Wise Man Of The West (Harvill Press Editions)

by Vincent Cronin

  In the field of astronomy Ricci expected still more useful results. From Portuguese almanacs he could predict eclipses more accurately than the college of mathematicians, but he was not sufficiently skilled to compile a detailed written work, which alone would convince the Chinese of the value of his system. In letter after letter to Rome he requested that an expert astronomer, with books and tables, be sent to Peking, for he was planning nothing less than the reform of the Chinese year. The Gregorian calendar, largely the work of his mathematical master, Christopher Clavius, had been adopted in western Europe in 1582 and promulgated throughout the Indian province a year later. If Europe had taken the momentous step of changing to a new calendar, might not China also? Ricci had already adapted the Gregorian system to the lunar year and translated it into Chinese, so that Christians could calculate the dates of Sundays and feast-days. But he had not dared to print his manuscript, since that would have been considered a revolutionary act of the first magnitude.

  The calendar was the origin and basis of imperial power. Even at the present time acceptance of the Chinese almanac by tributary states was taken as proof of vassalage. The Book of Rites, one of the nine vital volumes, made abundantly clear that the Son of Heaven was originally a star-gazer, his purpose to predict the moment when man must play his part in the rites of heaven and earth by sowing fresh grain. Not only did the early Emperors foretell the seasons by the movements of constellations, but they performed a mimetic ritual for bringing the earth through its annual cycle according to a system of metaphor. Every moon was identified with an animal and a host of other objects and qualities which could provide the basis of productive ceremonies and dances. Thus for the first moon it was laid down that its creatures were of the scaly kind, its musical note was chio, among the standard pipes it had the T’ai Ts’ou sound, its element was wood, the spleen was the sacrifice to be offered first; its numeral was eight, its taste bitter, its smell rank. During this month the Son of Heaven was obliged to occupy the room to the left of his Green Bright Hall, to ride there in the phoenix carriage, yoked with azure dragons wearing green flags. He was robed in green robes, wore green jade ornaments, ate wheat with mutton, and his vessels were lightly carved in order to aid the springing grain. During other months he ploughed the first sacred furrow and made ritual purifications, changing the colour of his jade at each season.

  Nature was beneficial—the fertile soil produced several crops a year—but the rainfall, especially in North China, could be catastrophically variable. Gradually the Emperor came to be identified with the constellation which marked his most important function—the rain-bringing dragon, sign of the fifth month.

  China had retained the lunar year, first devised when the needs of earth had made man look to the night sky. She found it difficult to calculate the solar cycle and harmonise it with the lunar appearances, because she held an erroneous view of planetary movement. The chief problem was when and how to insert an intercalary month. At present the insertion was made every three years but at different times in different years, with unsatisfactory results. The year was further complicated by its division into twenty-four fortnightly periods—the joints and breaths—corresponding to the days on which the sun entered each zodiacal sign. The years were dated from the reigning Emperor’s accession, and the astronomical character of the present dynasty was still further attested by the ideogram for Ming—composed of the characters signifying sun and moon.

  Ricci was convinced that the provision of a more accurate calendar would redound greatly to the credit of Christianity. It might even become possible to replace the lunar by the solar year. That would strike a decisive blow at magical belief; it might shatter the wheel—the twenty-eight constellations of the lunar zodiac—to which China was bound. Feasts of the kitchen god, the god of wealth and a host of other sub-divinities were specified in the Chinese calendar, having been calculated according to the months and certain symbolic numbers. Thus, on the fifth day of the fifth moon presents of mulberries, water chestnuts and cakes were made to ward off disease-bearing spirits, while dragon boats raced on the rivers, survival of a rite to induce celestial dragons to struggle and bring down rain; on the ninth day of the ninth month—the double Yang—the people of Peking, to avoid disaster, would climb such prominent points as the Density of Trees Surrounding the Gate of Chi or the Wall of Pure Metamorphosis. When this cycle of worship and mimesis had been disrupted, China would perhaps consider the acceptance of a supernatural religion less outrageous to nature.

