On March 11, 1688, the people of the northwest quarter of Beijing lined the streets to watch a funeral procession that was far more modest than that which had carried the coffin of the grand dowager empress from the Forbidden City a month before but that had its own points of interest and singularity. It included a delegation of high officials of the imperial court headed by Tong Guowei, whose family members were said to “fill up half the court.” Kangxi’s mother had been a Tong. Now a daughter of Tong Guowei was one of the most important of the imperial consorts. A family of bicultural origins, the Tongs had made the most of their ability to function effectively both in Manchu and in Chinese society. They had gained power as agents of the court in the provinces during campaigns against the rebellious Three Feudatories in the 1670s.
While the officials watched, the great varnished coffin of the deceased was brought out into the street and placed under a silk canopy of white, the color of mourning. Sobbing mourners prostrated themselves before the coffin as the procession formed. First came a band of musicians, followed by a group carrying a great tablet bearing in gold characters the name and titles of the deceased: Nan Huairen, president of the Imperial Board of Astronomy. Then there were many flags and banners and a large cross, carried between two rows of solemn Chinese Christians, each holding a lighted candle and a handkerchief to wipe away tears. There followed a large picture of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus holding the world in His hand. A portrait of the deceased accompanied an elegy composed by the emperor and written on a banner of yellow satin, both surrounded by a crowd of Chinese Christians and Jesuit missionaries, all in mourning dress. The coffin swayed along, borne by sixty men, accompanied by the eminent delegates of the court and a host of courtiers and officials on horseback. Fifty cavalrymen, impressive in their silent good order, brought up the rear.
From the first missionaries down to our own day, any foreigner who wants to fit into Chinese society takes a Chinese-style name. It should reflect in some way the sound of his European name as well as something of the values and commitments he brings to China. Nan Huairen was Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit. Nan reflected a syllable in his personal name. Huairen, “Cherish Benevolence,” proclaimed his allegiance to the highest and most demanding of the Confucian virtues, requiring complete selflessness, compassion for others, and constant moral self-examination, surely a Confucian virtue that a Jesuit would have no qualms about espousing for himself and his Chinese converts.
Verbiest had been a most worthy successor to his Jesuit confreres Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall von Bell. All three were expert in the very delicate art of using science, technology, and secular learning in the service of the Chinese imperial court to negotiate a space of tacit tolerance for Christian missionary activity in the empire. Ricci had made a profound impression on some eminent late Ming literati, and his renown, his learning, and the European clocks he presented had won him enough of a foothold at the late Ming court that on his death in 1610 the emperor had granted a plot of land for his burial, where several other Jesuits later were buried. It was toward that cemetery in Zhala, outside the northwest gate of the city, that Verbiest’s coffin was being carried. Schall had skillfully navigated the crosscurrents of the last years of the Ming, peasant rebellion, and Qing conquest, then had won the affection and favor of the young Shunzhi emperor, father of Kangxi and the first Qing ruler in Beijing, only to be imprisoned and almost executed in the last years of his life, after Shunzhi’s death. Under Ming and Qing he had demonstrated the superiority of European computational and observational astronomy and had been placed in charge of the important work of preparing the imperial calendar for each New Year. He too was buried at Zhala.
Born in 1623 in a village near Kortrijk in western Flanders, Verbiest had been educated by Jesuits except for one uncomfortable year in the Jansenist-dominated University at Leuven. After his Jesuit novitiate and ordination he had.made some efforts to go as a missionary to South America but then had made his decision for China in 1657. By 1660 he was in Beijing, never to leave it again except when he accompanied the Kangxi emperor on two expeditions beyond the Great Wall. Schall’s death had been followed by several anxious years when three Jesuits in Beijing languished in house arrest while all other missionaries were confined in Canton. Then, on Christmas Day 1668, court eunuchs had abruptly summoned the Beijing Jesuits to answer the young emperor’s questions about astronomy and the calendar. Stunned by the lively intelligence and curiosity and the political mastery of the sixteen-year-old Kangxi emperor, the Jesuits had demonstrated the superiority of their astronomy in repeated tests, so that their rivals and critics were dismissed and they were restored to favor and to responsibility at the Board of Astronomy.
