Matteo Ricci (20 page)

This involved creating an imaginary building in the mind
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proportionate in size to the amount of information to be stored there. A small house, temple, or pavilion could be used for just a few elements, whereas a series of constructions, each with various rooms, would be needed to contain hundreds. The next step was to create images associated with the items to be memorized and place them inside the building. Any item could then be recalled by entering the building mentally and seeing the images stored there.

As Ricci went on to explain in greater detail, the concepts to be memorized had to be associated with images capable of arousing strong emotions, like human figures in motion performing precise actions, wearing clothes indicative of their occupation and social status, and with facial expressions showing their frame of mind. As an example, he showed how to memorize the four Chinese characters meaning “war,” “to want,” “profit,” and “goodness.” He started by drawing a building with just one room and the entrance facing south and constructed four images by breaking down the Chinese characters representing those concepts. Since the character “war” was composed of two ideograms, one meaning “spear” and the other “to stop,” Ricci associated it with the image of two warriors in combat—one holding a spear and the other clutching him by the wrist—and drew it in the first corner. The character “to want,” formed by the components “woman” and “West,” was associated with the image of a woman from a western tribe and was drawn in the second corner. As a combination of “corn” and “blade,” “profit” was associated with the image of a peasant cutting corn, and “goodness,” composed of “mother” and “child,” was associated with a woman holding a child in her arms. These two images were placed respectively in the third and fourth corners.

Ricci pointed out that while this prototype “palace of memory” was very simple, a trained mind could expand and furnish it to memorize further concepts in a crescendo of mental associations and symbolic representations.

The Jesuit gave a copy of his work to the governor, who passed it on to his firstborn son with exhortations to make good use of it. His friends were quick to have it printed for circulation among the eagerly awaiting
shidafu
. The scholars appreciated the treatise as a display of learning but found the technique described far too complicated and less practical than the method they had learned in childhood, which consisted of repeating and copying characters and phrases over and over again until they were imprinted in the mind, possibly with the aid of rhymes or mental associations.

The Chinese friends, hoping to see the secret of Ricci’s memory revealed so that they could take advantage of it, were therefore disappointed. For those not as naturally gifted as the Jesuit, who had managed to learn Chinese as an adult in just ten years, the path of study was above all one of hard work and commitment, with no shortcuts, as the governor’s son was quick to realize. Having read Ricci’s treaty, he told the author that the technique would be no good to him, as only someone already endowed with an exceptional memory would be able to use it successfully.

The “Absurdities” and Achievements of Chinese Astronomy

Ricci took care to maintain a ready supply of gifts for dignitaries by constructing the small scientific and astronomical instruments that had now become his calling cards. The sundials that he made on the basis of what he had learned at the Roman College proved very popular in Nanchang. The Chinese also produced these devices in a range of sizes, including a portable variety fitted with a magnetic compass for orientation and an adjustable dial for use in different latitudes. The Chinese sundial differed in conception from the Western one, however, as it reflected the polar and equatorial character of Chinese astronomy. In studying the variations of the celestial vault during the seasons, the astronomers of the Middle Kingdom attached greater importance to observation of the pole and the circumpolar stars,
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whereas their Western colleagues concentrated above all on the stars in the zodiac. Moreover, the Chinese referred the position of the celestial bodies to the equator rather than to the ecliptic, as in the West.
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Ricci’s failure to perceive the radical differences between Chinese and Western astronomy led him to underestimate the former. He did, however, sometimes note real errors in the local instruments used for the measurement of time, as in the case of some sundials in Nanchang that were not correctly calibrated for the city’s latitude.
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The Jesuit constructed sundials of various sizes and had the finest of these, made in black agate for the governor, inscribed in Chinese with the names of the constellations of the zodiac, the duration of the days and nights in the various months of the year, the hour at which the sun rose and set, and the date of entry into the different constellations. The decorated sundial was such a success that the missionary constructed many others of the same type by request. The happy few who received them as gifts allowed their friends to make copies on paper by means of the xylographic procedure for making inscriptions on stone in the temples.

Ricci noted that many of the
shidafu
whom he presented with instruments were keen to understand how they worked and took an interest in his descriptions of the structure of the universe. Encouraged by their curiosity about Western astronomy, he explained the Ptolemaic system to the more intelligent among them, as well as the use of the astrolabe, showing them how to calculate the altitude of stars above the horizon. The latter task was made much easier by reference to the drawings in the
Astrolabium
of Christopher Clavius, which he had asked his old professor of mathematics to send and had just received.
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The Jesuit’s increasingly close relations with his circle of friends and acquaintances confirmed him in his belief that Chinese intellectuals had only a primitive grasp of scientific knowledge, and he went so far in a letter to a still unidentified addressee
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dated October 28, 1595, as to give a list of the erroneous ideas he heard in conversation as “absurdities” of Chinese astronomy. According to Ricci, the Chinese were still convinced that the earth was flat and were unaware of the existence of the antipodes. Moreover, many of them accepted explanations of natural phenomena based on bizarre beliefs and had no idea of the real size of heavenly bodies. For example, they believed that the sun was not much bigger than “the bottom of a barrel” and that it was hidden behind a mountain that blocked its beams at night. Solar eclipses, considered as unlucky in China as comets were in the West, also gave rise to fanciful explanations. The Chinese character for an eclipse meant “to eat” and reflected the ancient belief that the sun disappeared from view because it was swallowed by a dragon. The extent to which this idea lingered on in the Ming era is shown by the fact that when the phenomenon took place, the imperial astronomers would perform the ancient ritual of beating drums and playing bronze instruments in the public squares in an attempt to “rescue the sun” by scaring the dragon away.

