Wise Man Of The West (Harvill Press Editions)

by Vincent Cronin

  “There is no doubt that the black clockmaker seized the boy. He is a ruffian and must be sent back to Macao.”

  After directing both plaintiff and defendant to be kept in custody, instead of calling the plaintiff’s witnesses, whom he evidently knew to be biased, he ordered the president and other mandarins in charge of building the tower to be summoned, for they had visited the site on the evening in question.

  Most of that day Ricci spent in an ante-room, piecing together from snatches of conversation the progress of the case. The plaintiff had managed to slip away and visit the president of the tower committee, to whom he had given money and the promise of more on condition that he and his associates supported the false charges. He had also arranged that Ricci’s two neighbours should be allowed to come forward spontaneously and give incriminating evidence. The case seemed as good as lost. He foresaw a public bastinado, followed by ignominious expulsion from the town. Distractedly he prayed for himself and also—he hoped with more fervour—for the endangered mission.

  In the late afternoon witnesses were assembled. Ricci and the plaintiff were again led in and knelt before the governor. Suddenly disorder broke out at the back of the hall and, to the surprise of everyone present but Wang P’an, three old men clad in the purple robes of graduates entered and knelt beside Ricci. Stealing a glance, he recognised the men who had advised him to release the boy. The governor addressed them.

  “Is it true that the foreign bonze stole this boy away?” and he pointed to the snivelling urchin.

  In a cultivated voice the eldest answered, “No, your Excellency. The boy threw a great many stones at the foreign bonze’s house: for this reason a servant came out and took the boy into custody. We happened to be passing, so we intervened and procured his release.”

  “Did the foreign bonze keep the boy three days?”

  “No, your Excellency, not even three hours.”

  The governor rose and signalled to the guards. His inordinate authority, like that of every Chinese magistrate, lay not in rigorous laws or the power of beheading, but in a humble bamboo cane, with which he possessed the right to whip any one of his subjects in public audience. Yet, so terrible were the wounds it could inflict, so arbitrary the will which wielded it, that China largely owed her incomparable order and unity to a flimsy-looking piece of wood, five feet long, three inches broad and an inch thick.

  At the governor’s signal four guards hurled themselves on the plaintiff, led him screaming to the centre of the hall and threw him face downward on the floor. While one guard held him fast by the feet, and another by the head, his clothes were wrenched off. A burly executioner, stripped to the waist, raised the bamboo cane above his head. At a second signal he swung the stick down on the back of the victim’s thighs. A shriek of pain. “One,” cried a guard. Again the weapon was raised and in a whistling arc smashed down on bare flesh. Two, came the count. Three. Four. Five. The victim was turned over, and blows delivered with unabated fury across the front of his thighs. Ricci looked from the squirming prisoner round the hall. Most bystanders were casually conversing; some laughed, few showed interest, none pity. His two neighbours, who had been called to give false witness, evidently frightened by the sudden turn of events, took advantage of the whipping to elude their guards and scurry out of the hall on hands and knees. Ten, he heard the tally cried, and the prisoner was again turned over. What had he been told? That twenty or thirty strokes left permanent scars; fifty required months to heal; a hundred brought death. In supplication he bowed his head to the ground.

  “I beg your Excellency to stop these blows. The man was mistaken and meant no harm.”

  Wang P’an replied above the screams, “This crime deserves no mercy. He has had the audacity to accuse innocent men.”

  Again and again Ricci interceded, but not until thirty strokes had been administered did the punishment cease. Then, having dismissed the elderly mandarins, he declared Ricci and the Indian boy free. So sickened by the punishment he could scarcely feel relief, Ricci walked home, explaining what had happened to a host of curious questioners on the way, and wondering whether anything but misunderstanding and conflict could arise from this first intimate meeting of two disparate races.