The emperor’s interest in the Jesuits, and in their learning and technical skills, was authentic and personal. Over the next twenty years the Jesuits often had ridden off at dawn to a suburban palace to give the emperor a lesson in astronomy, physics, or mathematics. The emperor had learned a bit of Western music and delighted in several elaborate fountains and mechanical toys the Jesuits made. They had supervised the casting of some small cannons for use against the rebellious feudatories in the south. They had made a few converts in the bicultural court society, endured the embarrassments of visits to their church by cynical courtiers and palace ladies, and done their best to answer the emperor’s rather sharp questions about what seemed to him to be the contradictions of their teaching of the Holy Trinity. They had served as interpreters for Portuguese and Dutch embassies and now were involved in the negotiations with the Russians. The Jesuits found much of this secular activity distasteful and at odds with their missionary vocations, but their successes after 1668 had led to permission for other missionaries to reside in the provinces. Their good standing at the court did much to ensure that provincial officials would treat the missionaries well, and by 1688 a fitful discussion had begun that was to lead in 1692 to a formal imperial declaration that Roman Catholicism was not in conflict with good order and cultural orthodoxy and that Qing subjects might legally convert to it.
At the cemetery the missionaries read the prayers and performed the graveside ceremonies of the Church of Rome and then knelt while Tong Guowei read the imperial edict praising Verbiest’s services to the Qing and expressing the emperor’s sadness at his death. Father Thomas Pereira replied, expressing the Jesuits’ grief and also their immense gratitude for the favor the emperor had shown them by sending the edict and such eminent delegates. The Jesuits later learned that the emperor had been pleased by these expressions of gratitude and had bestowed new honorary titles on Verbiest and a gift of silver toward the construction of a monument over his tomb and the engraving of his edict on a marble tablet.
Five of the Jesuits who knelt at Verbiest’s tomb that March day in 1688 were newcomers, having reached Beijing just too late to receive Father Verbiest’s blessing before he died on January 28, 1688. (The most probable reason for the six weeks’ delay of Verbiest’s funeral was that no such public event could take place while the emperor was in mourning for the grand dowager empress.) The five newcomers all were French, and their arrival just after the death of the last of the pathbreaking court Jesuits makes these first months of 1688 a transitional point; up to this time the Jesuit mission in China had drawn its priests from all Catholic Europe but had been under the control of the Portuguese crown, which claimed patronage over all Catholic missions in Asia under the post-Columbus treaties dividing the world between Spain and Portugal. The French priests, although a welcome infusion of talent and manpower, represented a direct challenge to that Portuguese monopoly. Their learning and literary abilities also were to give some new turns to old arguments about the appropriate Catholic attitudes toward the heritage and values of Chinese civilization.
The story of the Jesuit encounter with Chinese civilization from Ricci on illuminates some of the global intersections in the early modern world. The expanding net of European sea voyages led to encounters with previously unknown peoples, many of whom the Europeans fitted into well-established human types. They considered the peoples of the Americas and sub-Sahara Africa to be as savages, occasionally noble, but more often cannibals or otherwise subhuman. The Muslims of the Indian Ocean were nothing new, simply “Moors,” followers of the epileptic impostor Muhammad, enemies of the Christian God. Hindus and Buddhists were worshipers of idols, often of the devil, and believers in a doctrine of transmigration of souls they probably had learned from the Pythagoreans. But the experience of China did not fit into categories derived from the European and Mediterranean past. China’s bureaucracy of learned men, who claimed to draw their moral guidance not from God or gods but from a hallowed past of sage rulers and teachers, and the good order, populousness, and wealth of the country had no precedent in earlier European experiences of alien peoples. Ricci, deeply impressed by the learning and moral seriousness of his intellectual Chinese friends, as they were with his, became convinced that large elements of the Chinese elite tradition were compatible with Christian belief or could be made so without fundamental change. Confucianism, in particular, could be treated as a secular or civil tradition in a synthesis analogous to Saint Paul’s linking of early Christianity with Hellenic culture or to the Renaissance mixes of Catholic fervor with adulation and study of the Greek and Roman heritage in which Ricci and his confreres were steeped.
