verbiest, who had sent Philippe Couplet and Shen Fuzong to Paris in 1680 with a request to Louis XIV to send missionaries skilled in astronomy to China. This aroused the interest of the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, then director of the Paris observatory, and of the members of the French Academy, who assigned the five Jesuits selected—Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Gerbillon, Jean de Fontaney, Louis Le Comte, and Claude de Visdelou—the task of carrying out studies in the fields of geography, astronomy, surveys, and natural history. On reaching Beijing after Verbiest’s death, the French Jesuits resumed Kangxi’s lessons in mathematics, and it was by his request that they organized a team of cartographers that traveled all over the territory of the empire in the decade from 1708 to 1718 and produced the “Complete Map of the Kingdom of Kangxi.”
Kangxi was so delighted with the missionaries’ assistance that he issued what has been described as the “edict of tolerance”37 for the Christian religion in 1692. While Catholicism was not accorded a privileged status with respect to the other religions, the document recognized it as coexisting peacefully with the state and completely extraneous to any of the sects regarded as endangering the balance of civil life. The doctrine professed by the missionaries was acknowledged to foster a climate of social harmony and to cultivate the best virtues of citizens, and Catholicism was therefore permitted as a private religion subordinate to the orthodoxy of the Confucian state, like Buddhism. Despite the limitations, the document marked the moment of greatest harmony in relations between the Chinese state and the Jesuits, confirming the success of the policy of cultural accommodation eighty years after Ricci’s death. As a further gesture, Kangxi granted them a plot of land inside the walls of the Imperial City, where they built the Bei Tang, or “northern church,” in 1693. The same year, the Jesuits used quinine for the first time in China to treat the emperor for malaria, and he appointed one of them court physician. In the meantime, the number of converts in the country as a whole rose to two hundred thousand.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the abundant literature on China produced by the missionaries and the correspondence between many of them and men of culture stimulated growing European interest in that remote empire—totally cut off just a century before—governed by literati. Works like the Novus Atlas Sinensis (1653) of Martino Martini and the China Illustrata (1667) of the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, a richly illustrated book based exclusively on the reports of missionaries, made China known again nearly four centuries after the publication and popularity of Marco Polo’s Travels. Produced by a team of about thirty missionaries under the supervision of Philippe Couplet and published in Paris by order of Louis XIV in 1687, the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus presented the Chinese philosophy of state to Western scholars nearly a century after Ricci’s first translation of Confucius into Latin.38 China fascinated Europe, and one of the most enchanted was Leibniz, who was in close correspondence with the Jesuits Joachim Bouvet and Filippo Grimaldi,
Verbiest’s successor as director of the calendrical office.
The Chinese Rites Controversy and
the Suppression of the Society of Jesus
The period of intense cultural exchange between China and the West at the court of Kangxi was to prove short-lived due to disputes that had already been undermining the stability of the Jesuit order and the Church for decades.
It became clear immediately after Ricci’s death that not all of the missionaries agreed with his choices. Niccolò Longobardo, the new superior of the mission, did not approve of the terms Tian (Heaven), Shangdi (Lord on High), and Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) introduced by its founder to indicate God, and he raised the question with the ecclesiastical authorities. The choice of religious terminology was, however, only one of the problems opened up by missionary work in China. Far more serious disputes arising outside the Society of Jesus and prompted by competition between religious orders were to follow.
Following Matteo Ricci’s approach, the Jesuits always allowed Chinese converts to observe the traditional rites in honor of the deceased and the ancestors, and to participate in the celebrations of Confucius. It had never seemed inappropriate for baptized literati to go to the temple of Confucius for the customary ceremonies of thanksgiving after passing the imperial examinations because the missionaries saw this as an exclusively secular practice. The Jesuit missionaries’ tolerance of Chinese rites was, however, considered an unacceptably permissive attitude to idolatry by the members of some orders, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans who had begun to gain a foothold in China after 1632. The “question of rites” dragged on for over a century in an interminable dispute accompanied by countless in-depth studies.39
It all started in 1643, when the missionary Juan Bautista de Morales, who entered China with the first Dominicans in 1633, accused the Jesuits of the Beijing mission of permitting idolatrous practices. Having obtained no satisfaction from the Visitor, he appealed to the Holy See and submitted his accusations in seventeen specific articles. Pope Innocent X decided in his favor in 1645, decreed the practice of Chinese rites incompatible with the Catholic faith, and thus condemned the interpretation of the same put forward by Matteo Ricci and his brethren.
The Jesuits did not submit to this decree, however, and sent Martino Martini to Rome in 1651 to defend their views. Alexander VII reversed his predecessor’s decision in favor of the Jesuits in 1656, and Martini returned to China in 1658 with papal backing and thirty-five new missionaries, including Ferdinand Verbiest.
In 1669, after further discussions on the subject, Clement IX ruled that the decisions of both his predecessors were to be considered valid and that choices were to be made “on the basis of particular circumstances, cases, and questions.”
This compromise rested on weak foundations, and the problem resurfaced just one year after Kangxi’s edict of tolerance toward Christianity. Charles Maigrot, the apostolic vicar of the Fujian province, issued a decree in 1693 forbidding converts within his jurisdiction to practice the Chinese rites and asked the pope to reconsider the issue. Soon afterward, five French bishops asked the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne to pronounce on works written by the Jesuits Le Comte and Le Gobien in defense of the practices of their order. The verdict delivered by the French theologians in 1700 was that the Jesuits’ theses were to be considered “reckless, scandalous, erroneous, and injurious to the holy Christian religion.”