  The original link between the Emperor and the peasants whose crops depended on his predictions was retained in other observances, such as the Son of Heaven’s practice of marrying not into mandarin stock but into the people, selecting his legal wife and forty-five concubines for their physical excellence, a rule which also applied to his family. To Ricci’s great amusement, in 1607 printed edicts were distributed in both capitals and other provinces of high repute urging all parents with sons of fifteen or sixteen, of good health and physical appearance, to present the youths to the local mandarins, so that a suitable husband might be selected for one of Wan Li’s daughters. They were stripped naked and examined minutely to see whether their bodies were strong and perfectly formed. Since no graduate or self-respecting father wished his son to suffer this indignity, the candidates were all plebeian and illiterate. A choice of two or three hundred was made, and finally narrowed down to ten. From these Wan Li and his mother, using purely physical criteria, chose a suitable son-in-law for the Son of Heaven. The youth was then put in the hands of tutors until the wedding day. Even after the ceremony he was obliged to kneel to his wife and had no authority until a son was born to her. Then he received honorific rank and a good income, but was allowed no jurisdiction over the people. Nothing must jeopardise that national unity, whose outward signs were the mandarin language and the calendar.

  From incidents such as this and the fruits of over twenty years’ reading of Chinese history Ricci, in letters to friends in Europe, found it possible to generalise about a country he had come to know intimately. The Middle Kingdom was an agricultural society subservient to the seasons’ strict tyranny—that fact underlay the most striking difference of all between China and Europe, one at which Ricci never ceased to marvel: that the most populous and richest nation of the world, with a well-equipped army of a million men, should have refrained from aggressive war for many centuries, though she lay close to petty states capable of being swallowed in a matter of weeks. As in the recent Korean war, she had occasionally taken up arms either in self-defence or to fulfil her duties to a tributary kingdom, but always with extreme reluctance. Her martial age lay two thousand years in the past; for centuries violence had been decried; Ming mandarins indulged in nothing more military than their game of blockade chess, proudly quoting the proverb: “One stroke of the civilian’s pen reduces the military official to abject submission” and Lao Tzu’s saw: “The best soldier does not fight.”

  This tradition was ingrained in rich, brown soil. China was a country with enough of everything—Ricci found only almonds and olives lacking, and these were adequately replaced by sesame oil. Carrying on virtually no foreign trade, she had no need to conquer markets, nor was she tempted by the poor land of neighbouring states. Even if a nearby country had offered voluntary submission, Ricci doubted whether any mandarin would have consented to govern it. Innumerable elegies testified to the Chinese horror of dying away from home, a sentiment which excited surprise at Ricci’s own self-imposed exile.

  Peace had produced that unity in time as well as in space which made it possible to read and understand the written language of 2,500 years before. It had also produced a remarkable continuity of government, for although each dynasty always issued a penal code of its own, this was generally a more humane version of the preceding collection. To reap riches man had only to subordinate himself to the imperial will and a bountiful heaven. There was no incentive to master nature by means of applied science, nor to perfe
ct military techniques. From the concordant procession of stars the Flowery Kingdom had learned a lesson of peace.

  In that same year, 1607, Paul Hsü’s father died. Paul escorted the coffin home to repay with three years’ mourning the protective care given during three years of helpless infancy. He would sleep apart from his wife on a straw mat beside the coffin, eat neither meat nor seasoned food, use very little wine, take no baths and for some months not even appear in public.

  The departure of this friend and colleague, a great blow to Ricci, was partially offset by the arrival of a new missionary. Sabatino De Ursis was an Italian of thirty-two, who had spent his novitiate at the Roman College under the same master as Ricci. He had been in Macao over three years, waiting to go to Japan; but Valignano, shortly before his death, gave orders that he should be sent to China, hoping that his training in mathematics and architecture would prove useful.

