Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  The Emperor absolutely prohibits local officials according welcome to the outlaws . . . to forget the Great Ming that has fed and sustained you and your ancestors for 300 years, and to give support to bandits that suddenly approach is inexcusable . . . just compare the two sides, the Emperor, a benevolent father who’s nurtured you, and outlaws, murderers, thieves, arsonists and rapists . . . you should to be loyal and listen to your father and the Great Ming . . . his imperial majesty orders that all outlaws, and anyone siding with them, will be beheaded and have their heads displayed publicly so to bring shame on their families . . .

  Outrage, laughter, ridicule? One seriously doubts whether this circular was ever actually circulated. If it was, just how far beyond Beijing might it have reached? Perhaps its preservation is a sign that it was never actually transmitted. Although it didn’t work, it’s still highly relevant to our story as it helps us appreciate the final, climactic episodes.

  On 25 April, just south of the Juyong Pass at Changping, Li Zicheng’s army forced Tang Tong, commander of Beijing, to surrender; a statue of the rebel leader on horseback now marks the spot. That same day, the Chongzhen Emperor escaped the approaching rebels, heading to Jingshan, the artificial hill created by the excavation of the Imperial Palace’s moat. There, one of his eunuchs assisted him to hang himself from a tree.

  The rebels took Beijing soon after, and then headed towards the Ming’s last great stronghold, the fortress town of Shanhaiguan, which marked the Wall’s seaside terminus. There, General Wu Sanggui was trapped between the advancing rebels on the inside and the Manchus on the outside, so he struck an eleventh-hour deal with Prince Regent Dorgon of the Manchus, to join forces with them and intercept the rebel army’s advance. The Fuyuan Gate was opened, permitting the passage of tens of thousands of Manchu horsemen and paving their way into the heartland of China.

  The next day, 27 May, the battle of Shanhaiguan raged between the ‘allies’ and Li’s rebels, resulting in a decisive victory for the former. The Manchus alone would add the postscript, founding the Qing Dynasty just months later, and occupying the Ming Imperial Palace.

  Three key locations – Changping, a suburban district north of Beijing, Jingshan, a hillock overlooking the Forbidden City, and Fuyuanmen, a gate in Shanhaiguan’s Great Wall – staged different events of the story, but all witnessed remarkably similar spineless responses from leading Ming figures: surrender, suicide and treason. All were cowardly actions in light of the circular sent by Chongzhen, who pinned his hopes on the loyalty of government officials to resist the rebels’ pressure.

  They didn’t, of course. And although it is clear that Chongzhen’s circular did little or nothing to save him and the Ming, the episode reveals how the endemic dereliction of duty – from magistrates to governors, from commanders to the Emperor himself – led to the Ming’s, and the Great Wall’s, final demise.

  Part Five

  Ruins

  Objects from 1644 to 1987

  The fate of the Wall was sealed by the Manchu Qing’s vast territorial gains, which rendered it useless. Under the rule of Kangxi and Qianlong, Qing China reined in the steppelands; it was almost fifty per cent larger than China today.

  Meanwhile, pressures from the West mounted. The roles and aims of the Jesuits became highly contentious. Foreign embassies were rebuffed. Gunships arrived in their wake, trade wars erupted and port-city enclaves were forcibly ceded to overseas powers.

  Heralding its rediscovery, the Ming Wall was highlighted by a survey in 1708. Foreigners tried to explain it, while images showed mere specks of it. Breakthroughs occurred in 1907–08: Stein explored part of the Han Wall, and Geil traversed the Ming Wall. Both produced landmark field studies.

  Revival, revolution and renewal followed in the twentieth century. The Wall became a line of resistance during the Sino–Japanese War. The Communists adopted it as a national symbol, then set about destroying it in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s anti-culture was opposed in 1984, as Deng Xiaoping urged China to love and rebuild the Great Wall. Once again it was the symbol of the nation, becoming a world heritage site and a major tourist attraction.

  In 2008, an extensive survey revealed the Ming Wall’s immensity as an outdoor museum of ruins. Surrounded by the world’s fastest-growing economy, and newly accessible to an increasingly mobile society, what remains of the Wall stands in desperate need of visionary curatorial work and public guardianship.

