In Our Time - Matteo Ricci and the Ming Dynasty

Episode Date: April 16, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life of Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest who in the 16th century led a Christian mission to China. An accomplished scholar, Ricci travelled extensively and came into contact with senior officials of the Ming Dynasty administration. His story is one of the most important encounters between Renaissance Europe and a China which was still virtually closed to outsiders.With Mary Laven Reader in Early Modern History at the University of CambridgeCraig Clunas Professor of the History of Art at the University of OxfordandAnne Gerritsen Reader in History at the University of Warwick Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1582, the Jesuit priest, Matteo Rici, disembarked at the port of Macau with the mission to convert to the people of China to Christianity. He planned to target the Ming Emperor, believing that if he adopted Catholicism, his subjects would follow. Over the next 30 years, Ritchie became one of the first,

Westerners to enter the Forbidden City. He mixed with princes and mandarins and founded the first Catholic cathedral in Beijing. By sharing European knowledge with local scholars, he changed the way China saw the West, and his reports of China transformed the way Europe viewed China for centuries to come. His approach to conversion, though,

later caused outrage in the Vatican. With me to discuss, Mathéé Ricci and the Ming are Mary Levin, reader in early modern history at the University of Cambridge. Craig Clunis, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford and Anna Gerritsen, reader in history at the University of Warwick. Craig Clunis, how much did Europeans know about China at the end of the 16th century? Well, they knew that China was very big, and they thought, or they were right, that China was very prosperous.

Europeans had first arrived in Chinese waters at the very beginning of the 16th century. The Portuguese arrived in China around 1530. So by the end of the century, by the time Rici arrives in Macau, there have been considerable numbers of decades of trade and interaction. But this trade and interaction had all taken place at the very edges of the empire. So there was very little knowledge about what the interior of the empire was like, how it was governed, what the major cities were like. So they did know something, after all, remember that Christopher Columbus,

when he set out, he set out for the east, he was attempting to, find a way to China. So the idea of this great wealthy empire was very firmly put in the minds of trade and rulers in Europe. And certainly the Catholic Church and the Counter-Reformation Project to evangelise the world certainly thought of China as a potential field where there were millions and millions of souls to be converted. This is the counter-reformation. This is the Catholic Church eventually reacting, not too much later, reacting against Luther and his massive. impact on the religious nature, let's call it Europe for ease.

And one of the drives they made was quite extraordinary that they decided to convert the world to Christianity just to show who was in charge. They did indeed decide there was an aim to convert the whole world and the Jesuit order of which Ritchie was a member is very much part of that. And so they're spanning out

across the whole world. Remember that the Portuguese and the Spaniards by now control Latin America. They are involved in the Mughal Empire. in India, they're involved in Japan. The year that Ritchie became a Jesuit is the year that the Spanish conquer the Philippines in 1571. So there's definitely this sense of a huge global project of which Ritchie is just a small part. Did you, can we develop the idea of China just a little bit? I mean, what sort of reports had come back to Europe about, what Ritchie

faced when he got there was a population we're told which was about the size of the whole of Europe, a very sophisticated society in some ways, he didn't know, and the brutalities and that, organised scholarly and so on. Was that coming through? I think it was coming through to a degree. There had been some books, and there had been a book published in Portugal by a Dominican who had managed to spend a month in the great city of Canton, Guangzhou, in the 1550s. But clear evidence of what the empire was. was like was to a certain extent lacking. It was an unknown land to a degree.

So there are images of China, but there's very little concrete or solid information about what it's really like, and certainly about how it's run and how it's governed. Were there further deeper other designs on China? Was it a sense of trade following the cross,

or was it out there to get souls, to save souls? Well, there's also the idea that you could potentially conquer it. Between the 15 60s and the 1580s, Philip the second of Spain, the man who launched the Spanish Armada, he's faced constantly, there are coming across his desk plans to conquer China. People are saying, you know, look how easily the Incas and the Aztecs fell. If we had 50,000 Spanish troops, we could conquer the whole empire. And he has to say at one point, look, don't send me any more plans

for conquering China. I'm kind of busy at the moment. There are other things going on. but certainly there were a series of European schemes to take control of China by force. So this is also an important part of the background in which Ritchie is operating. And a part of the background that the Chinese are very well aware of. And the Chinese image of Europeans at this period is of dangerous and violent people who are interested in trade but who can turn nasty at the slightest provocation. Mary Levin, the Jesuits were fairly new order when Ritchie joined them.

