Sino-Western Interactions: Materiality and Intellect in the Historiography of China

Matteo Ricci as Icon of Cultural Contact

It is evident today that the Jesuit legacy cannot be ignored: its texts are invaluable as systems of signs charting the contexts in which their authors lived, and not merely as personal narrations. Consider the ‘icon of a single haunted saint of cultural contact’ as Grafton and Goodman have called Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), ⁵ the Jesuit who opened the China mission. Ricci is the main subject of Mary Laven’s Mission to China and R Po-Chia Hsia’s A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, and is also discussed in China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800. This text has appeared at a time when a lot of attention is being focused on this Italian Jesuit, as 2010 was the 400th anniversary of his death. There has been a spate of exhibition catalogues, scholarly articles and books, enriching the already massive body of studies on Ricci and translations of his oeuvre. It is notable that an important part of the anniversary output on Ricci has been supported or welcomed by the Roman curia and by Catholic academic institutions in East Asia, mostly motivated by recent political evaluations of the emblematic power of Ricci as a missionary. Laven’s goal is to reconsider the cultural and emotional aspects of Ricci’s Chinese enterprise and written narrations, by rejecting what she calls ‘learned texts’: ‘We need to acknowledge a world of rituals, images and objects, which often speak more eloquently about the interplay between East and West than the learned texts for which the missionaries became famous’ (30). Although Laven’s main aim seems to be the unfolding of the real-world aspects of the China mission, she nevertheless begins her study by following Staunton’s scheme, dividing ‘learned ideas’, which are only linked to abstraction, from what is concrete. If the nineteenth-century author was absorbed in the study of Qing commercial laws and customs, Laven is interested in emotions and human relationships, as well as in the Jesuit Order’s logistic intelligence. However, her search for a more ‘tangible’ history of the mission becomes a reading of Ricci’s intentions and emotions, analysed though the lenses of a contemporary spectator. For example, cultural dialogues become a calculation between effort expended and future gains: ‘What exactly did the Jesuits think they were achieving by teaching arithmetic or cartography to literati?’ (131). The utilitarian attitude used by Ricci and his fellows to evangelize China runs through the book: friendship is an utilitarian tool (both in China and Italy); indeed Ricci’s linguistic enterprise is a functional move; discussing technology will make Jesuit missionaries in China indispensable, etc. (106, 139). What is tangible and not metaphysical – technology, rituals, objects, and emotions – is thus defined by the weight gained within a functional exchange. From such a perspective, this study is straightforward in indicating what was at the root of the ‘understanding and misunderstanding, conversations and confusions, descriptions and distortions’ that characterized the early China mission (4). This is the selling of the Roman Catholic faith, which Laven defines as: ‘a religion of credits and debits, of favours exchanged’ (217), best epitomized by the language employed by the Jesuits coming from a culture ‘that was intensely sensory, emotive and theatrical’ (228). Laven’s description of some of the cultural and social aspects of Ricci’s Italian upbringing, and of his first steps into China, compares well with the sort of thing found in tedious Jesuit hagiographies. Nonetheless, she sacrifices a crucial part of Ricci’s story – the link between his classical erudition and his learning of the material-cultural world of China. This mostly unfolded within three interconnected frameworks: the approach deployed to describe the dialogue with Chinese elites; the approach used to describe and enquire about material culture; and the view on gente semplice, the ordinary people, who could be easily convinced to kneel in front of a Christian image. ⁶ Ricci’s intellectual background provides the key to understand his capacity to link or divide, when needed, what pertained to theology and evangelization and what belonged to discovery, with the latter typically characterized by a wandering eye, detached from any thought of immediate material gains. ⁷

