Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (review)

When we think of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuits in China, famous names who were associated with the imperial court such as the Italian Matteo Ricci (利瑪竇, 1552-1610), the Belgian Ferdinand Verbiest (南懷仁, 1623-1688), the German Johann Adam Schall von Bell (湯若望, 1592-1666), or the Italian Giuseppe Castiglione (郎世寧, 1688-1766) may come to mind. Aside from these missionaries who lived and worked in Peking, perhaps as little as only one other of fame such as Giulio Aleni (艾儒略, 1582-1649), also Italian, but not part of the elites at the imperial court would surface. Being the founder of his provincial mission, Aleni was known as the "Apostle of Fujian," who after twenty-three years of sustained effort was credited with having built twenty-two churches and numerous chapels, and baptizing ten-thousand people. Impressive as Aleni's evangelization achievements were, the fact that he (like most China Jesuits) patterned his mission after Matteo Ricci resulted in his being known also as a "scholar from the West." True to the Riccian legacy, this title overshadows his phenomenal apostleship by virtue of the prevailing stereotypic view that Jesuits were primarily scholars, engaged in intellectual discourse with China's literati elites.¹

Prominence of the Peking-based Jesuit missionaries came from their high visibility in working within the imperial court of Ming and Qing China. Succeeding generations of Jesuit scholars had labored to impress emperors and their officials with their superior knowledge of Western science, technology (including the manufacture of cannons), mapmaking, art, and gadgetry, especially clock making. Therefore, the general impression of historians of Roman Catholicism in China is that while these giant intellectuals of the Society of Jesus worked on the level of Chinese officialdom, other Catholic orders such as the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians (perhaps not so scholarly inclined) labored more on the pedestrian rice-root level in the evangelization of the Chinese masses.

Not true, says Liam Matthew Brockey, whose unique knowledge of the Portuguese language enabled him to extensively research Jesuit archives in Lisbon, Macau, Rome, and other academic centers to uncover the strategic reality and expedience that the Jesuits sought to win Chinese friends among the ruling body who controlled the destiny of China. Because of the head start of Iberian imperialism based on maritime superiority, most of the early Jesuits were Portuguese, supported by the king of Portugal, their patron. Lisbon was a strategic port of embarkation to foreign lands including countries of Asia, where Portuguese enclaves of India's Goa and China's Macau were staging posts for the Jesuit mission in Asia. To know and understand the life and activities of early Jesuits, therefore, a knowledge of Portuguese is indispensable to decipher the accumulation of letters, reports, journals, and diaries in their archives.

It was Francis Xavier (方濟勿略, 1506-1552), the Jesuit missionary who worked in India and also Japan, a country he felt would never be converted to Christianity unless China, the cultural center of East Asia, was first brought into the faith. Xavier's forte for evangelization was the method of accommodating to the cultural traditions of the land, which was adopted by Alexandro Valignano (范禮安, 1538-1606), the Jesuit Visitor to the Far East, and implemented in exemplary fashion by Matteo Ricci, who set the pattern for most of all the confreres who followed him. Although the Jesuit China mission was somewhat of an extension and appendage to the older Japan mission, it soon gained independence by becoming (in Roman Catholic nomenclature) a "vice-province" with autonomy to act in ways more suitable to the cultural and political realities of the Middle Kingdom.

According to Brockey, from the very beginning of their mission in China, the Jesuits realized that it is only by gaining the acceptance and confidence of the highest governing authorities that they could avoid the whim and arbitrary rule of local magistrates, who often acted...