China and Catholicism
in the Sixteenth through
Eighteenth Centuries
. . .What would you say if I sent a troop of Buddhist monks into your country to preach their doctrines? You want all Chinese to become Christians. Your Law demands it, I know. But in that case what will become of us? Shall we become subjects of your king? The converts you make recognize only you in time of trouble. They will listen to no other voice but yours. I know that at the present time there is nothing to fear, but when your ships come by the thousands then there will probably be great disorder. . . . The emperor, my father, lost a great deal of his reputation among scholars by the condescension with which he let you establish yourselves here. . . .1
The Yongzheng Emperor (1723–1735)
Portugal, seizing on the rich possibilities for European expansion suggested by the exploratory voyages of such men as Ferdinand Magellan and Vasco da Gama, had by the late fifteenth century identified two main goals in Asia. The first was economic: it wanted to wrest control of the lucrative spice trade between Asia and Europe from the Muslim traders who had dominated the sea routes since the decline of Ming naval power. The second was religious: it hoped to regain in Asia, as well as in Africa and in Brazil, some of the ground the Catholic Church had lost in Europe as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation.
In the late fifteenth century Portugal and Spain reached a general agreement to divide the world outside Europe between them. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, Pope Alexander VI purported to give formal recognition to Spanish and Portuguese domination of world trade routes by allocating to Portugal Asia, except the Philippines, as its sphere of influence, and to Spain the New World, except Brazil. This was a remarkable formula to draw up before all the newly discovered territories had been thoroughly mapped. In effect, it aimed to deliver control over European expansion into Catholic hands just as Catholic authority was undergoing the first assaults of the Protestant Reformation.
Portugal and Spain were, however, unable to exclude other Europeans from East Asian markets. They remained the principal European traders in East Asia—the Portuguese in Macao, with a more substantial colonial center in the Indian port of Goa, and the Spanish in the Philippines—only until the British and Dutch East India companies, founded in 1600 and 1602 respectively, successfully took over part of the market in spices. The Dutch soon established rival colonial trading bases in Batavia, Indonesia, and on the island of Taiwan, where Spain also maintained an outpost. Iberian and hence Catholic domination of the “market” in Asian souls proved more tenacious. Although the expansion of Islam offered Catholicism some competition in parts of Southeast Asia, in China Islam was less pervasive, and moreover, no European Protestants challenged Catholicism’s monopoly for another two centuries. Thus the period from roughly 1600 to 1800 has been described as China’s “Catholic centuries.”
This chapter examines the introduction of European Catholicism into China, focusing in particular on its most conspicuous proponents, missionaries of the Society of Jesus. Although it is hard to separate the reception of Western religion, on the one hand, from the exchange of goods and secular knowledge, on the other—as the Chinese themselves often found—for clarity’s sake we shall examine them more or less separately in this and the next chapter. Although this approach requires some unavoidable chronological overlap, this chapter deals primarily with Christianity during the period from the late sixteenth century, when the Ming was entering its declining phases, to the early eighteenth century, when for a number of reasons the tide turned decisively against the foreign religion. The next chapter focuses on the international exchange of goods and ideas and principally covers the reign (1736–1795) of Qianlong, under whose watch both foreign trade and the interest in European secular knowledge reached new heights.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, China rarely rejected foreign knowledge on the ground of pure outlandishness. Foreign origins were neither a recommendation nor an absolute bar to acceptance. China’s reception of Christianity was influenced mainly by three factors. The first was the degree of compatibility between certain traditional Chinese beliefs and the Christian requirement that devotees should venerate the Christian God alone. The second factor related to the way Jesuit missionaries—Christianity’s leading exponents in China—used their knowledge of such secular topics as mathematics and astronomy to attract Chinese interest before they ever raised the issue of religion. Attract interest they did, but this approach backfired because it raised doubts about their true intentions. The third factor influencing China’s reception of Christianity was the momentous political changes taking place in China. In 1644 the Ming empire (1368–1644) which had expelled the Mongols from China, itself was replaced by Manchu invaders from the northeast, who established the Qing empire (1644–1911). To the majority of ordinary Chinese, the dynastic transition may have meant little more than the cessation of military activity and the resumption of the normal cycles of their lives. But for the educated classes, who were the prime targets of Jesuit mission efforts, the devastating experience of Manchu occupation completely colored their outlook, among other things disinclining them toward foreigners and foreign cultures. We turn now to a sketch of the situation in China at the time European missionaries first arrived in 1583.
On the surface late Ming China appeared truly thriving. Its population surpassed 150 million, far more than that of Europe at the time, which China roughly resembled in geographic size. Unprecedented agricultural prosperity gave commercial transactions a new importance, fueling the expansion of both regional and national markets. At the same time, the government consolidated the old forms of taxation in kind and in labor services into a single payment in silver, into which people converted the copper currency they used in everyday life. In other words, at about the same moment, the use of money, and silver in particular, became much more prevalent, both in the newly vital market economy and in the system of state revenues.
These currents contributed to a trend toward urbanization, particularly in the prosperous lower Yangzi area of Jiangnan. Urbanization in turn added momentum to a series of related developments, including the spread of literacy among both men and women; the much wider availability of books of all kinds; and a new attention to education for women, highly innovative in a world where up until then the main purpose of education had been preparation for the civil service examinations, which were reserved for men.
The same period saw the rapid expansion of a consumer culture, which endowed the possession of material goods with a new social significance. Members of the upper classes began to collect art objects and antiquities on a much larger scale than previously, as a yardstick of good taste and as a status symbol. Luxury goods, not least including exotic imports, were all the rage. Fine Japanese crafts, especially lacquer and metal wares, became a mainstay of luxury consumption (in Japan, Chinese luxury imports were equally prized). Other fashionable collectors’ items at the time included turkeys from the New World, to be kept as pets; Tibetan religious texts (for purposes more of prestige than devotion); and paper and brushes from Korea to add cachet to the display of artistic prowess. Late Ming culture, in short, was hostile neither to foreign trade nor to outside influence.
The late Ming also saw a relaxation in the sphere of intellectual life. Over the centuries Confucianism had been forced to make some adaptations to counter competition from Buddhism. Under the Song in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and others had developed a revised philosophy that was much more metaphysical than original Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism, as Westerners later called this new version, laid particular emphasis on moral rigor, the pursuit of self-cultivation through education and study, and public-spirited activism. It successfully fended off the Buddhist challenge and became the orthodox ideology upon which the civil service examinations were based. Hence it formed the foundation of every ambitious young man’s education until the examination system was abolished in 1905.
In the fifteenth century the influential philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) had sought to modify Zhu Xi’s arguments by proposing that true moral knowledge exists within every person and hence that everyone is innately capable of understanding the meaning of life. This suggested that the pursuit of Confucian virtue might, after all, not require intensive education or even any formal education at all. For some late Ming scholars, Wang’s ideas also raised the possibility that greater individualism and egalitarianism might be feasible within a Confucian framework, albeit a relatively unconventional one. At the same time, others who sought fresh approaches experimented with various creative and innovative syntheses of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist ideas.
This spirit of eclecticism met with strong disapproval on the part of some scholars, who feared that abandoning the orthodox tradition would lead straight to corruption and self-interest. But the point is that culturally and intellectually as well as economically and socially, the late Ming was in many ways a dynamic time and one of real open-mindedness about the possibilities of departure from traditional modes of life and thought. It created a fertile soil into which to plant the seeds of Christianity.
Beneath its veneer of prosperity the Ming was starting to show signs of trouble. The emperor lost interest in government and retreated into the pleasures of palace life, leaving court eunuchs and civil servants to run the country. Factional squabbles and extreme corruption became the political order of the day, seeming to confirm the worst fears of Confucian scholars. The central government’s once iron grip over the empire grew steadily weaker, and the infrastructure began to fall apart.
Natural disasters compounded the difficulties caused by human neglect. Exceptionally severe weather in the early part of the seventeenth century, now thought to be part of a worldwide Little Ice Age, destroyed crops, and with them many people’s food supply and livelihood. The government could no longer provide relief because it had failed to maintain the state granaries. Then a series of horrendous epidemics of some form of plague ravaged large parts of China. Some areas lost half their inhabitants; corpses lay everywhere. The overall population, a measure of prosperity, began to show marked decline. Survivors often were profoundly impoverished and close to despair. Some came together in armed associations that local officials were powerless to prevent or suppress. Uprisings sprang up in many different parts of the country.
Such groups were often extremely disparate and had no particular ideology or revolutionary goal. But as more and more disaffected people swelled their numbers, they began to occupy large portions of territory, preying on the inhabitants and destroying even the appearance of government authority or control. At the same time, along the southeast coast the expansion of maritime commerce was leading to long-term problems in the realms of both defense and the economy, while along the northern borders external enemies found little resistance to their increasingly frequent infringements into Ming territory.