  Next morning the governor sent Ricci yet another edict to place outside his house. It proclaimed, “The foreign bonzes have come to this town with the viceroy’s permission. One of them, against all the rules of courtesy, has been unjustly accused. No one in future is to molest them: if any are caught doing so, the Indian clockmaker is to bring them to the governor’s hall, where they will be punished mercilessly.” Hostility relented and a few weeks later, when Ruggieri and Philip returned with sufficient money to pay their debts and continue building, subsided altogether. Work was started at once on an additional six rooms, a verandah and a large separate chapel.

  Soon after Ruggieri’s return, news reached the missionaries that a poor Chinese had been pronounced incurably ill by the doctors and dumped in a nearby field by his despairing parents to die. Ricci and Ruggieri went out with a litter, found the sick man and brought him back to the house. Since they had no place to lay him, they told Philip and the Indian to construct a small wattled hut in the garden where they could set up a bed. They fed and looked after him, but it soon became clear that they could not save his life. Ricci, who knew something of the Kwangtung dialect, asked him whether he would accept Christian teaching. The poor wretch was convinced that Heaven had intervened in the shape of these strangers who cared for him like a son.

  He made a gesture of assent and murmured, “If it teaches you to treat me like this, it must surely be true.”

  So every day in his homespun Chinese Ricci taught the dying man the existence of an almighty God, and that although his body could not be saved, his soul could be redeemed, to enjoy eternal life. But these ideas, so opposed to the traditional belief in transmigration, were beyond him, and Ricci was obliged to simplify still further, teaching him the bare essentials for baptism: to acknowledge the Lord of Heaven, to repent for past wrongs. When the Chinese gave his assent, Ruggieri, as superior, poured holy water over his brow and recited the Latin words of salvation. As Ricci watched, it seemed that the moment of salvation of a single soul pointed beyond itself to his own vision: the conversion of China. But the missionaries’ joy lasted only a few days; their first Christian had been reborn only to die.

  Since disinterested charity outside the family circle was incomprehensible, the town gossips fitted the incident into a known category. Nodding with worldly wisdom, they said, “It is obvious the foreign bonzes knew the sick man had a precious jewel in his head. When he died they cut open his brain and took possession of the jewel. How else do you suppose they can afford to enlarge their house?” All but the graduates accepted this story as certain truth.

  Wang P’an, however, understood and sympathised with their motives. That spring there arrived with pomp and ceremony two wooden tablets on which were inscribed in gold three or four large, well-formed Chinese characters, a present from the governor, who had engraved them himself. In this way mandarins were accustomed to show their favour, single out friends for particular respect and officially recognise a place of worship, which otherwise remained illegal. One tablet, intended for the door of the house, which also served as chapel, proclaimed “Pagoda of the Flower of Saints”: a tribute to the Mother of God, patron of the chapel. The other was inscribed “They came from the West to bring us knowledge of Paradise.” The missionaries had originally been obliged to say they came from India, for the Chinese did not have names for Europe or its kingdoms. Their books stated India to be the furthest western land, and sometimes used that name loosely for the West. India, whence Buddhism had been brought to China, was believed to be a specially religious country where men tried to save their souls, and possessing in the Ganges a river of marvellously holy water. While Europe believed Paradise lay in furthest Asia, China, under Buddhist influence, thought it lay towards the West. Consequently
, Wang P’an had identified the Heaven of the missionaries’ teaching with the country of their origin.

  Both tablets were dated and signed with the governor’s name and rank. The missionaries set them up, like vertical captions on a Chinese etching, one beside the bamboo screen of the large room, the other beside the front door, under the shadow of the wooden cross which crowned the house. They and their chapel had been given a name: first stage, so they hoped, towards being understood.

  From their own side, too, they strove towards that end, turning likewise to written characters. They had discovered how little trust the Chinese placed in the highly ambiguous spoken word. Only when he had seen the pictographs written down and had studied them was he prepared to give or withhold his assent. A whole sentence might be shut up in a character whose beauties the eye alone could detect. The written or printed word had another advantage: it could penetrate and be understood throughout China, whereas they were restricted for the moment to a single town. They could not adopt the traditional evangelical method, haranguing in the open air or at home, for in China only revolutionary political doctrine was spread in such uncouth fashion. Religion was diffused by the example of a good life and by books. To wander through the streets preaching would be interpreted as the prelude to Portuguese conquest, and before the day was out they would be sent packing to Macao.

