From red, blue, green and grey stretches of rocky hills, they passed through the Ravine of Baboons into the black grit of the Western Gobi. Here they were obliged to travel silently by night, their way marked by the rotting bodies of merchants who had been killed and stripped by carnivorous Kalmaks. During the day they took turns to climb one of the camel-humped crests of sand in order to keep a watch for assailants, while the rest of the caravan bivouacked and made a scanty meal of parched barley. Along the dry riverbeds and eroded rocky ledges they could find no water to quench their thirst, no fuel to counteract a glacial wind marauding from the north.
Following the route of the conquering Genghis Khan, past cities which had collapsed before the encroaching desert, for three hundred miles Goes and his companions braved a cemetery of sand, thirsty, numb with cold, heavy with sleep. For weeks the world was spun into dust, a lifeless planet where time and again they projected their destination, only to arrive and find it a mirage. One night, however, in the last stages of exhaustion, their patrols found and grasped with a shout a single unmistakable thorn bush. As they approached the River Sulei, slowly living things were created, scrub, reeds and poplars, the first green glimmer of hope, and finally, dividing barbarism from civilisation with a single imperious sweep, following the hills north and south to the horizon, the crenellated line of the Great Wall, which—so the experienced travellers claimed—marked the frontier of Cathay.
At Kiayükwan, Passgate of the Pleasant Valley, the party was halted for twenty-five days while permission was sought to proceed to Suchow. Reaching the town about Christmas 1605—more than three years after leaving Agra—Goes heard Cambaluc, capital of Cathay, referred to as Peking, and, visiting a pagoda, realised that the Visitor’s informants had evidently confused Christianity and Buddhism because of certain external resemblances. The dream of Cathay had become the reality of China.
Suchow and its neighbour Kanchow were garrison towns which supplied the million men who kept perpetual vigil along the Great Wall. Half of Suchow was peopled by Chinese, half by Mohammedans from Kashgar, Persia and other countries trading through “ambassadors” with China. The merchants, bankers and warehousemen, together with their wives and children, formed an enclave similar to Macao. They were subject to Chinese law, strictly guarded, at night locked in their own part of the city and, after residing nine years, forbidden to go home. Goes found that he had gained little by hurrying on ahead. He was obliged to wait until Agi Afis arrived in Suchow, with papers signed by the King of Kashgar, authorising the caravan as an embassy come to offer tribute to the Emperor. These papers would have to be forwarded to Peking for approval before the caravan could be escorted to the northern capital.
Goes wrote a letter to the missionaries of Peking, distant a thousand miles, and entrusted it to Chinese travellers. Because he did not know how to transliterate the missionaries’ names, nor the exact address in Chinese, the first letter did not arrive. Receiving no reply, he wrote another on Easter Day 1606 and entrusted it to a Mohammedan who was visiting the capital secretly. He wrote: “I am a member of the Society. I was sent by my superiors to discover Cathay but I now believe that no such country exists, for I have traversed Asia without finding it, and this country, which we in Europe call China, is known to the people of Central Asia as Cathay. I have found no Christians, despite the tales of so many Mohammedans. I beg you, Fathers, or any other Portuguese or Christians in Peking, to help me escape from the hands of the infidels. I have suffered greatly on the journey, am exhausted and wish to return to India by the sea route. If I wait until the caravan is allowed to pass to the capital, I shall be here two years, for that is the customary delay.”
In November, eight months after its despatch, Goes’s letter reached Peking. Ricci was overjoyed. Either because he was unaware of the adopted name Abdulla or because the merchants had arrived in a different caravan, he had learned nothing at the Castle of Barbarians and begun to fear for the traveller’s safety. His own experience at Tientsin gave Ricci added sympathy for Goes’s predicament and impelled him to help at once. He sent a Chinese candidate for admission to the Society, John Fernandes, a prudent, resourceful young man or twenty-five, with orders to bring back Goes and his companions to Peking; and if this proved impossible, to return and consult Ricci. A northern Chinese, a recent convert, would accompany him. In midwinter the journey would prove formidable; leaving in December they could not hope to reach Suchow before March.
