Abstract
It was quite rare for a foreigner, in early seventeenth-century China, to be allotted a piece of burial ground outside the walled city of Beijing, the capital of the country, by the Emperor Wanli himself; yet, this is exactly what happened to the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci in 1611. What, then, was so special about this man? R. Po-chia Hsia (Pennsylvania State University) cogently answers the question in this fascinating and definitive biography.
Born on 6 October 1552 in the hillside town of Macerata, the administrative capital of the Marches, in an old, respectable and large family, Matteo studied for seven years at the local Jesuit College, where he acquired a formative experience that would mark his emotional and intellectual personality for life. Admitted to the Jesuit Novitiate in 1571, he began, the following year, his formal studies at the Roman College. Selected in 1577 by the general of the Society of Jesus for the Indian Mission, he arrived in Goa in September 1578, after a difficult voyage at sea. Ordained in July 1580, he subsequently completed his studies in theology and, in 1582, left Goa for Macao – a permanent land base that the Portuguese had been allowed to use since 1552 – where he arrived on 7 August. Once he entered China, Ricci’s journey took him northwards from Zhaoqing, Guangdong province (1583–1589), to Shaozhou, Guangdong province (1589–1595), to Nanchang, the provincial capital of Jiangxi province (1595–1598), to Nanjing (1598–1600) and, finally, to Beijing (1600–1610), the very heart of the Chinese empire, where he died on 11 May 1610 at the age of 57, worn out beyond his strength after more than twenty-five years of daily labour in the Lord’s vineyard. Hsia completes his book with a useful epilogue that traces Ricci’s legacy from his death to the present.
The challenges – over and above going without wine and bread, and sleeping on hard pillows and hard beds – that Ricci and his companions faced in their attempts to introduce Christianity in China were many: not only did the Chinese suspect all foreigners, but, coming from India, these Catholic missionaries were seen as bearers of the newest religious teachings from that country, simply introducing yet another school of Buddhism; the prevalence of polygamy, a fundamental contradiction between Chinese social practice and Christian morality, which actually proved to be the major impediment to conversion in China; the difficulties of gaining a residence permit, the accusations of kidnapping children, and the armed assaults; finally, the fear of rebellion that prevailed with the ruling classes and the emperor.
It is a truism to write that, in every mission, the personality of the missionary is paramount. Indeed, the story of the China Mission proves this point very eloquently. An expert in mathematics, astronomy, and cartography, and a discreet, prudent, charming, and persevering man of exceptional intelligence, with a prodigious memory and a gift for diplomacy, Ricci quickly understood that he would have to adapt both the nature of his message and the ways of conveying it, to the conditions prevailing in his land of adoption, if he were to reap the fruits of his missionary zeal. This he did, even though he always remained convinced of the general superiority of Western culture. Somewhat anxious at the hostility, both latent and overt, of the common people, Ricci never became an evangelical preacher; instead, he cultivated the goodwill of Ming mandarins and princes, met leading Confucian scholars, attended sessions at private academies, and, most importantly, gained a scholarly reputation with his Chinese publications – a language that he mastered perfectly. Given the crucial importance of Confucianism and the hierarchical structure of Ming society, Ricci rightly concluded that success would depend on a thorough knowledge of the Confucian classics on his part and on his ability to convert members of the ruling classes to Christianity. Ricci’s most famous treatise illustrates very well his modus operandi. Both a declaration of war against Buddhism and a synthesis of Christianity and Confucianism, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven was written in the form of a dialogue between a Chinese scholar and a westerner. In it, Ricci argued that “the Chinese sages knew and worshipped the true God in antiquity, but that knowledge and practice had been subverted by literati of subsequent ages and especially by the introduction of Buddhism to China” (p. 224). By thus interpreting the Confucian scholars' teachings in the manner of Christianity, Ricci and his companions (some 500 Jesuits came to China between 1610 and 1773) made quite a few converts (around 200,000 in 1701); less successfully, though, they also sowed the seeds of the Chinese rites controversy that would ultimately end the official Catholic presence in China in the eighteenth century.
Well conceived and well structured, meticulously researched and extremely detailed, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City excels at conflating late Ming society and Ricci’s career in parallel narratives that intersect smoothly at various intervals. Thanks to Hsia’s archival spade work, extensive reading (and here the author’s remarkable linguistic abilities allowed him to cast a very wide net of primary and secondary sources), and thoughtful analysis, we now have a much richer understanding of the career of Matteo Ricci in China. This book, which will appeal to theologians, philosophers, and historians, particularly those interested in the cultural interplay between East and West, is a real gem of historical scholarship. My only regret, besides the too many grammatical errors, is that Hsia, like Liam M. Brockey’s Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Harvard University Press, 2007), does not really attempt to explain why Ricci chose such a life of exile at the other end of the world; a serious look at Ignatian spirituality – the Spiritual Exercises, in particular – would have provided him with some food for thought and a likely credible explanation.