Matteo Ricci (22 page)

Along the “Grand Canal” to the Capital

Ricci returned to Nanjing, the city from which he had been expelled three years earlier, after a journey of two weeks. On entering the city, he realized that the distrust of foreigners perceived on the first occasion had not diminished but had indeed worsened due to developments in Korea, where fighting had started again after a truce. Despite China’s reconquest of Pyongyang and the peace negotiations already underway, the Japanese had launched a new offensive that was now in full swing, and the fear of invasion was spreading all through China. All foreigners were regarded indiscriminately as enemies, and nobody would offer the Jesuits accommodation for as long as the war lasted. To ensure his safety, Ricci stayed on the minister’s junk and traveled in a covered litter when visiting local dignitaries to ask for advice on how to obtain an audience with the emperor. The mandarins he approached explained that it was indispensable to have the relevant authorities send a memorial to the court stating the reasons for the request, but when Ricci had one drawn up by a specialist scholar and submitted it to the official responsible for forwarding it to Beijing, the
guan
refused to accept the document of a foreigner.

Wang then suggested that Ricci should follow him to Beijing, where he had to go for the month of celebrations organized to mark Emperor Wanli’s thirty-fifth birthday on 17 September. The mandarin would travel overland and the Jesuits on the junks carrying his baggage. This was the best opportunity Ricci could have hoped for, so they prepared for departure.

From Nanjing, a short stretch of the Yangtze led east to the Imperial or Grand Canal, running almost parallel with the coast through the provinces on the eastern seaboard to connect the south and north of China. It comprised a series of canals, each about forty meters wide, and stretches of river linked by a system of locks to create an entirely navigable waterway of 2,500 kilometers.

One of the most impressive works ever accomplished by man, the Grand Canal is a masterpiece of hydraulic engineering, a field in which the Chinese have excelled ever since ancient times due to the need for good channels of communication and efficient irrigation systems in a vast territory subject to long periods of drought. Work on the great project began between the sixth and seventh centuries
ad
during the Sui dynasty and continued through the following eras with the construction of new stretches and the rebuilding of older ones. It was entirely restructured from 1411 on in the Ming era, with a view to the transition of the capital to Beijing, so as to facilitate the transport of provisions for the court and the tributes of grain and rice from the southern provinces. The investment was colossal, and the improvements were radical and huge in scale. A workforce of 165,000 people was employed in the Shandong province to build the four reservoirs, fifteen locks, and one dam needed to channel water from the rivers into the Grand Canal and regulate the water levels in each of the stretches. Work was carried out farther south to free some stretches of the rapids that were responsible for at least one shipwreck a day according to the chronicles of the time.

The Imperial Canal was an endless construction project teeming with activity. Nearly fifty thousand men worked full time on its maintenance, and the transport of the tributes of agricultural produce alone required more than one hundred thousand people with over ten thousand vessels.
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Even though most of the expense for transport and maintenance was borne by the local authorities, the costs of the great waterway were a burden on the empire’s finances, and the duties paid by private merchant vessels at the stations along the way did little to offset the losses.

Ricci was fascinated by his journey through the economic and commercial heart of the empire, even though he failed to understand why the Chinese preferred this far slower and more laborious way to a short, quick voyage by sea along the coast for fear of pirates. Swift progress was in fact prevented not only by intense traffic but also by long waits at the locks to enable the transit of vessels from one stretch of river or canal to another with differing water levels. The junks were forced to line up and wait their turn at these bottlenecks for days at a time. Even though important mandarins like Wang had the right of way over merchants, delays were inevitable.

Ricci continued his journey of discovery northward through China with ever-growing interest, watching the countryside full of densely populated villages and fields of grain, rice, and millet unfold before his eyes. He never tired of recording distances and place names, making approximate calculations of the latitudes of the more important localities and noting the positions of major lakes, rivers, and mountains. He was amazed at the hundreds of vessels passing close to his at every hour of the day and night, and he observed the junks carrying perishable materials such as fruit and vegetables stop at the supply depots to stock up with ice. At one stage in the journey, his junk overtook an immensely long line of timber-carrying barges hauled by thousands of laborers on the bank. One barge after another, the line stretched along the river for nearly three kilometers by his calculations. The sailors told him that the wood was from the central-southern province of Sichuan and would be used to rebuild some pavilions of the Forbidden City destroyed in a fire two years earlier. Weighed down by their cargo, the barges would take at least a year to reach the capital.