What was distinctive about them? That's right. The Jesuits are one of the new orders of the Counter-Raffirmation Church. They originated in Paris in the 1530s and they gained papal approval in 1540. And one of the particular characteristics of the Jesuits, which is clear right from the outset,

is that they took a fourth vow. So besides poverty, chastity and obedience, they also vowed to go wherever in the world the Pope sent them. So mobility was absolutely at the heart of the order, whereas you think of some religious communities as living in a religious house, sharing in religious services throughout the day and night, coming together to eat in the refactory, wearing religious habits. The Jesuits were not committed to any of that. They had a far more flexible model for their life because they wanted to travel. They didn't have. They didn't

have to wear particular religious habits. They were encouraged to wear the clothes of the people they were evangelising in order to fit in. Did the Pope call, I've forgotten the phrase now, just a bit of a nuisance given that we're live and now talking about it. What did the Pope call on his secret army, his soldiers of Christ? Soldiers of Christ. One of their particularities, they seemed to be more directly connected with him than the other orders. Well, that's right, because of this, you know, this addiction.

vow of particular obedience to the Pope. So there really was this idea that the Jesuits were willing to go wherever the Pope would send them. And also one thing they distinguished them was their scholarship, their high levels of scholarship, the fact that those who could afford it in, let's keep calling it, Catholic Europe, sent their children to be educated by these men who were fiercely intellectual. Exactly. I mean, the Jesuits put huge store by education, the schools, which were for the laity, for layboys, were a really important way of making connections

with the European elites, but also the education of the Jesuits themselves, the Jesuit colleges, the extensive period of training that Jesuits underwent, learning not just theology, of course, but also really a good humanist education, grounded in the classics, history, philosophy, and also the sciences, maths, astronomy and stuff. This is pre-Galileo, so we're talking about them being able to follow all sorts of sciences, astronomy and the new technologists. What do we know of Materia reaches early life before he left Europe?

So he was born in 1552 in Mathurata in the Papal States, that's in central eastern Italy. He was the son of an apothecary, and I think it's really nice to think of him growing up in a pharmacy shop where you, you know, he could have smelled these Eastern spices and the pharmacy jars, you know, the rhubarb and the ginger and the mace and the cinnamon and so on. He, as a nine-year-old boy, he was sent by his parents to the Jesuit school in Mathiurata, which was brand new.

It was set up in 1561, and Ritchie went there in its first year, and that was obviously hugely influential. Then when he was 16, he headed off to the capital, to Rome, to study law. But it's a classic story, I suppose, of conversion. He was supposed to be doing the worldly career secular stuff, but in fact the pull of the Jesuits didn't leave off him.

And after a few years of studying law, he went over to the novice house of Saint-Andrea Quironelli in Rome in order to train to be a Jesuit priest. And for several years he went through very rigorous, not fairly, very rigorous training. Absolutely. So, you know, five years full-on Jesuit training in Rome before he was sent off to India, to Goa. So he's in, let's say it's in Goa, Gerritsen,

but he's about to move further east. How much China be coming to outsiders at this time under the Ming Emperor, Ming Dynasty? Well, China probably was at that time very full of contradictions, I would say. So it was established 1368, and that establishment at that time by the First Emperor of the Ming was to be a contrast with the period before,

which was open-minded, gave equal rights to different religious traditions, was welcoming to merchants from many different places, particularly from Central Asia. So the Ming was established under an atmosphere of change, of keeping out these kind of foreign threats. So the northern wall was fought, merchants weren't officially allowed in the country.

The size of the administration was set. The laws weren't officially to be changed at all. So officially the visitors, let's say, let's call them these in a nice way, the Portuguese as they arrived on the South Coast, the Jesuits particularly were rebutted. They weren't allowed officially to enter. So that all this sort of narrative is that the Ming was closed.

