Vermeer's Hat (15 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
The Jesuits knew Xu Guangqi better by his baptismal name. Xu Guangqi was Paolo Xu, the highest-ranking court official ever
to convert to Christianity. Like Lu Zhaolong, Paolo Xu was from a coastal family, but from much farther up the coast—Shanghai,
where seaborne threats came from Japan rather than Europe. The peace of Shanghai had not been disturbed by either Macanese
Foreigners or Red Hairs. It was too far north of the coastal zone in which they traded. Still, through a series of encounters
orchestrated by chance—yet spurred by Xu’s powerful curiosity—this Shanghai native came to know many Europeans in the course
of his life. The Europeans he knew, however, were neither Macanese merchants nor Dutch pirates. They were Jesuit missionaries
from all over Europe, and they brought with them knowledge that Xu recognized could have enormous value for China.
Jesuits had been entering China from Macao for less than a decade when Xu, struggling to make his way up the examination ladder,
met one of them in a southern provincial town in 1595. He had a second encounter five years later with Matteo Ricci, the brilliant
Italian Jesuit who led the Jesuit mission in China until his death in 1610. In the course of his third encounter in 1603,
Xu received baptism and took the Christian name of Paolo. Xu became a close associate of the Jesuits, particularly of the
scholarly Ricci, with whom he collaborated on a range of religious and scholarly projects designed to show the value of the
new knowledge that the missionaries brought from Europe. Few Chinese converted to Christianity; their traditions of ritual
and belief taught them to be dubious about adopting a faith that required them to renounce prior rites and beliefs. Xu was
not troubled by the commitment this new religious knowledge demanded. He figured that Christianity was just as much a part
of the larger European system of knowledge as metallurgy, ballistics, hydraulics, and geometry, and these were the subjects
he was eager to learn and adapt to China’s use. He saw no reason to accept some branches of what came to be called Western
Learning and reject others.
Lu Zhaolong regarded Paolo Xu, correctly enough, as his chief adversary in the debate over the use of European technology
in China. The only way to bring the emperor around to his view was to erode Xu’s considerable authority. The minor Portuguese
victory at Zhuozhou made his task that much harder. He had to proceed carefully. Lu’s main argument was national security.
“Inviting the distant foreigners will not only pose a risk to the interior, but it will give them a chance to detect our weaknesses
and become familiar with our conditions, and so laugh at our Heavenly dynasty for lacking defenders.” The only way China could
keep foreigners in proper awe of China was to hold them at a distance. The sight of three hundred mercenaries—“people of a
different sort, galloping their horses, brandishing their swords, and letting arrows fly from their bows inside the imperial
capital”—was too disturbing to allow. Putting China’s sovereignty in their hands was a crazy gamble. Besides, the cost of
transporting and feeding such a horde was too high. For the same price, the government could afford to cast hundreds of cannon.
In the end, Lu Zhaolong rested his appeal on ad hominem attacks on Paolo Xu by targeting the point where Xu was most vulnerable,
his Christianity. “The Macanese Foreigners all practice the teachings of the Lord of Heaven,” he complained in the final
section of his first communication with the emperor on this matter. “Its doctrines are so abstruse that they easily delude
the age and confuse the people,” and he gave instances of Christian cults that had appeared in several places in China. The
charge went beyond concerns about how badly three hundred Portuguese soldiers might act. There lay a much deeper anxiety about
foreigners infecting the core beliefs of Chinese culture. Lu even quietly suggested that a foreign religion might sway Chinese
minds against the dynasty’s authority. Millenarian Buddhist sects had recently been active in the capital region, on one occasion
inciting an uprising inside the city. Might not secret Christian congregations get up to the same thing? Even worse, Chinese
Christians would have secret connections to the foreigners, which meant secret connections to Macao, and who knew what such
connections might bring? “I know nothing about there being such a thing in the world as the teachings of the Lord of Heaven,
” Lu declared, wanting to know why the emperor would listen to someone such as Xu who preferred them over the writings of
Confucius. “How is it that he is so resourceful and keen in doing everything he can to guarantee the preservation of the Macanese
Foreigners and plan for their long-term prospects?”