In 1644 the Ming finally collapsed in the face of widespread peasant rebellions. They were replaced by Manchu invaders from the northeast, who proclaimed a new Qing empire. It took another forty years before the Qing could convincingly assert legitimacy as the bearers of the Mandate of Heaven to rule all China, for the country remained deeply disunited. Remnants of the Ming court fled south and tried repeatedly to reconstitute the old regime, with loyalist forces offering stiff resistance, but gradually the Manchus overwhelmed all opposition. In 1673 Wu Sangui (1612–1678), a former Ming general whose defection to the Qing had made possible the Manchu invasion, rebelled with two other southern satraps, whose combined military power and territorial control extended right across south and southwest China. It took the Manchus until 1681 to suppress this rebellion and establish their authority over south China.
In the meantime the island of Taiwan had become a base for anti-Qing activity. Taiwan had not been a part of the Ming empire, in whose imagination it remained a largely savage and isolated spot, but Spanish and Dutch traders and “Japanese” pirates all used it as a base. In the 1640s Dutch forces expelled the last of the Spanish settlers and the local pirates, only to be driven out with relative ease in 1662, when Zheng Cheng’gong, known in the West as Coxinga, established his own stronghold on the island.
The son of a Japanese mother and a Ming loyalist who had defected to the Qing in 1646, Zheng was a pirate entrepreneur who alternately supported the defeated Ming and negotiated with the conquering Qing. He operated in an unusually international ambience. Raised in Hirado, the Japanese port where the Dutch maintained a trading post, Zheng grasped the potential of the European weaponry he saw there and later used it effectively against both the Qing and the Dutch. In his campaigns against the Qing, he purchased arms, gunners, and vital supplies from both the Dutch and the British, in return for trading rights. He manned his bodyguard with African slaves escaped from Portuguese Macao.
During the 1650s Zheng conquered major portions of southeast and southwest China on behalf of the Ming remnants from his base at Xiamen (Amoy) on the Fujian coast. Alarmed at the prospects, the fledgling Qing were relatively receptive to Dutch embassies seeking trading concessions, hoping to enlist their military support. But having failed to recapture the former Ming capital of Nanjing from the Manchus, Zheng retreated to Taiwan, where the Dutch were no match for his forces. The Qing perceived little advantage in further alliance with the Dutch and accordingly gave short shrift to later embassies’ requests for more frequent commercial exchanges in more locations.
Zheng died in Taiwan in 1662. His descendants remained there in defiance of Qing authority until 1683, when Taiwan was finally brought under Qing control. Chinese assertions of sovereignty over the island date from this last act in the consolidation of Manchu power in China, which marked the beginning of large-scale Chinese migration to the island. In later years Zheng Cheng’gong attained mythic status in both China and Japan. He has been honored variously as a Confucian loyalist, an anti-imperialist, a Japanese nationalist, a Chinese nationalist, and a hero of the Taiwan independence movement. Thus both actually and symbolically he represents a key figure in the shifting relationships between East Asia and the West.
Devotion to the fallen Ming aroused profound ambivalence among educated Chinese. Those steeped in the morally compelling Chinese traditions of loyalty had to resolve the emotional issue of whether or not they could possibly transfer their allegiance to the conquering regime. The chaos of national disintegration and the devastating experience of conquest completely demoralized Ming intelligentsia. Many now took refuge in loyalism, a key component of traditional morality that called for men and women identified with an overthrown ruler or dynasty to sacrifice their lives, if necessary, as an expression of their continuing devotion.
In practice Ming loyalism took two main forms. The first involved active armed resistance and often resulted in death. The second, longer-term and more subtle, led to a significant shift in the intellectual environment. Many scholars debated, in an agony of self-reproach and wide-ranging recriminations, the reasons for the cataclysmic Ming collapse. As they searched for explanations, many condemned what they saw as the loose intellectual and moral atmosphere of the late Ming, when, they believed, there had perhaps been too much of a sense that “anything goes” and too little emphasis on pursuing practical goals for the benefit of the country. As a consequence, a revival of the rigorous moral ethic of orthodoxy, accompanied by renewed interest in classical studies and practical statecraft, returned to the ascendant among Han Chinese intellectuals, who hoped to find a way to compensate for having tolerated the fatal laxity of the Ming’s declining years. From this point of view, support for the new regime was particularly objectionable.
Such issues also resonated with the new Qing rulers. Without intellectuals’ support, the new regime’s legitimacy remained open to question. Besides, the Manchus were so much in the minority that they desperately needed a degree of cooperation from Chinese scholar-officials just to enable them to rule. Hence intellectual orthodoxy also received official encouragement from the Qing because it helped to identify them as upholders of Chinese traditions and thus to confound those who might question their legitimacy.
Overall neither the champions of the fallen Ming nor the new incumbents regarded a neutral stance as sufficient. Choices made in this volatile atmosphere determined the all-important judgment both of contemporaries and of history. These issues had much to do with the fate of the Catholic religion in China.
THE EARLY CATHOLIC MISSIONS TO CHINA
Catholic missionaries were at the forefront of China’s introduction to Europe and its culture. Among the members of the several different religious orders that sent missionaries to China at this time, the most numerous and conspicuous were priests of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit order), founded in 1540 with the express purpose of converting the heathen overseas. The first Jesuits took up residence in China in 1583 in the hope of gaining vast numbers of converts to their version of Christianity. Many spent the rest of their lives in China, living among Chinese people, speaking their language, and learning about their culture.
Constituted in 1540 by the soldier-mystic Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) as a highly militant order with the specific goal of converting “infidels” overseas, the Society of Jesus led the mission field in China. Sometimes referred to as the Shock Troops of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits called their leader a general and conceived of their overarching purpose as the conquest of the world for Christ. Christ himself was “transformed from an object of quiet reverence into a militant figure leading his disciplined order into battle against the devil.”2
The Jesuits placed great stress on education. They used their colleges both to promote the Catholic education of the European upper classes and to provide future missionaries with a thorough grounding in the Western classics, history, theology, mathematics, physics, metaphysics, astronomy, logic, and moral philosophy, among other topics. Young Jesuits also were rigorously trained to draw connections between the different branches of their knowledge in order to be able to analyze and defend their faith. In short, the missionaries, who were often among the first to represent European culture abroad, came from the intellectual vanguard of their times. In China this was particularly appropriate because of the longevity and sophistication of its civilization, and because of the resulting cultural self-assurance of the Chinese intellectuals, who the missionaries hoped would lead the way in converting to Christianity.
Some nine hundred Jesuits worked in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other orders—Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and the secular French Society of Foreign Missions—also were well represented in China, but their numbers were consistently fewer, and they kept comparatively low profiles. Members of different religious orders often vehemently disagreed with one another on doctrinal or tactical matters, and on some points contention existed even within a single order. The bickering and mutual antagonism such disagreements generated had significant repercussions for the long-term goals of the missions in China because they undermined respect for the people involved and for the cause of Christianity.
The total number of Chinese converts is hard to fix with any certainty since missionaries sometimes retrieved and converted the dying while some converts later renounced the faith; besides, we cannot always assess the accuracy of missionary claims. The numbers of converted Chinese probably amounted to at least tens of thousands in the first half of the seventeenth century. At the end of that century, according to the estimate of a contemporary Jesuit observer, the 60 or so missionaries from all orders working in China were converting perhaps as many as 500 or 600 people each every year, making an annual total of more than 30,000, not including the additional several thousand abandoned children whom missionaries took under their wing each year. During the course of the eighteenth century periodic repressions caused considerable attrition; nonetheless, it is estimated that by 1800 200,000 to 250,000 thousand converts to Christianity may have been spread across China. This result was in no small measure due to the efforts of Jesuit missionaries.
I: THE TOP-DOWN STRATEGY
The policies of the Jesuit missionaries brought them both their greatest successes and their greatest failures. Credit for many of the most significant is usually attributed to Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), among the first Jesuits to reach China in 1583, who set the standard for Jesuit mission work in China for the next two hundred years. The first policy we consider is that of focusing attention on educated, upper-class Chinese rather than on the ordinary people targeted by other religious orders. It was as the result of this top-down strategy that Jesuit missionaries were ensconced at the court of the emperor of China.
A two-fold rationale underlay the top-down strategy. First, the Jesuits wished to gain Chinese political support for the introduction of Christianity. Second, they hoped for a snowball effect. Jesuits assumed that once the elite converted, the common people would follow their social superiors into the foreign religion’s fold. Of course, Jesuits did not abide rigidly by Ricci’s guidelines. Even during his lifetime some of his colleagues were actively proselytizing among ordinary people, and by the end of the seventeenth century the vast majority of their converts were commoners.