  Towards the end of their first year in Shiuhing they began to translate the Ten Commandments, Philip and their acquaintances helping them to find equivalents for the Latin. In Chinese style, instead of using pens, they painted the characters with small brushes made from hare fur, dipping them in a mixture of water and ink manufactured from soot and sesame oil. By October the manuscript was ready to take to the local printer’s shop. Printing, known to Europe for little longer than a hundred and fifty years, had played an important part in Chinese civilisation since about the eighth century. Ricci had been astonished by the number and quality of volumes, covering every field of human knowledge, most of them well produced except that the flimsy paper, made from bamboo pith, would take ink on only one side. The printer, he found, possessed no movable type, for although the component parts of the characters were sufficiently simple, the difficulty of combining them into a multitude of forms would have been insurmountable. Instead, the written text was pasted in reverse on a smooth, unknotty tablet, made from pear, apple or jujube wood. When dry, the surface of the paper was scraped off, leaving nothing but the black characters on the tablet. Then the printer cut away the wood round the characters until they stood out in relief. From this he could print at great speed and at small expense a very large number of copies, the block being preserved indefinitely.

  The Decalogue emerged as a handsome production of sixteen columns, running from top to bottom and right to left. To those visitors who enquired about their doctrine, the missionaries presented copies. Like all written or printed writing, they were handled with almost awesome care: indeed, in the sixth of the ten courts of Taoist purgatory punishment was inflicted on those “who had shown no respect for written paper.” The effect far exceeded Ricci’s expectations. His Chinese friends said the commandments conformed to reason and natural law, and some even promised to observe them. So successful did this first leaflet prove that they soon produced another containing the Pater, Ave and Credo in Chinese. In return friends brought presents of incense, oil for the altar lamp and alms for the missionaries’ food, this being the customary way to repay a master’s teaching.

  Ricci was touched by this response, however conventional, for as he came to admire the natural virtues, good humour and industry of the Chinese, as he found himself sharing their joys and troubles by way of a sensitive, almost intuitive natural sympathy, he longed to establish warm relations, to help them to the truth no longer as a mere duty but from fellow-feeling.

  One day, as an experiment, Ricci exhibited an up-to-date Flemish map of the world he had brought from Macao. It showed Europe, the eastern and western coastlines of North America, the full extent of South America, the outline of Africa, India, Indonesia, Japan; the Kwangtung coastline and, to the north-west, Cathay as described by Marco Polo. One of its chief features was a supposed Great Southern Continent, occupying the lower quarter of the atlas, its two northward projections separated by a deep gulf near the Malay Archipelago. Their Chinese visitors were puzzled. Some thought the map a strange painting, others a Taoist charm. When Ricci explained what it was, they refused absolutely to believe him.

  “Surely you are mistaken,” they protested, “we have our own maps bearing no relation to this.”

  One of the mandarins sent a servant home to fetch an atlas and, when it arrived, spread the inferior parchment out on the table. This time it was the missionaries’ turn to be astonished. There could be no mistake about the heading: “Picture of All under Heaven,” but practically the entire sheet was occupied by the fifteen provinces. China like a cuckoo had turned all the other countries out of the nest. Into the right-hand corner Korea and Japan were squeezed; at the bottom, on the same line as Cambodia, stretched the islands of Borneo, Sumatra and Java; to the west lay India with Arabia underneath it; at the top was written Karakorum. A legend at the north-west corner mentioned that nine barbarian countries lay eastwards, eight to the south, six in the west and five to the north. All the foreign countries put together were smaller than a minor province of the Flowery Kingdom. No wonder, thought Ricci, they are contemptuous of foreigners when they consider the rest of the world so small in comparison with their own country. At the same time, the map brought home the almost unimaginable extent of China, stretching on all sides to the absolute natural limit, its eastern semicircular coast bounded by sea; desert to the north, to the west a rampart of high mountains. Ricci noted that altitudes were marked and that the map was crossed with rectilinear divisions, in accordance with the Chinese view that the world was a four-square plane.