Xu’s Christianity was not his only weak spot. His tie with Macao was another. Anxiety about what the foreigners got up to
in Macao runs like a red thread through all Chinese complaints about Europeans in this period. This was the anxiety that lay
behind the persecution of Christianity in Nanjing in 1616, when a very different vice-minister of rites, Shen Que, expelled
two missionaries. Alfonso Vagnone and Álvaro Semedo were transported back to Macao in—to quote an English rendering of Semedo’s
later account—“very narrow cages of wood (such as are used in that Country to transport persons condemned to death, from one
place to another) with Iron Chaines about their necks, and Manacles on their Wrists, with their haire hanging down long, and
their Gownes accoutred in an odde fashion, as a signe of a strange and Barbarous people.” Says Semedo, writing about himself
and Vagnone in the third person, “In this manner were the fathers carried with an inexpressible noise, which the Ministers
made with their ratling of Fetters and Chaines. Before them were carried three tablets, written on with great letters, declaring
the Kings Sentence, and forbidding all men to have any commerce or conversation with them. In this equipage they went out
of Nankim.” For thirty days they were transported in these cages southward to Canton and from there dispatched to Macao with
severe warnings to return to Europe and never come back.
Paolo Xu had been the lone voice defending these two Jesuits back in 1616, though even then he had warned another missionary
that the Jesuits should take care to hide their contacts with Macao. “All of China is scared of the Portuguese,” he stressed,
and Macao was the place on which they focused their anxieties. Hostile officials regarded it not as an innocent trading post,
but as a base from which the Portuguese were running a network of agents inside China to foment religious disturbances, smuggling,
and espionage. The missionaries were seen as its spies. This is why Shen Que charged Semedo and Vagnone with being “the cat’s
paw of the Franks.” A report from the Nanjing Ministry of Rites concurred. Macao was the base from and to which the Jesuits
traveled, the port that provided them with passage anywhere in the world, and the funnel through which the ministry understood
Vagnone received the 600 ounces of silver annually to distribute among the missions in China (the ministry later revised that
number down to 120 ounces). Macao was not just a base for foreign trade, notes a report by the Nanjing Censorate three months
later, but the base for Portuguese infringements on Chinese sovereignty: “their religion makes Macao its nest.” The Jesuits
eventually grasped the liability of their relationship with Macao, though they could never do without the colony. It was essential
to their entire operation in China, and to give it up was to forego the organizational and financial support that kept the
mission going.
Paolo Xu insisted on drawing a distinction between the Red Hairs and the Macanese Foreigners, exactly as his Jesuit friends
would have instructed him to do. The Macanese Foreigners supported their mission and provided them with the base from which
it was possible to send missionaries into China. If the Dutch took Macao from the Portuguese, the Jesuit mission in China
would come to an end. Their friends and enemies had to be Paolo Xu’s friends and enemies. Lu Zhaolong was not persuaded that
any foreigners could be trusted, Portuguese or Dutch. “Rites official Xu has collected arguments he has heard and turned them
into a memorial that chatters on for hundreds of words,” Lu complained, “the gist of which is to argue that the Red Hairs
and the Macanese Foreigners be distinguished, the one as obedient and the others as refractory.” Xu needed to make this distinction
in order to protect his connections with the Jesuits against the charge that there was no difference between Portuguese priests
and Dutch pirates. Lu would have none of it.
The Jesuits well understood how vital their connection to Macao was to the success of their mission. In 1633, a year after
João Rodrigues returned to Macao from his stint with the gunners, he sent a letter to the head of his Society in Europe.
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In the letter he underlines the need to protect the colony and its reputation, “for on this depends the trade so vital for
His Majesty’s Two Indies [the East Indies and the West Indies—the latter meaning the Portuguese possessions in what is now
Brazil] and also the mission to convert China, Japan, Cochinchina, Tonkin, and other countries to our holy religion.” Macao
was the financial and strategic heart of the Jesuit enterprise in the East. Rodrigues’s language uncannily echoes the language
of a statement issued by the Nanjing Ministry of Rites. “This city of Macao is the narrow entrance through which subjects
and all the necessary supplies for Masses and temporal upkeep enter these countries.” Had Rodrigues’s letter fallen into Lu
Zhaolong’s hands, it would have bolstered his suspicions about Macao being a beachhead of foreign penetration into China.