Ricci’s conversion of three leading scholars, all of whom gained high political office, was the most conspicuous vindication of the top-down strategy. Known to posterity as the Three Pillars of the Early Christian Church in China (kaijiao san dazhushi), together they provided the missionaries with powerful patronage. Each was impressed by the personal qualities of the European missionaries they came to know, and all were deeply interested in Western scientific knowledge. But that was also true of many Chinese who did not in the end adopt Christianity. What seems to have tipped the balance for these men, and other highly educated converts of this first generation of Chinese Catholics, was Christianity’s promise to provide moral certainty at a highly unsettling time.
The first of the three to be baptized was Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), whose native place of Xujiahui, now part of the city of Shanghai, later housed a Jesuit library and the Cathedral of St. Ignatius. Xu was deeply impressed by Ricci when they first met in 1600 and was baptized in Nanjing a few years later. Shortly thereafter he passed the highest level of the civil service examinations and was assigned to work at the prestigious Hanlin Academy in Beijing. Xu then embarked on a collaboration with Ricci that produced some of the first translations of European books into Chinese. Together they translated works on Western geography, astronomy, hydraulics, and mathematics, notably the reworking of the first six books of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry done earlier in the century by Ricci’s own teacher in Rome, Christopher Clavius. Xu also adapted Western ideas in some of his original work on agriculture and trigonometry. He later became a grand secretary, one of the highest political offices in the empire. He was thus well placed to promote the Jesuits’ cause.
The second of the Three Pillars was Li Zhizao (d. 1630), a native of Hangzhou whom Ricci himself baptized in 1610. By then the two men had been acquainted for nine years. Li, whose initial attraction to Ricci was the Jesuit’s knowledge of geography, formed the opinion that here was an extraordinarily learned and virtuous man whose sense of right and wrong seemed almost infallible. At first Li resisted conversion, possibly because he did not wish to send away his concubine, as Church doctrine insisted. Only after Ricci had nursed him through a serious illness did Li finally agree to receive baptism and give up the concubine. Ricci died soon afterward, but Li became a powerful supporter of the missionaries, not least because of his strong interest in the Western scientific discoveries to which they had introduced him. The ambiguity of the title Li gave to his collection of Western works in translation suggests the complexity of his attraction to Western learning; he called it “First Collection of Writings on Learning about Heaven” (Tianxue Chu Han). Here “heaven” almost certainly referred to both religion and astronomy.
Under Li’s influence a fellow Hangzhou scholar-official, Yang Tingyun (1557–1627), converted to Christianity in 1612 and became the third of the Three Pillars. The range of Yang’s intellectual pursuits was in some respects typical of late Ming intellectual life. Earlier he had been active in promoting both orthodox Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism. But after he converted, Yang persuaded many members of his family, including his parents, to become Christians and with them formed a society in which they could together improve their grasp of Christian doctrine. Like Xu Guangqi and Li Zhizao, Yang published extensively so as to disseminate the information concerning Western science, geography, and philosophy as well as religion that he gleaned from the European missionaries. Like a number of his contemporaries, he also came to question long-cherished ideas about the distinctiveness of Chinese culture, for instance, speculating that the human race was all the same despite environmental and historical differences. Such observations did not of course endear Yang, or the Christianity he espoused, to the more traditional-minded of his contemporaries.
Yang Tingyun also devoted some effort to drawing clear distinctions between Christianity and Buddhism. To him, Christianity’s strength derived from its moral rigor and humanity, in contrast with Buddhist attitudes. He noted, for example, that the man-made rules of Buddhism allowed him to keep a concubine whereas the more rigorous, immutable, God-given law of Christianity did not. (Like Li Zhizao, Yang sent away his concubine, the mother of his two sons, although, also like Li, only after personal struggles.) Moreover, Yang preferred Christianity because Buddhism focused indiscriminately on all living things, whereas Christianity elevated humans to a higher plane. It was clearly more worthwhile to devote one’s energies to helping needy people than to save an animal from the butcher. Having saved a person’s life, one could also try to save his or her soul. Yang Tingyun’s efforts to demonstrate Christianity’s superiority to Buddhism, along with his withdrawal of financial support from Buddhist institutions, provided tangible evidence that Buddhism was losing ground to the new interloper and fueled growing Buddhist hostility to the foreign religion.
Besides the Three Pillars, Jesuits succeeded in converting almost two hundred courtiers of the Ming court prior to the dynastic transition. These included eunuchs and palace women. But Jesuits in China were unable to avoid becoming caught up in the fiery politics of the dynastic transition. After the Ming fell, some missionaries accompanied the beleaguered court as it fled south. With the help of the influential Christian loyalist eunuch Pang Tianshou (d. 1657), they converted the would-be Yongli Emperor’s wife, his mother, and his eldest son, as well as his father’s legal wife, who took the Christian name of Helena. Desperate to find help for the failing Ming cause, and perhaps epitomizing the sense of many converts that adherence to the foreign religion brought the promise of more than just spiritual aid, in 1650 both the eunuch Pang and the empress Helena wrote to the pope and to the Jesuit general in Rome, asking for their prayers and their help in resisting the Manchus. The empress’s letter reads in part: “. . . I hope that you, in concert with the Holy One Catholic Church, will on our behalf request of God protection and assistance in restoring peace in my country. Thereby, the eighteenth ruler of Our Great Ming [the Yongli Emperor], the twelfth-generation descendant of the Great Founder, as well as his ministers, would all know to venerate the true Lord, Jesus. . . .”3 But by the time their Jesuit emissary was able to deliver the letters, the Ming cause was beyond redemption.
For missionaries who remained in Beijing in 1644, on the other hand, it seemed only realistic to transfer the focus of their attentions to the new Qing court, which welcomed Jesuit offers of service. But to educated Han Chinese, the Manchus’ willingness to employ foreigners recalled the Mongols and heightened fears that their new rulers planned to destroy first their political power and eventually their entire civilization.
Jesuit missionaries provided a whole range of services to successive Qing emperors, and their contributions undoubtedly encouraged imperial sanction for their presence, if not endorsement of their religion. But the influence their work gradually brought them at court also provoked considerable hostility from a variety of quarters. Such resentment was not surprising. In a society in which proximity to the emperor was an important key to political influence, anyone who succeeded in gaining such access was bound to acquire enemies along with it.
In the long run the Jesuits’ switch of allegiance to the new regime had fatal consequences for their mission in another way: it largely discredited them among the ethnically Chinese scholarly classes. Such men had lost political power, but they remained numerically strong and socially influential. Formerly both the prime source of support for the Jesuit mission and the main target of its conversion efforts, they now regarded the foreign missionaries both as political traitors and as pawns in what they perceived as a Manchu assault on Chinese culture. Chinese scholars despised the missionaries on both counts. This gradual alienation was fueled by Qing policies deliberately restricting contact between the missionaries and the Chinese gentry. By welcoming the missionaries into the Manchu camp, the new regime consciously deprived the Chinese elite of this potentially uncontrollable source of intellectual and spiritual stimulation and kept it for themselves. The Jesuits’ abandonment of their original policy of concentrating on the Chinese elite, in favor of focusing their attention on the new sources of power at the Qing court, thus turned out in the end to have been a terrible miscalculation.
In the highly charged climate surrounding the transfer of power, the role of Catholic collaborators further damaged the Jesuits’ position. One such man was Zhu Zongyuan (b. 1609), baptized with the name of Cosimo at Hangzhou, Zhejiang, in 1631. In Hangzhou, which had a thriving Christian community, Zhu gathered a considerable following through his writings, which he hoped would convince people to convert to Christianity. He argued that different countries had different values but that difference did not necessarily signify inferiority. It followed, he said, that it was misguided to stigmatize foreigners as barbaric and that China had much to gain from other cultures. Christianity could serve as a pointer to the true Way. Pursuing these arguments to their logical conclusion, Zhu later threw his support to the Manchus, carrying with him many of those whom he had already persuaded to convert to Christianity. Zhu’s arguments prefigured those of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thinkers who suggested that foreign influences had often revitalized Chinese culture just as it had reached a point of stagnation.
In the early Qing it happened that the new governor of Zhejiang and Fujian provinces was a northern frontiersman who had converted to Christianity along with members of his clan. He had served the Manchus before the conquest and had encountered Christianity when the Manchus occupied Beijing. So under the political leadership of the Catholic governor, and urged on by Zhu Zongyuan and his band of Catholic converts, the formerly staunch province of Zhejiang fell to the Manchus. In this case the snowball effect of Christian conversions sought by the Jesuits led to a large-scale transfer of political allegiance. To Ming loyalists, the unexpectedly rapid fall of this prosperous coastal province to the Manchus thus seemed inseparable from the Christianity of Chinese collaborators.