Ricci’s accommodations to Chinese ceremony and terminology never were without opponents even within the Society of Jesus, but they were debated among the missionaries in a nuanced and fairly open-ended manner until Manila-based Dominicans and Franciscans entered the China missions in the 1630s and soon took their condemnations of the Riccian accommodations straight to the Roman Curia. The baffled Curia, with no independent sources of knowledge of China, agreed with whichever side had last presented its explanation of Chinese realities and issued contradictory directives that settled nothing. Conferences among the missionaries confined in Canton in the late 1660s had led only to tenuous new understandings, and even these were challenged when the gifted Dominican polemicist Domingo Fernández Navarrete slipped away from Canton, made his way to Europe, and mounted a skillful campaign against the Riccian accommodations in books and in lobbying at the Holy See. Verbiest sought to rebut Navarrete’s views. Nothing was settled in 1688, and the next fifteen years saw an eruption of “Rites Controversy” polemics in Europe. A papal legation sent to Beijing to reassert papal control over the practices of missionaries and converts in China outraged Kangxi and shattered the fragile goodwill that Verbiest and his confreres had built up.
In the 1680s, however, despite the jurisdictional confusion and the simmering quarrels over the Riccian accommodations, China seemed to hold much promise for the growth of Catholic missions. Promoters of a French role in the missions soon made plans to send a party of French Jesuits to China. These missionaries were to be completely independent. To improve their welcome in Beijing, they were to be chosen for their ability in mathematics, astronomy, and related fields. Moreover, in a wonderfully baroque use of the passion of the age for facts and maps, their refusal to submit to other church authorities was to be explained on the grounds that they were going not as missionaries but as scientific observers, collecting geographical and astronomical data for the Academy of Sciences.
Six Jesuits sailed from Brest early in 1685 on the ships that carried the Siamese ambassadors, the sieur de Chaumont, and the abbot of Choisy to Ayutthaya. In 1687 five of them went on to China on a Chinese junk, arriving at Ningbo in July. Kangxi, delighted to learn of the arrival of Jesuits who knew mathematics and astronomy and brought scientific books and instruments, summoned them to the capital. Thus it was that the five French newcomers to Beijing were among the prominent mourners at Verbiest’s funeral. For one of them, Jean-François Gerbillon, his mission to collect geographical information was about to expand beyond his wildest imaginings. A high-ranking delegation, led by the redoubtable Songgotu and by the emperor’s uncle Tong Guogang, was about to set out to attempt to meet the Russian envoys who had spent the previous winter at Selenginsk. The Russians now were overcoming the linguistic barriers that had inhibited earlier communications with the Qing court by regularly bringing with their envoys a Polish secretary or two who would translate each communication into Latin, to be translated into Chinese and Manchu by the Jesuits in Beijing. Thus it was thought necessary that two Jesuits should accompany the Qing envoys. One would be Thomas Pereira, who had been in Beijing for fifteen years and had won special favor by teaching the emperor Western music. Gerbillon would be the other.
Early on the morning of May 30, 1688, Gerbillon, who had been in China for less than a year and in Beijing for four months, joined in an imposing procession of seventy or eighty officers and about a thousand cavalrymen that set out from the capital to the north, seen off by the emperor’s “eldest son.” This probably was the thirteen-year-old heir apparent, whose instabilities of character and morality may already have contributed to the emperor’s emotional displays of filial piety before and after the death of the grand dowager empress.
For every day of his four-month journey through the steppes, Gerbillon, scientific investigator dispatched by the Academy of Sciences, as much devoted to the augmentation of knowledge through the careful observation of particulars as were Rumphius and others whom we shall meet later in this book—Hans Sloane, Claude Perrault, Locke, Leibniz—noted down the distance and direction of the day’s progress, the nature of the country, its animals, plants, and people. In the first days he described the great fortresses that guarded the valleys to the north of Beijing and the immense wall that linked them, which “descends to the precipices, and climbs to the top of inaccessible rocks.” Impressed by the feats of construction, he thought the results added little to the security provided by the mountains themselves and found many points on it meagerly garrisoned.
