Matteo Ricci (5 page)

On arriving in Macao at the end of July 1579, Ruggieri found detailed written notes recommending the study of Chinese that had been left by Valignano before setting off for Japan. It would be his task to open the way to China while Ricci was still in Cochin, as we have seen, reluctantly teaching Latin and Greek grammar.

Macao, the Gateway to China

The Portuguese colony of Macao on the Chinese border was situated on a peninsula in the midst of lush subtropical vegetation on the estuary of the Zhujiang, or Pearl River, in the Guangdong province on the South China Sea. The Portuguese name Amacao, from which Macao derives, was a compound of Ama, a local divinity, and gau, meaning “port.” The Portuguese had built up a rich settlement of about ten thousand inhabitants with a large hospital and some churches. There were about five hundred families of Portuguese merchants married to Indian or Chinese women as well as missionaries of various nationalities and Indian slaves. The numerous Chinese residents were mainly small shopkeepers and craftsmen or were employed as interpreters for commercial transactions and relations with the local authorities. The pope had recently declared the city a diocese with jurisdiction over China, Japan, and Korea.

Relations between China and the Portuguese did not run smoothly, as attested by the wall built a few years earlier to separate the mainland from the area reserved for the colonialists, which the Chinese were allowed to enter only with permits twice a week. Portuguese ships had permission to sail up the estuary twice a year as far as neighboring Canton,
25
the capital of the Guangdong province and the most important commercial center in southern China, where they stopped for as long as was needed, from two weeks to a few months, to conclude their business. Every other contact between Westerners and the Chinese was discouraged.

The precarious balance of this peaceful coexistence was demonstrated by an incident that took place a few years earlier, when the Jesuit Cristoforo da Costa baptized a young Buddhist from Canton and took him to Macao. Whether justified or unjustified, the suspicion that the young man had been forced to convert triggered a reaction in a section of the local population, who stirred up a riot and even threatened to destroy Macao, until the local officials ordered the missionaries to send the young man back to his hometown.

Relations between the Chinese and Portuguese became strained immediately after the first Portuguese ships made a stop in southern China. An embassy led by Tomé Pires traveled all the way to Beijing in 1520 to request authorization to trade freely throughout imperial territory. Not only were the delegates denied an audience with the emperor, but the Chinese—having learned that Portugal was still occupying their protectorate of Malacca and fearing that it might wish to invade China—had them imprisoned on the way back to Macao and refused to release them. The Chinese government subsequently banned all trade with Portugal. However, economic interests ultimately prevailed, and the ban, which had never been respected, was officially lifted in 1554. The Chinese had since accepted the gradual colonization of Macao in practice, albeit without granting official authorization.

The fear of foreigners and the consequent hostility toward merchants and missionaries were particularly strong in the coastal provinces, as the local populations were exasperated by the recurrent attacks of Sino-Japanese pirates from time immemorial. The scourge of piracy was so dreaded that the Chinese government decided to prohibit all trade between China and Japan in 1560. While this ban was still officially in force, commercial transactions took place all the same through the Portuguese, who plied back and forth between the two countries with their ships. The merchants loaded Chinese products in Macao, especially silk, the commodity most prized in the land of the rising sun, and brought back Japanese silver, greatly in demand in China for use above all as money and in the production of ornamental objects and jewelry. As the precious metal was so coveted in China that it fetched nearly double what it would in the rest of the world, the Portuguese made a fortune by purchasing Chinese goods that they sold in Japan and Europe for practically twice the amount of silver they had invested. The ships loaded with merchandise usually left Macao in June for Japan and in January for India and Europe.

The transit of goods in Macao was controlled by three agents, often including a representative of the Society of Jesus, who ensured division of the goods purchased in Canton according to established quotas so as to allow all the merchants resident in the city to share in the profits. The Jesuits also invested in the sale of silk in accordance with the very favorable terms of an agreement secured by Valignano, which guaranteed them a set percentage of the product every year.
26
The direct involvement of priests in commerce, which served to finance the missions, was criticized by some members of the order but had already been sanctioned by Pope Gregory XIII and would be permitted also by Superior General Acquaviva, who was well aware that the donations of rich merchants were not enough to ensure the survival of the Jesuit residences. The system worked and business was booming despite the ever-present danger of shipwreck. The worst occurred in 1573, when a typhoon struck a vessel just out of Japan, causing one hundred deaths and the loss of eight hundred thousand ducats, a colossal sum for the time.