Ricci was not surprised that the common folk accepted such rudimentary explanations of natural phenomena, since ignorance of the laws governing them was just as widespread in Europe as in China. He was surprised, however, that such farfetched ideas should be shared by the cultural elite of the country. In a letter to Superior General Acquaviva dated November 4, 1595,
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he commented that the scholars knew little of science and devoted too much attention to “morality and elegance in speaking or rather writing.” The same letter mentioned another Chinese conception of the universe that he considered a glaring error: “They think that the sky is a void and that the stars move in the void.” The Jesuit had evidently heard of the
Xuauye
, or “dark night,” cosmology dating back at least to the fourth century, according to which the universe is infinite, boundless, and empty, and the celestial bodies floating within it evolve in a process of constant transformation of indefinite duration. Ricci considered this simply absurd by comparison with the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic conception of the universe as born out of an act of divine creation, motionless, limited in space and time, and precluding any possibility of a vacuum.

Though devoid of any theoretical framework, this Chinese vision of the universe is closer to contemporary cosmological hypotheses than Ricci’s, and the void, as described by the physics of our day, is a basic concept encompassing the secrets of the constant transformation of matter and energy. The theory put forward by the missionary was indeed backward, even for his day, and was on the verge of being superseded by developments in European astronomy. At the very time when he was talking about these subjects to the Chinese, broader-minded European scientists were in fact becoming convinced of the validity of the heliocentric theory developed by Copernicus and were abandoning the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The clash between Galileo and the Church over the Copernican system was less than twenty years away. Despite the Pisan scientist’s forced recantation in 1633, the more accurate description of the universe was to become established in the following decades, and the conception of the universe in which Ricci firmly believed was to be jettisoned forever.
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Sure of himself and unaware of the course that scientific progress was to take, the Aristotelian Jesuit was convinced of the overwhelming superiority of his knowledge, not least because his reputation as an astronomer was borne out by the facts when he predicted the timing and duration of the solar eclipse of September 22, 1596, with greater accuracy than the Chinese astronomers by consulting the tables he had brought with him.
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This was a small personal triumph. From that moment on, as he wrote with just a touch of overemphasis to Acquaviva,
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the inhabitants of Nanchang began to consider him “the greatest mathematician and natural philosopher,” a view that he admitted he would have shared if the whole world had been reduced to China. In a letter to Girolamo Costa, he spoke of being “another Ptolemy” in the estimation of the Middle Kingdom’s inhabitants.
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In actual fact, even if we disregard their cosmological views about the structure of the universe, Chinese astronomy was by no means as backward as it may have appeared, and it had certainly not been so in the past. Historians of science have established that the Chinese astronomers of antiquity were well in advance of their Western colleagues in many fields, especially observations. The Chinese had studied the heavens meticulously since the dawn of time, listing the stars and recording every celestial event with far greater tenacity and precision than any other people. It is to them that we owe, among other things, the earliest and most detailed star catalogues. While Ptolemy listed 1,028 stars and 48 constellations in the third century
bc
, an almost coeval Chinese catalogue included 1,464 stars and 284 constellations, and one compiled two centuries later had 10,000 stars, the highest number ever recorded.

China also produced maps of the heavens long before the West. The most renowned of these is the planisphere drawn by the geographer and astronomer Suzhou—tutor to the heir to the throne Huang Sheng—in 1193 and subsequently carved in stone. It presents a typical Chinese division of the celestial vault into twenty-eight segments of different widths, each characterized by a particular constellation serving as a point of reference.

In addition to a description of a solar eclipse discovered on a fragment of animal bone used for casting oracles and written over one thousand years before the Christian era, China can also boast the earliest records of sunspots, the dark, irregular shapes that appear and disappear cyclically on the sun’s surface as a result of magnetic disruption of the solar magma. Indicated in the ancient language with a character meaning “crow” or “dark,” their appearance was regularly recorded in China back in the pre-Christian era, together with details of their shape, size, and duration.
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Sunspots were instead still unknown in the West during the late sixteenth century and would remain so until first observed by Galileo with his telescope in 1610, nearly two thousand years later.
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The appearance of supernovas was also documented in China long before the West. As is known, the Chinese records for 1054 included the most famous event of this kind ever observed, an explosion in the Taurus constellation that shone so brightly as to be visible also by day for three consecutive weeks.

Ricci was naturally inclined to underestimate Chinese astronomy, as he had no way of knowing its history and primacy with respect to the West. As historians of science have pointed out, his assumption of superiority was not always justified. In any case, Western and Chinese astronomy were the products of worldviews and methods of investigating nature so far removed from one another as to make direct comparison very difficult. Moreover, as the Jesuit was only just beginning to understand, the role of astronomy in Chinese society was very different from the one it performed in Europe. In China it was a state science, and astronomers were government officials working in conditions of semisecrecy and reporting directly to the emperor.

Astronomy and the Emperor

The role of astronomy as a science at the service of the imperial regime went back to the dawn of Chinese thinking and influenced the development of the discipline from the very outset. Chinese philosophy saw the heavens and the earth as intimately and indivisibly interwoven, and the universe as an immense organism in which the various parts communicated with and were influenced by one another in the same way as the organs of the human body. The entire universe evolved in accordance with the Tao and underwent constant change driven by
qi
, or vital energy, endlessly circulating in the infinite variety of its manifest forms. This vision was incompatible with the description of the universe accepted by practically all of the European scientists of the time, whereby the heavens and the earth were radically different in nature. The former, the realm of God, were eternal, incorruptible, and perfect, whereas the latter, man’s dwelling place, was exposed to the variability of natural phenomena and was subject to decline, decay, and death.