On June 2 the expedition reached the city of Baoan. “This city has two walls, entirely of brick. The land around it is the best and most fruitful we saw in all this valley, the grains and other crops are very fine, although the land is a little dry. The Chinese have discovered the secret of watering their fields by making the water of springs in the vicinity run through canals which they have dug; they draw the water from these canals manually.” At the next town a rich merchant gave a banquet for Tong Guogang, and Gerbillon was told that even Uzbek and Persian merchants came there. This zone was thoroughly controlled by the Qing. Local officers came to pay their respects to Tong Guogang and Songgotu. By imperial command local people regularly brought cattle and sheep to feed the expedition.
On June 7 Gerbillon saw his first Mongol camp and wrote down a full description of the construction of a yurt and a more cursory description of the apparent poverty and uncouthness of the people. He predictably had no use for the lamas—senior monks in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, often believed to be reincarnations of a godlike figure or holy teacher—toward whom “the Mongols display a veneration beyond all expression.” He was convinced that the Qing court’s cordial treatment of them was solely for the sake of Mongol politics and asserted that in Beijing they quickly became accustomed to wearing fine clothes and bought the prettiest women slaves “on the pretext of marrying them to their slaves.” From June 15 to 17 the party camped near Huhhot, then already a major Mongol center and today the capital of China’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. Gerbillon accompanied Tong Guogang and Songgotu to the principal Lamaist temple, and was appalled by their reverence toward the young man who was venerated as a reincarnated Bodhisattva. They prostrated themselves before “the pretended god,” who placed his hands on the head of each and had each touch his prayer beads. The “Living Buddha” wore a long robe of fine yellow satin with a multicolored border, not unlike the vestments of a Catholic priest, which completely covered his body; when he reached out for a cup of tea, Gerbillon could see that underneath the robe his arms were bare and he had only a plain red and yellow monastic robe thrown over his shoulders. The meal that followed included some decent rice and soup, but also some disgusting dried fruits, oily cakes, and half-cooked chunks of meat. They toured the temple, parts of which seemed clean and well decorated, and saw a child also venerated as a Living Buddha.
Gerbillon was regularly measuring the height of the sun and calculating his latitude. He commented frequently on how cold it was at night and how hot in the middle of the day. Leaving Huhhot, the party struck nearly straight north, hoping to make contact with the khan of the Khalkhas. The scattered trees and cultivated fields that had been seen from time to time on the road to Huhhot disappeared. There were many rabbits, antelope, wild goats, pheasants, and wild geese, and the soldiers hunted every day. Gerbillon was delighted to be served a delicate pheasant egg omelet. The party split up to follow three separate routes. Now they saw a few Khalkha camps, which seemed even more impoverished than those of the Mongols farther south. Finding enough water for the expedition’s hundreds of horses and camels was a daily worry.
On July 8 the party came across a miserable camp of twenty-five to thirty Khalkha yurts. Some of the people had come from farther north, fleeing the invading forces of Galdan of the Dzungars. Even the senior lama, brother of the Khalkha khan, was said to be fleeing to the south. The next day the column turned back south to rejoin the other two so that the commanders could consult about this new situation. By July 22 they had rejoined Songgotu and his column and had received orders from the emperor that they were to turn back to Beijing and write to the Russian ambassador at Selenginsk to make new arrangements for a meeting. This was a great relief; the weather was very hot, the horses were growing tired and thin, and the unsettled conditions to the north added immensely to the risks of an attempt to reach Selenginsk that summer.
As the party made its way back toward Beijing, they learned that orders had gone out to all the Mongol vassals of the Qing to mobilize their forces against the Dzungars. Some of them also were to join the annual imperial hunt, north of the Gubei Pass, which this year would have even more than usual the air of a military exercise. On August 12 Gerbillon witnessed one of the more low-key days of the hunt, in which a double circle of soldiers and servants gradually closed in while frantic hares tried to find a way out, even trying to run between the men’s legs; 157 hares were killed in less than three hours. On August 29 he was able to examine and describe a wolf and some antelope that had been killed on the hunt. The route now led through much better country, then a difficult gorge, and there were apricots and sour wild cherries to be picked along the way. On September 27 they caught up with the imperial hunting camp. Gerbillon was deeply impressed by its orderly layout, with the guards and high-ranking officers’ tents nearest that of the emperor, which did not seem a great deal larger or more splendid than the others but had a gold ornament on its highest point. The high officials and the Jesuits went out to wait beside the road and greet the emperor as he returned from the hunt after dark; His Majesty greeted them courteously, remarking that they must be very tired.