Immediately after his arrival in the Jesuit residence of Macao, a building of forty-eight rooms located on the outskirts of the city with an attached novitiate and a church dedicated to the Mother of God, later to become the College of Saint Paul, Michele Ruggieri devoted his energies to the study of Chinese. It was no easy matter to set about learning such a complex language, especially as it was almost impossible to find suitable teachers, most of the Chinese residents being uneducated, speaking only the local dialect, and being ignorant of Portuguese. The missionary had to make do for a certain period with a painter who did not speak his language but could at least draw the figures corresponding to the Chinese words on a sheet of paper.

As the months passed, Ruggieri realized that his progress was very limited and that his studies cost him what Ricci later described as “great toil.” The Jesuit did not even have the support of the other missionaries, who were convinced of the futility of the China enterprise and were irked that their companion had been exempted from all tasks by order of Valignano in order to concentrate on his studies. Alone against everyone, having become, as Ricci put it, a sort of “martyr to the fathers and brothers here”
27
—that is, his fellow priests and superiors—Ruggieri wrote to Valignano repeatedly, asking to be teamed with Matteo Ricci, his traveling companion on the
São Luis
who had still to be assigned to a mission. The Visitor finally agreed and gave instruction to this effect to the authorities in India.

Meanwhile, in an effort to switch from study to action, Ruggieri decided to enter into China in the only possible way, namely by accompanying the merchants on their journey to Canton. He did this on three occasions, endeavoring each time to stay for as long as possible and to establish relations with the local officials, not least by offering them gifts in accordance with Chinese practice. He had been received by the
haidao
, the official responsible for the security of the coastal areas and for control over foreigners, and had made contact with a military commander, to whom he presented a mechanical clock. The amazed reaction to this gift led Ruggieri to believe that spring-powered devices capable of ringing the hours were unknown in China, where mainly water clocks and sundials were used to measure the passage of time. The missionary had no way of knowing that it was in fact the Chinese who had constructed the first mechanical clocks, the most famous of which being the astronomical tower of Su Song. Dating back to 1092, this clock of nine meters in height used hydraulic devices to indicate the position of the sun and the stars and to tell the time in hours and fractions of an hour. The mechanical clocks of Western design were a novelty, however, and the Chinese began to use the term “bells that ring by themselves” for those objects shown to them by the missionary that were capable of chiming suddenly, as though by magic. The success obtained showed the Jesuit that following the local custom of making gifts of rare objects and demonstrating knowledge of a few words of Mandarin Chinese was an excellent way to win the favor of dignitaries, and he began to think that the task of penetrating China would not prove so very difficult. In order to make suitable preparations for this enterprise, he obtained permission to build a new residence in Macao, the House of Saint Martin, complete with a small chapel situated behind the college, where he intended to lodge the future converts and to continue the study of Chinese together with Ricci. In the meantime, he wrote to the Superior General requesting precious objects and books for presentation as gifts to Chinese officials, including an illustrated Bible and two mechanical clocks, which he already dreamed of presenting to the emperor one day.
28

Ruggieri visited Canton again in March 1582 after Valignano’s return from Japan. Despite the delay due to the slowness of communications between Macao and Goa, Ricci had finally received instructions to proceed to the Portuguese outpost on the threshold of China. It was in April that the man destined to develop the plans sketched out by Valignano and commenced by Ruggieri hurriedly embarked on the first ship bound for Macao, where he arrived three months later after a stop in Malacca. He traveled together with Francesco Pasio, who was on his way to Japan via Macao. Shortly before boarding, Ricci added to his baggage a mechanical clock intended, in accordance with Ruggieri’s suggestions, as a gift for the governor of Guangdong. The Jesuit fell so seriously ill during the voyage as to fear for his life, but he recovered immediately after disembarking in Macao on August 7, 1582.

Notes

1. Jonathan Spence,
Chinese Roundabout: Essays on History and Culture
[trad. it. Roma: Fazi, 1996, pp. 66–67].

2. From
padrão
, the stone cross erected by Portuguese navigators at every new landing place.

3. Gaetano Ricciardolo,
Oriente e Occidente negli scritti di Matteo Ricci
(Naples: Chirico, 2003), pp. 41 ff.

4. G. C. Roscioni, op. cit., p. 108.

5. It became possible to calculate longitude accurately on board vessels only in the second half of the eighteenth century with the introduction of the first efficient marine chronometers.

