Matteo Ricci (6 page)

Ricci studied all the books he could gather together and had some parts translated by his interpreters, impatiently awaiting the day when he would be able to read them unaided. He was impressed by the quantity and quality of the treatises on medicinal herbs, embellished with detailed illustrations, and probably consulted some of the texts later included in the most important pharmacological work of the Ming era, namely the
Bencao Gangmu
or
Compendium of Materia Medica
by Li Shizen, published in 1596 and containing the names of 1,892 plants, 11,000 recipes for cures, and 1,100 illustrations. The work also made the first mention of a method of immunization against smallpox, over two centuries before Western medicine. Ricci commented on the methods of Chinese medicine in his letters—“they do everything delicately with herbs”
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—and reported admiringly that the physicians were able to treat dental problems by inserting “iron” into the teeth, by which he probably meant something similar to fillings or primitive dentures.

The Jesuit also found useful information in the numerous Chinese geographic treatises featuring the different provinces of the empire, which he studied carefully with the intention of using them to draw more accurate maps of the country than those commonly circulating in Europe. The maps of the East published in the West were in fact not only incomplete in their representation of largely unexplored countries but also contained misinformation due to the unscrupulous manipulation of data by the Spanish and Portuguese so as to enhance the importance of the territories whose trade they monopolized. Ricci warned De Fornari not to trust maps of the world because of the gross mistakes they made, “either through lack of knowledge or due to the disputes over borders between the kings of Portugal and Spain,” and announced his resolve to correct the inaccuracies: “They will now cease.” He set to work immediately by calculating the geographic coordinates of Macao and deciding to do likewise for each of the other Chinese cities he would visit.

The Charade of the Permit and the Letter from Wang Pan

Ricci hoped that his stay in Macao would be short and that he would soon be able to settle in China together with Ruggieri, not least because various signs seemed to indicate that the Chinese authorities were not as hostile as had been thought.

While he was still en route from Goa to Macao, the governor of the Guangdong province, Chen Rui, resident in Zhaoqing to the northwest of Canton, expressed his desire to receive Macao’s two highest authorities, namely the bishop and the captain of the garrison, in an official audience. The invitation was significant, and the Portuguese decided to accept, albeit with the precautionary step of sending Michele Ruggieri and the judge Matthias de Panela, two figures of lesser official standing, in their place.
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Their meeting with the governor, described by Ricci in his subsequent account of these events as “shrewd and fond of money,”
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proved most cordial. The official showed his appreciation of the mirrors and lengths of velvet and wool presented to him as gifts and entrusted the two visitors with silver to buy other goods in Macao, asking them to return with new Western objects for a further meeting, at which only the judge was present. Being obliged by illness to remain in Macao, the Jesuit took care to send a pair of reading glasses, articles still unknown in China and in great demand throughout the East, as a personal gift, together with the promise that he would deliver a mechanical clock in person as soon as he was better.

The effects of these attentions were beyond all expectations, as the governor was so pleased with the gifts that he gave the judge a permit authorizing Ruggieri and a fellow priest to reside in China. Given this unexpected opportunity, Valignano decided to act quickly. As Ricci had now arrived in Macao together with Francesco Pasio, the Visitor asked the latter to take up residence in China with Ruggieri instead of leaving for Japan, despite his awareness that neither of them had yet mastered the language. After settling in, the two missionaries would be able to submit a request to the authorities for Ricci to join them. Valignano authorized Ruggieri and Pasio to adopt the dress and appearance of Buddhist monks, exchanging their customary black apparel for the traditional gray robes and shaving their heads and chins. In view of the fact that bonzes enjoyed great respect in Japan, where a Jesuit mission had been successfully established, this step was intended to convey the idea to the Chinese that the two men were priests in the easiest and most immediately evident way.