After the 1630s the Jesuits rarely met with successes as spectacular as their conversion of such politically powerful men as the Three Pillars or the eunuch Pang Tianshou. But Christianity did not peter out among educated Chinese, and it persisted especially among the less elevated ranks of the scholarly. Some of the second and third generations of elite Chinese Christians assimilated the foreign religion to a greater extent than had their predecessors. By the middle to late seventeenth century, becoming a Christian was not always in itself so remarkable an event as it had once been. In fact, many of these later-seventeenth-century Chinese Catholics became Christians for the simple reason that their fathers had been Christians before them. It was, so to speak, a family matter, and many of these later converts never came into direct contact with European missionaries. But as Christianity was passed down from generation to generation, sustaining one’s belief also acquired overtones of Confucian filial piety.
For these later educated converts, Christianity often became a creative force within their own culture. Their search for compatibilities between Chinese and Christian beliefs stimulated them to reexamine traditional Chinese concepts in ways that earlier scholarly converts had not. Some, for example, devoted their lives to cross-cultural studies, setting out to demonstrate the ways in which Christianity reinforced traditional Confucianism while Buddhism contradicted it. For instance, the five human relationships of Confucianism—between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger brother, and friends—as well as the associated virtues of benevolence, morality, propriety, wisdom, and trust seemed entirely consonant with the law of the Christian God, while one of the perennial Chinese criticisms of Buddhism was its disregard of this ordering of society. The later converts also placed far greater emphasis than had their predecessors on expressing their Christianity through the promotion of social welfare.
Their overall approach, sometimes called inculturation, was qualitatively different from that of men such as the Three Pillars. For Yang Tingyun, for example, Christianity’s strongest appeal lay in its moral firmness at a time of uncertainty, whereas for the later generations that kind of attraction, while still present, was complemented in a deeply meaningful way by the insight that Christianity could in effect do something for Confucianism. These second and third generations of elite Chinese Christians have been relatively little studied, so we do not yet know a great deal about them and their beliefs, nor are they thought to have been very numerous. We do know that although they generally lacked significant influence among their scholarly contemporaries, they sometimes acquired considerable local followings and thus contributed to the spread of Christianity in the countryside.
II: THE USE OF SECULAR KNOWLEDGE
The second distinctive mission strategy of the Jesuits in China was their use of secular knowledge as a lure. They hoped to establish a more or less equal intellectual relationship before any question arose of trying to convince Chinese of the ultimate truths of Christianity. In addition, recognizing the unusual antiquity and sophistication of Chinese civilization, they feared that an immediate challenge to fundamental Chinese values might easily prove counterproductive.
This policy was fairly successful, but it had two important consequences in China. First, the strategy of postponing any discussion of possible conversion raised doubts among some Chinese about the Europeans’ true intentions. Initially it had seemed that the missionaries simply wanted to discuss science, technology, and ethics, to exchange information. Only gradually did Chinese come to understand that the Europeans hoped to persuade them to adopt Christianity. Second, many Chinese pursued the scientific and technical knowledge they acquired from missionaries with at least as much zeal as they addressed to grasping European religion and philosophy. In other words, Chinese caution about Christianity had much to do with the way in which it was introduced to them.
Once again, Ricci set the tone. His erudition and his mastery of Chinese language and culture enabled him to publish in Chinese a number of works that helped ingratiate him with his Chinese readers. On Friendship, for instance, published in 1595, drew on the Western classical tradition in much the same way as a Chinese scholar might draw on the Chinese classics. Popular among Ricci’s learned friends, it had an uplifting message that was designed as a recommendation for some of the loftier aspects of European culture, not including its religious aspects. Ricci also made a profound impression with extraordinary feats of memory, which greatly appealed to Chinese scholars, for whom public success depended on the ability to absorb vast amounts of classical scholarship.
Ricci also began a tradition of presenting such elegant and intricate objects as prisms made of Venetian glass, elaborate clocks, mechanical toys, and engravings. Given the late Ming enthusiasm for imported luxuries, these went down very well, although their popularity prompted some Europeans to jump to the inaccurate conclusion that Chinese admired trivia above all else. Another skill Jesuits used to draw in educated Chinese was cartography. Ricci, for instance, hung on his wall a map of the world, on which he traced for visitors his itinerary from Rome to China. The map drew on existing sources, both Chinese and European, not all of which met the standards of accuracy he was striving to demonstrate. Yet many found it riveting, prompting him to make a series of world maps for the Chinese that incorporated some of the latest European discoveries. As we shall see in the next chapter, Jesuit cartography came to form an important part of the introduction of Western knowledge into China, as did Jesuit astronomy.
By their transmission of secular knowledge, Jesuit missionaries helped attract attention to some of the most exciting aspects of their native cultures. The emperors they served employed them primarily because they were all, in varying degrees, extremely interested in the information and skills these learned Europeans of multiple talents had to offer.
The Kangxi Emperor (1662–1722), in particular, was passionately interested in Western scientific knowledge and set out to learn their skills himself. Jesuits at his court instructed him in a wide range of subjects and gave lessons to some of his many sons, as we can see from the reconstruction of the old emperor’s musings done by Jonathan Spence:
In the early 1690s I often worked several hours a day with them. With Verbiest I had examined each stage of the forging of cannons, and made him build a water fountain that operated in conjunction with an organ, and erect a windmill in the court; with the new group—who were later joined by Brocard and Jartoux, and worked in the Yang-hsin Palace under the general direction of my Eldest Son Yin-T’i—I worked on clocks and mechanics. Pereira taught me to play the tune “P’u Pen chou” on the harpsichord and the structure of the eight-note scale. Pedrini taught my sons musical theory, and Gherardini painted portraits at the Court. I also learned to calculate the weight and volume of spheres, cubes, and cones, and to measure distances and the angle of river banks. On inspection tours later I used these Western methods to show my officials how to make more accurate calculations when planning their river works. I myself planted the measuring device in the ground, and got my sons and bodyguards to use their spears and stakes to mark the various distances. I held the calculating tray on my knee, wrote down the figures with a stylus, then transposed them with a brush. I showed them how to calculate circumferences and assess the area of a plot of land, even if its borders were as jagged as dogs’ teeth, drawing diagrams for them on the ground with an arrow; and calculated the flow of river water through a lock gate by multiplying the volume that flowed in a few seconds to get a figure for the whole day.4
The use of secular knowledge did not lead to large-scale Chinese conversion to Christianity. Apart from arousing suspicions among a number of Chinese about missionaries’ true intentions, another major disadvantage was that Jesuits tended to make science seem rigid, unchanging, and, like religious truth, endowed with eternal value because they hoped that the revelation of scientific accuracy would lead to Chinese recognition of the perfection of the Judeo-Christian God. Yet scientific knowledge was constantly undergoing transformation. The reality was that the Jesuits used their secular knowledge only as a means to an end, and they offered no more than what they deemed necessary to achieve their conversion goals. We return in more detail to Jesuit missionaries’ secular activities in China in the next chapter.
III: THE POLICY OF ACCOMMODATION
The policy of accommodation conformed with the unusual Jesuit policy of respecting the indigenous cultures of those they sought to convert. Such a policy recalled the very early days of the Church, when it had perforce adapted to Greek, Roman, and other cultures, but in the course of the medieval period this kind of cultural modesty had dissipated. To many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans, heathenness was equated with inferiority and accommodation seemed not so much pragmatic as simply inappropriate. The adoption of the policy of accommodation in China is attributed to Matteo Ricci, who believed that some degree of accommodation was essential if Jesuits were to shepherd China into the Church. This view was borne out by the extreme reluctance of otherwise receptive Chinese to abandon certain of their traditional practices.
Accommodation meant adapting to Chinese ways to the greatest extent possible without compromising the integrity of Catholicism. It was a question of reaching a balance between two sets of firmly held principles and assumptions, each of which derived from the premise that the other would eventually recognize the universal truths of the other culture. It was for this reason that Jesuits undertook the several years’ study required to learn the Chinese language. They tried to understand Chinese civilization within its own context, by studying Chinese classical texts with their scholarly commentaries. They learned about Chinese religion, Chinese culture and customs, and China’s political system, and most of them dedicated their whole lives to the missionary endeavor. They came to dress and live like Chinese scholars in the hope of confronting them, as nearly as possible, on equal terms.