6. J. Spence,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
, cit., p. 68.

7. FR, book II, ch. IX, p. 238.

8.
Il Mappamondo cinese del Padre Matteo Ricci S.I.
, 3rd edition, Beijing, 1602, now in the Vatican Library, commentary, translation, and annotation by Pasquale D’Elia (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1938), pls. 3 and 4.

9.
Dictionnaire d’histoire maritime
(Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2002), pp. 344–46.

10. Joanna Waley-Cohen,
The Sextants of Beijing
(New York: Norton, 1999), p. 46.

11. J. Spence,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
, cit., p. 80.

12. J. Spence,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
, cit., p. 106.

13. Letter dated November 29, 1580; OS II, p. 13.

14. Letter dated November 29, 1580, p. 12.

15. The term “Mughal” or “Mogul” was used in the West for the sovereign of the Indian-Islamic dynasty and, by extension, his empire, the founder of which was Bubur or Baber (1483–1530) of Timurid-Turkic lineage, the fifth descendant of Timur or Tamerlane. The dynasty was strengthened by Akbar the Great (1542–1605).

16. G. C. Roscioni, op. cit., p. 82.

17. As he wrote from Cochin to Gian Pietro Maffei in November 30, 1580; OS II, p. 17.

18. Letter to Claudio Acquaviva, November 25, 1581; OS II, p. 19.

19. On February 19, 1581, at the age of 38.

20. Letter to Claudio Acquaviva, November 25, 1581; OS II, p. 20.

21. FR, introduction, p. XCIII.

22. FR, introduction, p. LXXXVII.

23. FR, introduction, p. LXXXVIII.

24. FR, introduction, book II, ch. I, p. 142.

25. Guangzhou in Mandarin Chinese. Canton is the Western name for the Guangdong province and is also used for its capital.

26. J. Spence,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
,
, cit., pp. 175–76.

27. Letter to Claudio Acquaviva, February 13, 1583; OS II, p. 32.

28. Letter from Michele Ruggieri to Everard Mercurian, November 12, 1581; ibid., appendix 3.

v

From Macao to Zhaoqing, 1582–1583

If it cannot be said that philosophers are rulers in this land, it can at least be truthfully said that the rulers are guided by philosophers.
1

My intention is nothing other than to go ahead with this enterprise, which I regard as one of the most important and useful to God in Christendom today. We consider it a very good thing to be responsible for as many souls as there are in this other world of China.
2

—Matteo Ricci

The Name of China, Ideograms, and Brushes

The first direct contact between Ricci, who turned thirty on October 6, 1582, and the Chinese population came in the Portuguese colony. He was struck by their small build, their youthful appearance belying their actual age, their eyes which he described in his history of the mission
3
as “small, black, markedly oval, and protruding,”
4
their minute noses and ears, and their straight black hair worn long by both sexes, under a sort of cap for the men and held in place with valuable ornamental hairpins for the women of the upper classes. While most of the Chinese living in Macao belonged to the lower class, visiting officials clad in silk were sometimes seen in the streets. When it was very sunny, they walked in the shade of large paper parasols held by servants, as did the wealthy Portuguese traders.
5

Having settled in at the Saint Martin residence and in the absence of Ruggieri, who had made another trip to Canton, Ricci set about following the Visitor’s instructions by learning about the government, customs, and way of life of the great empire stretching out on the other side of the wall. In accordance with Valignano’s orders, which he asked Superior General Acquaviva to confirm by letter, Ricci was to be assigned no other duties so as to avoid distracting him from the task he had been set. He was delighted to enjoy a considerable degree of freedom from the local clergy and their dogged incomprehension of the China mission. As he wrote to Acquaviva, “They are all very devout but the things of Christianity are understood only by those who actually deal with them.”
6

Ricci knew that the great Chinese empire was of ancient origin, was richly endowed with culture, and was proud in the conviction of its superiority to other peoples. It was commonly believed that the Chinese took no particular interest in discovering what was happening outside their borders. The Jesuit was only exaggerating a little when he described them as “convinced that all the knowledge in the world is contained in their kingdom and all the others are ignorant barbarians. Speaking in their books and writings of foreign kingdoms, they always assume them to be peoples slightly inferior to animals.”
7