The Ming was inward-looking, was xenophobic even. But when you look a little bit more closely, and particularly at the 16th century, you see a very different world. In fact, what you see is that the laws that had been established were almost unenforceable. The size of the administration had proportionally diminished because the growth of the population. The attempts to enforce these restrictions of traders as they came in from outside proved to be impossible, the coastal line, miles and miles of it, of course, all full of secret ports and harbours and little

inlets, absolutely impossible to keep out those who wanted to come in. So, in fact, by the 16th century, as Craig was saying earlier, there was a thriving trade, commodities leaving China, silver coming in in vast quantities, most likely... Silver was what they most wanted, wasn't it? Silver was what they most wanted and the easiest way of embarking on this trade. and of course it was silver from the Spanish Empire, from Peru. So really, China was, by the 16th century, at the heart of a global economy of an exchange system,

of commodities and of silver. How rich he went there to convert? It's really gallant, isn't it? I mean, it makes David and Goliath looks like a sort of a grain of sand in the mountain, really, but he went to China to convert it to Christianity. How available was China for that effort? Well, again, I think it's an answer that has to be contradictory.

So on the one hand, they faced an enormous challenge. They found a place that was extremely literate, took education very seriously, took scholarly learning very seriously. So they couldn't enter and say, look, you have nothing, we have all the learning. That didn't work. They also couldn't offer a sort of idea of hierarchy and order and say, we will give you this structure, because that was all already present there too.

But in terms of the religion, they found a very complex system that was in many ways very open-minded because it wasn't problematic within the Chinese religious practices to coexist next to each other. So there was a Confucian tradition, a Buddhist tradition, a Taoist tradition, there was popular religion, and all of those in a way co-existed quite happily next to each other. At some level, this syncretic practice of a lack of exclusivity

meant that Christianity could somehow slot into this. Except for the inconvenient fact that Christianity declared itself to be an exclusive religion. Precisely. So that was exactly the issue. So it wasn't problematic for a Confucian scholar to adhere to Confucian ideology and to stick to Confucian principles, to guide his family life, his respect for his ancestors, his relationship with his ruler, but also draw on, let's say, the services that a Buddhist temple might offer certain prayers, maybe the funeral for his mother, he might well also dabble in Taoist philosophy or maybe use a Taoist specialist, all entirely

unproblematically, but the commitment to disavow all those practices and to turn to Christianity exclusively was much, much more difficult. And that's one of the challenges. that the Jesuits faced when they arrived. Craig Clunas, were there any useful precedence for Mathia Ricci when he was working out the strategy for this mission? Well, the Jesuits had had a certain amount of success in other places, and I think Japan is a very interesting case. The Jesuits had been established in Japan

from earlier in the 16th century. Japan at this period was going through a very chaotic phase, and different warlords are looking, for advantage with one another and therefore it was much more, the Jesuits were much more able in Japan to make connections with very powerful

and important people who were willing to use them as part of their strategies. It was all connected with the trade, as Anna has said. So the idea that if you went for the top, I suppose there's also the idea that in a sense if you knock out the top

because after all the experience of the conquest of of the states of Latin America had always been about kind of destroying the person at the top. So in a sense, if you could convert the person at the top, I think all early modern people, everybody in the 16th century,

thought in these very hierarchical ways. This was true in China as much as in Europe. The human society was a hierarchy and getting to the person at the top was what mattered. And it was a precedent that Christianity had plenty of evidence for from the beginning, I mean, well, near the beginning

they went to, Constantine was an example of going to the top, in changing Rome into it, and then when they came across to this country, they went for the kings in Northumbria, they went for the kings, and particularly the queens, actually, that's what they went. So it was, it had proved its worth. Yes, absolutely. The Emperor Constantine is constantly

in the thoughts of men who know their sacred history very well indeed. So the idea was he would somehow, and we're now talking to a man who took years and years and years to get to Beijing, who would get that, meet the emperor, and then he would be well on his way. Well, the other idea, in a sense, what they want the emperor to do is to issue a clear order

that they are allowed to live in China and to preach the gospel. This is what they want. They want, as it were, a charter from the emperor, which will say this is legitimate, these people have a right to be here, I support what they do, as a preliminary stage to the actual conversion of the importance of the importance. imperial family, but this is what Ritchie wants. This is what he's fixated on that. If he can get to Beijing, if he can get to the emperor, if he can get the express permission of the emperor for the evangelisation process, then that will be the crucial step.