The party now continued on its way toward the capital. The mountain scenery was pleasant and less daunting than farther north, and there were even some wild grapes and wild pears near the road. The road was much more commodious because this was a route the emperor often took on his hunts. The party returned to Beijing on October 6; the emperor arrived on the eleventh. On December 9 the Jesuits gathered at the tombs of Ricci, Schall, and Verbiest for a further ceremony ordered by the emperor, at which his mourning edict was read aloud in Manchu.
The adventure was wonderful, the glimpses of the splendor of the imperial court fascinating, the information collected would delight the Academy of Sciences, but Pereira and Gerbillon had had only one or two occasions when they managed a bit of discussion of religion with the great men in charge of the expedition and had had to grit their teeth as they saw them groveling before a Living Buddha. The Jesuits’ purpose in leaving behind their families and the comforts of their native lands and making such long and dangerous voyages was to save souls. The favor of the imperial court was essential to the safety and continuity of the mission enterprise, but the fruits seemed to come so slowly. Beijing court society had produced a few distinguished converts, including some Manchus of the imperial clan and some Tong relatives. It was said that there were some eighty thousand converts in the Shanghai area, which had been the home of Ricci’s first significant convert. Other centers of Catholic growth were much smaller but could be extremely robust; the area around Fuan in Fujian Province, ministered to by Dominicans from Manila, had many zealous converts, and they and their descendants were to remain steadfast through many troubles in the eighteenth century. But there were never enough missionaries, and they were too conspicuously foreign, too vulnerable to suspicion of foreigners even when official policy was benign, too likely to die before their language learning and acculturation reached a level where they could interact with people effectively. Missionaries shook their heads at their converts’ difficulties in learning Latin, and many of them were convinced that the Chinese character simply was not suited to the rigors of priestly life, but slowly the missionaries came around to the idea of a native priesthood.
Thus it was that on August 1, 1688, three Chinese—Liu Wende, Wan Qiyuan, and Wu Li—knelt before Bishop Gregorio Luo Wenzao in a church in Macao and were ordained priests in the Society of Jesus. Luo himself was a singular figure, educated and ordained by the Manila Dominicans, going along somewhat hesitantly with their opposition to the Riccian accommodations to Chinese tradition. Wan had been received into the society at Hangzhou, where there had been a solid Christian community since late Ming times. Liu had come into the orbit of the missionaries as an official in the Board of Astronomy in Beijing and used the Western name Blaise Verbiest. Wu Li was the kind of convert the Jesuits dreamed about, a poet and painter admired in the best circles of creativity and connoisseurship, a participant in the moral and intellectual ferment of the early Qing who had found in Christianity, as the Jesuits had argued since Ricci’s time, the supplement to and completion of his Confucian quest.
Born in 1632, Wu Li was too young to have taken an examination degree under the Ming before 1644, so he was not bound by any formal ties of obligation to the old dynasty. But opportunities for advancement through the examinations were limited in the early Qing, and in any case his real interests were in painting and poetry, for which by the 1660s he was associating with some of the most famous masters in the empire. In the 1670s Wu Li joined in intellectual and literary circles that were especially interested in Song Dynasty poetry, with its vivid observations of mundane realities, and in poems and plays with historical themes, which had special resonances to men who had lived through the dramas of the Ming-Qing transition. Wu also associated with men who sought to give concrete expression to Confucian values through local meetings for moral exhortation and the study of classical texts. But for some the gap between utopian dreams of social and cosmic harmony and the present dusty realities was too wide, the conventional stories of the rise and fall of dynasties too full of delusion and chicanery. Such men needed a “single lord” to follow and worship, a new way of understanding the origins and nature of the world.