  Only Wang P’an believed that the European map might be more than a fiction.

  “I want you to translate all the annotations into our language,” he told Ricci. “Then we can compare the two maps. If I am satisfied that your version is correct, I shall have it printed and distributed throughout the Middle Kingdom.”

  Ricci had been taught geography by Christopher Clavius; he had a knowledge of Ortelius and Mercator; at sea and in India he had taken bearings which had enabled him to revise and complete the atlases he carried, even the best of which still relied on imagination for distant Asia. Carefully he drew up a simple and reasonably complete map on a sinusoidal projection, with the prime meridian 170 degrees east to bring China towards the centre, marking the land white and the sea with large black dots. With its parallels of latitude and longitude, the equator and meridians, all the countries with their names written in Chinese, it impressed the mandarins, who had to admit that while amplifying, it also corresponded with their own knowledge. No one in Shiuhing had ever left China, whereas the foreign bonzes had travelled from the distant West. Their map, after all, might represent the truth. The consequences of this admission were revolutionary and highly favourable. If China was merely one among many great countries, if other people knew more of the world than they did, had they been wise in believing that all foreigners were, like their immediate neighbours, barbarians? Moreover, when Ricci pointed out Italy, so distant from China, and the oceans which lay between, they began to lose some of their fear that the missionaries were the forerunners of conquering armies. Ricci took his work to the governor, together with a clock which the Indian had now completed. Wang P’an was delighted and thanked Ricci profusely. He had the map printed at once, with his own name on it, and gave copies to all his friends. The clock, however, he was unable to regulate and soon returned to the missionaries for use in their own house. There he began to resort even more frequently as a consequence of two fortunate events: his wife, who had not yet born him a son, became pregnant and he himself received promotion, three years before the normal date, to the office of Superinten
dent of the Western Frontier. While still resident in Shiuhing he now had authority in two provinces, and with his increased power could help his protégés even more. Extremely superstitious like all Chinese, he believed his new friends had brought him luck.

  The following month they published an even more important work. As early as 1581 Ruggieri had written a Latin catechism which had been translated into Chinese by Philip and others. The following year Valignano ordered Ruggieri to have it printed as soon as possible. As the two Italians made progress in the language, they saw the book’s shortcomings and started to improve it. During the past summer a strange event had taken place. A graduate from Fukien, married and father of a family, came to the missionaries. In a dream he had seen a foreigner, who explained what he must do in order to be saved, but on waking could not remember his doctrine. Having heard of the foreign bonzes, he identified them with the figure of his dream and had come to learn from them the way of salvation. Ruggieri invited him to live in their house to learn Christian doctrine and to help the missionaries with their Chinese writing. It was this graduate who perfected the style of the catechism and prepared it for publication. Its sixteen chapters took the form of dialogue between master and pupil. First, the existence of God was proved from the causal argument, and God’s attributes enumerated. Versed in Chinese customs more than psychology, the Italians made extensive use of simile. “Those who adore Heaven instead of the Lord of Heaven are like a man who, desiring to pay the Emperor homage, prostrates himself before the imperial palace at Peking and venerates its beauty.” Then followed a discussion of the soul’s immortality, the ten commandments and the purpose of baptism, arguments effective enough to win the young graduate to the new faith during the course of revision. In its printed form the work contained over thirteen thousand characters on seventy-eight pages, bound in blue cloth. Chinese books were authenticated with their author’s seal, engraved with name and surname on ivory, brass, crystal or red coral. The missionaries made their own seal from the letters IHS, with a cross above the H, a monogram of the name of Jesus Christ, which Ignatius de Loyola had adopted as the emblem of his Society. They stamped this seal at the beginning and end of the catechism. Twelve hundred copies were printed in November 1584, but the demand proved so great that these were soon followed by an even larger impression from the same blocks.