So that's what he's focused on from a very early stage. Mary Laman, how did Madia Ritchie use his scholarship to gain influence? Well, Ritchie was absolutely insistent that the way to convey the way to convey. the Chinese was through reason, science and books. He said this repeatedly, and in his letters to his Jesuit colleagues, he very often asks them to send out books, send over to him books about clockmaking or geometry or astronomy, because he said, you know, with these things,

I can really impress the Chinese. And I think this was partly because of his own self-identity as a very learned European man, and it was partly because he rightly identified the literati as in some sense sharing that identity. So the literati, the state, the civil servant class in China who had had to pass many, many examinations in order to gain their posts and were deeply immersed in confusion learning.

And so as part of this strategy of going to the top, Ritchie was absolutely convinced that, that if he could have conversations with the Mandarin's, if he could impress them with Western science, then they would be drawn over to his thinking. There was almost a tension now, because as Craig said earlier on, or I think it was you said, actually,

Jesuits didn't have to dress, didn't have a uniform they dressed as they dressed. And he had two identities, didn't they? Because he started off by dressing as a Buddhist, so trying to reach out to, let's call the ordinary people for want to have a better phrase. And then he didn't think that was working well enough, so he started

to dress like a Mandarin and go for the great Confucian scholars and so on. Exactly. Well, so the Jesuits really abided by this principle of when in Rome, do as the Romans do. But of course, that's all very well. That actually requires choices because not everybody in a massive society like China is behaving

in the same way. So you have to make your choices with whom you're going to align yourself. And it's quite true that when the Jesuits arrived in China, they first thought the obvious group to identify with were the Buddhist priests, celibate, religious men. It made sense to them initially. But then as they got to know the society better, and of course the Jesuits were very committed to ethnography, to finding out about the foreign lands that they were attempting to evangelise, they realised that the people with the real clout and the real status were the mandarin's. And in the 1590s, that's when Ritchie changed his clothes.

And he put on the fine Confucian robes of a scholar. And by that time, Anna Gerriton, he was well into Chinese life, his Chinese culture. His linguistic skills seemed to have been extraordinary. Could you give us some notion of that before? Could you give us some notion? Sure, so he decided initially to learn Chinese and that would have been spoken Chinese and quite quickly after a year or so was able to converse easily. But he recognised that the spoken language is quite different from the written language

and that this literary language, which is a comparison you can make similarly about Latin and Italian or other dialects at the time, that was the language really of scholarly learning. So he immersed himself in the learning of the literary texts and that took years. and for those of us who have spent time learning that, we know how hard it is. But it is also the challenge that he faced, particularly, is that he didn't have any of the kind of aids that we have. So no dictionaries, no grammar structures. He created those things.

So his commitment to that learning is absolutely phenomenal. And as is his output is phenomenal. Of the books he translated from one language into another. And at one stage found a Latin equivalent alphabet for the Chinese alphabet. Is that right? Well, the Chinese don't have an alphabet, but a set of characters that are not necessarily just by looking at them clear about how to pronounce them. So he created an early system of representing these characters by Roman letters and indicating the tone of them because it's also a tonal language. So he devised this way of representing Chinese characters that made it readable, I suppose, not just for himself but for his fellow followers.

So there's really bridging connections there with the work. One thing that he, one great wonder that he achieved was to make the complete map of 10,000 countries, a massive map he created presumably with hell. Can you tell us about that and why, what sort of impact it had? So this was almost his calling card. It was one of his most effective ways of impressing the scholars, as Mary was saying earlier. It started off in a fairly simple form. It was basically in one of the first residences, the first residence in Jai Tia.

in the south of China, on the wall in the reception room. How big was it? Probably that first map, which doesn't survive quite small. And it was just a way of starting a conversation saying, here's China, this is where I'm from, a sort of informal piece to get people interested in who he was and where he was from. It got picked up, and it caught the attention of scholars, of people further afield.