In his A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, Hsia produces important and detailed evidence to explain Ricci’s Chinese setting. For example, in the chapter exploring the period spent in Zhaoqing he shows how Ricci and the fellow Jesuit Michele Ruggieri were ‘assimilated into the Chinese universe of religious representation’ (92), and in particular how at the beginning, Buddhism served the local elite as a vehicle for assimilating Catholicism. With its mastery of a tremendous amount of new material, Hsia’s study shows some of the sophistication much needed today for thinking about the history of relations between Europe and China. However, the overall tone of the book is still partially rooted in the Jesuit hagiographic tradition, which amplifies Ricci’s role at every turn. This type of historiographical narrative tends to regard any exchange linking cultural entities as reducible to communication between individuals. Ricci and his companions thus represented Europe; Haun Saussy, for example, maintains that Europe and China saw: ‘An interaction between two vast and complex cultural ensembles, each built up over thousands of years, communicating though the tiny pipeline of at most a dozen Italian and Portuguese priests and their Chinese interlocutors’. ⁸ In turn Hsia claims: ‘There is something irresistible in Ricci’s story: by virtue of his intellect, a heroic individual bridges impossible chasms between civilizations, opening up a new world of understanding by the strength of his learning and genius’ (305). The peculiarity of Hsia’s study is that this perspective is reinforced by the valuable new insights about many Chinese contacts, mostly literati, who had exchanges with Ricci. ⁹ If Laven’s text is a story of misunderstandings, Hsia tells a story of sympathies, but his narration also provides evidence of the chasm between the early modern views of cultural accommodation and those of colonialism. The first was theorized by Ricci – but only experienced by the few Jesuits living in China – and the latter conceived by all the European establishments, such as trading companies and religious orders, looking for spiritual or commercial gains.

Tangible Exchanges

In spite of the conceptual division between accommodation and invasion it is precisely crude commerce – the final gain of nineteenth-century colonialism – that provides relief for Western historians of China, pro-Jesuit scholars included. As Staunton had imagined, evidence of commercial exchange turned out to be an unprejudiced historiographical element, a tangible and incontrovertible demonstration of cultural interconnections. Is it possible then to write histories of cultural exchange through objects of commerce, and their sellers and buyers? John E Wills’ edited collection, China and Maritime Europe 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions, provides a partial answer to this question. Here some of the authors allude to the fact that ‘trade’ may have constructed the stage on which the other actors, the settlers, the diplomats and the missionaries played their parts. This collection of essays, a spin-off from the Cambridge History of China series, has contributions from Willard J Peterson, John W Witek and John L Cranmer-Byng. The fundamental perspective here is to consider all the connections established between the Qing empire and those who reached China through sea routes – the ‘maritime Europeans’ – some of whom also came from the Americas. Some of the authors force us to reconsider the Qing tribute system (Cranmer-Byng and Wills), and how maritime Europe related to the Ming Empire (Wills). However, the central part of the book is a straightforward historical chronicle of the Catholic Missions (Witek), and of Ricci’s enterprise (Peterson), in which the material culture of exchanges within the mission are not explored. In terms of page count, at least, the study is perfectly balanced, between the framework of exchange constituted by transoceanic goods such as tea and porcelain, and the Catholic endeavour where the marketing efforts are devoted to promoting the universality of European ideas, predominantly by means of astronomy, map making and mathematics. These two perspectives, which both still put Europe in a hegemonic position, raise the question of the use of historiographical language, and of the capacity to link evidence coming from different contexts. To explore fully the exchange between the Jesuit mission in China and the literati requires one to look beyond the events described, and understand how the negotiation between traders, Chinese elites, European intellectual currents and Catholic missions unfolded. Goodman and Grafton’s question, ‘how is proffering a religion different from selling silk or horses?’ does indeed pose a scholarly challenge. ¹⁰ If we were to answer that there is no difference, this could be a swift way to resolve the contrasts between intellectual and economic or factual history – measurable exchange would allow us to understand the intellectual exchanges of the Jesuit mission. However, this approach would tend to obscure the historiographical complexities which lie beyond visible actions, and these complexities allow us to discern the facts contained within textual narrations.