There were three main areas in which the Jesuits found their beliefs or principles in conflict with Chinese ways: the question of Chinese “rites,” or reverence for one’s family ancestors and Confucius; the question of what terminology was appropriate for “God” and other Christian concepts; and the Christian insistence on monogamy versus the upper-class Chinese practice of concubinage.
The issue concerning Chinese customary practices of reverencing one’s ancestors and paying homage to Confucius was as follows. If these practices were fundamentally religious, they would constitute a form of idolatry. In that case would-be converts to Christianity would have to be persuaded to abandon such practices before they could be admitted to the Church. But if they were merely civil observances of a secular nature, then Chinese converts could continue to perform them.
Jesuits grasped that outlawing the traditional forms of displaying respect for ancestors would strike at the core of Confucian values of filial piety, a linchpin of China’s social and political structure. Even the most convinced Christian converts would find that hard to swallow. So accommodation emerged out of pragmatism. Jesuits themselves were sharply divided on the issue of the Chinese “rites.” Some sincerely believed that because the Chinese practices did not involve the same kind of worship as the worship of the Christian God, they did not contradict Catholic theology. Others saw accommodation as a provisional but necessary expedient without which conversion would be well-nigh impossible.
Other pressures strengthened the Jesuits’ commitment to the principle of accommodation. Since they had consistently portrayed Chinese people as highly civilized, in order to gain extra credit in Europe for their eventual conversion, they could hardly admit that the rituals to which such civilized people were so attached were in effect pagan in nature because pagans were by definition uncivilized. So some Chinese customs had to be clearly defined as nonreligious in order to avoid their being deemed to be pagan practices, and if they were not religious, there ought not to be any reason to require converts to abandon them. The Jesuit position became increasingly entrenched as they defended themselves against attacks from other orders.
Whatever the practical justifications, the accommodation policy caused the Jesuits many problems. In China it laid them open to charges of caprice. Some missionaries, for instance, advised their converts to worship God in the same place where they paid their respects to their ancestors, either a family temple or the main room in their homes. But to Chinese that seemed to equate the Christian God with the ancestors and hence to contradict missionaries’ claims of overarching supremacy. Other recommendations Jesuits made to their Chinese converts more directly contravened Chinese laws and customs. For when Christianity placed its God and his earthly representative, the pope, above China’s emperor, it plainly interfered with the proper political order. Ricci himself, in a rare moment of imprudence, had advised his Chinese followers that obeying a superior father (i.e., the Christian God) at the expense of obeying an inferior father (i.e., the emperor or one’s own parent) was perfectly in accordance with the requirements of filial piety. But in Chinese terms this was tantamount to incitement to insurrection or filial disobedience, both of which the criminal codes condemned as particularly heinous crimes, punishable by the execution of the perpetrator and his or her entire family. As one commentator summarized it, “When they require people to consider the Master of Heaven as their closest relative and to abandon their fathers and mothers and place their sovereign in second place, giving the direction of the state to those who spread the doctrine of the Master of Heaven, this entails an unprecedented infringement of the most constant rules. How could their doctrine possibly be admissible in China?”5
In Europe accommodation laid the Jesuits open to charges of tolerating heresy. Such charges were repeatedly leveled against them in the course of the resulting debate, known as the Rites Controversy. This dispute lasted over a century and did a great deal of damage both to the Jesuit mission in China and to the Society of Jesus more generally. Critics insisted that since the Chinese “rites” involved paying respect to graven images and “worshiping” Confucius and the ancestors as though they were gods, accommodation made nonsense of at least two of the Ten Commandments of the Bible. Even if accommodation brought more converts, it thus was just as unacceptable to many European Catholics as, for different reasons, it was in China. But if they expected China to acquiesce meekly, they reckoned without the great Kangxi Emperor.
In 1692 Kangxi, against the recommendation of Chinese advisers who resented the Jesuits’ influence at court, issued an Edict of Toleration, in effect allowing religious freedom to Christians in China. The edict permitted missionaries to worship in their churches, and while it did not expressly permit preaching and other evangelistic activities, neither did it explicitly forbid them. It seemed a major triumph for Christianity in China and raised the hopes of many Jesuits, who thought it a prelude to imperial conversion.
But Kangxi’s formal toleration of Christianity did not signal imperial enthusiasm for the foreign religion. Kangxi raised the prohibition on Christianity partly in recompense for missionaries’ technical services and partly in recognition of the Jesuits’ accommodative efforts to comprehend and appreciate Chinese civilization. The Edict of Toleration appeared to suggest that the policy of using secular knowledge was working, but in reality the most it did was to acknowledge that Christianity promoted harmony and served public morality and hence differed from heterodox sects covered by the criminal law.
Papal attempts to formalize Rome’s jurisdiction over Chinese Christians put an end to Kangxi’s willingness to be broad-minded about the foreign religion. In 1705 the pope sent an emissary to China, seeking imperial approval for the extension of papal authority over Chinese Catholics. Kangxi rejected the proposal absolutely. In his view, the possibility that Chinese would owe allegiance to some authority other than himself posed a direct threat to his dominion over his people. A second papal legate, who reached China in 1720, was no more successful. Jesuit missionaries then looked for creative ways to circumvent the opposing views of pope and emperor. They tried, for instance, to modify some funeral practices without actually replacing them altogether, suggesting that relatives of the bereaved offer to pay for the coffin rather than to contribute silver to use in a burial sacrifice.
The papal missions and decrees heralded the end of China’s toleration of evangelism by Catholic missionaries. Kangxi, already concerned that some Westerners might be passing themselves off as missionaries to disguise some darker purpose, instituted a system of signed certificates. All Westerners wishing to live in China had to make a commitment to remain for the rest of their lives, a requirement directed against spies and profiteers as much as against missionaries. Missionaries had to agree, in addition, to allow Chinese converts to reverence Confucius and the ancestors. Refusal to sign meant expulsion.
In part influenced by those within the European Church establishment who resented Jesuit successes, the pope soon decreed that ancestor worship and the sacrifices to Confucius were simply unacceptable. The first papal bull against the Jesuits’ position was issued in 1707; it was confirmed in 1715 and again in 1742. In short, the Church declined to permit Chinese Christians to continue to perform their traditional reverences on the ground that these were idolatrous and incompatible with Christian practice. Any Chinese desirous of converting to Christianity must first renounce such practices. There was no middle ground.
When Kangxi read a Chinese translation of the 1715 papal decree, he commented in his own hand: “Having read this proclamation, I ask myself how these uncultivated Westerners dare to speak of the great [philosophical and moral] precepts of China . . . most of what they say and their arguments are ridiculous. Seeing this proclamation, I at last realise that their doctrine is of the same kind as the little heresies of the Buddhist and Taoist monks. . . . These are the greatest absurdities that have ever been seen. As from now I forbid the Westerners to spread their doctrine in China; that will spare us a lot of trouble.”6
The second main area of dispute concerning Jesuit accommodation was the question of whether to use existing Chinese terminology for the Christian God or whether such terms were too confusing and too tainted with “heathen associations.” Like the issue of the rites, such debates were fraught with pitfalls. Ancient Chinese had worshippedShangdi (“Lord on High”) and Tian (“Heaven”), and some Jesuits were persuaded that these were very much the same as their own all-knowing, all-powerful God. But if Europeans used the identical terms for their own God, might Chinese fail to understand that the Christian God was in fact different? Was it preferable to create some new term such as Tianzhu, the “Lord of Heaven,” or should the missionaries devise an appropriate transliteration for the name of God? While the Jesuits themselves could not agree about this, some Chinese found it either insulting or deceptive to equate the Sovereign on High of the Chinese classics with the God of the Western religion.
In the seventeenth century these issues became more contentious when they became part of an effort to prove that ancient Chinese ideas coincided with those of the Bible. Missionaries, who believed all human history was to be found in the Bible, devised a theory according to which the Chinese had migrated eastward from the Mediterranean area after the Great Flood of biblical times. The Europeans may have sincerely believed this theory, but for the Chinese, the implications were unacceptable. To identify Chinese history with Western, Judeo-Christian history in effect deprived the Chinese of their own history. It asked them to disown their ancestors. That was just what the Jesuits were resisting in the Rites Controversy.
The issue was muddied yet further by conflicting attempts on the parts of both Europeans and Chinese converts to demonstrate that, as the Pillar Li Zhizao put it, “There are the same minds and the same principles in the Eastern and Western seas.”7 They all sought to prove that the major points of the European religion were identical to the traditional ideas of the Chinese. The underlying purpose was very similar, but the emphasis was slightly different. Chinese tried to show the inherent Chineseness of Christian beliefs, while missionaries tried to show that ancient Confucianism was largely in accord with Christianity. They suggested that the Chinese had once known about the God of the Bible but had somehow lost their intellectual compass. In both cases the motivation was to demonstrate that the new ideas from the West amounted in essence to no more than a revamping of ideas formulated in Chinese antiquity, because they thought that in that case they would be far more likely to gain acceptance.
