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FUSION OR CONFUSION? LEARNING THE 'GRAMMAR OF THE CHINESE OBJECT'? Paul Rule (To see the illustrations, please click on the  icons. Images
open in new, smaller windows.)
Fundamentally, though, he shows that objects are embedded in culture, and that serious misunderstandings can arise if this is not appreciated. In the history of one of the earliest modern encounters between cultures, that of the Jesuit missionaries in China and the high culture of China, there were many incidents that demonstrate fusion of horizons or viewpoints, and many that show simply confusion. Today I want to discuss three examples: Madonnas, sceptres and clocks. Madonna or Guanyin? The pioneer, and perhaps best known of all the Jesuit missionaries is Matteo Ricci who arrived in China a little over four hundred years ago, and in Beijing, on which our interest focuses, exactly four hundred years ago next January. Ricci, like his European Jesuit confreres, appreciated the value of pictures to convey his religious message. He brought with him several religious paintings and displayed them both to attract attention to their religious message and to promote western art with its oil paints and its techniques of perspective and chiaroscuro that contrasted with Chinese art techniques. However, what we are interested in is not the technical side but the cultural knowledge and assumptions that lay behind the message. These often led to misconceptions. At the very first Jesuit mission station in Zhaoqing, Guangdong province, Ricci and his companion, Michele Ruggieri, had placed a painting of the Madonna and Child on display. Ricci described in his memoirs what happened: To this image of the Madonna and to her son, which we had placed on the altar, all the mandarins and other literati and the common people, even the ministers of the idols, who came to visit the Fathers, all of them paid their respects, making their genuflexions and bows right down to the ground with the utmost respect, and they admired the technique of our painting. However, a short time afterwards, in the place of the Madonna, was put another of the Saviour for this reason that the Fathers while saying we had to adore one God alone, had not yet been able to proclaim the mystery of the Incarnation. So, seeing the image of the Madonna on the altar, the Chinese had become a little confused and many had gone around saying everywhere that the God that we adored was a woman. [1]What was that confusion? Surely not just the female rather than male god. Rather, I strongly suspect they identified the Madonna and Child with the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the bringer of children. This is confirmed by a later incident. When Ricci finally made his way north along the Grand Canal towards the capital, in August 1600 he reached Linqing in Shandong where he encountered Liu Zongzhou, the Superintendant of Rice Transport. Liu was impressed by the painting he saw on Ricci’s boat of a Madonna with the young Jesus and John the Baptist. Of course he told his wife about it that night and she immediately said she had had a dream about ‘a pagoda, that is one of their gods, with two children at the side…It seemed to her that her dream contained some sort of mystery’. The upshot was that she asked for a copy of the painting which a young Chinese painter [2] accompanying the Jesuits duly made and they presented to Liu who ‘was very pleased and thanked the Fathers saying that they would pray before it in his house.[3] The Jesuits presumably were happy at the thought of a Madonna being venerted in this influential household, but one supects that Mrs. Liu was busy praying before the painting to Guanyin for two sons. When, a little later, the Jesuits met up with the influential eunuch Ma Tang who was attempting to get the credit for presenting their gifts, he ‘venerated on his knees’ the icon of the Madonna and promised her that he will give her a place in the Palace of the Emperor.[4] However, Ma’s memorials were rejected and he became irate with the Jesuits and searched their belongings for the cause of his ill luck. He discovered a crucifix with realistic details including bloody wounds, and interpreted it, not unreasonably, as a fetish to perform sorcery against the Emperor.[5] Again we can only guess the beliefs that led to these actions on the part of the ruthless and feared eunuch, but they certainly involved interpretations at cross purposes to those of the Jesuits. Later, when the Jesuits were established in Beijing they succeeded in presenting their gifts, including the paintings, to the Wan Li Emperor. He is said to have exclaimed on seeing the painting of Jesus: ‘This is a living Buddha!’