In recent decades, historians of Jesuit-related themes have begun to use perspectives focused on commercial and tangible exchanges, but this has been more a matter of adopting the historiographical language rather than using new methodologies to make links between interconnected spheres. Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China 1579–1724 by Liam Matthew Brockey is a fitting example of this trend. This work, a well-conceived study on the history of Christianity in China, enriched by a large amount of new primary sources from Italy and Portugal, is at once genuinely Jesuitical and solipsistic. The Jesuit Order is here taken as the only ‘constant element among variables’ within the field of early modern global Catholic evangelization (407), and the book deals with all the different aspects of the Chinese mission, with the main focus on its religious practices. The ‘journey’ is therefore the experience over almost 150 years of a ‘handful of missionaries who believed that they could, with little more than firm conviction and divine assistance, convert the Chinese to Christianity’ (4). While one of the many merits of this study is its clear explanation of the complex relationships that linked the Roman Curia and other European institutions to the missionaries operating in the Ming and Qing empires, it looks at China exclusively from within the Order. Instead of individual and collective uncertainties arising from cultural displacements, here the missionary action is structured in a mercantile fashion, and the Order presented as a global institution. Its success or failure in delivering the ‘divine merchandise’ is thus bound to the standardized training of its members, including the learning of Chinese language and culture. Like an army outside its national boundaries, this groundwork will be essential for the Jesuits’ success in the matter of conversions, from the printing of books and teaching to the organization of the converts’ communities. The capacity to discern and decide what elements or parts of the Chinese culture and society were worth confronting, which is recognized as one of Ricci’s individual gifts, is presented here as a quality inherent to the Jesuits as a whole. In Brockey’s words: ‘Those Jesuits of long ago, they maintained, had possessed an enlightened ability to distinguish between essential and nonessential cultural and doctrinal concerns’ (15). As a detailed chronicle of how the Jesuits in China dealt with all the challenges they faced from the Imperial power and from Europe, this text is aimed at an audience which wants to read about a series of sequential events but only as part of the history of Catholic evangelization. Brockey’s work, which handles primary sources with remarkable vividness, is grounded in the modern historiographical idea that regards any event which can be set in a series as historically significant. This brings to mind not so much the texts as the readers of the narrative represented by the ‘Edifying Letters’ (Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites par quelques missionaires de la Compagnie de Jésus), the collection of Jesuit epistles from China published in eighteenth-century France. The letters served as first-person nonfictional historical accounts of China, in which the fracture between the individual experience and the Jesuit Order, or its Catholic doctrine, was perfectly concealed. Their readers could enjoy an easy narration without any inkling of which aspects of it were beyond the authors’ experience, especially cultural and religious conflicts, nor how the materiality of exchanges was brought into line with ideas. Indeed if one looks at the striking Jesuit archival inheritance on China, dating from the end of sixteenth to the end of eighteenth century, or even just at the Japonica Sinica, there is an ocean of dramatis personae, of characters who acted and reflected. Nonetheless, all they left on paper was narration of events, which are being examined and commented upon up to this day. Files will continue to turn up in archives, containing forgotten manuscripts from China or Europe discussing the state of the mission, requesting goods, or asking for logistical support. As direct witnesses the biographical profiles of their authors are indeed crucial, but the task of historiographical research is to consider them only as manifestations of a hidden complexity, and not as a collection of evidence. This complexity transcends the history of Christianity, and with regard to the China mission should be perhaps investigated by considering the transformation of Catholic missionaries into explorers. Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, qualities such curiosity and courage, which had previously been condemned and censored by Catholic morality, began to appear in Jesuit texts, and acquired emblematic meanings. Suddenly Prometheus’ intelligence and Icarus’ fearlessness were not blameworthy manifestations of human selfishness, but the right means to discovery. ¹¹