Most participants in these quests turned from Confucianism to Buddhism, or vice versa, or tried to revive some strand of Chinese popular religion and hero worship. Wu Li became, in 1679, one of the handful who made the astonishing leap to commitment to an obviously foreign faith. He at first planned to accompany Philippe Couplet, S.J., to Europe but then remained in Macao, becoming a novice in the Society of Jesus in 1682. A series of his poems from these years are vivid evidence for his skills as an observer and describer: the little white houses of the slave quarters, the Chinese fishermen coming in at night, the slaves singing and dancing to a guitar at a church festival, Wu and his European confreres struggling to converse with each other and sometimes having to write things out in their different scripts. He also expressed his growing understanding of his Christian faith in poetry. One poem begins as a conventional Chinese expression of sympathy for the hard life of a fisherman, then notes that lately Catholicism has come to his city, and some friends of the fisherman’s have changed their job: “[T]hey now are fishers of men.” It ends with a wry naturalistic touch, worthy of the best Song poets, as the fisherman realizes that converts keeping the fasts of the church will be better customers for his fish.
The Jesuits had made some risky accommodations with Chinese culture, and some of their critics were convinced that Chinese Christians under Jesuit tutelage were crypto-Christians at best, with no sense of the terrifying drama of the death and resurrection of the Son of God and the salvation He offered to each sinner. Such accusations cannot survive a brief acquaintance with Wu Li’s Christian poems:
By nature I have always felt quite close to the Way;
When done with chanting my new poems, I always concentrate my spirit.
Prior to death, who believes in the joy of the land of Heaven?
After the end, then comes amazement at the truth of the fires of hell!
The achievements and fame of this ephemeral world: footprints of geese on snow;
This body, this shell in a lifetime of toil: dust beneath horses’ hoofs.
And what is more, the flowing of time presses man so fast:
Let us plan carefully about the ford that leads to the true source.
And perhaps it was in connection with his ordination on August 1, 1688, and his own first mass that he wrote:
Again he washes his hands,
and then turns around.
He prays that he and all assembled sinners
may be washed clean with not an iota left:
only then may they not betray
Jesus’ compassion.
Why does he make the sign of the Cross over and over again?
The holy death took place nailed thereon.
The Jesuits risked all to change China. Many Chinese were respectful, and some converted. Chinese specialists in computational astronomy recognized and adopted the Jesuits’ superior techniques. Many Chinese painters, although not the most ambitious and culturally pretentious ones, tried to learn something of Western techniques of shading and perspective. But the religious and cultural impact of the missionaries’ message remained limited and local; Wu Li’s conversion was not the beginning of a great trend. Ricci had stumbled on a time of exceptional cultural openness and deep questioning of received modes of thought, but by 1688 most Chinese intellectuals had resolved their tensions in ways that had nothing to do with a foreign religion. China’s culture was changing, self-critical, but it had no unquenchable thirst for novelty, no principled quarrel of ancients and moderns, before about 1900. A thirst for new facts and new places was not absent, but it was not as widespread and obsessive as in the culture of seventeenth-century Europe. Whereas China’s vast publishing industry rarely put out anything that offered a connected picture of the distant lands from which the traders and missionaries came, in 1688 Europe, and especially France, there was a wave of publishing about China that crested about 1700 and continued far into the eighteenth century. The anti-Christian polemics of Voltaire and other masters of the Enlightenment ironically owed much to the accounts of Chinese ways in the writings of the Jesuits.
In the middle of 1687 the learned world of Europe gained new access to the heart of the Confucian tradition with the publication in Paris of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, a splendid folio volume of more than five hundred pages. In 1688 a long synopsis in the Journal des Sçavans and reviews in the Bibliothèque Universalle et Historique and in the Acta Eruditorum and a French synopsis by Jean de la Brune, La Morale de Confucius, Philosophe de la Chine, spread knowledge of this great work in the European intellectual world. This magnificent book contained full translations of three of the “Four Books” the texts at the heart of Neo-Confucian intellectual life that claimed to present the teachings of the Master himself and his immediate disciples. It also contained a brief life of Confucius. A chronological summary of more than three thousand years of the Chinese monarchy took up more than one hundred pages. The dedication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus to Louis XIV was followed by a Preliminary Declaration of more than one hundred pages, which claimed that this work was intended not “for the amusement and curiosity of those who live in Europe” but for the use of missionaries. This was a bit disingenuous; the splendid book was meant to publicize and glorify the Jesuit mission enterprise in the courts and elite circles of Europe and to justify its approach to China. But it was true that the translations the book contained were the product of about eighty years of collective effort, as one generation of missionaries struggled to understand the texts that were so central to the lives and convictions of the educated Chinese whom they were seeking to attract to Christianity and then used the results of their efforts to teach newly arrived missionaries, who later might try their hands at improving the translations.
