Matteo Ricci (17 page)

During a stop for supplies in a small port, Ricci discovered that the magistrate Liu Wenfang, an acquaintance from Shaozhou, was stopping there on his way back from Beijing after the customary journey made every three years to pay homage to the emperor. Having arranged to make a formal visit of courtesy, the Jesuit decided that this would be a good opportunity to show off his new garments of silk made for him shortly before leaving, which had been stored in a leather trunk. Now sporting a long beard and flowing locks, Ricci donned for the first time the robe of dark red silk with blue borders and the customary long, wide sleeves; a belt in the same colors; new embroidered slippers of black silk; and a tall, stiff, black square hat that reminded him so much of a bishop’s miter. As he wrote a few months later to his fellow Jesuit Girolamo Benci, “We had all adopted Chinese dress, retaining the square biretta in memory of the cross, but this year I have even dispensed with that for an outlandish hat, pointed like a bishop’s, so as to become totally Chinese.”
28
He also prepared the indispensable book of visits, entrusted it to the servant who was to accompany him, and had himself borne in a litter to the door of the magistrate’s temporary residence, where he waited for the master of the house to greet him on the threshold in accordance with ceremonial etiquette.

While not surprised by the change in dress, this acquaintance displayed greater respect for Ricci than he had on their previous meetings, when the Jesuit was dressed as a monk. He bowed with his hands and sleeves joined in the customary greeting and repeated the phrase
qing qing
, (“please, please”). Ricci returned this greeting with the same gestures but remained standing instead of kneeling down. The mandarin then took a chair, positioned it in the place of honor facing north, dusted the seat symbolically, and invited his guest to be seated. The missionary took a chair in turn and placed it before Liu Wenfang with the same gestures. During the learned conversation that followed, Ricci spoke in Chinese with no difficulty whatsoever, quoting various passages from Confucius and Mencius from memory. It was a duet performed on an equal footing by a Confucian scholar and a missionary who acted just like a Confucian scholar.

When the time came for Ricci to take his leave, the master of the house accompanied him to the door insisting that he should stay, in accordance with ritual. After a series of bows, Liu Wenfang withdrew and appeared to have gone back definitively into the house before reappearing on the threshold for the last farewell, as custom required, just when Ricci was about to enter his litter.

Expulsion from Nanjing

The party encountered no further obstacles as they continued along the river. The Jesuit wrote down the latitudes of the towns they passed through, using a small astrolabe to make rough calculations of the position of the sun and the stars with respect to the horizon. He took note of the mountains, lakes, and rivers, as well as of changes in the landscape and crops, with the intention of drawing a detailed map of the vast territory he was discovering little by little, well aware that he was the first European to penetrate into the heart of the China of the Ming dynasty.

The convoy made a brief stop in Nanchang, where news of the presence of a foreigner soon spread and a crowd gathered. Ricci decided to stay on board in order to avoid incidents. After setting off again, the party stopped to visit a Taoist temple in front of which a market had been set up with an abundance of local produce. Prompted by curiosity, Ricci entered the picturesque building full of believers, but his presence soon attracted attention. When it was clear that the Jesuit displayed no reverence before the statue of the saint, a group of the faithful insisted on his kneeling down and resorted to force when he refused. One of the vice minister’s servants intervened to extricate him from this awkward situation and took him back to the junk with no further incident. Ricci decided that he would never again enter a temple without previously declaring his religious convictions.

The junks continued on their way and entered Lake Boyang, an immense river basin more than one hundred kilometers in length. A short distance from the northwest shore was Mount Lushan, its peak always hidden by stormy clouds and whose slopes were said to be dotted with over three hundred Buddhist temples visited by thousands of pilgrims. On reaching the town of Jiujiang on the far side of the lake, the junks entered a bend of the mighty Yangtze, or Yangzijiang, the longest and most important river in the empire. Called the “Blue River” or “Long River” (Changjiang) by the Chinese and actually the fourth longest in the world, the Yangtze starts at the foot of the Tibetan plateau in the western province of Qinghai and runs a distance of 5,800 kilometers before flowing into a majestic estuary on the Yellow Sea north of present-day Shanghai in the Jiangsu province. A great and pulsating artery of the empire, the Yangtze runs the entire width of China and constituted for centuries the only channel of communication between the innermost regions of the country and the eastern coast.