David Mungello’s The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500e1800 sheds some light on this transformation. First published in 1999, this revised third edition is aimed at students and general readers. The portrait of Xiangfei (probably one of emperor Qianlong’s consorts) as a cover illustration perfectly reflects the text’s perspective. The picture was in fact produced in the second half of the eighteenth century, probably by one of the students of Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), an Italian painter attached to the Jesuit mission who served in the Qing workshops up to his death. It hints at a territory where East–West exchanges can only be understood through asymmetrical relationships and processes of cultural osmosis: the picture is suggestive of the Italian painting tradition but stands on a Chinese medium and within the Qing fictional world. To portray the links involved in such an exchange, Mungello successfully introduces, in a general historical overview, the idea of mutual influence and outlines the confrontation between Christianity and Chinese culture. In addition he provides a few sections dealing with European technology and art (38–48, 65–77, and 106–10). Although this is a straightforward presentation of the basic questions, it nevertheless mentions the issue of sinicization of European techniques and religious views in the realm of art and technology, bringing them in conformity with local tastes and culture. The second part of Mungello’s book is devoted to the intellectual history that derived from Europe’s cultivation of its own idea of China. Explaining the different contexts of European acceptance and then rejection of Chinese culture between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the author divides the Europeans who were involved with China into three kinds: the missionaries, the proto-Sinologists, and the ‘popularizers’ (94–5). While the first group was clearly interested in Chinese culture because of the missionary enterprise, the second investigated different topics on a proto-scientific base, for example the study of the Chinese written language as primeval idiom. Finally, the popularizers were neither interested in ‘cultural accommodation between Chinese and European cultures’, nor in a ‘serious intellectual approach’, and they were the ones who ‘produced the greatest distortions of Chinese culture’ (95). Obviously, as both explorers and missionaries, the Jesuits in China could act at various times according to one or more of the three typologies mentioned above. What Mungello demonstrates, by linking different aspects of intellectual frameworks and of material cultures, is that the narrative of the exchange cannot be limited to a history of evangelical or commercial persuasion, or to a fictitious history of emotions, but has to expand to the selling of ideas, manifested in tangible objects, representations and rituals within a specific geographical area.

The Interweaving of Perspectives

Michael North’s Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900, an edited collection of essays stemming from the International Congress of Historical Science in Sydney (Australia, 2005), discusses encounters in the visual arts and offers new critical views on cultural transfers. Its perspective takes into consideration the multifaceted nature of cultural encounters, and how within such an exchange ‘information and objects may flow in different directions even if unequally’ (DaCosta Kaufmann and North, 1), while also keeping in mind that a cultural exchange ‘might still imply that a cultural good is simply handed over’ (DaCosta Kaufmann and North, 2). One merit of this book is that it leaves the reader with a sense of work in progress and curiosity: the essays do not always draw out all the theoretical threads underlining the different topics, but the material examined is of great interest. The studies presented here are all grounded in a market framework, and in the study of collections and workshops. They cover Asia from the Indian region to Japan: from the use of Asian objects in European medieval courts (Karl-Heinz Spieß), to the Christian-Japanese imagery of the Fumi-e, used by Japanese authorities in trials to uncover hidden Catholic converts (DaCosta Kaufmann). The collection of essays as a whole is effective, both in indicating the main issues involved when writing histories of supposed cultural exchanges, and in warning the reader that one cannot apply a single theoretical model to objects belonging to different contexts. From this perspective it is evident that powerful simplifications such as the concepts of hybridity, métissage, or of globally shaped cultures dominated by mutual exchanges, do not work when describing processes of exchange, but only when describing their subjectively selected results. This collection of essays calls for a reconsideration of all those failed exchanges, ‘rejections’ and ‘misapprehensions’ that remained marginal in mainstream history, but are instructive for understanding cultural dialogues (DaCosta Kaufmann, 140).

Nicolas Standaert’s impressive research on funerary rites in China and Europe in the seventeenth century shows again that we cannot use a universal recipe in the study of cultural exchanges. The Interweaving of Rituals also provides a theoretical and methodological framework that may trigger a fruitful debate between East-Asia specialists. Standaert calls for renewed scholarly attention to the ritual aspects of religions. In the convergences and divergences between beliefs, doctrinal canons and practices, he finds the key to explore cultural contacts between Europe and China. In particular, he compares and analyses Chinese and European sources on funerary canons and customs, missionary knowledge of Chinese funerary culture, and the development of Christian funerals in China. This book is a compelling example of a historiographical narrative that takes into account the two-way nature of Chinese and Catholic relations: how Chinese cultural elements were incorporated into Christian rituals, and how these were integrated into the Chinese template. Within the Jesuit scholarly tradition, Standaert is one of the innovators who has given a new sinocentric approach and a fresh methodological view to the study of the exchanges between China and Europe in the early modern period. This can be seen in the analytical framework proposed by the author in the last chapter of his book, which was initially published in 2002 in a CSRCS Occasional Paper. ¹² Standaert lists, and locates within the history of sinology, four analytical schemes for studying cultural interactions, which he employed in his research. These are: the ‘transmission framework’ prevalent in the 1960s, which focused on the active role of the transmitter, for example the missionaries (207); the ‘receptive framework’, which mostly evolved in the 1960s and 1970s and focused on the Chinese perspective on the transmission, for example on Chinese reactions to the missionaries’ activities (209); the ‘invention framework’, from post-colonial and cultural studies, that considers the exchange as a construction of a linguistic and imaginary reality, and which in turn questions the historiographical language adopted (210); and finally the ‘interaction and communication framework’, which the author constructs with elements of the other schemes. This last approach recognizes that communication involves both reception and transmission, and that Chinese and Europeans are both receivers and transmitters. Moreover, it focuses on experiences of disengagement from mainstream culture, such as, for example, the minority of Chinese converts versus the rest of the population (213). In describing this methodological trajectory, Standaert proposes that conflicts and incongruities should be considered as crucial aspects of cultural exchanges, that the extra-textual life of historically described facts should be taken into account, and finally that the idea of culture as an indivisible unity should be questioned, although he maintains that Christianity in China represented a broad cultural phenomenon (4). Perhaps Standaert’s rich scholarly production represents another, historiographical, story of adaptation. It transcends the solipsistic cages of both the Jesuit legacy, and of positivistic and quantitative historiographical dogmas: rejecting the missionary idea that the world of nations will find cultural and religious harmony and recognizing that written history will never attain balance between reality and its representation.