. He gave the two paintings of the Madonna, one with the child Jesus and John the Baptist, and one of the Madonna and child (a reproduction of the Madonna of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome) to his mother. She, ‘a great devotee of the idols’ according to Ricci, used burn incense before the latter every day until she grew afraid at its lifelikeness and put it away in her storeroom where the eunuchs showed it to visitors, presumably for a fee.[6] I think there is little doubt that the Virgin Mary was being mistaken for Guanyin. As Lauren Arnold has shown,[7] it is from about this time that Guanyin comes to be represented holding a child (there are many examples extant, for example in the Royal Ontario Museum and the Chinese University of Hong Kong). Here is the latter: Slide 1 of Guanyin and child from the Simon Kwan Collection, The Art Gallery, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, Fig. 10-17, p.151. An early seventeenth century engraving represents Guanyin in a way that strongly suggests a western model: Slide 2: From the Sancai Tuhui (1607) Taibei rp, Chengwen, 1974, in Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, Fig. 10-15, p.149. And here is what is alleged to be an even earlier example, attributed to the great Tang Yin (1470-1524) although I have doubts both about the attribution and the early date: Slide 3 from the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, Fig. 10-16, p.150. Eventually, the compliment was returned as Chinese artists produced Madonnas in Chinese style for the European market. The Jesuit astronomer, Adam Schall von Bell, sent some home to his family and two of them are found today in the Dresden Gallery.[8] One last incident in Ricci’s memoirs, relating to Madonnas, shows yet another possible confusion. This time it involved Ricci’s encounter with the Chinese Jew, Ai Tian. Ai visited the Jesuit house in Beijing and at first both he and Ricci thought they had found co-religionists. Then Ai saw a copy of the painting, which had been presented to the Emperor, of Mary with Jesus and John the Baptist, and immediately identified it as Rebecca with Jacob and Esau, and the twelve apostles as the twelve sons of Jacob.[9] And so began the European fascination with the Jews of Kaifeng which continues to this day. A painting of a female with a child is not a Madonna and Child (or Guanyin with child, or Rebecca and Jacob) until culturally recognised as such. The ethnicity of the depiction only does not per se identify the subject. For example, here is a modern Chinese Madonna and child from the Ricci Institute’s collection which shows how Chinese style and sensibility can be used explicitly to represent a Christian theme. Slide 4: 11A Lu Biyün, Madonna and child, from the Ricci Instiute’s collection of the Fujen Uiniversity’s school of Christian art of the 1930s and 40s. Today, many people, even in western galleries, in looking at a Madonna and Child Jesus, see only a beautiful painting of a woman and child. Others more knowledgeable, would say that its style is mannerist or Italian primitive, or that it comes from a certain period in the artist’s oeuvre, or even that the model was the artist’s mistress. To know the artist’s intention and/or the original understanding of a work of art - and these by no means exhaust the possible meanings - we must follow the grammar of the original cultural context of the object. Bouvet and the Bian To take another example, this time more directly related to this exhibition because it concerns the production of objects for the Chinese court, I want to tell you the story of Father Bouvet and the bian. One day in 1704 the Crown Prince, Yinreng, sent one of his men to the French Jesuit House within the Imperial City asking for a job of enameling in a special shade of blue. This was not an unusual request. The royal glassworks and enamelling department had been set up there in the Jesuit compound, under the Jesuit priest Kilian Stumpf, some years before.[10] Pierre Jartoux S,J, who tells the story in a letter home,[11] examined the four pieces of metal to be enamelled and saw a ring, a round piece like a sword guard, a piece like a hilt, and a quadrangular point, the whole decorated with elaborate designs. He was a comparative newcomer and unable to fathom what the object might be. The Jesuit enamelling expert, Brother Jacques Brocard, presumably saw the technical problems in decorating the pieces. Onto the scene comes the interpreter, the old China hand, Father Joachim Bouvet. He is immediately worried. ‘This looks like the sceptre of an idol’, he says. ‘We can’t have anything to do with this!’