Goes had arrived prosperously, still accompanied by the faithful Isaac, with five servants from Yarkand, two negro servants, the finest jade and merchandise worth three thousand taels, the number of his horses increased to thirteen. But in Suchow he suffered far more than on his travels. Idle and cocksure after the dangerous journey, the Mohammedans began in earnest to persecute the good-natured stranger. He was forced to lend money which was never repaid, and to give extravagant feasts for the members of the caravan. The cost of living was high and as he had little ready silver Goes was obliged to sell his precious jade for half its real value. He then bought four hundred pounds of inferior quality, buried it under the paving stones of his lodging and swore to use it only to reach Peking. With the remaining twelve hundred taels he paid some debts and his current household expenses. The captain continued to borrow more and more money, under threat of leaving Goes behind when the caravan left for Peking. Soon he had become absolutely penniless and in February hunger broke his health. For a month he lay ill. He had received no reply to his letters and supposed them lost. The caravan would not leave for another nine months. How could he survive until then?
Meanwhile Fernandes, also alone—his Christian servant had stolen half the money and fled—was approaching Suchow. At the end of March he arrived in the two-faced city and was directed to Goes’s lodging. Entering, he recognised in the emaciated face, worn as the effigy on an old coin, the large eyes and thick beard of a European. He knelt by the bedside and greeted the sick man in Portuguese. A smile softened the wind-whipped face. They joined hands, the Chinese and European lay brothers: the link was made, the journey at an end. Taking Ricci’s letters, Goes read them and raised them in his thin fingers to heaven, reciting with tears in his eyes the canticle of Simeon with which he had hoped to greet Father Xavier: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart, O Lord, according to thy word, in peace.”
Fernandes discovered that Goes was far too ill to travel to Peking. Having tried without success to find a reliable doctor or medicine, he tended the sick man himself, nourishing him with chicken and trying to rally his spirits. But Goes had been kept alive only by the will to complete a task assigned by his superiors. The force of a lifetime had been spent in conquering Asia: now he lay devastated as the Gobi. His last message was for Ricci. “You should never trust the Mohammedans; as for the journey, it is very long, difficult and dangerous, and I advise no one to undertake it again.” He grew steadily weaker and, ten days after Fernandes’s arrival, died of exhaustion.
His Mohammedan companions, who had been watching for this, began systematically to rob the house. The most valuable object was a complete diary of his journey, in which Goes had later made a record, in Persian, of his loans. This they tore to pieces, so that the debts could no longer be reclaimed. Isaac and Fernandes, unable to prevent its mutilation, picked up and carefully preserved every scrap they could find. The Mohammedans also wanted to bury Goes according to their religion, so that his property would revert to them. Fernandes forestalled this scheme. Buying a coffin he and Isaac buried outside the town, in Chinese soil, the traveller from the distant Azores, reciting a rosary over his grave.
When the two Christians returned to Suchow, the Mohammedans took captive Isaac and Goes’s one surviving negro servant. As the first step in claiming the dead man’s hidden jade, they tried to make Isaac invoke the name of Mohammed. When he refused they put him in chains and threatened to kill him. At Fernandes’s urgent request, the governor of Suchow held an enquiry at which the merchants claimed Isaa
c and the negro were Mohammedans whom Goes had captured; and that they had no ties with Fernandes, who had come from Peking to steal them away. When the governor refused to intervene, Fernandes made a three-day journey to present another petition to the viceroy at Kanchow. To save the Armenian’s life, Fernandes claimed to be a nephew of both Goes and Isaac, attributing to them his own surname Chung. The viceroy instructed the governor to examine the case again, giving as his opinion that Isaac and Goes’s property should be handed over to Fernandes. The merchants however, hoping Fernandes would soon be obliged to leave, bribed the governor with several hundred taels to delay judgment.
The enquiry dragged on for five months. Fernandes and Isaac spent all their money and in order to eat were obliged to sell the clothes off their backs. Isaac meanwhile taught his deliverer sufficient Persian to enable them to converse and to substantiate their supposed relationship. From a chance remark Fernandes evolved a plan. On their next summons to court, he carried with him a piece of pork hidden in his sleeve. When the Mohammedans repeated their old charge that Isaac was one of their number, producing the pork he and Isaac began to eat it voraciously. Throwing up their hands in horror, the thirty merchants spat and anathematised them, then trooped out of court, declaring Isaac had been corrupted. Out of respect for their companions’ beliefs, both he and Goes had refrained from eating pork during the three-year journey.