  42.

  Science Convert

  ‘The Jesuit Atlas of Kangxi’s Realm’

  Several of this atlas’s thirty-five sheets are of enormous interest to me. As I arrange them in adjacency from east to west, they reveal the Great Wall’s minutiae from end to end, showing its main lines, divisions, branches and loops. Tracing the battlement-like symbol, I see that more than 300 points along its length are named – a veritable procession of places ending in the characters kou (‘pass’), men (‘gate’) and shuimen (‘water gate’). Rolling a wheeled map measurer along the same route, I can ‘recalculate’ – perhaps as a curious mind did 300 years ago – a plausible figure for the Wall’s total length: 6700 kilometres.

  Remarkably, this charting of the Great Wall proved to be the opening stage of the first nationwide field survey in the history of cartography, and it was a team of foreigners, French Jesuit missionaries, which carried it out. After more than a decade of fieldwork the surveyors’ maps were presented to the Kangxi Emperor (1661–1722) in 1718. The largest territorial China in history had become the most intensely and accurately mapped land in the world.

  For the makers of the atlas this was no overnight, ten-year success story. Since the first Jesuits had arrived in China in the mid sixteenth century they were aware of the great uses and roles of maps, for themselves, their hosts, sponsors, and most importantly, for advancing towards their ultimate goal. This atlas shows just how far their mission got, by the early seventeenth century. They won the approval of the Emperor, mapped his empire, but failed in their main aim: conversion of China to Christianity. However, as our object’s name – ‘The Jesuit Atlas of Kangxi’s Realm’ – indicates, this work stands as an extraordinary testament to Jesuit diplomacy and perseverance, scientific and geographical endeavour, and to the vastness of the Emperor’s domain. Among these elements, it was accurate surveying techniques that ensured the success and legacy of the great enterprise.

  To appreciate the surveying achievement of these map-makers, consider what would be involved in making a map of your own immediate locality – say, within a radius of about five kilometres of your home. At your disposal is standard desktop stationary, a protractor, a compass and a few other essentials.

  How might you approach the task? Would you bother to actually go out and survey the ground? Would you use the compass to take bearings, observe the sun’s highest point to record an accurate local noon time for comparison with GMT (be sure to protect your eyes), and get up in the middle of a clear night to measure the angle to the North Star above the horizon (provided you are in the Northern Hemisphere)? Could you do the follow-up maths, to work out a scale and make a grid on the paper, and then make a real map covering your eighty square kilometres? Could you give the latitude and longitude of your home address?

  If you were to do anything less, you’d merely be making a sketch map, and you wouldn’t have met the challenge that the makers of our atlas first faced: to impress upon the Kangxi Emperor that their skills were unparalleled, and should be utilised.

  Father Jean-Francis Gerbillion, Father Superior of the French mission, had interpreted for the Qing court at the Treaty of Nerchinsk negotiations with the Russians in 1689. Having won the respect of the Emperor, Gerbillion used his influence to praise the French mission’s map-making expertise. By 1705 he managed to receive Kangxi’s permission to oversee the making of a demonstration map for imperial examination.

  ‘Job seeking’ had long been an essential part of Jesuit evangelising activity in China. Whatever kn
owledge and skills they imported – astronomy, timekeeping, mathematics, cartography – its sharing was directed at achieving a singular ‘short-cut’ result: the empire’s adoption of Roman Catholicism. The Jesuits aimed to show that it was God alone who granted their outstanding abilities, and that their belief in Him gave them the best understanding of the Earth and its place in the universe of all things. And if they could convince the Emperor himself to convert to Christianity, most Chinese under his rule would follow.

  The Jesuits were China’s first foreign experts. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) spearheaded the Roman Catholic Church’s mission in Ming China, leading the order from the Portuguese enclave at Macao to Beijing in 1601, and then into the circle of the imperial court. Ricci was granted land to build a church, and upon his death a plot for a cemetery. Many outstanding Jesuit scientists followed in his footsteps. Formally the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, Jesuits were known as the most academically brilliant and practically capable group of their church. (The current Pope, Francis, is a Jesuit.) After religious studies in Rome, Jesuits trained in specialist skills and awaited the right mission.

