From Rome to Beijing: Sacred Spaces in Dialogue ed. by Daniel M. Greenberg and Mari Yoko Hara

The editors’ introduction to this new volume of essays on Chinese-European (mainly Jesuit) exchanges in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries makes clear its mission and unifying theme. While previous studies of the early modern Jesuit China mission framed the participants as a pair of reified areas (West and East) or political entities (Europe and China), this volume’s contributors sought to look at their interpenetration as inhabitants of a single space locked in an ongoing negotiation. The space may be physical, as in the urban landscape of Beijing, or it might be abstract, as in the representation of space in painting and astronomy. In either case, it is not the space itself that matters, but the human relationships that evolve within it as missionaries decide how to design buildings for the Beijing cityscape, European painters interact with Chinese tastes and learn Chinese techniques, or astronomers cooperate in pursuing original research. The actual physical and mental spaces within which these relationships unfolded may be long gone, but the processes and results of the negotiated relationships remain.

The book is divided into three sections: Part 1, “Space and Order: Visible and Invisible Constructions of Beijing,” deals with the Beijing cityscape, both physical and imagined. Part 2, “Spaces of Artistic Practice: Invention and Exchange in the Palace Workshops,” treats of the Jesuit painters who came to the imperial court and their relationship both with the emperor and with Chinese painters. Finally, part 3, “Space, Knowledge Production, and Cross-Cultural Exchange,” deals with four separate topics in cross-cultural exchange: translation, choices in mode of dress, visual culture, and astronomy. Each chapter features numerous illustrations, all of which are immensely helpful for readers in following the authors’ arguments.

Now to the individual essays.

The first chapter comes from senior scholar Eugenio Menegon. Entitled “An Invisible City: Urban Life and Networks of European Missionaries and Christian Converts in Qing Beijing,” it deals with the various issues and decisions that arose from having church buildings within the “inner city” of Beijing: where to build, in what style, whether to adopt a distinctly European style or a local style, how prominent or discreet to make them, and how each handled a Christian group often at odds with those in the other churches. The chapter shows that the groups dominating the four churches in the inner city nurtured intense rivalries: within the three Jesuit churches, the French-dominated “northern church” tried to maintain independence from the other two Jesuit-controlled churches, while all three treated the Fideist church as a pariah. At the same time, some of the Chinese elite tried to suppress the churches while others defended them. In this way, the chapter provides strong support to the editors’ contention that looking at human relationships as they unfold in space can weaken the paradigm of a monolithic “Europe” encountering a unified “China.”

Chapter 2, “Beijing as Political Theater: the 1761 Syzygy in Painting and Legitimizing the Qianlong Regime” by Cheng-hua Wang, is not actually about the syzygy, an astronomical event, but a painting that depicts the Beijing cityscape during this event. In 1761, the sun, moon, and five planets all lined up over Beijing during the celebration of the New Year’s festival, and the Qianlong emperor commissioned a painting to mark this auspicious sign. Beginning from the premise that the Qing, as a “foreign” dynasty, required legitimation, the author relates how the court and the Jesuits cooperated to produce a linked chain of symbolic elements from which both benefitted. In sum, the syzygy legitimates the dynasty by witnessing its reception of the Mandate of Heaven. The presence of the Jesuit-run observatory and its scientific instruments validates the syzygy. The imperial architecture of the painting and officials and commoners who point to the sky in it reinforce the political significance of the conjunction. The realism of the painting, even to the point of omitting the planets, which would not be visible while the sun was up, validates the eyewitness quality of the painting’s contents. All of these elements together constitute a “rhetoric of persuasion” about the legitimacy of Qianlong’s rule.

This chapter demonstrates convincingly that the physical and temporal space of the painting was a locus for political symbolism that served both the Jesuits and the court. For example, one of the instruments depicted in this painting to show that this heavenly event was validly observed is an armillary sphere. This instrument would inspire trust in the Jesuits’ empirical claims, but since the Qianlong emperor directed its construction, its presence in the painting also confers the status of objective observer upon him. Thus, this chapter serves the mission of the anthology quite well.

The next chapter, “Crossing Bridges and Borders: The Political and Artistic Stakes of New Year’s Celebrations at the Qianlong Court,” by Daniel M. Greenberg, also deals with the representation of space within a painting. The painting, called “Merrymaking in the Palace” 宮中行樂, depicts a line of new concubines crossing a bridge to enter into the court. Commissioned by Qianlong to hang in a private apartment that he occupied during the New Year festival, it is juxtaposed with another painting depicting foreign ambassadors lining up to present tribute at the palace. While much of this chapter dwells on art-historical matters, it also considers the meaning of this juxtaposition in a space inaccessible to outsiders and the Jesuit participation in the production of both pieces.