In face of such incontrovertible proof, the governor gave judgment that Isaac, the negro and Goes’s property should be handed over to Fernandes. The negro, however, had been so terrified by the merchants that he declared publicly his intention of remaining with them. Selling over half of the four hundred pounds of jade, Fernandes paid Goes’s debts and set out for Peking with the remainder of the precious stone.
Fernandes’s letters to Peking had been lost on the way, so that Ricci had been without news for ten and a half months when on October 29th, 1607—five years to the day after Goes’s departure from Agra—the Armenian and Chinese arrived. At sight of their bowed heads and heavy step, Ricci dismantled his triumphal arches of acclaim and waived all words of welcome. When the story was told, in silence he took from them Goes’s trappings, curiously animated now their owner was dead: a gold cross worn on the journey, passports signed by the rulers of Kashgar, Khotan and Kara-shahr, together with letters from Jerónimo Xavier and the Archbishop of Goa. These Ricci kept in the house as relics of a Brother in Christ whom he considered a martyr.
Isaac rested a month in Peking, while Ricci pieced together the diary and learned from the Armenian details of the journey. Ricci then wrote letters to India, pointing out that Goes’s journey had proved beyond doubt his theory that Cathay and China were one. As for the “Christians” of Cathay, they were probably “Adorers of the Cross” who had now become almost extinct. Isaac was entrusted with these letters and sent back to Macao, where he received a warm welcome and was given a passage on the carrack for India. In the straits of Singapore the boat was captured by a Dutch privateer. The captain, however, was so impressed by Isaac’s account of his journey, that he set him free at Malacca. Several months later he arrived in India, where he was given a pension by the Jesuits. Learning that his wife had died, he preferred not to return home, and ended his days in Chaul.
As a monument to Benedict de Goes, from the scraps of diary and notes taken down from Isaac, Ricci relived those three years and wrote down an account of the journey which in many respects paralleled his own. Goes, in seeking Cathay, had found countries and towns, mountains and deserts marked on no map, Chinese or European. He had stitched the great multi-coloured stuff of central Asia into place between hempen India and silken China, cut open the great melon of which his contemporaries had merely fingered the rind.
Before him, the only Europeans to leave records of a trans-Asiatic journey were certain Franciscans and Marco Polo, who from the Persian Gulf took a more southerly route through Khotan and Charchan. Polo, in fact, had been precursor both of Goes and of Ricci. For seventeen years he lived in the Middle Kingdom, making two long journeys, along the western mountains and eastern coast. But his vision was bounded by the Khan’s court, his account of the country, whose language he never learned, dominated by its array of high numbers, silk and gold.
Goes had given proof that Cathay owed its existence to a confusion. Two words, referring to the same country, had been given substance. In central Asia the term Cathay had prevailed, derived from a tribe called Khitan who had formerly lived in an area south-west of Manchuria and south-east of Mongolia. In the tenth century this people invaded northern China and the name Khitai, written Cathay by Europeans, was applied to China as a whole by Arabs, Persians and Russians. Consequently Marco Polo and the Franciscans, approaching China through Turkestan, knew their destination as Cathay.
The other part of the tangle Ricci had already unravelled. The Chinese themselves were as ignorant of the term Cathay as of China. They called their country Middle Kingdom or by the name of the ruling dynasty. Her neighbours, to the south and east, knew her under the name of the dynasty ruling at the time of their first important encounter. In Japan, China was known as T’ang from a dynasty which ruled from the seventh to the tenth centuries after Christ; in Cochin-China and Siam as Chin, after a principate in north-west China from the eighth to the third centuries before Christ. The Portuguese, who by chance gained their first knowledge of the Middle Kingdom through the Siamese, adopted the name the Siamese used and applied it to the country they reached by the sea route. In its modified form, China, this became general throughout Europe. The difference of name had arisen from a difference of approach. It had fallen to Ricci to discover that neither in fantastic customs nor wealth did the real country fall short of the extravaganza which had excited Europe for centuries, and to begin to justify its title of Christian kingdom.