  For a group of French Jesuits specialising in the science and art of map-making, their chance came up in China during the late 1600s. With the recent rise of the Qing it seemed probable that scientific cartography might capture the imagination of China’s new rulers, if they could be convinced of its accuracy by speakers in their own Manchu language.

  King Louis XIV (1643–1715) sponsored the French Jesuit mission. His investment had multiple aims: to break the dominance of other European Jesuits in China, to obtain better knowledge of China and to gather astronomical data, particularly concerning the local timings of the regular eclipses of Jupiter’s moons, for the astronomer Gian Domenico Cassino (1625–1712), who was compiling tables to enable easier calculation of longitude.

  Cassino had been appointed the King’s astronomer at the newly established Parisian Academy of Sciences, also known as the Paris Observatory, where Jesuit fathers had trained under his direct tutelage, focusing on mathematics, astronomy and cartography. It was also mandatory for Jesuit missionaries to become outstanding linguists in their destination countries, and in Kangxi’s China that now meant learning Manchu as well as Mandarin. Typically, Jesuits went out on their mission, worked and died there.

  I looked for the survey team at Zhalan cemetery, now in the grounds of the Beijing Communist Party Training College, and Wutasi, or the Five Pagodas Temple, where the headstones of Jesuit graves have been pieced together, rescued from the desecration they suffered during the Boxer Rebellion (1900). I found gravestones for the four ‘fathers of the survey’: Gerbillion (1654–1707), Jean-Baptiste Régis (1663–1738), Joaquim Bouvet (circa 1656–1732) and Pierre Jartoux (1669–1720); all bore crosses and dragons, and were written in Latin and Chinese.

  Sometime in 1705, this group of fathers surveyed an area of flood-prone flatlands to the south-east of Beijing, between the capital and today’s Tianjin. They followed their fieldwork with tabletop cartography, and after seventy days submitted their map for imperial examination. They gave instruction on how to use it, how to orient it, how to work out distances and how to appreciate the relative positions of its features. It was no decoration, but a tool. All we know is that the map pleased the Emperor.

  Kangxi was becoming increasingly interested in having good maps for two reasons. First, he was directing territorial expansion like no other emperor before him, and he needed to record these accomplishments on authoritative maps. As they still do, maps then served as national land deeds, so Kangxi wanted to make known his borders to the rest of the world.

  Second, accurate maps would provide valuable strategic intelligence for future military campaigns, especially in the lesser-known border regions. A number of nomadic tribes inhabiting the fringes of ‘Chinese Tartary’, or that part of greater China north of the Great Wall, especially the Zunghars, continued to threaten, and Kangxi was aware that his empire was most fragile at its distant edges.

  Geographical knowledge of a potential theatre of conflict along these new frontiers was considered basic knowledge in the art of war, and Kangxi knew well of the perils that lay in wait for the logistically unprepared. He scorned the attitude of past and recent Han Chinese officials, saying they were ignorant of the geography of these outer regions. In 1697 he had found bodies of his own ‘Green Battalion’ troops who had died of hunger the year before while pursuing the Zunghars.

  Next, for an inexplicable reason, but very much to our advantage, in 1707 Kangxi gave an ailing Father Gerbillion the go-ahead to ready Jartoux, Régis and Bouvet to prepare to survey ‘the country surrounding the Great Wall’. They began the project in June 1708, but why the Wall? No one really knows. Perhaps the legendary defence, built to keep out Kangxi’s ancestors and their likes, had somehow ignited a special fascination within the mind of the ruling Manchu as he sat enthroned in Beijing’s Imperial Palace.