After a month of travel and a long stretch through the Shandong province, the junks crossed the Huang He, the second-longest Chinese river (after the Yangtze), known as the Yellow River due to the deposits of loess that colored the water and kept it cloudy. Ricci recalled the Chinese phrase “when the Yellow River runs clear”—an event traditionally supposed to take place only once every thousand years—being used to indicate that something would never happen. The deposits that built up in the river along its course of 5,400 kilometers raised the level of its bed and led in the rainy seasons to the terrible floods for which it had always been known as “China’s Sorrow.”

Another month of travel brought Ricci to Tianjin, the “port of Beijing,” one day away from the walls of the capital, where it was obligatory to leave the vessels and continue overland, as the last stretch of the Grand Canal was reserved exclusively for junks carrying goods for the court.

The First Time in Beijing, the City of Dust

Ricci entered the capital of the empire for the first time on September 7, 1598, fifteen years after arriving in China and 323 years after Marco Polo reached Khanbalik, the capital of Cathay, located on the same plain not far from Beijing.

He encountered two stretches of walls on entering from the southern part of the city, the first built in 1553 to delimit the “outer city” of houses developed over the centuries in the southern section of the original city, and the second controlling access to the “inner city,” its most ancient nucleus. Consisting of a stone base and a superstructure of brick filled with beaten earth, the walls were the most imposing Ricci had ever seen, far taller and thicker than those encircling European cities. He estimated that twelve horses could have run abreast along the walkway on the top. Soldiers and eunuchs responsible for collecting excise duties were stationed at the city gates, which were closed at night and were kept under military guard. The city was built like a series of nested boxes, with the inner city surrounding the walled citadel of the Imperial City, the residence of the court and off limits to common mortals, and in the center of this the Forbidden City with the imperial palaces and the apartments of the reigning family, the true heart of the empire.

Cattaneo and Ricci were put up by Minister Wang, who had arrived before them, while the two Chinese novices and the servants stayed in rented accommodations. The
guan
had just heard that he would shortly be promoted to the post of minister of rites in Beijing and thought that it would be very easy to help his friends obtain an audience with the emperor once the appointment had been officially confirmed.

Ricci began to explore the city. He found it more austere than Nanjing, but its inhabitants initially appeared friendlier than in the south of the country. The produce on sale in the markets proved very expensive, as it was mostly imported from other provinces. He noted on walking through the streets that the curse of prostitution was even more widespread than in the other Chinese cities, and he was informed that there were as many as forty thousand whores.

Ricci soon noticed that Beijing, where it seldom rained, was enveloped in a cloud of dust that rose from the unpaved streets and mixed with a fine brown sand from the Gobi desert. The inhabitants wrapped their heads in black veils as protection against this almost imperceptible but omnipresent dust, which penetrated houses, closets, and trunks, worked its way between the pages of books, and clouded the delicate porcelain on display in the wealthier homes with a light patina. Ricci adopted the practice of covering his head, which also performed the useful function of concealing his foreign appearance.

He used the available means of public transport to explore the city, which offered the visitor a range of litters of various sizes or a horse or mule with a guide familiar with the streets and the addresses of public offices and officials. If no means of transport were obtainable for hire, it was possible to find one’s way with the aid of the guidebook that all outsiders bought on entering the city, even though it was easy to get lost in the maze of
hutong
, or alleys, running through the most densely populated districts. Ricci noted on entering the homes of some dignitaries and minor officials that they had the same architectural structure as the poorer dwellings. They were low buildings surrounded by walls that concealed everything inside with a wooden door and a high step to keep evil spirits out. The houses of dignitaries had decorated front doors, and pairs of stone lions symbolizing power flanked the palaces of the most important
guan
. The entrance provided access to a square courtyard lined with trees and wooden arcades onto which the pavilions and rooms opened, a structure recalling the peristyle houses of ancient Rome. In a mansion owned by a wealthy mandarin, there would be another door in the side of the courtyard opposite the entrance providing access to another courtyard surrounded by rooms, and so on, in a reiteration of the same elementary structure directly proportional to the owner’s wealth.