And Matteo Rici, over time, created several iterations of this map. the ones, there's a 1602 map in the Vatican that remains, there's a 1608 edition that remains. What we know about what they all share is that Matteo Ritchi made some very key adaptations that made this extraordinary piece of advertising almost. So one of the things he did was, as opposed to European maps at the time,

which always would have had Jerusalem at the centre, he made the key move to move Europe and Africa to the left-hand side of the map, which of course then shifted Asia to the center of the map, China just to the left of the center and Japan just to the right. And then on the right-hand side of the map were the Americas. So North America and South America, which was, of course, fairly new knowledge in Europe too at the time,

but certainly entirely unknown in China at the time. So the map worked as a way of introducing new knowledge and bringing that inter-circulation in China, but also this key innovation again that Matteo Ricci, that characterizes Mateo Ricci, is that he made it in a way readable to the Chinese viewers. So he added the names of places in Chinese. For many places, there was no equivalent.

There was no Chinese place name for unknown places, and there are still the names used for these places today. And it created this visual impression of what the world looked like, what China's place within that might be. So the larger, the later additions of the map are about 10 foot wide and 5 foot high. They're absolutely enormous and they were as you say exactly

collaborative projects. They were visually quite stunning pieces. Craig Clunis now can I come to what became the most controversial part of what he did which was this, let's call it the accommodation strategy. What was that?

Well the accommodation strategy I think comes out of the idea which we've already talked about, that you're not going to convert China by telling, and you're certainly not going to convert the Chinese upper classes, by telling them that they've got it all wrong. So what you need to do is to find the parts of what they already believe that are not abhorrent to Christianity, and you need to work with them. So Richi convinces himself that if you go back into the early Chinese text, the early Confucian classics,

it's obvious that the Chinese did worship what he calls the Lord of Heaven, Tianju. And Tianju is still the word used for the Christian god by Catholic Chinese today. So he finds this term in the Confucian classics and he says, okay, so they did have, because it's part of his belief system

that God has placed intimations of the truth of of Christianity in the belief systems of pagan peoples, because these things are true. And so pagan belief systems already include intimations of the truths of Christianity, and therefore you should work with the grain of what these people already believe. So he's very much about stressing this, the omnipotent Lord of Heaven, the creator of the universe. What he's therefore not so keen on talking about are the bits of Christianity, that are going to be most difficult for Chinese to absorb.

And those are the incarnation, the incarnation of Christ, and in particular things like the crucifixion. So he very, very much downplays that. Within the visual imagery of Christianity that the Jesuits present, again in their residences and that visitors to their houses will see, what is foregrounded is the image of the Madonna and child. they keep crucifixion scenes very much out of the way and they downplay that both in their writings

and in their visual presentation of Christianity. But Catholics back in Rome had every right to be a bit upset that the crucifixion and the resurrection didn't play much of a part when it was central to the whole enterprise. Yes, but of course the level of communication that Ricci is kind of on the other side of the world and although he writes regularly, He doesn't tell them that.

He doesn't tell him that. People in Rome only know what he's up to by what he chooses to write back. And of course, his superiors in the Jesuit order would entirely approve of what he was doing. He wasn't some kind of maverick who's making this stuff up as he goes along. He's very much in tune with the Jesuit understanding

and also the idea that sacred mysteries should be not unveiled all in one lump, but that they should be unveiled a little. bit at a time in keeping with the ability of potential converts to understand what you're saying. Can you continue in that line in a way, Mary Laughan, his accommodation strategy. In his book, the true meaning of the Lord of Heaven was written in Chinese. What impact did that book have? Well, that is the ultimate document of accommodation. It was published in Beijing in 1603. and to go back to Craig's point about what did the people in Rome know about it,

one of the reasons why it took so long for Ritchie to get to the point of publishing that catechism was because he was actually awaiting censorship and approval. And that eventually came through after many delays and logistical complications. It came through from Macau. But the permission was not coming directly. from Rome. And of course it's a book written in Chinese, so nobody in Rome would have been able to understand it. It was, I mean, I think what's remarkable about that book is that while it aspers to set forth the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and it tells the readers about an omnipotent

creator God and the immortality. of the soul and heaven and hell and human agency free will. It's got those key theological tenets tucked away right at the end of this long book. In a small paragraph is this section about the life of Christ, which says Christ was born of a maiden, of a virgin mother. and 33 years later, he reascended to heaven. That's it. Now, the catechism is framed as a dialogue between a Western scholar and a Chinese scholar.