  Pantoja had never been close to Ricci. He was an efficient administrator—he had a calculating eye which noticed the price of goods—but his Spanish education made him adopt a condescending attitude towards the Chinese, which Ricci more than once had to check. The severer climate did not suit him and a rice diet made him dyspeptic. Ricci continually had to exercise patience, and his warmer nature found no response in the Spaniard. For the candid Southern Italian, however—his birthplace was Lecce—he felt an instinctive sympathy which soon developed into intimate friendship. Not for seven years had he lived with a compatriot, spoken Italian, exchanged memories of the Roman College, which even after a lifetime remained his dearest memory, received news of the General, of friends in the capital and at Coimbra. A deep spiritual life, a love of the Chinese people, unflagging zeal, mathematics: at every level they found common interests. For a long time Ricci had felt the need of such a friend, and now more than ever. It was becoming clear that every fresh triumph forged another manacle chaining him to Peking, a prisoner of the Emperor he had hoped to win. At fifty-four, his face was webbed with lines, his hair and beard prematurely grey. He was beginning to realise that he had undertaken a journey without return.

  chapter thirteen

  The Quest for Cathay

  His own days of travel might be ended, but since 1603 Ricci had been accompanying in spirit a member of the Society who had undertaken an unimaginably long journey. He had set out from India to find Cathay and from there proceed to Peking. Since it would decide once and for all the true relations of Cathay and China, Ricci took almost as much interest in the journey as though he himself were making it. He was, moreover, its goal, for the traveller carried letters for the superior of the China mission. Whenever a foreign “embassy” arrived, Ricci anxiously made enquiries at the Castle of Barbarians. Every letter in a strange hand he opened with excitement. Month after month for three years, as he waited in vain for news, he led a dual life of prayer and sympathy for this other Asian explorer. The monstrous tribes, gryphons and ants larger than foxes which still survived on contemporary maps might be fictitious representations of the unknown dangers of central Asia, but those dangers, as he had learned at Goa and the Castle of Barbarians, were none the less formidable in reality. Ricci began to lose hope for the traveller to Peking.

  The Provincial in India had informed him of the journey and its chain of causes.

  Not long after Ricci’s first visit to the northern capital, Acquaviva’s successors at the court of the Great Mogul in Agra learned from Mohammedan merchants that Cathay lay north-east of the Mogul’s kingdom and—most marvellous of all—was peopled with Christians, having priests, sacraments and churches. Ricci had already written to his brethren in India giving reasons for believing that Cathay and China were one. They found his theory difficult to accept. First, China contained only the faintest vestiges of that Christianity which tradition held to be a distinguishing mark of Cathay, and which the merchants’ account confirmed. Secondly, the weight of almost every known authority and many centuries opposed any such identification. Thirdly, court customs in Cathay differed widely from those observed by Ricci. The Visitor in India believed that the name of Cathay, if coterminous with China, might have been extended to the Middle Kingdom. At all events he decided to put the Mohammedan merchants’ claim to the test. Having obtained the Pope’s support for a mission to Cathay, he wrote to King Philip III for the necessary money. The English still clung to the idea of a north-west passage, and the Dutch were now trying to find a way to Cathay and China, passing north of Norway, through Moscow and Tartary. Hoping to forestall these attempts on Cathaian gold, Philip approved the scheme.

  The Visitor decided that, as a preliminary, someone must be sent to discover more certain information about Cathay, to reduce any Christians to Rome and to find out whether a line of communication with China shorter than the sea route could be established. He selected a Portuguese lay brother of the Society called Bento de Goes who spoke fluent Persian and had a thorough knowledge of Mohammedan customs. Goes had been born in the Azores in 1562. As a young man he joined the Army and saw service in India. He led a dissolute life until one day, entering a chapel in Travancore, and praying before a picture of the Virgin, he obtained the grace of total conversion. There and then he vowed to join a religious order and at the age of twenty-two entered the Society. His superiors decided that he should become a lay brother. Angry that he had not been considered suitable for the priesthood, he ran away during his novitiate. Four years later, however, he returned to the Society, and since then had distinguished himself as brave, intelligent and thoroughly reliable.

  Goes received his orders at Agra in 1602. His immediate destination was the kingdom of Kashgar; after that he would proceed eastwards through unmapped regions to the Christian realm, wherever it was; from there to China, Peking and Ricci. Since he would be travelling, at least during the first stages of his journey, among Mohammedans, clearly he must hide the fact that he was a detested Portuguese. He decided to assume the dress and name of an Armenian Christian merchant, exchanging his black soutane for an ankle-length frock and turban, with a scimitar, bow and quiver, and allowing his hair and beard to grow long. He called himself Abdulla, servant of the Lord, with the addition of Isai, meaning the Christian. From the Mogul Akbar, a close friend, he obtained money and letters of recommendation to allied or tributary princes. Jerónimo Xavier, great-nephew of the Apostle of the Indies and Goes’s superior, appointed two Greeks as his companions, Leo Grimanus, who spoke fluent Persian, and a merchant called Demetrius. Four Mohammedans newly converted to Christianity would act as servants.