Ricci was struck by the width
29
and depth of the river as well as by the countless junks of all sizes crowding its waters. He saw four-masted vessels with the customary sails of rush matting and noted that groups of smaller junks traveled side by side in small fleets for protection against the frequent attacks of pirates lurking in ambush along the banks. He observed strange groups of two-story bamboo rafts and realized that they were houseboats moored to the bank and used as temporary dwellings by the merchants who stopped there to conduct their transactions. Proceeding northeast along the Yangtze and generally sailing close to the strong north wind, the junks cut diagonally across the southern part of the present-day province of Anhui.

The Jesuit admired the towns and houses erected along the banks of the river, and the small temples built on the peaks of rocky islands, from which the monks emerged to ask the passing vessels for offerings, and he observed how the vegetation and climate changed before his eyes. With the Guangdong province now behind them, the rice paddies had begun to give way to fields of grain with rows of windmills alongside them. Isolated willows and pines grew in place of the luxuriant bushes and trees that lined the banks to the south. Ricci was glad of a break from the rice-based diet and enjoyed the oatcakes bought very cheaply from sellers along the banks, together with an abundance of freshly caught fish.

The Jesuit realized during stops that firewood was a rare commodity in that part of China and was sold at high prices by those who built up stocks for the winter. He was told that for heating during the coldest months, the peasants burned the canes that grew along the banks or a fuel that he had never seen before, a dark substance that he described as “a sort of bitumen-like mineral or stone that they extract from mountains, which produces heat for a long time but no flame and has a smell similar to sulfur.”
30
It was coal, widely used in China at the time but practically unknown in Europe.

Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who had traveled to Cathay three centuries before Ricci, also spoke with wonder in his
Travels
of the “black stones” burned in winter for heat. Ricci was well acquainted with Polo’s work, which had enjoyed very large circulation in Europe, and he began to think over what he had read there during the long journey along the river, noting many similarities with what he was now discovering. He remembered that Marco Polo had also described a great river flowing from east to west and separating the nine kingdoms in the south of Cathay from the six in the north, as wide as a sea and used by a quantity of vessels of such size as to cause amazement. Polo called this the
Chian
,
Chiansui
, or
Quian
, but Ricci began to think it might actually be the Yangtze. The Jesuit was greatly struck by these similarities because everyone in sixteenth-century Europe was convinced that the Cathay where Marco Polo had lived and the China that traded with the Portuguese and where Ricci was now living were two different countries, the former shown on all the maps of the time as located in an unspecified area northwest of the latter.

It was nearly a month since the beginning of the journey and eleven days since the departure from Ji’an when the group of junks entered the province of Jiangsu. They reached Nanjing on the western bank of the Yangtze on May 31. Ricci was most curious to see the second capital, which the Chinese considered the most beautiful city in the world, and he resolved to settle there.

Nanjing covered a very large area, it had a population of one million inhabitants, and it was protected by three rings of city walls. The outermost, which ran for a distance of sixty kilometers, enclosed the village in which Ricci took temporary lodgings. The second,
31
thirty kilometers in length, encircled the city proper and had thirteen gates. The third, situated in the heart of the metropolis, protected the Imperial City, the location of the palace where the Son of Heaven had lived when Nanjing was the capital. This was subsequently used as a model for the Forbidden City, the imperial residence in Beijing. China’s second city was guarded by a contingent of fifty thousand soldiers.

As soon as he had settled in, Ricci entered the city for a short exploratory visit. On observing the system of rivers and canals with stone bridges running through the center, he was reminded of the description in Marco Polo’s
Travels
of a beautiful town called Chinsai (or Quinsai) full of canals crossed by “twelve thousand bridges.” The city mentioned by Polo was in fact almost certainly Hangzhou in the Zhejiang province, which had even more canals than Nanjing, but Ricci, who had no way of knowing this, confined himself to noting the surprising similarities between what he saw and Polo’s words.