So in a sense, it kind of dramatises that ideal relationship that Ritchie was trying to create between Jesuits and literati. and I think it's hard to gauge its success actually. No, it's just I'm going to congratulate you for continuing uninterruptedly with that reply when we had a very efficient studio manager come in and change most of the microphones round the table while you were doing it for reasons which will be explained to us all later. Nevertheless, we'll get on with the programme. We'll have to speed up a little bit now, Anna.

How well did he understand Confucianism? It was a learning process, let's say. So he took time. He started off from having to learn the basic text and working his way into the scholarship. By the time he arrived in Nanchang, when he changed his dress and started to appear as a Confucian scholar,

he actually had a very sophisticated understanding and had dialogues with other scholars. So he was well down the trial. by that. Yeah, I would say and he was able to communicate effectively on the principles of Confucianism. Do you have names? Do we know certain persons he talked to? Is this a generalisation

that I know about Confucianism? No, we have some of his interlocutors. We know some of the individuals he worked with, Chinese scholars, and there were collaborations. Craig Lennes, how close was he getting to his about goal, which was to meet the Emperor of China?

He got into the forbidden city, but? Well, in 16, one, partly through the agency of various eunuchs, these are the castrated servants of the imperial family, through the agency of unix, he finally does make it to Beijing, and by this point he is, he does know some very powerful and quite important people high up in the imperial bureaucracy, so he's able to reside in Beijing. This is part of, from the emperor's point of view, having people come from very far away and tell you you're great is one of the things that makes you an emperor.

So the imperial court is used to the idea of foreigners coming from very far away, we'll house them, we'll feed them, we'll listen to them, tell us how great we are, but we won't interact with them. And in fact, I don't think that Ritchie had any chance at all of ever meeting the emperor face to face. That was never going to happen.

But there's a sense in which he became influential in court, Well, he becomes influential in imperial circles in the sense that high bureaucrats know him, but those high bureaucrats have a very difficult and conflicted relationship with the Emperor of the Day, who often for long periods refuses to meet his senior bureaucrats at all. Any of them? He refuses to meet any of them. He goes into a massive sulk. This is all about a dispute about who is to be the crown prince,

and this leads to a huge row between the Emperor and his high bureaucrats, in which for a very long period he won't meet them, he won't interact with them, he sends them messages via his eunuchs. On to the new unix then, Mary Lavin. What reaction or interreaction did Ritchie have with the eunuchs and why is it important that we discuss it?

Well, he had to deal with them because they were this buffer around the emperor. So if he wanted to try and get access the emperor, it had to be via the eunuchs. This was a period, it's pretty much a high point of eunuchs, in Ming history. So there are about 100,000 eunuchs at this.

We've been there before, it's still much your eyes water. Indeed. Ritchie did not conceal his contempt for the eunuchs. He's incredibly rude about them. He describes them as barbarous, stupid, stolid, dull, baseborn. So they didn't learn diplomacy at this judgmental? These eunuchs are very powerful. He must have known that, seriously. And that's absolutely the tension there, that he needed to sweet talk them.

Often he had to bribe them. He had to give them presents. He needed their influence. They were very important intermediaries, and he didn't like them at all. Can we take this one step further, Anna Gerritsen? He met scarcely any women, and that's because of the system. and also if he thought what he thought about the eunuchs, as marriage just said, no wonder, because they guarded the women. Yes, the women at the imperial court. But he actually had very little to say about women also in his time before he arrived at the court.

