Matteo Ricci (8 page)

The Confucian philosophy consisted of a set of primarily ethical and political precepts and made no mention of metaphysics. It put forward a hierarchical and ritualistic conception of society and laid great stress on culture as a means of human improvement. The resulting ideology had a deep and lasting influence on Chinese culture and constituted the basis for the creation and perpetuation of the form of centralized, bureaucratic government existing in China since the birth of the empire.

The bureaucracy consisted of about twenty thousand officials stationed in every part of the country during the late Ming era. While 10 percent of these worked in the capital, the others—governors, prefects, and magistrates, whose respective areas of jurisdiction were provinces, prefectures, and districts—were appointed in Beijing and were sent to serve in provinces other than those of their birth so as to prevent favoritism. As they did not know the dialect of the cities in which they served, they were assisted in their relations with the population by the local administrative staff, who represented the second level of the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats were divided into nine ranks, the ninth being the lowest and the first the highest, which were in turn subdivided into two levels. The duties and privileges of the
guan
were minutely codified according to their rank. The color of their robe was red for officials of the fourth rank and above, and blue for all the others. The style of accessories, such as headgear and boots, also changed according to hierarchical position. The most immediately obvious insignia of rank was the embroidered birds, as Ricci had noted on the mandarin square of Wang Pan, starting with quail for the lowest level and rising through oriole, mandarin duck, heron, silver pheasant, wild goose, and peacock, to golden pheasant and crane. The
xie zhai
, a mythological creature of menacing appearance with a scaly body and a horn to gore miscreants, was instead the embroidered badge of the dreaded censors.

While hierarchies were unquestionable, duties precise, priorities absolute, and procedures implacable within the framework of the state machinery, corruption and the abuse of power, as Ricci was to observe on various occasions, were as widespread as in Europe, and many officials were all too ready to supplement their low salaries by making decisions in favor of those able to offer valuable gifts.

Not all of the
shidafu
, meaning the literati who had passed the imperial examinations at one or more levels, held posts in the state administration and were therefore
guan
. Some failed to obtain employment, some fell into disgrace and were removed from office, and some were on leave for the three-year period of mourning customary on the loss of a parent. Those holding no position in the bureaucracy devoted their energies to teaching in the state schools and to giving private lessons to prepare candidates to sit the imperial examinations, for which there was great demand. Commissions to draw up documents, memorials, and letters in the styles appropriate to different circumstances were another lucrative source of income. Those with no need to worry about money could simply cultivate their knowledge, dabbling in calligraphy, writing poems, and taking part in the countless
shuyuan
or academies of the late Ming era, where intellectuals and men of culture would gather to discuss philosophical, ethical, and political subjects. Only a minority devoted themselves to the study of technical disciplines such as mathematics and medicine, which were considered sciences of an inferior level in China. As a pastime, the
shidafu
enjoyed playing
wuqi
, a “war game” in which they could display their talent for strategy at the purely theoretical level.

While scholars and landowners were at the top of the social ladder, merchants were held in much lower regard, rich and poor alike, being preceded in terms of priority also by farmers and artisans. Commerce and economic activities were in fact despised by the Confucian ideology but nevertheless underwent a phase of explosive expansion in the late Ming era, especially in the southeast of the country. The most prosperous entrepreneurs, who made their money through the manufacture and sale of silk, cotton, porcelain, valuable wood, and every other kind of merchandise, even took the liberty of wearing precious silk garments like high-ranking officials, although this was prohibited.

It was immediately clear to Ricci and Ruggieri that their primary contacts in the variegated panorama of Chinese society should be with literati and state officials, as these were the most cultured classes and were the most closely connected with the imperial power structure. Once the linguistic barrier had been overcome, the
shidafu
and
guan
would be able to hear and understand the Jesuits’ message, grant them the indispensable permits required for residence on Chinese soil, and facilitate their relations with the local authorities. In order to communicate with them on an equal footing, Ricci studied Mandarin Chinese assiduously and practiced reading and writing the literary language every day. After nearly a year in Zhaoqing, he was already able to speak Chinese without an interpreter.

The Five Continents:
The First Edition of the Map of the World

Time passed. The two Jesuits had pawned the prism for the equivalent of twenty
scudi
to pay for the material needed to build their residence and were now in debt. Ruggieri decided to seek funds in Macao and left on a junk with thirty oarsmen placed at his disposal by the prefect Wang Pan, who asked him to bring back a clock, declaring his readiness to pay any price for one of the “bells that ring by themselves.”

Ruggieri reached his destination only to find that the coffers of the Jesuit college were empty, and he was forced to stay there for a few months awaiting the arrival of ships from Japan with silver for the missions. As he had not even managed to find a clock for the prefect, he sent an expert craftsman of Indian origin to construct one in the Jesuits’ residence in Zhaoqing. Ricci describes the man in his history of the mission as a very dark-skinned “
canarino
,” the term used for the inhabitants of the Canary Islands, who were similar in complexion to Indians.

During the absence of his companion, Ricci realized the true extent of the hostility felt by a section of the population, who used injurious epithets like “foreign devils” to refer to the missionaries. Rumors had long been spread that the building of the tower was secretly financed by the Portuguese with the intention of entering China in the wake of the Jesuits, and the building was now known with contempt as “the foreigners’ tower.”