In view of the conundrum of incompatible cultures producing cultural transfers, perhaps one should finally look at ‘stuff’ wandering around the globe, as recounted in Robert Finlay’s The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History. The book covers 1000 years of global commercial and cultural exchanges involving Chinese porcelain. Here the object, and together the agent, of exchange is a piece of glazed ceramic: it is porcelain that influenced transoceanic trade, and which today serves as evidence of ‘cultural encounters’ and as ‘barometers of human affairs’ (6). Finlay, a historian of Europe who has specialized particularly in Renaissance Venice, is also a historian of Portuguese-Chinese maritime trade. In this book he considers the ways in which various societies assimilated porcelain into ‘their art, religion, politics and economy’ (7). Unlike spices and silk, which travelled from East to West, porcelain did not move in only one direction. Instead, it became an entity, item and idea together, bought, reinterpreted and misconstrued in persistent multi-directional exchanges (10). In the intellectual history of China and the West, silent characters suddenly appear, such as the illiterate decorators in Jingdezhen, the porcelain city which housed the Imperial kilns. For centuries they had been copying foreign patterns such as Arabic calligraphy, and in the early modern period they found themselves busy replicating, alongside designs from East Asia, European armorial patterns and Christian mythological landscapes (27). Almost following Brockey’s logistical view of cultural encounters, the decorators worked to balance the two cultural sides: the desires of European patrons and Chinese procedures for making porcelain. This was a process of replicating forms that at first were unknown, but which later became familiar through their Chinese simulacra.

Describing the Christian converts working at the kilns of Jingdezhen, and the Jesuits with whom they interacted, Finlay mentions that the converts ‘treasured their jars of holy water while continuing to pay tribute to Tung’, the god of porcelain (36). Perhaps such a syncretic attitude, described by Standaert above, should be attributed not only to a few Jesuits operating within a spiritual mission, but to everyone involved in processes of adaptation within the East–West dialogue. What Finlay implies is that commodities like porcelain, flowing between different cultures, tell historians that exchanges always conceal efforts to defend cultural values which cannot be negotiated, and that comparisons are not always the outcome of cultural exchanges. Although Finlay makes use of Jesuit accounts, especially those of François-Xavier Dentrecolles (1664–1741), who discovered and transmitted information on the production of porcelain to Europe, it is nevertheless a work of research on technology, trade and consumption. Like the example of the pilgrim flask, employed by the author to demonstrate the transformative cultural journey of porcelain, from Mesopotamian antiquity to the Pilgerflaschen produced at Meissen (299–301), perhaps we should look at the actors of the China–Europe exchange as pilgrims, people moving in space with spiritual, intellectual and material needs, and not as icons of cultural or religious identities. Eventually, as Finlay points out, the exchange of porcelain produced a koinē of ceramic art (304): an aesthetic language not enclosed in self-referential narratives but mirroring a cross-cultural exchange based on both creative ‘innovation and misreading’ (301).