Ricci remembered what he had learned in the courses of history and geography at the Roman College and compared his knowledge with what he read in Chinese books with the aid of interpreters. He knew that China was the country referred to as
Sinai
in Ptolemy’s
Almagest
and that it corresponded to
Serica
, the term used in Greco-Roman antiquity to designate the eastern region from which silk came. He was surprised to discover that the name
Cina
or
China
used by Westerners was completely unknown to the Chinese, who referred to their country as the
Zhong-guo
, or “Middle Kingdom,” an expression still in use today, or with the name of the reigning dynasty, the Ming at the time, often preceded by the adjective
da
, meaning “great,” hence
Da Ming
. Matters were further complicated by the fact that not all of the Eastern countries used the same name for China. While the Japanese still referred to it by the name of the Tang dynasty, in power from the sixth to the ninth century of the Common Era, the inhabitants of Cochin China, a region of present-day Vietnam and Thailand, then called Siam, used the name of the Chin or Qin dynasty ruling in the second century
bc
, from which the name “China” is thought to have then derived. The capital was called
Beijing
, meaning “northern capital,” which the Portuguese transformed into
Pequin
on the basis of its pronunciation in the Cantonese dialect, and which Ricci wrote as
Pachino
,
Pacchino
,
Pequinum
, or
Pequim
.

The absolute ruler was the emperor, or
huangdi
, referred to as “the Son of Heaven,” who governed with the assistance of a bureaucratic structure of officials,
guan
in Chinese, recruited through a system of competitive examinations.
8
These officials were resident both in the capital Beijing and in the fifteen provinces of the empire, each administered by a governor
9
and a hierarchy of
guan
in charge of the prefectures, sub-prefectures, districts, and further territorial subdivisions.

The emperor ruled a country larger than the whole of Europe, where the distances, the size of the provinces, and the number of the inhabitants of cities, towns, and villages reached orders of magnitude inconceivable for Westerners. China had a population of approximately two hundred million at the end of the sixteenth century.
10
The Ming dynasty, a name meaning “light,” had been in power since 1368, and the fourteenth emperor, Zhu Yijun, had been on the throne for nine years, his succession having taken place in 1573, before he reached the age of ten. He was known as Wanli, the “era name” he had chosen in accordance with custom on his accession,
11
at which point the numbering of the years started again from zero. As Ricci was informed, the year 1582 was therefore referred to as the “ninth year of Wanli” by the Chinese.

Now familiar with some basic facts about China, Ricci set about learning Chinese with the aid of teachers and devoted his energies above all to the study of Mandarin, the language spoken by the educated classes
12
and very different from the local dialects used in all the provinces. Although well trained in the learning of new languages, the Jesuit found Chinese completely different from any classical or contemporary language he had ever studied, including the hardest. He described it to Martino de Fornari,
13
his professor of rhetoric at the Roman College, as “nothing like either Greek or German” and went on to give lengthy explanations of its characteristics and its difficulties for the learner. One of the peculiarities of Chinese was the absence of declensions, declinations, conjugations, genders, forms, tenses, and modes. The meaning of a phrase depended on the order in which the words were placed, with the aid of a few particles. Another was the fact of consisting mostly of short words of one or two syllables, whose pronunciation was an authentic riddle, as practically every word changed its meaning when pronounced in different tones.
14
While pronunciation was a torment, writing proved still more complex. Ricci described the ideograms, elaborate characters made up of numerous minute strokes of ink, as “tangles of different letters” and the writing as something impossible for anyone to believe without seeing or attempting for himself. The language was made still more elusive by the fact that many Chinese words written with different characters were very similar in pronunciation. As a result, communication was often ambiguous, and writing from dictation was almost impossible. As if this were not enough, the pronunciation of the same words in the different dialects changed so much as to make conversation between the inhabitants of different provinces difficult. As the Jesuit complained to his former teacher, “It is the most ambiguous spoken and written language ever to be found.” He noted on numerous occasions that in order to make themselves understood and clear up misunderstandings in oral communication, the Chinese would often use their fingers to draw the characters corresponding to their spoken words in the air or on the palm of their hand, thus showing that it was the written rather than the spoken language that unified the empire. Children learned to write by devoting their first few years of school to memorizing the basic characters, a demanding task that required constant practice. Ricci was not frightened by the scale of this undertaking, which was still more onerous for an adult, because he was naturally gifted with an excellent memory and knew how to increase its capacity by means of the ancient mnemonic techniques studied at the Roman College. His ability was indeed such that he is reported to have had perfect recall even of things he read only once.
15