And it's not at all surprising because the circles he operated in were the elite families, the elite men guided by Confucian principles. And they would have, because of family morals and guidance, kept the women out of sight, kept them inside the inner, their chambers, as it were. So it's not surprising that the only women he encountered would have been lower class, lower born, more impoverished women about whom he had very little to say. What's interesting is that with hindsight, for many centuries probably, we relied heavily in European perspectives of China on the writings by the likes of Mateo Ritchie. We said, oh, well, these women are hardly visible.

They are mostly very modest and obedient. It's only recently that, we've started to look a bit more behind the scenes and recognise that probably in those very same households that he entered when the men were not there. And of course they were away for long stretches of time. It was the women who were in charge, who were doing the financial transactions, who were educating their sons, who were communicating with other networks of writing women. So he had great powers of observation, but certain things were just not visible to him. Great learners. What? What? What? What are the Europeans learning about China from him while he is there?

Well, he's writing lots of letters back. So I think that within the network of Jesuits and Jesuit contacts in European elites, there's a percolating knowledge about China. But while he's just after he's arrived in China, a book is published in 1585 by a Mexican bishop called Mendoza. and this is a huge bestseller in Europe at the time it goes into 30 editions up to 1600 and this is the book that Europeans read. So they are getting more information about China but it's not coming directly from Rici.

But the success of this book I think tells us that there is a huge hunger in Europe to know about China. So I think it's inconceivable that Ritchie's letters and we know he wrote many, many more than those which survive. that these letters will have been recopied and passed around within the Jesuit order, that people in Latin America will have known to an extent what he was up to. And so we're back into China, Mary Love. And what's the feeling is, what impression do you have, what progress, if we can use that word, he would have been making by the time he got to the Forbidden City.

By then he's been in China for quite a long time, very long time, devoted to it, like the language, written books, in Chinese, translated in the night of Chinese. What's the view of this man and his influence? Is it he's an eccentric or is it he's becoming part of it? Or is he threatens to take us over? Yeah. Well, I suppose there are various different ways in which you could measure Ritchie's success. One thing that we could contemplate as how many people actually converted.

And by the time of his death, we're talking about 2,000, 2,500. Maybe that sounds impressive, but the population of China was about 200 million. It's actually a tiny, tiny handful. I should say, by the way, following on from Anna's point, that actually where there is specific information about who converted, quite a large number of that 2,000-odd Christian converts were women. So that's interesting. Of course, in one way...

But from the beginning it was always more appreciated. Christianity was more... Always seems to be more appreciated by women, from Mary Magdalene onwards. Sure. But I mean, I think what's really interesting is. interesting, it is always this tension between what Ritchie is saying he's doing and aspiring to do and what's actually happening. So, you know, among these converts, there are women, there are artisans, there are Buddhists. And it's very, very few of these Confucian scholars, which were his ideal. Craig? We actually know quite a lot, don't we, about what Chinese intellectuals thought about Ritchie. He was a big, big celebrity and lots of people record meeting him. And some of the things. this is very positive. I mean, people, they find him very suave, they find him very personable.

One person, though, uses the term of him, he's kind of intricate, he's tricksy, they can't quite figure out who he is, and the question, people are asking themselves, well, why is he here? They don't, they don't quite, they don't entirely get it. And of course, there are some people who have an answer to why he is here, which is that he is a foreign spy. So, for example, from 1609, we have a very interesting, a kind of a dinner party of people. none of whom had ever met Ritchie, but they've all heard of him. He's a big celebrity. And they're sitting around this identity saying, well, it's quite obvious word. He's a spy for the Portuguese. These foreigners, by this time the Dutch are involved. There's wars going on between Europeans off the coast of China.

And Ritchie is some kind of spy. We all know that. So clearly, not everybody thought he was utterly wonderful. Anna, in 1715, by the century after his death, Pope Clement the 11th, wanted to ban ancestor worship. What was the reaction in China? Well, so ancestor worship, the care for one's ancestor was a religious duty, and Mateo Ritchie allowed that. That was part of his accommodation. Absolutely, part of his accommodation strategy, which worked very well. It was one way of facilitating communication and conversion. But in the longer term, that certainly didn't sit well.