Chinese and missionaries each compiled lists of quotations from the Chinese classics that seemed to reveal affinities with Christianity. One such work, for example, gives sixty-five occurrences of the terms Shangdi or Tian in Chinese classical texts: thirty-three from the Book of History (Shujing), twenty-six from the Book of Songs (Shujing), three from the Mencius (Mengzi), two from Confucius’ Analects (Lunyu), and one from the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong). All these texts were fundamental works of the classical Chinese canon. Such evidence was, however, open to reinterpretation by those who used it to try to discredit the Europeans by showing that Christianity was merely a later Western corruption of Chinese ideas. In the end, and not without dissenters, Catholic Christianity became known in China as Tian Zhu Jiao, “the Teaching of the Lord of Heaven.”
The third great issue of the accommodation policy pitted Christian insistence on monogamy against the Chinese practice of concubinage. A Christian could have only one wife. Adultery was against God’s law. But what was to be done when would-be converts had one or more concubines? It was a common practice among the better-off, justified by the filial need to produce male descendants to continue one’s family line. Missionaries refused to convert a man who declined to send away his concubine. That was probably what had delayed the conversion of Li Zhizao in 1608. From a Christian point of view the issue was clear. But so it was for Chinese. A woman could not in all conscience simply be sent away. She was in effect used goods, whom her natal family would not necessarily take back in—that would involve terrible loss of face as well as expense—and quite likely no one else would want her. She could perhaps be given to a poor man unable to afford a wife or sold into prostitution.
The public confession made by Wang Zheng, a scholarly convert who committed suicide when he heard of the fall of the Ming, shows the traumas men as well as women sometimes suffered over the concubine question. Wang’s agonizing, typical of many of his contemporaries as they considered conversion, shows one solution to which many may have resorted, whether or not in good faith: they kept their concubines within their households but no longer slept with them. When Wang was converted to Christianity, he decided never to take a concubine. But because his wife had no son, his family overruled him. Later he repented and tried to send her away:
My wife wept and begged me to tolerate the concubine, and we nearly had a quarrel. The concubine too was so distressed that she nearly lost her life. She would on no account remarry, and she expressed her wish to become a Christian and observe chastity. . . . Throughout the whole night I reflected [saying to myself] that I am nearly seventy, and my behavior is no better than that of a youth of seventeen. . . . Now I promise before God that in future I will treat the concubine as a friend . . . and if afterward I again commit sin with her, the angels [will be my witness] and I am willing to die the penalty of death.8
The insistence on monogamy also raised questions about the status of concubines’ children, as one outraged detractor of the missionaries observed: “My friend was old, poor and had no son. Fortunately, he had been able to buy a concubine and by her had a son who was just one year old. [The missionaries] told him that, in their country, it was believed to be virtuous not to have any concubines and thought to be of no importance not to have a line of descendants. My friend obeyed them and ejected the mother of this child. I do not know whether the child is still alive.”9
The missionaries tried to devise ways to circumvent the concubine problem. If a male convert’s principal wife refused to become a Christian, the missionaries allowed him to marry one of his concubines. But they had no authority to grant such permission; besides, such practices clearly contravened Chinese law. Sometimes Jesuits overlooked the presence of a concubine because they recognized the hardships involved. One critic charged that they did so when the would-be convert was especially influential. For good measure he also accused the missionaries of licentious behavior: “They would like all kings and sovereigns to adhere to their vicious doctrine, expel all their concubines from their women’s quarters and live like common people with but a single wife. But in their residences they themselves invite ignorant women at nightfall to enter a room draped with red hangings, where they close the doors and practise unction with holy oil, give them holy water and place their hands on five places of their bodies: these are impure and secret rituals.”10
Thus this aspect of the accommodation policy, like the Rites Controversy and the disputes over religious terminology, made it easy for critically disposed Chinese to scorn the Jesuits as inconsistent and hypocritical and their religion as hopelessly incompatible with Chinese customs.
In sum, accommodation was double-edged. It undoubtedly played a part in bringing the Jesuits their greatest conversion successes, for they sometimes had encountered resistance to Christianity specifically on the grounds that it turned Chinese away from some of their most hallowed customs. It also helped the missionaries gain the confidence of the Kangxi Emperor, under whom they attained their greatest influence in China. Ultimately, however, accommodation and the extreme rancor that surrounded it were major factors in the downturn in Jesuit political fortunes both in China and in Europe. Each side was apprehensive about a loss of control and integrity. Kangxi saw the proposal that he surrender control over Chinese subjects to the pope as a threat to his sovereignty, while churchmen feared that to surrender control over Chinese converts to an alien, secular emperor would undermine Catholicism’s integrity. In China the accommodation policy fueled suspicions about doctrinal inconsistencies, prompting a loss of respect for the Jesuits, while in Europe it contributed to the suspension—at the time it was called the abolition—of the Society of Jesus in 1773. At both ends, then, the Jesuits probably lost more than they gained by their attempts at accommodation. Yet missionaries of other orders who spurned accommodation fared little better in their conversion efforts.
CHRISTIANITY, RELIGIOUS BELIEFS,
AND “SUPERSTITION”
When Jesuit missionaries reintroduced Christianity into China, they had to contend with Buddhism, which by that time had sunk deep roots in Chinese soil. Both Chinese and Europeans were aware of similarities and differences between Buddhism and Christianity; they just interpreted them differently. Considerable animosity grew up between the two religions. The enmity was partly attributable to the conversion of men such as Yang Tingyun and Buddhism’s consequent loss of political and financial support. But some of the reasons had to do with Jesuit policies. The first Jesuits to reach China, including Ricci, had initially dressed as Buddhist monks since Buddhism, a religion, seemed at first glance to have much in common with Christianity. Once the Jesuit missionaries grasped, however, that Chinese scholars did not accord men of religion the kind of respect priests customarily received in Europe and that Buddhism itself did not enjoy great prestige among the most influential, they adopted the garb of Confucian scholars, hoping thus to improve their opportunities of encountering Chinese scholars on equal terms. Once the Jesuits had made this shift, they turned sharply against Buddhism.
Regarding Buddhism as a potential competitor for Christianity in Chinese minds, Jesuits attacked it as mere superstition. This tactic won them the initial support of Chinese who objected to Buddhism’s lack of social conscience and saw Christianity as a tool against it. But it naturally brought some antagonism, both from Buddhists themselves and from others who thought the differences between the two religions were so slight as to be illusory. Critics of Christianity’s claims to originality and uniqueness drew attention to its similarities to Buddhism—for example, the prohibitions against killing, the use of religious images and ceremonies, and the belief in paradise and hell. Missionaries, regarding the similarities as traps set by the devil to delude people into following a false doctrine, only condemned Buddhist practices all the more vehemently. The point is that although missionary successes and the zeal of wealthy and influential converts such as Yang Tingyun undoubtedly attracted the hostility of Buddhist monks and their powerful supporters toward Christianity, the Jesuits’ own vilification of Buddhism, despite its superficial resemblance to Christianity, also bore considerable responsibility.
Ironically, the “superstitious practices” of Buddhism, missionary denunciations of which antagonized Buddhism’s supporters, played an important role in encouraging the adoption of Christianity among ordinary people, who did not necessarily draw clear distinctions between the European religion and their own popular beliefs, and judged gods on the basis of their ability to provide assistance in times of need. Because of such people’s limited literacy, we know far less about their understanding of Christianity, but scattered information gives us some sense of how it spread at the grass roots level in China.
Reports of the efficacy of Christianity among the people often took place in the context of miracle tales. Such tales were already familiar to Chinese because they were widespread in the Buddhist tradition. Moreover, the resemblance of Chinese Christian miracle tales to their Buddhist counterparts probably helped spread Christianity among ordinary people, for ideas are often more readily absorbed when they seem somewhat familiar. But the Chinese Christian miracle tales contain elements that identify them as distinctively Christian. The tales were fairly remote from the exalted doctrinal debates missionaries held with their elite converts, but even the most highly educated were not always immune to such tales’ persuasive power. Li Zhizao’s conversion after he recovered from the illness Ricci nursed him through was a case in point.
The moral of every miracle tale was that only belief in the Christian God could bring salvation. A sampling of two such stories gives some sense of their general flavor. Both originated among the flourishing community of Chinese Christians in early-seventeenth-century Fujian province, where the Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) was sometimes called the Confucius from the West. Both stories are taken from a morality book compiled by a scholarly convert, whose quotations are all that now remains of the tales.