Ricci committed as many characters as possible to memory and did exercises every day in the correct use of the brush used by the Chinese for writing, which was held with the wrist at a precise angle to the paper. The Chinese brushes varied greatly in shape and size, and the bristles of different animals were used in accordance with their purpose. Those preferred for writing were the stiff, short hairs of weasels, martens, and skunks, especially suitable for the smaller characters, or hares, rabbits, deer, and wolves, while goat bristles were prized above all for painting.
16
Made of bamboo, ivory, wood, lacquer, porcelain, and precious metals, the handles could be sober or richly decorated. The technique Ricci learned during his daily exercises struck him as closer to painting, and his comment to De Fornari—“their writing is more like painting”—pinpointed the aesthetic and creative dimension of calligraphy, which had indeed become an art in its own right in China and was appreciated as much as the representation of landscapes or animals.

In his exercises and in writing letters to Rome, Ricci noted that Chinese paper was much flimsier than the type used in Europe and that only one side of the sheet could be used. Paper had been invented in China in the second century
ad
, if not earlier, and had come into general use there about a thousand years before Europe. It had been commonly used for centuries not only for writing but also to make hats, shoes, clothes, blankets, money, kites, and ornamental objects, as the missionary was amazed to discover.
17

One year later, Ricci’s progress was already greater than his friend Ruggieri had managed in three, and he was now able to remember and write a large number of characters: “I’ve got a good number of them into my head and can already write them all.” It is hard to tell just how many characters Ricci learned in his first year of study and in the later course of his life, when he set about writing books in Chinese. He states in his history of the mission that Chinese has a total of seventy thousand characters, but knowledge of ten thousand is sufficient for everyday purposes. While this is an exaggeration, the total number is still very high—forty-nine thousand according to the dictionary published in 1716 during the reign of the emperor Kangxi.
18

Books Galore

Having attained some familiarity with the writing, Ricci began to examine Chinese books and saw that they were produced in a different way from those in the West. He discovered that they were read in the opposite direction, turning the pages from left to right, which gave a European the impression of beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. Moreover, the writing on every page was vertical rather than horizontal, and the words and phrases were written one after the other with no breaks and no punctuation, thus leaving the reader the task of isolating the groups of characters constituting units of meaning.

In seeking out manuals to consult with the aid of interpreters in order to draw up the report on China requested by Valignano, Ricci became aware of the extraordinarily vast scale of book production. Printing was indeed widespread in the Ming era, including not only historical, philosophical, and ethical works published in literary Chinese, the written language that played a role comparable to Latin in Europe, but also a large number of books in the vernacular. Works for all tastes were to be found on the market, from romantic novels to all sorts of practical handbooks for everyday use, technical works on agriculture and handicrafts, dictionaries, glossaries, and guides for merchants.

This vast circulation of printed volumes surprised Ricci and confirmed his view of the Chinese as a literate people. The vast output of publications was made possible by the use of xylography, or wood-block printing, the most ancient technique known. This had become widespread in China as early as the sixth century
ad
, during the Tang dynasty, and long ahead of the West, where the use of an analogous procedure did not begin before the end of the thirteenth century. The characters and figures of a page of a book were carved in relief on a block of wood used as a matrix for printing, which was then coated with ink and pressed against sheets of paper so that the shapes in relief were printed as black characters on a white ground. Colored illustrations were also reproduced with the use of different inks. The method required considerable skill in carrying out the intaglio work but proved economical because the completed wooden matrices made it possible to run off as many copies of the book as might be required at any time. Ricci observed and admired the Chinese craftsmen and their mastery in carving the wooden blocks, and he realized that they worked much faster than the Western printers using the more recent technique of movable type: “As regards speed and facility, it seems to me that their engravers cut a block in the same time as it takes our printers to compose and emend a sheet, or slightly less.”
19

Printing with movable type had also been known in China long before in Europe, with wooden or ceramic type being used there in the eleventh century, whereas it was not until halfway through the fifteenth century that Johannes, or Henne, Gensfleisch (c. 1400–1468), known as Gutenberg after his family’s hometown, brought it into large-scale employment in the West. Instead of wooden blocks engraved with entire pages, this technique used small blocks of lead, each bearing a letter of the alphabet in relief on one of its faces. This “type” was then arranged in a special container to compose the words for printing. Unlike wood-block printing, where the completed matrices were no longer susceptible of modification, the movable type could be used repeatedly for different publications. Because the very high number of Chinese characters involved the use of an equally high number of types, thus making the printing process too expensive, this technique was used in China only for works of particular importance, such as imperial publications.