chapter fourteen
Unless the Grain Die
One day at the beginning of 1608 Ricci and Pantoja received an urgent summons to the palace. At the college of mathematicians they found the president and other eunuchs in agitation. The Emperor had sent word that they must make him twelve maps printed on silk in six sections similar to Ricci’s third edition. Chinese atlases were fashioned in odd ways—some were carved on wood and could be taken to pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, so that provinces might be studied separately—and it caused Ricci no surprise that the Emperor should ask for his in the form of a folding screen.
Ricci had taken care never to present a map, in case the Emperor, seeing the small extent of his own country, should think the missionaries were depreciating China. A eunuch, however, to whom Ricci had given coloured copies, had recently presented one to the Emperor who, on the contrary, had been delighted with the different kingdoms, each marked with interesting descriptive and ethnological information, and wanted copies for his heir and members of his family.
The eunuchs’ request for blocks of the third edition put Ricci in a quandary. Li Chih-tsao the geographer, on his return home to Hangchow, had taken one set, which could not be retrieved for at least six months. The printers had had another, but the year before their printing house had collapsed as a result of heavy rains, killing two workmen and destroying the blocks.
To the eunuchs this news was tantamount to a death sentence. They thought Ricci was hiding the truth, and insisted that four of their number should visit the mission residence and inspect the broken blocks. Ricci in pity sent a servant to Paul Li’s house for the blocks of a recent fourth edition, in eight sections with an emended text. But the eunuchs did not dare present the Emperor with this when he had specified the other. For three days they remained in terrified perplexity until Ricci, despite his other pressing duties, offered to cut new blocks, like the third edition but better. He proposed to have them ready within a month and to pay for the printing himself. The delighted eunuchs sent the Emperor a memorial to this effect. Ricci finished in time a work which in 1602 had taken a year to complete, being careful to add as many notes as possible
favourable to Christianity. Now that all hope of an audience had faded, those oblique marginal comments remained his only means of communication. Later he also printed two hemispheres, one for each side of the dragon throne. Ricci hoped that, seeing these and the map, the Emperor or his family would feel curious about Christianity. At the very least, he believed the sight of so small a China would lessen their arrogance and disdain for strangers.
Also in the first months of 1608 Ricci published a new book which he always referred to as The Ten Paradoxes. Its full Chinese title was Ten Chapters of a Strange Man. His physiognomy, his extraordinary memory, his mastery of Chinese, his knowledge of polite etiquette, his celibacy, his contempt for honour or public appointments, the rumour that he practised alchemy and his extraordinary doctrine: all these things made Ricci “strange” in Chinese eyes. The phrase in the title had further overtones, for Confucius had said, “The strange man is strange in the eyes of men but like unto Heaven,” and fitted in well with the paradoxical nature of the work, cast in the form often dialogues, each with a different friend of high rank, including the Minister of Rites and Li Chih-tsao the geographer. The first chapter, dating from 1601, took the form of a conversation about the value of time with the Minister of Civil Appointments; Ricci, then in his fiftieth year, pointing out that he had irretrievably lost fifty years of his life. The paradox had added force for the Chinese, who were flattered to be considered old: that is, in some sense linked to the glorious, static past. The other chapters were entitled “Man is only a guest in this world,” “It is useful to have death constantly in mind,” “The constant thought of death is a preparation for the judgment to come,” “The man of worth speaks little and would prefer to keep silence,” “The true reason for fasting is not that man is forbidden to kill animals,” “Nothing is more conducive to a better life than to examine our conscience and discover our faults,” “The sanction of good and evil will become evident in the next life,” “By foolishly trying to discover the future, a man incurs misfortune” and “The rich miser is more unhappy than the poor beggar.” The arguments were drawn from Scripture, Christian saints, Greek philosophers and even Aesop. The book was more admired by the graduates than any of his other works and only a few months after publication was reprinted several times in the provinces. Among the many prefaces for new editions was one by a member of the Academy:
Wise Man Of The West (Harvill Press Editions) Page 26