. ‘It is a whip’, says the emissary of the prince, a bian. Now the object in question, judging from an illustrations in a contemporary encyclopedia of a bian , doesn’t look much like a ‘whip’ but it is found among a group of weapons. Slide 5 from Sancai tuhui (1607), Taibei rp, Chengwen, 1974, III, 1202. I presume that Bouvet thought it resembled a vajra/dorje , a ‘thunderbolt', or a khatvanga as found in the hands of many Tantric Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Slide 6 from the Museum of Fine Arts, illustrated in P. Berger & T.T.Bartholomew, Mongolia: the Legacy of Chinggis Khan , New York (Thames & Hudson) 1995, #93, p.259. Slide 7 a Buddha from the Forbidden City, from Yu Zhuoyun, Palaces of the Forbidden City, New York (Viking Press) 1984, #204, p.183. The Prince’s servant insisted it was a sceptre, and purely for the use of his master, but that did not necessarily solve the problem. There is, in this exhibition, a ruyi, a common type of sceptre or good-luck emblem, used for example, to adorn the marriage bed of a member of the royal family. But the one in question, which belonged to the Qianlong Emperor, is incised with Daoist and Buddhist symbols and many flowers. Bouvet may have suspected some such symbolic allusion in this case. Slide 8 Bouvet remained obstinate. He was notoriously so, and some year later had a famous run-in with the Emperor himself when he refused to apologize for returning prematurely from a mapping expedition commanded by the Emperor after he had fallen from his horse. A Manchu Emperor would not regard a simple fall from a horse as reason to abandon a mission. He was also tempting providence by thwarting the Crown Prince, a notoriously irascible character, who was to be deposed from the succession in 1712 for acts of insane violence and sexual exploitation of children. Finally he is persuaded through the intervention of the Emperor himself that the object in question is simply for ornament. As far as I can work out it was like a British Army officer’s ‘swagger stick’, originally the whip of a cavalry commander, then a kind of baton. The Prince’s chief eunuch comes to the Jesuits one day in triumph, pulls out of his pocket a European watch and shows them the engraved picture of King Solomon. ‘Look’, he says, ‘he is holding a bian !’ And, sure enough, there is Solomon with his sceptre. Ironically this was the conventional contemporary representation of a Tartar King. Here are some European engravings of Asian Kings from the late 15th to the late 17th centuries, all showing then with sceptres which, of course, Asian kings, unlike European ones, did not use. Slides 9, 10, 11. From Mandeville’s Travels, Strasburg 1499, Sebastien Munster. Cosmographey, Basel 1598 (Abb. 191 in Europa und die Kaiser von China ) and Der grosse Tartar-Cham from Eberhard Werner Happel, Thesaurus Exoticorum (Hamburg 1688), ibid. Abb.235. What a Clock? If you have already visited the exhibition you will have noticed the number of clocks. In fact, they are underrepresented in proportion to their number in the Palace museums. The Dowager Empress Cixi, and her predecessors, were probably the greatest collectors of clocks in world history. Slide 12: Ci Xi But why? What did they see in clocks? Europeans saw clocks primarily as time-keepers, a kind of scientific instrument. This is not to deny that Europeans also prized and collected clocks for their beauty or simply through collector’s mania. But Chinese emperors and empresses had no need of clocks to order their day, let alone for scientific purposes. The Chinese court kept time largely by the sun. Dawn was the hour of official audiences and many are the complaints of high officials at the ridiculous hour they had to get up to attend the court. The Jesuits got caught up in this same business, ironically through the Kangxi Emperor’s favouritism towards them. They found they were expected to present themselves, before dawn, at the gates of the imperial residence to inquire after the Emperor’s health. This would be recorded in a book and the Emperor would note their absence if for some reason they missed out. The problem was that much of the year he resided in the Yuanmingyuan, well outside Beijing. They would have to leave their house within the walls of the city, and ride through the icy Beijing night to get to the residence. In time, they made friends of the princes and notables who lived out there and got permission to stay overnight in order to present themselves at dawn, and eventually had their own house there. If you look at one of the clocks in the exhibition, the English eighteenth century ‘elephant’ clock, you will find that its multiple dials not only register the lunar month and day as well as hour, minute and second, but