Matteo Ricci (31 page)

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.
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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 on
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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.
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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.”
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Even though Chinese mathematics was less backward in the Ming era than Ricci believed,
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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.

Though delighted to have a collaborator as scientifically gifted as Li Zhizao, Ricci did not forget his religious mission and soon began to speak during the lessons of astronomy and mathematics about the Lord of Heaven, the creator of the heavens and the earth and supreme lawgiver of the universe, and to illustrate the principles of the Christian religion. The
shidafu
listened to the religious instruction with the same attention as he paid to the scientific teaching. As he was to write in the prefaces to some of Ricci’s works, he was greatly impressed by the Jesuit’s personality, strength of character, probity, and ability to address ethical and mathematical subjects with the same profundity. For him, Ricci was the “perfect” master and embodiment of the Confucian virtues, capable of improving himself through study and the practice of the virtues.
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Li Zhizao was won over by the Jesuit’s teaching and was willing to receive baptism but had to be dissuaded “due to the impediment of polygamy.”
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The scholar had a concubine that he had no intention of repudiating. Having secured Li Zhizao’s promise that he would rectify his marital position sooner or later, Ricci resigned himself to waiting for the fruits ripened through the teaching of science.

Notes

1. Cit. in T. N. Foss, “La cartografia di Matteo Ricci,” cit., p. 181.

2. This was the fourth courtyard encountered after entering by the southern gate of the Imperial City and passing through four gates one after the other. Those granted an audience were probably admitted through a side entrance to the Forbidden City and were taken to the courtyard by a shorter route.

3. Among the many descriptions available, readers are referred to May Holdsworth and Caroline Courtauld,
The Forbidden City
(Hong Kong: Odyssey Publications, 1995).

4. FR, book IV, ch. XIII, p. 147, no. 3.

5. Cited by Ricci: see FR, book IV, ch. XIII, p. 148.

6. FR, book IV, ch. XIII, p. 151.

7. For Li Zhizao and the other best-known Chinese converts, see Willard J. Peterson, “Why Did They Become Christians? Yang T’ing-yun, Li Chih-tsao, and Hsu Kuang-ch’i,” in
East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773
, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988), pp. 129–52; Nicolas Standaert, ed.,
The Handbook of Christianity in China
(Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 404 ff; Jacques Gernet, “Gli ambienti intellettuali cinesi all’epoca del Ricci,” in
Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi Ricciani, Macerata-Roma, 22–25 ottobre 1982
, ed. Maria Cigliano (Macerata: Centro Studi Ricciani, 1984), p. 121.

8. T. N. Foss, “La cartografia di Matteo Ricci,” cit., p. 183.

9. Ricci calculated from 15° to 42° of latitude north. It was impossible to calculate longitude precisely in his day. In the Ming era, China extended from 18° of the island of Mainan in the south to 42° north, from 70° to 125° east of Greenwich.

10. “I am inclined to believe that the maps of the world with wild animals, sea monsters, and caravels are all subsequent to 1672, the year in which they were first seen on the maps of Ferdinand Verbiest,” (
Il Mappamondo cinese del Padre Matteo Ricci
, cit., p. 103, no. 2).

11. For Ricci’s map of the world, see P. D’Elia, preface to
Il Mappamondo cinese del Padre Matteo Ricci
, cit.; Theodore N. Foss, “A Western Interpretation of China: Jesuit Cartography,” in Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh (eds.), op. cit., pp. 209, 251; T. N. Foss, “La cartografia di Matteo Ricci,” cit., pp. 177–95; John D. Day, “The Search for the Origins of the Chinese Manuscript of Matteo Ricci’s Maps,” in
Imago Mundi
47 (1995): pp. 94–117; Yu Dong and John D. Day, “The Mappamundi of Matteo Ricci,” in
Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae, VI, Collectanea in honorem Rev.mi Patris Leonardi Boyle, O.P. septuagesimum quintum annum feliciter complentis
(
Studi e testi
; 385) (Vatican City: 1998); Isaia Iannaccone, “Matteo Ricci e l’introduzione delle scienze occidentali in Cina,” in
Le Marche e l’Oriente, Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi Ricciani, Macerata, 23–26 ottobre 1996
, ed. Francesco D’Arelli (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente), 1998; Gaetano Ricciardolo, “Geografia e cartografia in Matteo Ricci S.J. La determinazione delle coordinate geografiche della Cina,” in
Le Marche e l’Oriente
, cit.; R. Smith, op. cit.