  According to Father Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, the French order’s historian in Paris, who compiled the observations of twenty-eight French brothers active in China in Description de la Chine, ‘A Description of China’, by January 1709 the fathers had returned to Beijing . They presented Kangxi with a map, measuring 4.5 metres in length, which showed the Great Wall from Shanhaiguan to Jiayuguan. Unfortunately, this original map has been lost, but an intriguing question arises: did any of the Jesuit priests individually travel the entire distance between the Wall’s two main terminal points, perhaps recording an historical first? We know that Father Bouvet retired ill after two months, but we cannot be sure whether the team divided its labour to cover the ground, as was their approach later in the China survey.

  Although the foreign map-makers had taken this second examination, it seemed they were still ‘on probation’. According to Du Halde, they faced their key test at the end of 1709 when asked to produce a map of Peichilli, the province around the capital, which Kangxi knew very well. It was their excellent work here that did the trick. Oddly, when Jesuits first arrived in China they were banned from learning Chinese and prohibited from travelling. Now they were about to embark on the longest of journeys, mapping the whole empire. Kangxi explained his decision:

  . . . because the existing maps for the land and cities of China were sketchy, and had distances that were inaccurately calculated, I sent the Westerners to map the empire from the far south to Russia and from the east to Tibet, using their methods of calculating the degrees in the heavens to obtain precise distances on earth.

  The long survey began. It was a crippling workload in the harshest conditions, and several fathers perished. To obtain faster results the team divided up its labour. They also utilised previously determined astronomical observations made at established mission stations across the empire. Building on this existing grid of information, the Jesuit surveyors recorded latitudes in darkness, using ‘astrolabes’ to measure the angle of the North Star above the horizon. Forefathers had previously measured local time and its difference from the Paris Meridian, an imaginary line passing through the Cassini Room of the Paris Observatory, but for the Kangxi survey they made calculations of longitude by either observing the eclipse timings of Jupiter’s moon or with reference to the Peking Meridian.

  DESCRIPTION: ‘Jesuit Atlas of Kangxi’s Realm’, a boxed set of 35 maps (atlas)

  SIGNIFICANCE: Contains the first accurate geography of the Ming Great Wall, gained by scientific surveying techniques carried out 1707–08

  ORIGIN: Opening phase of Jesuit-led imperial survey commissioned by Kangxi Emperor from 1707–17. Led to production of sheet maps, bound and boxed atlases in various editions, languages and locations between 1718 and 1941. This edition is a facsimile of a 1721 woodcut-printed edition, published Beijing , 1941

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing

  Eventually, the Jesuits recorded the precise locations of 641 points to form a grid. They then used triangulated compass bearings and simple geometry to work
out the intermediate positions and distances apart of many other places, as well as the shape and courses of various geographical and historical features. Thirteen years after making their demo map of just one small region, they returned to Beijing to work on the final presentation titled ‘A Comprehensive Map of the Great Qing Empire’.

  The Jesuit fathers covertly transmitted accounts of their survey back to France, their sponsor, where an equally talented and dedicated team processed and published the materials. Along with Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s ‘A Description of China’, which contained many maps, the King’s geographer, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville published Nouvel atlas de la Chine, de la Tartarie Chinoise et du Thibet (‘A New Atlas of China, Chinese Tartary and Tibet’) in 1738. Maps therein also served as demonstration maps: a new era of cartography had dawned.

  Although the French had swiftly published and circulated their survey results, the Kangxi Emperor and his successors restricted the circulation of the maps. Qing cartography remained largely sketchy and decorative, and most Chinese were ignorant of the benefits offered by scientific geography. Kangxi’s maps, it seems, were admired mainly because they showed off his conquests. The Emperor himself played down the accomplishments of the foreigners:

  I was careful not to refer to these Westerners – whom I had dispatched to make a map . . . – as ‘Great Officials’, and I corrected Governor Liu when he referred to the Jesuits Regis and Fredilli as if they were honoured imperial commissioners . . . For even though some of the Western methods are different from our own, and many even an improvement, there is little about them that is new. The principles of mathematics all derive from the ‘Book of Changes’ and the Western methods are Chinese in origin . . .

  Qing China remained traditional, resisting change, looking inwards and backwards, resting on the laurels of its early inventions. By contrast, Europe relished the Enlightenment, pioneering new knowledge, forging a global view, spreading education, looking outwards and forwards.