As to the first painting, a verse composed by Qianlong himself notes that in the past, Han Chinese princesses were married out to other nations to cement alliances, but in the Qing era, concubines came in, thus reversing the flow. Not only does this representation provide a common thread with ambassadors from outside China bringing tribute, but it also indicates China’s improved international status. The painting of the ambassadors made use of Jesuit books that contained illustrations of modes of dress in other nations. This allows the painting to depict a ritual ideal rather than reality: the procession includes ambassadors from France even though no French official had yet visited the court, much less offered tribute. Greenberg opines that both paintings, located within the emperor’s private apartment, provided him occasion to reflect on his role in the world.

Part 2 begins with Jeffrey Muller’s chapter “‘My Eyes and Taste Are Grown a Little Chinese’: Jean-Denis Attiret, SJ, Recognizes the Equal Value of European and Chinese Art.” It centers on Attiret, a Jesuit painter who served at court. He complained a lot and hated tofu but later became the first European to say in writing that European and Chinese tastes in painting were equally valid. How he came to this conversion, after so many years of Europeans (including Matteo Ricci) proclaiming the clear inferiority of Chinese art, is the primary topic of the chapter.

Miller attributes this to three main causes. First, as a court painter, he had access to the emperor’s private collection, which exposed him to the finest examples of the Chinese style. Only his predecessor Baldassare Castiglione had enjoyed such a privilege. Second, recent European publications on the relativity of taste gave him a theoretical language with which to describe difference in a nuanced way. Interestingly, the same language was later adapted to show the equal status of all religions. Third, his own Jesuit missionary training emphasized subduing his own ego for the sake of the mission and its accommodationist technique. Thus, when the emperor severely criticized his western-style oil painting and ordered him to switch to watercolor and train with the other court painters, he was able (with difficulty) to suppress his indignation and learn alongside painters who treated him as a colleague.

The next chapter, “The Drawings of Ferdinando Bonaventura Moggi (1684−1761) and the Applied Arts Workshops (Zaobanchu) at the Qing Court,” by Elisabetta Corsi, is the most difficult to summarize for several reasons. It is the only chapter that does not seem self-contained. The author makes several references to her previous publications and those of other writers with whom she is in a long-running debate. I suspect that if one has been following this chain of articles, then one may have a better understanding of this chapter’s points. It is also quite disjointed, moving abruptly from one topic to another. For example, it begins with an anecdote about the Jesuit Matteo Ripa proving himself poor at engraving before Qing officials. However, some engravings attributed to him are quite well done, so the author suggests that perhaps they were done by Fernando Moggi instead. We later find out that the engravings in question are actually drawings, and there are three of them, not two.

After this, the author moves on to two minor non-Jesuit artists who worked in the imperial workshop. From this point on, the essay drops its discussion of Rupa, Moggi, and the origins of the drawings. The conclusions follow only from this new topic. The suggestions for future research seem sound: scholars should not attend only to the superstar Jesuit artists such as Castiglione but look at the work of lesser-known, non-Jesuit figures to see how they cooperated in the imperial workshops and how they fit into the circulation of material art supplies. She also recommends that scholars stop focusing exclusively on the intellectual aspects of the Jesuit missions and bring into the picture lesser members of the delegation who worked as skilled artisans. This is fine, but if the substantial portion of the chapter that dealt with the drawings has no bearing on the conclusions, then I do not know why it was included.

The first essay of part three, Florin-Stefan Morar’s “Before Sinology: Early European Attempts to Translate the Chinese Language in the Sixteenth Century,” deals with the earliest European linguistic encounters. The author begins by noting that translation is not a straightforward transfer of information; it is the production of knowledge, a point illustrated later in the essay when he calls attention to Michele Ruggieri’s reading of Aristotelian concepts into his translation of the Great Learning as well as the Jesuits’ well-attested efforts to fashion Confucius into a thinker compatible with Christian theology. After that, the essay points out that the earliest European knowledge of China was mediated without reference to the language, as figures like Marco Polo simply gave reports of their lived experiences.