  In company with an ambassador from Kashgar who was returning home, Goes set out from Agra on October the twenty-ninth, 1602, and reached Lahore, second capital of the Mogul’s kingdom, six weeks later. Here every year a caravan of some five hundred merchants was formed to travel to Kabul. To avert suspicion, Goes shunned the two Jesuit missionaries in Lahore and lodged with a Venetian merchant called Giovanni Battista Galisio. Because they had already proved themselves untrustworthy, he sent back his four servants to Agra and engaged an Armenian Christian named Isaac, who lived in Lahore with his wife and children. Goes also bought camels for the journey and merchandise, mostly lapis lazuli, which would corroborate his disguise and support him on a journey which might last many months. His more precious baggage contained a letter for the people of Cathay, another for Ricci, and a table of movable feasts until the year 1620: first essential for drawing back an errant body into the orbit of Rome.

  In mid-March, season of purple passion-flowers, the caravan set out from Lahore, half a thousand merchants with their servants, camels, horses and baggage carts. Although Kashgar lay almost due north of Lahore, their route ran north-west-wards towards the only practicable pass connecting India with the rest of Asia. Strict discipline regimented the days. When it was time to break camp, the captain of the caravan ordered drums to be beaten. At the first roll, everyone packed away tents and equipment in corded bales; at the second, camels and carts were loaded; at the third, the travellers
mounted and shambled off. When darkness fell, lest any of the party stray, drummers rode before and behind the column, sounding a way through the night.

  Goes spoke Persian to the other merchants and passed without difficulty as a compatriot of his servant Isaac. To observe Lent, he ate only one meal, in the evening: a heap of rice, with onions and flour-cakes baked in ashes. Sometimes a little dried fish was added as a luxury. He had hoped to find time to recite his breviary, but the camel’s swaying movement made him too sick to read. He tried nevertheless to pray: he considered his venture into country which no European had traversed an act of obedience, a missionary journey. His destination was Cathay; his task to link a lost people with Rome. Yet he himself stood in danger of becoming lost. He was travelling among militant Mohammedans who might try to force him, at point of argument and scimitar, to apostatise. He was leaving his dearest friends, above all Jeronimo Xavier, to whom he had written before setting out from Lahore: “May Jesus Christ grant me to see your Reverence again in this life; then I shall be able to sing the canticle of Simeon, ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart, O Lord, according to thy word, in peace.’” Alone, he feared to grow tepid, slack, rank—if he survived the physical dangers described by his companions: extremes of heat and cold, gorge and glacier, brigand and wild animal, fever and mountain sickness.

  Through sterile, flat plains bordered to the north by a sinuous salt range, the first stage of their route was marked by a line of trees planted by Akbar to commemorate a recent decisive victory over his brother, the Sultan of Kabul. Another monument to this war was their first important stop, Attock on the River Indus, a fortified city built to hold the north-west frontier of the Mogul’s kingdom. Through this country the silk route had passed for centuries, from Kashgar to the ports frequented by Alexandrian and Arab sailors, before being destroyed by Mihirakula the Hun. Putting on heavy quilted coats, they climbed steadily up the valley of the Kabul River, between snow-covered peaks, to Peshawar, with its colony of yogis, a garrison town guarding the entrance to the narrow Khyber Pass. Here they rested their animals for twenty days before moving up the defile which entered like a V-shaped wedge into the barrier of mountains, two days’ journey due west. Crossing the pass, they descended into the plain of Nanghahar in the fullness of spring: after the arid mountains, fields of rice and cane-sugar, groves of palms and olives, vineyards, peach trees, figs and pomegranates, the blossoming trees alive with monkeys and orioles. In the market towns Goes heard Afghan musicians playing flute and lyre according to modes more familiar than those of Agra, an enticement to continue his journey westwards across the Persian plateaux to Portugal and a green island lying a lifetime away.