The memory palace
stands on its elevation, suffused in an even light. The reception hall is still
silent, yet inside there is more for the mind to dwell on…
Jonathan Spence has made a name for himself as the author of
books on various aspects of Chinese history which aspire to be more than
informative works of scholarship or historiography, works which aim at the
status of literature. He does this by eschewing a conventional exposition in
which narrative is balanced by analysis, and looks for a more thematic,
artistic, human approach. In this way he reveals new insights into the culture
he is writing about, and has created a new kind of genre, one that sits between
literature and history, and shares the best of both. It helps that Spence can
also write really vividly.
Here he casts his eye on the story of Matteo Ricci’s
interaction with the Ming Dynasty, using as his basis four images that Ricci
described in his work on memory palaces, mental images that he designed in
order to teach his Chinese listeners/readers how to design their own memory
palaces; and four drawings that Ricci designed for inclusion in a book called The Ink Garden, published by one of his
Chinese friends in 1606. The book alternates between a description of image and
drawing, teasing out as much information as possible about the background of
the image/drawing, and using it as a springboard to look at various aspects of
Ricci’s life, work, and the interaction between two cultures.
In his analysis, for example, of the third picture from The Ink Garden, ‘The Men of Sodom’,
Spence compares the Biblical passage which prompted the picture, and Ricci’s
own verbal descriptor of the picture, drawing out the changes that Ricci made
to the story that he believed would appeal to his audience, the suppressions of
material that he felt would be beyond them – or inconvenient to explain, such
as the incest between Lot and his daughters, and the inexplicably cruel death
of Lot’s wife by salination. Spence also then compares the final version of the
drawing Ricci made with another drawing Ricci used as a basis for his own, the
engraving of Crispin de Pas which Ricci had with him, again, expanding on the
changes Ricci made, and which he felt were necessary to get his message across
to his audience.
This method of close readings supplemented with descriptions
of the world of Ricci’s youth and the world of Ming Dynasty China recreates a
wonderfully detailed and vibrant portrait of the world in the sixteenth century,
both the outer world of externalities of shipping and horrible sea voyages, for
example, and the inner world of mentalities and ideologies, a recreation that
doesn’t only focus on Europe, but one that shows how Europe and China were
slowly drawn together by the inexorable pull of trade, profit and the desire
for exploration and conquest, both territorial and ideological. The book is not
only interesting for students of Ming China, but also for students of Renaissance
Europe.
Spence is fecund with his use of detail, and scrupulous with
his judgments. He makes no comments on the dreadful lies that Ricci told about
his religion; he voices no disapproval of the strong profit motive underlying
the Jesuit mission to China (the Jesuits established their own trading cycles
with Japan and India, reaping enormous profits, giving rise to the rumours
among the Chinese that the Jesuits were alchemical wizards who had mastered the
art of turning base metal into silver – the basis of Chinese currency-, for how
else could they explain the seemingly endless inflow and outflow of specie into
the Jesuit coffers?); he conveys no sense of outrage at how the Jesuits threw
overboard any ‘unsuitable’ books they found their shipmates reading on the
long, dangerous and very boring voyage out. Spence simply presents the facts
and lets them speak for themselves, citing for example, a letter from a Chinese
scholar to Ricci, suggesting that Ricci’s attacks on Buddhism are wrong headed,
and politely requesting Ricci to actually read some of the Buddhist texts, and
helpfully appending a list of relevant sutras, and then Ricci’s reply to him,
with all its rudeness, self-importance and narrow-mindedness.
Ricci, in spite of his learning, linguistic gifts,
scientific accomplishments and personal courage, considered as an embodiment of
a culture that believed itself superior to China’s, comes across as arrogant,
dull-minded, unscrupulously foxy, a people user, a bearer of a creed replete
with blood and cruelty that is crude in comparison with the subtlety of
Buddhism and the liberal minded-openness of Daoism. With each set-back the
mission encounters, the reader rejoices that the spread of Christianity has
been foiled or hindered in some way, and that its noisome nonsense has been
minimized. And yet one can’t help but feel sorry for Ricci the man, or at least
empathize with his experience as a despised foreigner in a culture vastly
superior to his own, with his loneliness and isolation, with the hatred he
encountered amongst ordinary Chinese – which even resulted in an attack on the
Jesuit compound in Shaozhou by a howling angry mob – and by his efforts to
learn the language.
Ricci’s guiding dream, his goal throughout all the long
years of his life in China was eventually to effect a conversion of the Emperor
Wanli to Christianity, a goal which shows at once his hubris and naivety, in
imagining for one second that the Son of Heaven, the highest human embodiment
of a culture much older and wiser than Ricci’s own, would stoop to listen to
Ricci’s pablum about a virgin birth and worship of a man who died on an
instrument of torture. When Ricci was finally admitted to the Presence, he met
only an empty chair. The Wanli Emperor lived in total seclusion and never gave
personal audiences, not to anybody, not even to the highest princes of his
realm, and certainly not to a greasy, hairy, sweaty, long-nosed foreigner with
overweening ambitions; and Ricci had to make obeisance to a piece of furniture,
which is an image of an encounter between cultures that stays with you long
after you read about it.
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