The first tale tells of the death of an active convert named Zhang Shi, whose baptismal name was Michael. This story was widely disseminated and had considerable influence. It was interpreted as proof of the real existence of heaven and hell and as evidence that Chinese could go to heaven and, as it were, live happily ever after—provided, of course, they had converted to Christianity. It shows the Christian God presiding over a heavenly tribunal, much as King Yama does in the Buddhist tradition, but in this case God is assisted by the apostle Matthew and by none other than Matteo Ricci himself. Michael Zhang Shi’s death had been foretold in a miraculous way: as he prayed, twenty-one golden characters had appeared on his bedcurtain. The last five characters read: “Within three years, I will come and fetch you.” On the day that he died, three years to the very hour after this occurrence:
. . . he saw with his eyes wide open how the Master of Heaven [i.e., God] judged a sinner and sent him to hell; and a child was sent to the place of the children. At the third judgment it was Michael [Zhang Shi]’s turn. At first he was severely reprimanded. The apostle Saint Matthew and the virtuous Matteo Ricci accompanied him and earnestly implored the Master on his behalf. Thereupon, the Master called to the Heavenly Spirit [i.e., the angel] Michael: “Let him go to the bright Heaven.”
At that moment, the command reverberated like thunder and Michael [Zhang Shi] regained consciousness. He felt extremely hot and asked immediately to be fanned, whereupon he gave a detailed account of his vision to the whole family. When he had finished, he passed away peacefully.11
The second miracle tale reproduced here concerns a family prompted to convert to Christianity after a woman had miraculously recovered from demonic possession. The scholarly editor of this collection of tales suggested that the woman was partly to blame for the possession because she had encouraged the demon by expressing her dissatisfaction with her prospective husband, but the tale itself does not seem to imply that her husband or other family members faulted her:
Zhang Qixun was a man from Sunjiang in the prefecture of Quanzhou [Fujian] whose family for generations had earned their living as boatsmen. He was married to a girl named Fu, [from] a distinguished family of Wurong, who had lost her father at an early age, and had been betrothed to [Zhang Qi]Xun when she was not yet fourteen years old. [For that reason] she was constantly discontented and unhappy, thinking “That Zhang is no match for me.” Now her [future] husband kept in his home an evil image, only one [square] foot in size, of what is popularly called Lord Zhang. Whenever this demon came at night, he used to go to Fu’s bedroom, and her spirit often followed him to his dwelling-place, which was all golden gate-towers and storied buildings made of jade, and all kinds of precious and rare things, and he told her “I want to take you as my wife.” So it went on for three years, during which her face from day to day become more [sickly, as if she were suffering from] jaundice. Her aunt was amazed at it, and when after inquiry she had come to know the reason [of Fu’s disease], she at once had her married to Zhang Qixun, expecting that in this way she would avoid being harassed by the demon. [In actual fact, the reverse proved true;] whereas previously he might come once or twice a month, now he arrived every night. Fu and her husband slept together, and the demon also shared Fu’s bed. Her husband was so enraged that he could not stand it any longer, and privately, without Fu’s knowing it, he drove a nail into [the demon’s] navel on the evil image. That night he came again and showed Fu his navel and intestines, all stained with blood dripping out. Fu’s disease then daily grew worse. After abstaining from food for two or three months or even more, her condition had become critical. Her husband was deeply distressed about it; he invited a magician to expel and exorcise [the demon] but whatever he undertook, nothing worked.
Then the husband suddenly heard about the Sacred Doctrine of the Lord of Heaven [i.e., the Christian God]. He thereupon went to the church, humbly begged for help, and invited the Friends of Religion to come to his house, to sprinkle Holy Water, and to paste the Holy Name on [the walls of] the bedroom. That day, just when the night was falling, the demon appeared again, but he did not dare to enter the private apartment—he only went to the hall and asked her to meet him there. The Friends of Religion again brought a Holy Cross to the house, and then the demon vanished without a trace. Fu gradually recovered from her illness, and took food and drink as before. The whole family was moved by [the Lord’s] grace and they all observed the holy Religion and were baptized. This happened in [February or March of 1633].12
For some Chinese who came into contact with missionaries it was Daoist notions about the possibility of distilling an elixir of immortality that attracted their attention to Christianity because of its promise of eternal life. Qu Rukui (fl. ca. 1605), an accomplished scientist with considerable technical knowledge, had originally been drawn to Ricci by the possibility that the Jesuit knew about alchemy, Qu’s passion. Qu later converted to Christianity, finding the spiritual relief it offered more persuasive than alchemy as an antidote to death.
Alchemy and the possibility of prolonging life sometimes produced bizarre results. In the summer of 1678 Jesuits resident in Hangzhou set about removing the remains of one of their number, Martinus Martini, to their newly established Christian cemetery. Martini had already been dead for seventeen years, so it was reasonable to expect his body would have decomposed, even though Chinese coffins were famous for being airtight. But his “hair, beard, and fingernails were . . . intact, and the tomb was found to contain no unpleasant odor.”13
The condition of Martini’s body caused a sensation among the residents of Hangzhou, who became much more enthusiastic about Christianity when they thought the Jesuits might have brought a magical substance that could preserve the body forever. It was rather different from the formula for eternal life that the Jesuits were trying to convey. The extremely slow decomposition of Martini’s body continued to cause excitement even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, almost two hundred years after his death, with pilgrimages to the Jesuit cemetery to trim Martini’s hair and nails.
For some missionaries the temptation to exploit alchemy’s seductive power was irresistible. In 1735 Dominique Parennin (1665–1741) used his knowledge of physics and chemistry to perform “magic tricks” as a preamble to bringing his scholarly audience the enlightenment of Christianity. His ploy was not terribly effective, and as we shall see, a reputation for alchemical skill was a dangerous thing, for a hostile audience might accuse such “magicians” of the most heinous acts.
The negative side to the use of miracle tales and “magic” to encourage conversion, the promise of alchemical or magical potential, and the stories missionaries spread about Jesus’ power to work miracles was that Chinese tended to suspect miracle workers of being troublemakers. They knew that Jesus himself had, after all, been put to death by the state for breaking the law. In China too there were laws against those who masked subversion with religion.
China broadly tolerated such religions as Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as popular folk sects such as the White Lotus, a loosely knit group of heterodox religious assemblies known for their propensity to rebellion, so long as they kept on the right side of the law. But laws against religious groups specifically included the following unacceptable transgressions: people who tampered with the imperial calendar, for to suggest one was entitled to do so implied authority even over emperors; people who deluded others by claiming magical powers, among which alchemical skills might be included; people who assembled large and potentially disorderly groups of men and women, offending public morality; and people who offered rewards in the next life for those martyred in the present one. Christianity was subject to these laws, and some of its adherents’ activities seemed to skate perilously close to just these types of banned behavior. Besides, missionaries preached the brotherhood of man and the equality of all, doctrines ominously reminiscent of the White Lotus. To a society ordered on the premise that one’s role depended on one’s position in a complex hierarchy, such notions were hard indeed for the Chinese to accept. They completely conflicted with basic concepts of social organization.
Thus it was not hard to build a convincing case against Christianity. Missionaries and their associates operated clandestinely, gathering groups together and forming cells in many parts of the country. They failed to maintain the proper hierarchies. They had extensive overseas connections. They received foreign funding. Their organization was strong, and they appeared to obey the directives of a central authority. Perhaps they were spies; their interest in cartography certainly suggested that possibility. In this context, when Chinese recalled that among the Japanese troops fighting in Korea in the 1590s had been fifteen thousand Christian converts, the effect was chilling. Moreover, Chinese were aware that the foreign nations that had already colonized parts of Asia embraced Christianity in one form or another. So it was not altogether farfetched to argue, as did a number of Christianity’s enemies, that the spread of the foreign religion might prove a sinister prelude to invasion.
These kinds of suspicions highlight a fundamental difference between Western notions of the role played by religion and those held in China. In Catholic Europe, where attempts to separate church and state were of recent origin, the Church claimed authority over the secular sphere, but in China the reverse was true: the emperor’s power was all-embracing. He was the Son of Heaven and the sole mediator between heaven and earth. The head of a religious institution could not possibly have authority over him, nor could religion exist independently. In China, religion either specifically served the state, in which case it was orthodox, or did not, in which case it constituted rank heresy. It was thus virtually unthinkable that a ruler of China would formally adopt a foreign religion that acknowledged an alternative leader, far less permit such a religion to become institutionalized in China. In other words, the Chinese concept of religion’s place in the order of things presented an insurmountable stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in China, for it just seemed rife with subversive potential. In these circumstances it was no wonder Christianity failed to make broad gains in China.