Nanjing was richly provided with vegetable gardens, lakes, parks, and wooded hills. The open-air markets offered an extraordinary abundance of meat, apricots, and all kinds of fruit, as well as peanuts, pine nuts, and vegetables at very economical prices. Ricci admired the sumptuous palaces, the great mansions, the towers, and the innumerable pagodas, but he judged the architectural style of the edifices as somewhat austere due to the absence of the triumphal arches of colored wood and stone that embellished the other towns he had visited, such elements being forbidden in an imperial city. Although the urban landscape was charming, Ricci noted a “vigilant and suspicious” atmosphere in the streets and thought it safer to continue his explorations in a covered litter. It did not take long for the Jesuit to find mandarins who had heard of him through friends that had made his acquaintance during their travels to Zhaoqing and Shaozhou. The
guanxi
, or network of social contacts based on common acquaintances, also worked in Nanjing, and the Jesuit was invited to numerous banquets where he presented himself dressed in silk as a
daoren
or “master of the Way.”

The basis for his stay in the second capital was very fragile, however. Without the intercession of an authoritative mandarin willing to vouch for him, it was impossible to obtain permission from the authorities to reside in the city. On the advice of friends, Ricci turned to Xu Daren, undersecretary at the ministry of public works. They had met when the mandarin was military supervisor in Zhaoqing, and he recalled making him the gift of a terrestrial globe and an hourglass and receiving an informal invitation to visit Nanjing.

The dignitary received Ricci with every honor but became hostile on learning of his desire to settle in Nanjing, as he had no wish to be accused of favoring the entry of foreigners into the city. Determined not to jeopardize his career, he cut their meeting short, promised another, and immediately ordered information to be gathered about the missionaries. When Ricci was admitted to the second audience, Xu Daren announced that he had been informed of the missionary’s expulsion from the town of Zhaoqing on charges of conspiring against China. He decreed that the missionaries could not stay in Nanjing and sent his men to threaten their landlord, forcing him on pain of torture to sign a document undertaking to hire a junk at his own expense and to make sure in person that they boarded it the following morning and left the city forever. The Jesuit had no choice but to obey and decided to fall back on Nanchang, as advised by the farsighted vice minister of war with whom he had left Shaozhou.

After the failure of his attempt to reach Beijing, this expulsion from Nanjing dampened Ricci’s customary optimism, and he succumbed to dejection during his journey to Nanchang. He tells us, however, that one night Christ appeared in a dream bringing consolation and assurances that his plans would eventually succeed, and he saw himself walking freely in a splendid imperial city. The memory of this vision made him feel stronger and more hopeful on awakening. Having regained his combative spirit, he succeeded in making friends with a dignitary from Nanchang that he met during one of his stops, who promised to help him find accommodation in the city through acquaintances.

China and the Cathay of Marco Polo

On his way back along the river, Ricci thought over the extraordinary similarities between Marco Polo’s descriptions and the cities and countryside of the provinces he was traveling through, and he began to wonder whether Cathay, which he called “
Cataio
,” and China were not in fact the same country. He knew that the kingdom visited by the Venetian merchant was considered a mysterious and mythical place whose immense riches fired many with the desire to travel there. He also knew that its exact geographic location was still unknown, as no one had since been able to retrace Polo’s journey to the outermost frontiers of Asia. Ideas about Cathay were still as confused in the sixteenth century as they had been in the fifteenth, when Columbus had attempted to reach the Indies by sailing westward on the celebrated expedition that led to his landing in the Americas in 1492. Well acquainted with the
Travels
, the Genoese navigator took with him a letter addressed to the Great Khan, or “
Gran Cane
,” as Marco Polo called the emperor of Cathay, and expected to be able to meet him on arrival at his destination. The search for Cathay was continued in the sixteenth century, particularly by the English, who were prevented from using the routes to the eastern markets that circumnavigated Africa, which were monopolized by the Portuguese, and who hence were eager to find new routes to the north of Europe. At the end of the century, however, Holland was also engaged in unsuccessful expeditions in search of a northeast passage to the East, above all with Willem Barents.