The Preliminary Declaration was an important statement of the approach to the Confucian heritage the Jesuits had been developing ever since Ricci’s time. It argued that there were passages in the classical texts in which Heaven seemed to have consciousness, to care for mankind, and to infuse in man a moral conscience. There was a smaller number of references to the Lord on High, which seemed even more like intimations of the One God. But the Song Dynasty Neo-Confucian commentators, systematizing an organic naturalism that also was powerful in Chinese culture since early times, had insisted that the Lord on High was simply a synonym for Heaven, and Heaven was just a way of referring to the patterned order of a cosmos that ran itself and did not need a transcendent deity as establisher of order or object of worship. Ricci, encouraged by critics of Song thought in late Ming times, had emphasized the passages with glimmerings of an ancient knowledge of God. He also argued that the Song commentators had systematically suppressed evidence that the ancient Chinese, down to somewhat after the time of Confucius, had known and worshiped the True God. The greatest cause of the loss of that ancient knowledge, he said, was the coming of Buddhism in the first century C.E. The teaching he brought would remove that Buddhist taint, already widely criticized among Confucian intellectuals, and would supplement Confucian earnestness in self-cultivation and moral action with knowledge and worship of the True God.
This risky formula, which cast foreigners as explainers to a sophisticated elite of the real meaning of its classical texts, offended some Chinese intellectuals, intrigued some and led small numbers to the great leap of conversion. In the Preliminary Declaration it was reflected in descriptions of the “pure simplicity of the golden age,” in which the sage emperors worshiped the Lord on High or an active, beneficent Heaven, and in demonstrations of gratuitous distortions of these passages by the “Modern Interpreters”—that is, the Song commentators. The translations themselves occasionally may be seen giving a twist toward anticipation of Christian ideas. For example, the phrase “bright virtue” appears several times, referring to a deep potential for virtuous action that can be “brightened” or developed. But in one passage the Jesuits translate it as “rational nature,” and in another they build on assertions that this virtue is received from Heaven to find in it intimations of the Christian concept of the immortal soul. The result is an obscuring of the uniquely Chinese sense of the moral potential of man rooted in his organic relations to the world around him. In its place there is a concept of “rational nature” so narrowly based in abstract discussions of the soul and the rational nature of man that it could be easily cut away from its moorings in the Christian drama of sacrifice and redemption and used to support Enlightenment rejections of Christian orthodoxy.
In early reports on China around 1600 European readers had gotten glimpses of Chinese wisdom and a strong impression of the prosperity, populousness, and good government of the empire, but not a concrete sense of people and events. That changed abruptly after the collapse of the Ming, as accounts of the “Tatar Conquest” by missionary eyewitnesses began appearing. First impressions of a collapse of a civilization comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire soon yielded to an understanding that despite the many brutalities of the conquerors and the tragedies of heroic but vain Ming resistance, a new and effective order was rapidly emerging. Most of this writing took the form of narratives that focused on rulers and other individual actors. Speeches and actions might be melodramatic, but they were not exotic; these were actors in a kind of drama all too familiar in seventeenth-century Europe. Some of the reports depicted the Manchus as brave warriors imposing order where the “effete Chinese” could not, a vision that owed as much to European views of leadership and virtue in their own society as to the realities of early Qing China or Chinese ideals of scholar-official rule. The History of the Two Tartar Conquerors of China by Pierre Joseph d’Orléans, S.J., published in French in 1688, was an excellent representative of this genre, particularly rich in its portrayal of the Qing court as seen by the Jesuits. It included notes drawn from two imperial expeditions beyond the wall when Ferdinand Verbiest had followed the emperor, who showed the foreign priest much favor and studied the constellations with him.