And that's one of those bits of news that filtered back to the Pope and had a very dim view of that. And the reaction of the Pope was to outlaw this practice of ancestor worship for those who had converted. And when the Emperor of China found out that some individual elsewhere, this Pope who they couldn't place quite, had made a decision that affected the emperor's own Chinese subjects, that certainly didn't go down well,

and that led to that banning decision of 1715. The expulsion of the Jesuits. Exactly, exactly. So with hindsight, that accommodation strategy probably had quite disastrous effects, but at the time that Ritchie was there working his way through Chinese society, it was probably the only way of doing it. We're near the end now, Craig. Is there any way in which we can talk about this mission

in terms of success or failure? I think it's a bit too late to be it having many nuances here, Craig. Yes, I think Ritchie set for Europeans what Ritchie told us, and in the books about Ritchie published immediately after his death, that became what China was like for Europeans. And to a certain extent, the Western image of China right down into the 20th century, is still dominated by a set of terms

about the literati, about this society, which Ritchie was the first person to lay down. Also, for Chinese intellectuals, Ritchie remains a name to conjure with for centuries. Well, thank you very much. Thank you Mary Levin, Anna Gerritson and Craig Clunis. Next week we'll be talking about the 18th century playwright and novelist Fanny or Francis Burney. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out? That's the first thing. Well, I think the first thing we missed out was the point that, although Ritchie is still the big name, there were lots of other, not lots, but a number, a significant number of other Europeans in China. And indeed, when Ritchie first went to China, he wasn't even the main man, he wasn't the senior man. Was that Ruggieri? This is Ruggieri, who is clearly a very, very important figure in getting the whole thing off the ground and whose skills were complementary to Ritches in many ways.

So I think the most important thing that we missed out was this. We fetishized Ritchie into this. It's all about him. We're not missing it out now because it's being recorded. It's all about him. But on the other hand, I was thinking about this. But actually, from the Chinese point of view, Ritchie's the only one that counts. We have a 44-minute program and not 17 seminars.

It wasn't fetishistic, really. It was actually just selecting someone to dwellings. But we're not doing that because we're right to focus on Ritchie in a, sense from the Chinese point of view because he's the name they remember, he's the star at the time. The Chinese sources at the time do not go on and on about meeting Ruggieri and so on they go on about

meeting Ritchie and Ritchie's Chinese name, Li Mado is still one that's known to every educated Chinese person, whereas only specialists have ever heard of Ruggieri in China as well. He was given a house wasn't he? Near the forbidden city, is that right, or a place to live?

Yes, no, he had a residence first, Ruggieri he set this up in Jiao Ching, which is not far from Canton in the south. He established a place to live in Nanchang and then, of course, famously the house in Beijing. So he had various residences, most of those combined with a church. In fact, this first church that he established in Jiao Qing in the south was a house plus a church, which they identified as a temple. So the term given to this is the name for a Buddhist temple.

and at this time he dressed as a Buddhist monk, he shaved his hair. So it will have looked very much like a place of worship that was perhaps Buddhist in nature. And that was their first base from which to begin the process of conversion. And it was next to this great pagoda, wasn't it? Which was called the Tower of High Fortune, which was basically channel good energy. So it absolutely fits with this pluralistic notion of Chinese religion,

which was essential for him getting a foothold. but then of course More difficult to embed that actually Exactly yeah To get a commitment Did his death have any Was there and do we have any record Of not so much how he died

As how his death was treated Well he was buried in some state He's given land to be buried in By the emperor And that's a sign of favour The burying of foreign envoys Who died in China Had been buried on Chinese soil before

So in a sense This again is part of the imperial beneficence to people who have come from very far away to give them a place to be buried. And his gravestone was one of the sort of tourist sites of Beijing. Really, write down, well, it still is, but it was a tourist site in Beijing very shortly after he died.

It's a guidebook to Beijing, published in 1635, which lists Ritchie's grave as one of the things that you can go and see there. Well, I see the producer Simon Tillerson hovering at the door. In he comes. Bringing tea or coffee, what would you like? There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash Radio 4.