The climate in Beijing was much drier and harsher than in Nanjing, and the inhabitants used coal for heating as well as cooking, the bedroom being nearly always located beside the kitchen so as to take advantage of the heat produced during the preparation of meals. The model of the brick
kang
, or sleeping platform, connected to masonry conduits channeling hot air from the kitchen was widespread throughout the north of China.

The more Ricci explored the city, the more similarities he noticed between his own observations and his memories of Marco Polo’s
Travels
, which prompted him to seek further evidence that Beijing and Khanbalik were one and the same. If Cathay really was a large and powerful country situated east of Persia, as it was believed in Europe, why had Ricci never heard it mentioned by the Chinese during all his years in China? Additional support for his conjecture was provided by two elderly Turks resident in Beijing for forty years. Having arrived as members of an embassy to the Son of Heaven, they had never been granted permission to return to their native land for fear that it might organize a military expedition against China, and they were forced to live as prisoners at the government’s expense. They told Ricci that China was still called Cathay in Muslim countries and that that capital was known as Khanbalik, or “
Cambalù
” as he wrote it. This information was borne out by some Persian merchants. Ricci probably discovered also that during the Mongol dynasty, the Chinese used the term
Dadu
, meaning “Great Capital,” instead of Khanbalik.

The confusion of the Mongol, Chinese, and subsequently Portuguese names used for China and Beijing had caused “our cosmographers to make two kingdoms out of one . . . with no possibility of finding out the truth until today.”
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Certain that he had now cleared up all doubts and taking it as established fact that China and Cathay were one and the same, Ricci wrote again to his superiors in India and Italy but failed to convince them. The idea of Cathay was so deeply rooted in Western culture that it could not be dislodged very easily, and as we shall see, the Jesuit would have to try and try again before his brethren began to think that he might be right.

After his first superficial explorations of the city, Ricci tried to obtain an audience with the emperor. Since Wang had still to take office as minister of rites and was therefore powerless to help, the Jesuit was obliged to seek the support of other officials. He thus found out that in order to arrive at the imperial court, it was indispensable to negotiate with the
taijian
, or eunuchs, who operated a power structure parallel to that of the
guan
as a sort of private bureaucracy serving the emperor and controlling access to the Imperial City.

Ricci met a eunuch supposedly willing to act as an intermediary and showed him the gifts for the emperor. Having heard that the Jesuit was an expert alchemist, the
taijian
said that he would only help in exchange for his secret formulas for making silver. Ricci denied any such knowledge and was unceremoniously dismissed with the information that the war in Korea had made foreigners unwelcome and there was no possibility of being received at the court until it was over.

Meanwhile, the celebrations for the emperor’s birthday had come to an end, and Wang, whose appointment was still awaiting ratification, was obliged to leave Beijing, having no grounds for prolonging his stay in the capital. The mandarin could do nothing more for his friends at present and advised them to return to Nanjing with him. The missionaries decided to remain in the hope of finding support elsewhere. Manuel Dias, who had taken over as superior of the Jesuit College in Macao after the death of Duarte de Sande the previous year, sent a bill of exchange to finance the missionaries’ stay in the capital, but they were unable to cash it, and the same thing happened with another sent from Japan. Now devoid of sufficient funds and treated with growing hostility by the
guan
to whom they applied for assistance, they finally resolved to leave Beijing and await a “better time and better opportunity” to return. Ricci was bitterly disappointed and described the capital as a “Babylon of confusion rife with every kind of sin.”
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