Ruggieri and Pasio arrived in Zhaoqing at the end of December 1582
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and soon obtained permission from the authorities for Ricci to join them. In the meantime, Valignano set off again on his constant travels throughout the East for the purpose of organizing the missions, heading this time for India.
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Before Ricci was able to join his companions, however, the governor was removed from office by one of the
guan
responsible for ensuring the smooth functioning of the provincial administration—one of the dreaded censors known as “the emperor’s eyes and ears”—and the missionaries’ position in China became most precarious. Ruggieri and Pasio were ordered to return to Macao but managed to obtain a letter from the mandarin addressed to the
haidao
in Canton, who was in control of the entry of foreigners, asking him to grant the missionaries permission to reside in the provincial capital. While awaiting an audience with this official, the missionaries returned to Macao, and Pasio was authorized to continue on his way to Japan, abandoning the Chinese enterprise forever.

When the new governor, Guo Yingpin, took office in Zhaoqing, his subordinates found a copy of the letter delivered to the Jesuits by his predecessor in the records. Given the absence of any documentation of the steps that had been taken as a result, the officials feared punishment for failure to perform their duties and instructed the Portuguese authorities to return the original, which was lying unused and “sealed so that it could not be opened” in the Jesuit residence in Macao. Determined not to miss this opportunity for slipping through the meshes of the Chinese bureaucracy, the rector Francisco Cabral decided to ignore the order and to send Ruggieri and Ricci to present the letter to the
haidao
.

It was then that the missionaries entered the labyrinth of Chinese bureaucracy, discovering its complexities and its almost infinite procedural ramifications, and becoming aware that the strict laws safeguarding the territories of the empire were applied with the utmost rigor by some officials and with considerable elasticity by others. In order to be received by the
haidao
, authorization had to be obtained from the district official resident in Xiangshan, not far from the provincial capital, who made it known, however, that he regarded a document issued by a sacked governor as devoid of any validity. The missionaries then decided to leave without authorization, but nobody was prepared to take two foreigners without written permits by boat to Canton. Fortunately, the hostile official suddenly left Xiangshan, and his replacement, who knew nothing about the matter, granted the Jesuits permission to present themselves to the
haidao
. The latter, however, proved just as elusive as he was courteous, claiming that he lacked the power to grant a residence permit and advising the Jesuits to apply to the new governor, supposedly the only individual capable of doing so. After so much effort, they found themselves back at square one.

Not only were the Jesuits ordered to leave Canton posthaste, but the governor also had an edict posted on the walls of all the towns in the province forbidding anyone to grant foreigners residence permits and threatening anyone who taught Chinese to foreigners with severe punishment. Ricci and Ruggieri returned to Macao “with practically all hope now lost of ever being able to obtain entry . . . into China.”
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In August 1583, less than a week after their return to Macao, Ricci and Ruggieri received a letter signed by Wang Pan, prefect of the region in which Zhaoqing was located and hence an administrative official of a certain importance, inviting them to take up residence in the town. This came as a great surprise. Nobody could imagine what had induced Wang Pan, an official famed for his integrity, to ignore the edict just issued by the governor, his superior. Some later reconstructions of the events suggest that Wang Pan was prompted by curiosity, having heard of the Jesuits’ mechanical clock—the “bell that rang by itself”—and wishing to see it for himself; others that the mandarin had learned that Ricci and Ruggieri were experts in mathematics and astronomical calculations and wished to meet these two sages from far away.

Ricci saw Wang Pan’s invitation as a sign “more likely to have come from heaven than through human agency,” but he also thought more prosaically that the handsome gratuity bestowed by Ruggieri on some administrative officials during his first stay in Zhaoqing so as to secure their intercession on the Jesuits’ behalf might have finally borne fruit.

Whatever the contingent reasons may have been, this development was one of great symbolic significance. After all the Jesuits’ fruitless efforts to gain entry to China, it was a mandarin that took the initiative and invited them in. Events had taken a turn favorable to the missionaries through unfathomable subterranean processes.