The bulk of the remainder of the chapter describes three early strategies for reading Chinese texts. The first, “captive expertise,” involved compelling bilingual Chinese captives to provide translation services. The second, the “collaborative model,” joined Europeans with very partial knowledge of Chinese with natives who could speak a modicum of some European language. Both of these methods proved unsatisfactory since quality control was lacking. The third, “study abroad,” became the preferred method, at least until western universities began offering Chinese classroom instruction. This model was exemplified by the Jesuits, who spent long years in China, mastered the language, and devised a pedagogy for teaching it to new arrivals. Using the examples noted above, Morar succeeds in characterizing translation as a negotiated “space” for the production and transmission of knowledge.

Chapter seven, “Out of Habit: Jesuits in Flux,” by Florence C. Hsia, deals with the choices Jesuits made in their mode of dress in a way that goes beyond the well-known circumstances of their initial adoption of Buddhist garb and subsequent switch to the Confucian scholar’s gown. This strategy of accommodation was written into the Society of Jesus’ founding charter. Thus, even after their adoption of literati attire, their manner of dress evolved; there was no single permanent solution to their sartorial problem. They chose garments appropriate for specific circumstances: formal attire when at court, Manchu dress after the Qing took over, and workman’s dress for the imperial workshops, all influenced by individual scruples about their vow of poverty. Choice of dress came through experimentation and amid much heated discussion within the Society. Various superiors and visitors-general also weighed in and made rulings that varied over time.

The Jesuits’ ethic of “being all things to all people” clashed with other Europeans’ ideas that dress ought to serve as a frank declaration of identity and status. In this light, accommodation might be seen as disguise or deceit. Hsia also points out that the appearance in Europe of picture books featuring illustrations of the “native dress” of other lands and groups, such as religious orders, influenced the public’s perception of costume as a signifier of community role and had the effect of stabilizing the Jesuits’ mode of dress as their choices increasingly converged with their depictions. Again, this chapter satisfies the task of showing that even such a seemingly minor matter as wardrobe choice provides an imagined space in which competing parties negotiate divergent significations.

Next comes Walter S. Melion’s essay, “What’s in an Image?: The Annotated Manuscripts of Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia.”This chapter focuses exclusively on a book by the early Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal, which served as a guide to Ignatian meditation on scripture and featured copious engravings illustrating gospel passages accompanied by annotations and instructions for their devotional use. Melion makes use of pre-publication manuscripts that show the editorial process and instructions for the printer. The book was massively important: every Jesuit internalized its text and images, it guided their devotions, they took copies of it when they went on mission to sustain their faith, and they used it to teach their converts. Nadal’s strict control over its engraving and reproduction set the tone for Jesuit publishing abroad, including in China, where an abridged Chinese edition circulated.

The final chapter, “The Double Hemisphere Star Atlas (1634): Rhetoric of Empiricism in Sino-Jesuit Technical Images” by Mari Yoko Hara, rounds out the collection with an examination of the circumstances surrounding the 1634 production of a very large (five meters in length) map of the stars of the northern and southern hemispheres. While seemingly a pure and simple instrument for demonstrating objective knowledge, the author shows that this star atlas was also a site for scientific, social, political, and religious negotiations as well.

The argument is complex, bringing in many factors that converged in the atlas. It was lavishly produced and presented directly to the Chongzhen emperor, a move that we must see in light of competition with Chinese and Muslim astronomers for court patronage. It played on a current European turn away from supporting scientific assertions with citations from classic texts and toward direct observation. Its status as a product of empirical observation made it a plausible site for cross-cultural collaboration; since it depended on no one cultural heritage, western and Chinese astronomers could work together on it. It flowed from the visual culture of the Jesuits, and here Hara claims that the star atlas was not different in kind from Nadal’s book of gospel engravings, as seen in the previous chapter.

Nevertheless, toward the end of the chapter, Hara begins to chip away at all the above claims by noting contradictions. The star atlas was not based entirely on direct observation; the China Jesuits drew upon books already circulating in Europe. By not telling their Chinese co-workers about these sources, the Jesuits reduced them to mere fact-checkers, belying the claim of cross-cultural collaboration as equals. In this way, as well as by featuring illustrations of the European astronomical instruments used, the star atlas became the site of a kind of scientific colonialism. (I note that this is at odds with the claim in chapter two that, since the emperor helped design some of these instruments, the effort was more collaborative. However, Hara is writing about the late Ming, and Wang about the Qing, so things may have changed in the interim.)

All in all, this collection will be of great interest to scholars working in early modern Europe-China relations and the Jesuit missions. The authors succeed in unsettling some of the truisms of past scholarship and make effective use of the concept of “space” as a lens through which to reconsider the very dynamic human relationships that governed real-life interactions on the ground.