The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe

Introduction

3 Introduction In spring of the year 1681, the Kangxi Emperor ordered the entombment of Empresses Xiaocheng and Xiaozhao, both of whom had died several years earlier. Their bodies had been kept seven and three years, respectively, in a village close to Beijing, awaiting the completion of the emperor’s mausoleum. His wives were the first people the Kangxi Emperor mourned as an adult. For their entombment, he arranged a cortege of great pomp. The Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest briefly wrote about this event in a letter to Europe: When they were transferred to the place of sepulture, the whole Court of Beijing spread out, that is countless o‹cials followed the funeral procession in a great and noisy escort. The two co‹ns in which the bodies were put were most splendid and looked like great houses made out of pure gold. One thousand eight hundred bearers carried them on their shoulders, alternating at determined distances . Six hundred o‹cials had been appointed who only took care of the bearers . I also was in the midst of the funeral procession (Ego quoque pompae funebri interfui).1 The image of a foreign missionary being present in the midst of a Chinese funeral procession represents what this book will explore: the role of ritual in the exchange between cultures, and more particularly funerary rites in China and Europe in the seventeenth century. The quest for such a focus in the exchange between cultures arises from the emergence of new ritual studies in recent years. One generation ago, research on Chinese religions focused almost exclusively on doctrinal questions and analyzed religious texts rather than practices. The study of the ritual aspects of religion has been gaining importance, however, particularly because of developments in the study of Daoism. As a result, orthopraxy, or right practice, rather than orthodoxy, or right belief, is viewed as one of the major keys for the understanding of Chinese religions. In the scholarship of the Christianity of medieval andearlymodernEurope,ritualhasalsorecentlybecomeamajortopicof analysis . In an important historiographical study of Christianity, the historian John introduction 4 Van Engen points out that “the real measure of Christian religious culture on a broad scale must be the degree to which time, space, and ritual observances came to be defined and grasped essentially in terms of the Christian liturgical year.”2 Little investigation has been undertaken of the extent to which observance of ritual persists when Christianity moves to another culture in which a diªerent “ritual time” prevails. There is, of course, the “Chinese Rites Controversy”—a major dispute about whether Christians could be allowed to participate in certain Chinese rituals—that shaped Sino-European relations at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. Surprisingly, however, the ritual aspect of this controversy has been overlooked as well. Most studies on the Rites Controversy have stressed doctrinal discussions among the Western missionaries. In a stimulating article titled “Some Naive Questions about the Rites Controversy: A Project for Future Research,” scholar of Daoism Kristofer Schipper calls attention to the potential significance the ritual aspect of the Chinese Rites Controversy may have for a comparison of European and Chinese ritual systems. Through such a comparison, scholars may gain some insight into the mutual perception and interaction of the two entirely diªerent ritual traditions. Schipper encourages an investigation into the extent of their respective adaptability and permeability, since that might contribute to our understanding of Chinese and Christian ritual culture .3 A final reason for choosing the ritual perspective is that the study of the contact between China and Europe, and especially of Christianity in seventeenth -century China, has usually focused on religious doctrine and the sciences . Yet, the study of the equally important topic of ritual has so far been neglected. Research contributing to this book has benefited from substantial transformations in the field of the study of Christianity in China during recent decades.4 There has been a paradigm shift from a mainly missiological and Eurocentric viewpoint to a sinological and Sinocentric approach, characterized by, among other things, the use of Chinese texts as primary sources for research and thus taking the Chinese actors as primary subjects. A result of this paradigm shift is that Christianity is taken as a broad cultural phenomenon , not limited to typically religious phenomena—such as theology, liturgy, and catechetics—but also embracing a wide variety of cultural elements that came along with Christian faith and practice, such as mathematics...