The Jesuits then asked Kangxi to clarify the Chinese standpoint, and the emperor confirmed that Confucius was considered a sage rather than a god and that the ceremonies in honor of the dead were not religious in character. Offended by what he considered the interference of a secular authority in the religious domain, Clement XI responded in 1704 with the approval of a decree drawn up by a committee of cardinals that forbade Chinese Christians to take part in rites in honor of Confucius and the ancestors or to designate God with the names Tian or Shangdi adopted in the classical texts. Tianzhu was the only term to be used. The papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon was dispatched to China immediately to carry out an investigation into the conduct of the Jesuits.
In his second audience with Kangxi in the summer of 1706, the legate made the inappropriate choice of the apostolic vicar Maigrot, one of the Jesuits’ fiercest opponents, to act as his interpreter. Even though he had lived in China for twenty years, Maigrot had a poor grasp of the language and failed to recognize some characters that Kangxi gave him to read during the audience. He was also unable to identify the Chinese name “Li Madou” and admitted that he had not read Ricci’s Christian Doctrine. Irritated by this unjustifiable demonstration of ignorance, the emperor took offense at Maigrot’s presumptuous arrogation of the right to teach the Chinese how to judge practices that formed an integral part of their millennial culture and dismissed him from his presence. He then issued a decree in December requiring every missionary to carry a document promising to remain in China for the whole of his life and to accept Li Madou’s interpretation of the Chinese rites. The period of tolerance toward the Christian religion was over forever.
Tournon reacted in February 1707 by drawing up a list of instructions for missionaries on how to respond to the emperor’s demands. Kangxi had him arrested and handed over to the Portuguese in Macao, who imprisoned him for violating their right of padroado, or jurisdiction, over missions in the East.
The Chinese rites were definitively condemned eight years later in the papal bull Ex Illa Die of 1715, and the patriarch of Alexandria, Ambrogio Mezzabarba, was sent as a new legate to ask the emperor to allow his subjects to practice Christianity in the form approved by Rome and to recognize the pope’s jurisdiction over Chinese Christians in matters of religion.
Indignant that a “barbarian” should presume to teach the Chinese how to interpret the “Great Doctrine” of Confucianism, Kangxi threatened to prohibit the Christian religion. The papal legate made some concessions to moderate the condemnation of the rites, but these were annulled by the new pope, Innocent XIII.
China continued to fascinate European intellectuals in that period, not least because of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, a collection of letters sent by missionaries from China and published on a regular basis as from 1702 by the French procurator of the missions in China and Japan, Charles Le Gobien. Leading figures in the French Enlightenment admired the ethical and political wisdom of Confucian philosophy, grounded on reason and natural morality, and saw the third Qing emperor as an enlightened sovereign.
Kangxi died in 1722, and two years later the ministry of rites endorsed accusations put forward by the general governor of the Fujian province and declared the Catholic Church the most pernicious of all the false sects. The new emperor, Yongzheng, banned Catholicism and ordered the confiscation of the churches. With the sole exception of those serving as court astronomers in Beijing, all the missionaries were originally to be expelled to Macao but then were confined to Canton. Any priests attempting to continue their activities clandestinely were henceforth to be expelled or arrested. The religious authorities gave orders in 1742 that missionaries leaving for China were to swear they would treat those practicing the Chinese rites as idolaters.40 In 1736, only a few years earlier during the reign of Qianlong, various works by Ricci, including his treatise on friendship and his translation of Euclid’s Elements, had been included in the “Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries,” the official edition of the most important books published in China.
As regards developments in Europe, the Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise by the French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde—one of the most celebrated eighteenth-century works on the Middle Kingdom and based entirely, like Kircher’s, on the reports of missionaries—was published in 1735, and the Sinophily of the French Enlightenment reached its peak in 1740 with Voltaire, who judged the Chinese empire the best organized in the world and
appreciated Confucianism. The Middle Kingdom was also the subject of his Orphelin de la Chine, based on a Chinese theatrical work of the thirteenth century and performed in Paris on August 20, 1755.
The main source of information on the empire so idealized by the Enlightenment dried up, however, when Jesuit missionaries stopped sending reports back from China. In 1773, after nearly two centuries during which some five hundred Jesuits had worked in China along the path indicated by Matteo Ricci, the Society of Jesus was suppressed by Clement XIV, and the missions in the Middle Kingdom were handed over to the Lazarists. The members of the abolished order occupied important positions in the calendrical office until the death in 1774 of the last director, Augustin de Hallerstein, who had held the position since 1746.41
Even after the suppression of the Society of Jesus,42 missionaries formerly belonging to it remained at the imperial court as astronomers or experts in other disciplines and continued the work of cultural dissemination in which they so excelled. During the reign of Qianlong, a group of Jesuits designed the “Complete Map of the Empire,” and the Milanese lay brother Giuseppe Castiglione,43 known in Chinese as Lang Shining, the court painter since the reign of Kangxi, designed the Yuan Ming Yuan, the imperial summer residence just outside Beijing, together with other former Jesuits as a fusion of Chinese and European architectural styles.
Remembrance of Matteo Ricci: Writings and Monuments
After three centuries of total oblivion, Ricci’s manuscript was rediscovered in 1909 by the Jesuit historian of religion Pietro Tacchi Venturi, who brought out the first edition in 1911 under the title I Commentarj della Cina as well as part of Ricci’s correspondence. After Tacchi Venturi, the Jesuit sinologist Pasquale D’Elia brought out the three-volume edition Fonti Ricciane, Storia dell’Introduzione del Cristianesimo in Cina between 1941 and 1949. This was to have been followed by an edition of the letters, which D’Elia was unable to complete before his death.
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