So too, had he learned that both the priests transported out of China in a cage in 1617 were back inside in the 1630s, defying
Chinese laws and converting people to their suspect creed, his worst fears about Macao’s threat to the authority of the dynasty
would have been confirmed.
Macao’s position as the financial clearinghouse for the Jesuit mission into China was the very reason why Las Cortes, the
Jesuit chronicler of the wreck of the
Guía
, was on his way from Manila to Macao when the ship went down. In his memoir, he says only that he had business to transact
in Macao and reveals nothing further. When he finally got to Macao, he transacted it with none other than João Rodrigues.
What their business involved, Las Cortes does not say, but within two months he was on the next ship back to Manila.
On his return voyage, Las Cortes had the misfortune once again to sail through a storm. In a convoy of five ships that crossed
the South China Sea together, only four reached Manila. In his memoir, Las Cortes expresses great concern for the loss of
that ship’s cargo, which he notes included Chinese silks purchased in Macao for three hundred thousand pesos. Sumptuous brocades
and feather-light gauzes in a dazzling array of colors, these fabrics were of a sort that no European could weave or buy anywhere
else, but Las Cortes was not interested in the beauty of the silks. He was interested in what they were worth. “If one took
account of what it would have fetched once it was sold in Manila,” he writes of the lost cargo, “one would without doubt
have to add two hundred thousand pesos, which drives the loss up to half a million pesos.” Being the last substantive entry
in his account of his yearlong adventure in China, the calculation draws attention to itself. The lost cargo may reveal Las
Cortes’s own purpose in going to Macao: to buy Chinese silks that the Jesuits could then sell for a profit in Manila, generating
proceeds that would fund their mission in the Philippines. Perhaps this also tells us that he was bringing a load of silver
to buy such silks when he crossed to Macao on the
Guía
. If the missing silk was Jesuit property, Las Cortes’s mission to Macao was a severe loss in both directions.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF SAILING OFF course and getting stranded on the China coast were just as huge for the people on board the
Guía
as for the owners of the cargo in the hold. An entire year passed before passengers and crew received a final judgment at
Canton. The deliberation was handled by the provincial surveillance commissioner, whose position combined the responsibilities
of chief prosecutor and provincial governor. Las Cortes does not record the commissioner’s name, but it was probably Pan Runmin.
Pan Runmin had just stepped into the post of surveillance commissioner in 1625. Within a few months he would leave for a promotion
elsewhere, but he was likely still in Canton when the case of the
Guía
came up. Little is known of Pan, other than that he was from Guizhou Province, deep in China’s southwest interior, a tribal
region where few ever got the education needed to become an official and the only foreigners were the tribespeople living
in the mountains. Las Cortes may have been the first European Pan ever dealt with. The Jesuit sensed that Pan was intrigued
by the foreigners and observant of details. Indeed, he seemed more interested in learning about the foreigners than in prosecuting
the case.
Pan began his examination by scrutinizing the shipwrecked, even to the point of examining the soles of the barefooted to check
whether they had been force marched. It was soon abundantly clear to him that the foreigners had suffered at the hands of
his officers. He called the commander from Jinghai and put him through questioning. The commander stuck to the story he had
told in Chaozhou: these were Red Hairs and Dwarf Pirates, not the innocent merchants from Manila and Macao they claimed to
be, and his men had apprehended them accordingly. Some may have suffered injuries, but their injuries occurred on the day
they were shipwrecked, before they came into his custody. He was not responsible for their condition.
The commander urged the commissioner to focus on the main issue, which was that the shipwrecked were foreigners, including
Japanese, who had entered the country illegally.
According to Las Cortes’s account of their day in court, Commissioner Pan wanted to know whether any cargo came ashore with
the foreigners. If so, that property would be treated as contraband, and any Chinese who handled such goods would be guilty
of smuggling. (As Lu Zhaolong’s friend, Judge Yan, noted in a case involving illegal trade between Cantonese soldiers and
Dutch traders, “Those on board [foreign ships] are not permitted to bring goods ashore and those on shore are not permitted
to go on the boats and receive goods.”) The Jinghai commander insisted that the survivors came ashore with nothing but what
they were wearing. The
Guía
carried no silver, he insisted, and no one under his charge had taken a thing from the foreigners. Pan had enough judicial
experience to know this was probably nonsense, but he lacked evidence to the contrary and had to give up trying to extract
the truth from his subordinates.