The mounting tension reached a climax when stones were thrown at the missionaries’ house one night. A servant rushed out and caught the youngster responsible but wisely decided to let him go for fear of making matters worse. Sometime later, the boy’s parents reported Ricci to the authorities for having used a magic potion to paralyze him and hold him captive for three days with the intention of selling him in Macao. The charges were immediately brought to the office of Wang Pan, who summoned Ricci to an audience. The interpreter spoke in his defense and showed the prefect the stones thrown at the house, which he had taken with him as evidence. Wang Pan ordered the Jesuits to send the clockmaker, whose presence was seen as a danger by the population, back to Macao and decided to hear the other witnesses. Three officials involved in the construction of the tower who were present at the time unexpectedly spoke up for the missionaries, and the short trial came to an end. The accuser was beaten “very cruelly” on the legs with wooden sticks, a traditional form of Chinese punishment that could be continued to the point of causing the death of the guilty party. The following day, the prefect presented the missionaries with a new edict to be hung in their entrance forbidding any further molestation.

Peace returned to the residence, and the local dignitaries resumed their regular visits. The objects that the mandarins observed with the most curiosity included a planispheric map of the known world
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that Ricci had hung on the wall of the room in which he received guests in order to show them his country and to teach the Chinese some geography.
13
The Jesuit had in fact noted that the local maps presented a Sinocentric view of the world, with China shown as occupying practically all of the known lands. While Europe and America did not even appear, countries like Japan, Korea, the tributary states of Southeast Asia, the regions to the north of China, and India were so small that the surface they occupied all together was less than a single Chinese province. America and Europe were instead clearly marked on Ricci’s map, and China was shown in its correct size.

In actual fact, not all of the Chinese maps totally ignored the rest of the world, as some drawn in the past included countries of Central Asia and the regions of Africa reached by the seafaring expeditions of the eunuch Zheng He. It is, however, a fact that the existence of the five continents was not known to the Chinese in the Ming era.

Ricci was convinced that ignorance of geography was one of the causes of the hostility felt by the Chinese toward foreigners:

Their conception of the greatness of their country and of the insignificance of all other lands made them so proud that the whole world seemed to them savage and barbarous compared with themselves; it was scarcely to be expected that they, while entertaining this idea, would heed foreign masters.
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While pleased to be able to show the Chinese something they did not know, the Jesuit noted that their reactions to the European map were by no means unanimous. Some took offense on seeing their country so diminished; some concealed their perplexity in laughter, a ploy the Chinese often used to cover up embarrassment; and some took the representation to be a sort of Taoist amulet. There were a few literati who believed that that map was accurate and who displayed an interest in discovering everything Ricci knew about the faraway countries shown there. One of these was the prefect, who was eager to learn everything the newcomers had to teach him and who was so impressed by the European map of the world that he asked the missionary to make him a copy with the Western names translated into Chinese.

Ricci thus realized that with the aid of an image—something far more effective than an explanation in his still-halting Chinese—the distant world from which he came had found a place in the scholars’ imagination, and meaningful contact had been established between Chinese and European culture.

The Jesuit set to work in response to the prefect’s request. Being obliged to cut China down to size but afraid of giving offence, he hit on a way of making his more realistic representation of the earth easier to accept. Diplomatically abandoning the Eurocentrism of Western maps of the world, he placed Asia in the center, with the Americas on the right and Europe and Africa on the left, thus granting China a privileged position while showing its true proportions with respect to the other countries. He also took care to include information from the Chinese sources he had been able to examine. The
Yudi shanhai quantu
, or “complete map of the mountains and seas,” has not survived, even though Ricci also sent copies back to his superiors, but historians have managed to reconstruct it on the basis of reproductions and descriptions found in documents of the period.
15
The Jesuit indicated the five “zones” into which the world was divided with Chinese names—North and South America, Asia, Libya (Africa), and Magellanica, meaning the Antarctic area with its still indefinite boundaries—and did the same for the oceans, the major seas, the Nile and the Plate (the only two rivers shown), and China, with Beijing and all the provinces of the empire. He indicated the cardinal points and drew the lines of latitude and longitude and the equator but not the tropics.
16

Engraved on wood blocks and printed in 1584, the map of the world drawn in Zhaoqing was the first Western-style map to appear in a Chinese version. Ricci subsequently made a number of increasingly detailed versions including new information from European and Chinese sources, but always with China in the central position. By a significant coincidence, the year in which Ricci’s map of the world was printed in China also saw the first publication of a map of China in Europe. Drawn by the Portuguese Jesuit Luis Jorge de Barbuda, it appeared in an edition of Ortelius’s atlas.
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While Wang Pan liked Ricci’s map of the world so much that he had his own name added to it and numerous copies printed as gifts for friends, not all of the literati shared his enthusiasm. One furiously objected that China was drawn too close to the North Pole. Others mocked the author. “When they saw the world so great and China in one part of it, so small in their estimation, the more ignorant people began to make fun of the description.”
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Those who instead tried to understand it were pleased to see that the Jesuits’ homeland was too far away to constitute a threat. Nobody would send troops from such remote kingdoms to invade China.

Together with the map of the world, Ricci presented the mandarin with the clock that the craftsman had begun to construct and that he had completed himself. Wang Pan was very happy but gave it back a few months later, as he could not get it to work. In the meantime, having noted the great success of mechanical clocks, Ricci decided to place a very large one on the outside wall of his residence to ring the hours so loud that it could be heard all through the neighborhood. This was the first public mechanical clock of Western style to appear in China. Though greatly admired, it was not used to tell the time, not only because it was inaccurate, but also because the Chinese divisions of time were different from those in the West. The standard unit of time in China was twice as long as an hour, and the day was divided into one hundred quarters of an hour instead of the ninety-six of the West. Moreover, day and night were divided into periods of different length,
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impossible to represent on a Western dial. It was easier for the inhabitants of Zhaoqing to tell the time by observing the sun and the stars, as country folk had always done all over the world. Despite their appreciation of Western technology, the scholars also found it more practical to follow the traditional divisions of time.