Matteo Ricci (27 page)

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 list 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.

v

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.

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 Jin
3
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 Mei
4
(“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 gifts
7
: 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 servants 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.