Residence on Chinese Soil in Zhaoqing

Ricci and Ruggieri prepared to leave for Zhaoqing at the end of August. The first difficulty was raising the money to finance the opening of the new mission, since the eight thousand ducats assigned to the Jesuits of Macao had disappeared with the wreck of yet another Portuguese ship the year before. The Portuguese merchant Gaspar Viega came to their aid with an offer to cover their initial expenses pending the arrival of fresh funds by sea.

With shaven heads and chins and clad in gray robes, with the addition of a square cap similar to the biretta of Catholic clergy
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being the only detail distinguishing them from Buddhist monks, the two Jesuits embarked at the beginning of September 1583, together with some servants and their Chinese interpreter, Filippo, a convert to Christianity born in Macao. They were to sail up the Pearl River to Canton, receive the permits needed to continue their journey from the
haidao
, and then proceed along the river to Zhaoqing with a military escort sent to protect and watch over them by order of Wang Pan.

Most of the transport in China took advantage of a network of rivers and canals enabling vessels of all shapes and sizes to proceed through the country. All the merchants in the south of China stopped in Canton, where the most important markets were located. Ricci’s impression on leaving the provincial capital was that the port of the densely inhabited metropolis was more crowded than Venice or Lisbon and that the Pearl River, which he judged to be wider than the Po, was so congested as to constitute “one long harbor.” When the Jesuit learned that the capital, Beijing, could also be reached by way of the river and canal system in approximately three months, he had the image of China as “an enormous Venice,” as he wrote to Giambattista Román, the Spanish procurator resident in the Philippines, from Zhaoqing on September 13, 1584.
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Sailing alongside the Jesuits’ medium-sized junk were all kinds of sampans, the flat-bottomed wooden boats used in the Far East for rivers and coastal waters; huge barges carrying materials or passengers; and the sumptuously equipped and decorated ships of eminent mandarins. Ricci found out that the Chinese distinguished all vessels in terms of their cruising speed, the fastest junks being called “wind boats” and the slowest craft “horse boats.” In addition to the vessels in motion, he observed ramshackle sampans moored along the banks and used as dwellings for entire families together with a few ducks and chickens.

The two Jesuits saw the rich Chinese countryside opening up before their eyes, rice paddies and cultivated fields alternating with plantations of sugar cane, thick clumps of bamboo, orchards, and market gardens. Along the banks of the river, lined in the Chinese fashion with embankments covered in vegetation and “cool, shady” trees, they saw peasants carrying large wicker baskets hung at both ends of long bamboo canes resting on their shoulders. When the river came to one of the very numerous and thickly inhabited villages, they caught glimpses of enclosures full of pigs, ducks, geese, chickens, goats, and water buffalo. Ricci could see no flaw in the well-being of the inhabitants of the fertile land “full of trees and gardens” into which he was now venturing for the first time. On viewing the regular succession of villages and towns, he formed the unreal idea of China as a very orderly country. As he wrote to Román, “The whole of China looks as though it was constructed by a mathematician who went around, compasses in hand, putting all the inhabitants in their right place.”

On September 10, 1583, after about ten days of travel, the Jesuits disembarked in Zhaoqing, a town of subtropical climate surrounded by wooded hills, cultivated fields, and orchards at the confluence of the Xi Jiang, a tributary of the Pearl River, and one of its lesser branches. They were taken with no delay to an audience with the man who had arranged their entry into China, the prefect Wang Pan, before whom they knelt down and asked for permission to remain and live in the town in order to worship their god, the Lord of Heaven and Earth. The official gave them a warm welcome and responded to their request for land on which to build a house by granting them permission to look for a suitable site. The missionaries found a spot meeting their requirements just outside the city walls and close to the point where the two rivers met, which Ricci described as “very cool due to the many trees and gardens all around it.”
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An octagonal nine-story pagoda called the “blossoming tower” or “tower of good fortune” was already under construction there to house the city’s administrative offices. Traditionally erected with an odd number of floors gradually decreasing in size, towers were used throughout Chinese territory as religious or public buildings.