THE DECLINE OF
CATHOLIC INFLUENCE IN CHINA
The overall number of Catholic converts in China decreased by about one-third during the course of the eighteenth century, and mission work had to go underground. The main reason Catholic influence in China fell into decline was the debacle between the Kangxi Emperor and the pope in the early eighteenth century, but there were other contributing factors, particularly Jesuit involvement on the wrong side of an extremely bitter struggle for the imperial succession. This aroused the hostility of the eventual winner, who became the Yongzheng Emperor (1723–1736). In 1724 Yongzheng banned Catholicism, ordered all Christians to renounce their faith, and expelled to Macao all foreign missionaries except those rendering technical services to the court. Yongzheng’s successor, the Qianlong Emperor (1736–1795), shared his father’s distaste for Christianity and barred missionaries altogether from the provinces. But enforcement remained sporadic, and groups of European missionaries managed to proselytize in the Chinese countryside throughout the eighteenth century.
Crackdowns against Christianity were prompted in part by fears about the possible consequences of large assemblies, as we can see from a criminal case dating from 1754. Just outside Beijing a group of Catholics practicing openly came to official notice. The ringleader had been punished before for proselytizing; now it seemed he was regularly preaching to large mixed assemblies. The authorities destroyed crucifixes and religious texts uncovered in a house-to-house search. Further investigation disclosed that the community had originated when Jesuits working in the imperial workshops in nearby Beijing had converted their Chinese apprentices, who had then returned to their villages and spread the word.14
Farther from Beijing, things were easier. In the west China province of Sichuan, for instance, the number of Catholics multiplied, especially in the second half of the century. By 1800 there were perhaps forty thousand converts in Sichuan alone. This increase was just the reverse of the national trend.
Perhaps most striking of the various Christian communities of late-eighteenth-century Sichuan was the Institute for Christian Virgins. Sponsored by the (anti-Jesuit) French Society of Foreign Missions, the institute grew out of an indigenous movement among Chinese women to avoid marriage and dedicate their lives to religion. Its members took vows of chastity and devoted their lives to social work and teaching in schools for girls. Of course they aimed to make Christians of their pupils and focused primarily on evangelism, but the mere fact of providing education for girls was so unusual as to verge on the revolutionary.
Most Christian Virgins came from well-to-do families, often Christians themselves, who were willing to support their daughters; there was no place in Chinese society for groups of celibate women living independently. Like the White Lotus sect, which often fell under suspicion of subversion, Christianity provided outlets for women’s religious fervor and allowed them a degree of empowerment that was impossible within an orthodox Confucian framework. The Institute for Christian Virgins often came under attack from Confucians, who considered the Virgins’ vows of chastity antisocial, if not downright subversive; marriage was a moral duty. But the group grew steadily—by the end of the nineteenth century one thousand women were affiliated—and was finally disbanded, presumably, only in 1950.
Some accounts suggest that Qing fears of missionary subversion were not wholly unfounded. In Fujian province in 1746, for example, a Chinese man, to whom the local Jesuit had refused a loan, accused the missionaries of paying people to convert, trafficking in weapons, and inciting people to revolt. Unfortunately for the missionaries, it transpired that a number of local bandits were Christians and had European weapons and money in their homes. Local missionaries managed to escape, but a Dominican bishop was put to death in the aftermath of this episode.
As missionary influence in China steadily dwindled during the eighteenth century, the Society of Jesus was rapidly losing ground in Europe as well. The Portuguese government expelled the Jesuits in 1759; by 1762 those in Macao had also been deported, and their property confiscated. Other countries followed suit. In 1773 the papal brief Dominus Ac Redemptor suppressed the Society of Jesus around the world. In Beijing the brief was executed two years later. Jesuits already in China remained, but there were no new arrivals.
The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw a wave of persecutions of Christians in China, particularly in the years 1784 and 1785, shortly after the second of two major Muslim uprisings. This occurred because in a curious parallel with Englishmen who sometimes wondered if China might not be a Muslim country, the foreign origin of Islam led many Chinese to confuse it with Christianity. The anti-Christian activity represented a preemptive strike against possible rebellion. At the height of Qing imperial power, Catholic influence in China reached a low point.
CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM:
A COMPARISON
Of the two great religions China received from abroad, Buddhism took root much more deeply than did Christianity. One reason for this had to do with the respective religions’ institutional structure. As the last chapter showed, Buddhism filtered into China from India in the first century. It came in a piecemeal fashion, with merchants, travelers, and some priests who journeyed across Central Asia. Later Chinese traveled to India to learn more about Buddhism and to collect scriptures to bring back and translate. The transmission of Buddhism to China was never directed by a central Church in quite the way that Rome later tried to exercise control over the Christian missions in China.
By contrast, Christian missionaries of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries labored under a fatal disability: their entire operation was under the central direction of the pope in Rome. This sharply restricted their freedom of movement and their ability to make judgments based on their experience in the field. Many of the decisions that governed their actions were made in the context of Counter-Reformation church politics and had little to do with conditions in China. This greatly limited missionaries’ effectiveness. Early Buddhists had no such handicap. This distinction had much to do with Buddhism’s success in implanting itself in China.
The second reason concerned political circumstances in China at the time the foreign religion was introduced, including the presence or absence of a centralized power in China. When Buddhism was putting down its roots in China, the Han empire was in decline. After its fall in 220 there followed almost four centuries of political fragmentation. When Catholic Christianity arrived in China in the late sixteenth century, China was entering a period of social and political instability, but the resemblance was only superficial, for a number of reasons. In the first place, China’s late Ming political disintegration lasted only until the Qing conquest some six decades later. Second, part of the new Qing regime’s program involved the imposition of strict limits on intellectual freedom; after the Qing conquest, Chinese scholars were far less willing to take intellectual risks. The late Ming atmosphere of experimentation that had so favored the missionary cause simply evaporated, while for Chinese distraught about the peril into which their civilization had fallen, the experience of foreign occupation made any belief system of foreign origin almost automatically subject to suspicion. Finally, the Jesuits’ decision to serve the conquest regime lost them much of the sympathy of the Han Chinese elite, as a consequence of loyalist and protonationalist sentiments. In the climate of the times the foreign missionaries’ shift of allegiance appeared treacherous indeed to Chinese undergoing the experience of alien occupation.
Third, unlike the early Buddhists, Catholic missionaries gave far greater prominence to intellectual debate than to social activism, with some exceptions. Moreover, for various reasons their economic role was not integrated into Chinese society, whereas, as we saw in the last chapter, Buddhism and international trade were closely connected. In the Ming-Qing period, the links between Christian missionaries and European traders were much looser; commerce and religion remained largely separate. Traders were confined to coastal areas, while missionaries spread out all over the country. Moreover, the English and Dutch, who came to constitute a considerable proportion of the foreign merchant community, were Protestants unlikely to form much connection with Catholic missionaries, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian.
Fourth, when Buddhism arrived, its only real competitor was Daoism, to which Buddhism bore some resemblance. Like a vine that wraps itself around existing vegetation, Buddhism attached itself to the native plant of Daoism and then flourished so much that it somewhat overwhelmed it. At that time too, Confucianism was still relatively new and insecure as a set of state operating principles; more important, it made no attempt to address spiritual needs. Thus Buddhism filled a gap by offering salvation to all, doing so without regard to social position. By contrast, when Catholicism arrived, there existed choices other than Christianity: Buddhism itself and a well-entrenched Neo-Confucianism much better placed to compete for direction of China’s spiritual life. Buddhism’s political role also gave it an advantage. At a time of continuous competition for political authority, it offered an alternative source of legitimacy to contending rulers. By contrast, such political influence as the Jesuits achieved never attained the same scale, and ultimately it brought them more trouble than gain.
Fifth, Christianity’s all-or-nothing approach was simply incompatible with Chinese customary practice. Chinese who treated religious practices as a language for petitioning unseen powers were primarily interested in their efficacy. They saw nothing strange in mixing and matching different sets of beliefs. Buddhism was able to find its place within this tradition, but Christianity’s claims to exclusivity and requirement of absolute faith presented a virtually insuperable disadvantage.
In sum, the Christian mission to China of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, dominated by the Jesuits, failed to make the massive inroads anticipated because of a combination of cultural and political factors within China, on the one hand, and, on the other, European Church politics. The China mission was not a total disaster as a religious endeavor—two hundred thousand or so Chinese converts are a considerable number—but it was not much to show for two centuries’ work in a country whose population by 1800 approached the three hundred million mark. Where the missionaries achieved much greater success was in making it possible for Chinese to find out about other branches of European knowledge and other kinds of European people and customs.