A much more distinctive contribution to European knowledge of China was made by the New History of China by Gabriel de Magalhaens, published in 1688 in both French and English translations; the Portuguese original text has never been found. Magalhaens probably finished his book about 1675, when he was in his sixties and had been in China for thirty-five years. He had taught in the Jesuit establishments at Goa and at Macao before his arrival in 1640 at the lovely and cultured city of Hangzhou beside its famous West Lake. But soon he was sent off to aid Luigi Buglio in Sichuan, making the long and daunting trip up the Yangtze just in time to join Buglio in harrowing adventures as captives first of a monstrous rebel and then of the suspicious Manchu conquerors. Once settled in Beijing in 1648, Magalhaens stayed there until his death in 1677 except for one trip to Macao. He kept his distance from the court favor seeking of Schall and Verbiest.
Magalhaens’s book contains good examples of the expositions of Chinese history and philosophy found in most Jesuit books, but it is particularly noteworthy for its sense of movement through the vast empire and its capital and its engagement with their ambiguities. The author gives an excellent description, probably drawing on his observations on his trip to Macao and back, of the Grand Canal and its sluice gates, where great grain barges were winched up to a higher level of the canal by hundreds of men straining at huge capstans. His section on the capital is especially notable for its account of the imperial palaces. He takes his reader with him on a walk, starting well to the south of the gate we now call Tiananmen, describing what is seen as one emerges from each grand gate into each new courtyard. People told him it had been much more splendid under the late Ming, “yet there is that in it still which serves to fill the imagination, and display the grandeur of the empire.” He describes fully the “ordinary audience” ceremony, at which capital officials gathered to prostrate themselves in the greatest of the palace courts before the emperor, far away in the shadows of his throne hall. If we count the courtyards he and his reader traverse on their imaginary walk up the central axis of the palaces, he has reached fifteen by the time he emerges from the north gate of the palace compound, crosses a wide avenue, and passes through another triple gate into a vast open area that is left unpaved. It adjoins stables for some of the emperor’s horses and is watered to keep the dust down when the emperor is about to go riding. Beyond the next gate is a fine park with five artificial hills built up out of the earth removed to make the lakes to the west of the palaces; this park and these hills still are to be seen in Beijing. They “are covered with trees to the very top, planted with an exactness of symmetry, every one with a round or square pedestal, wherein several holes are cut for the rabbits to burrow and hares to sit in, of which those little hills are very full. The park also has many deer, goats, and birds, and the emperor often comes there to relax and watch them.” Louis XIV, lord of Versailles, was not much for reading, but I should like to think that somehow he read or heard a bit of these descriptions and was envious.
The lord of Versailles also would have understood the most startling aspect of Magalhaens’s description of the Chinese politics of his time.
To be a viceroy, or governor of a province, before a man can have his commission sealed, will cost him twenty, thirty, forty, and sometimes threescore, sometimes seventy thousand crowns [ounces of silver]. And yet so far is the king [emperor] from receiving a farthing of this money that he knows nothing of the abuse. Only the grand ministers of the empire, the colaos or counsellors of state, and the six supreme tribunals of the court are they that privately sell all offices and employments to the viceroys and great mandarins of the provinces. On the other side, they to satisfy their avarice and reimburse themselves of the money laid out for their preferments, extort presents from the presidents of territories and cities, who repay themselves upon the governors of towns and boroughs, and they, or rather all together, make themselves whole again, and replenish their purses at the expense of the miserable people. So that it is a common proverb in China that the king unwittingly lets loose so many hangmen, murderers, hungry dogs and wolves to ruin and devour the poor people, when he creates new mandarins to govern them. In short there is not an viceroy, visitor of a province, or any such like officer, who at the end of three years of his being employed, does not return with six or seven hundred thousand and sometimes a million of crowns.
The Kangxi emperor certainly was very much aware that men sought office in order to get rich. He must have known a good deal about the ways those seeking appointments sought favor in the capital. Magalhaens’s picture of a constant and systematic sale of offices gets only scattered support from Chinese sources from the time, but he spent a great deal of time listening to people of all conditions in the capital. His own experiences of China, perhaps his own misgivings about his confreres’ enthusiastic pursuit of court favor, may have led him to believe the worst about the society around him. If Wu Li proves that some Jesuit converts were real Christians, Magalhaens proves that the fathers themselves could be respectful of Chinese culture and awed by the majesty of the court without becoming starry-eyed Sinophiles. Neither side of this great encounter feared ambiguity or complexity. That is why we continue to learn so much from it about the early modern world.