also the Chinese four ‘watches’. However, the clockface is minute compared with the elaborate structure it rests on. Rather than an astronomer’s or bureaucrat’s timekeeper, it is an objet d’art. Slide 13. The elephant clock from the exhibition catalogue, p.60 The Chinese had clocks, including mechanical clocks, long before the Europeans arrived. They also had, as again you will see in the exhibition, ways of measuring the phases of the year from star charts and astronomical measurements. But the Jesuits brought one novelty, chiming clocks, and, so far as I can see, the notion of the clock as a collectible. It was this that sparked the imperial clock collection, and successive embassies and visitors, learning of the Jesuits’ initial success in presenting clocks, followed suit. By the end of the dynasty there must have been little room in the imperial storerooms for anything else. Here is another enormous European clock from the palace Hall of Union: Slide 14: Conclusion The Jesuits were early bridge-makers between China and modern Europe. They were not primarily, although they have often been misrepresented as, mandarins. The court Jesuits apart from a few who held office in the Bureau of Astronomy, were members of the inner court, the Emperor’s personal servants, not part of the official hierarchy. They were not even really scientists, but technologists who knew how to do things, to provide objects and services for the pleasure of the Emperor and the Court. In the course of that service they helped the fusion of cultures. They gave private lessons to the Kangxi Emperor and his sons in mathematics, western medicine, geography and western politics, and helped map the empire accurately for the first time.. In turn they studied and translated Chinese classical texts and commentaries, and were the first to introduce many aspects of Chinese culture to a European audience. More often, though, they were confused, struggling to understand the grammar of the objects they dealt with. They helped lay out the imperial gardens with their knowledge of surveying, architecture and hydraulics, but generally failed to appreciate the aesthetics of the Chinese garden. The Jesuit artists managed to impart certain European techniques of chiaroscuro and perspective, but were forced in the long run to conform to Chinese notions of landscape and portraiture, as Castiglione’s paintings in this exhibition show. They often resented their role as lackeys of the court but after long years of service they sometimes became more Chinese than European. Adam Schall adopted a son in the Chinese fashion. João Mourão was executed for his involvement in court intrigue. The portraits of many of these men in Chinese robes and long white beards are those of distinguished Chinese gentlemen. In some things, the Jesuits' appreciation of and admiration for Chinese culture grew with time. Ricci, around 1600, expressed contempt for Chinese music. One of the last Jesuits of the old mission in the late 18th. century, Jpseph-Marie Amiot, not only collected and annotated Chinese melodies and wrote the first major treatise in a western language on Chinese music, but even composed church music in the Chinese style.[12] In philosophy, while most Jesuits wrote deprecating and generally misinterpreting Buddhist and Daoist ideas, they gradualy came to a better appreciation of Neo-Confucianism and ceased to label it as simply materialism. On the other hand, their imperial master, at least Kangxi, was indulgent, respected their conscientious objection to certain tasks and their religious practices. Kangxi ordered special Lenten dishes for Jesuits engaged on imperial missions. He ordered Ferdinand Verbiest to accompany him to Manchuria in 1682, and to participate unarmed in a tiger hunt, but put him under the immediate protection of his brother-in-law.[13] They were in a unique and unrepeatable position and we can learn much from their experience as relayed to us in their letters and formal writings. But the prognosis for cultural 'fusion' cannot be a very optimistic one. To the end they remained conscious of an irreducible difference. But let me close on another more positive note. Is cultural fusion desirable? Isn't what attracts us to a exhibition like this precisely the difference, the marvellous variety and irreducible uniqueness of human cultures? Today a global mass culture threatens to swamp all cultures in a soup of popular music, films, consumerism and crude economic values. But China resists and I for one hopes it continues to do so. We all profit by awareness of other cultures, and by selective borrowings or appropriations, but long live difference. ENDNOTES 1. Translated from Fonti Ricciane, ed. P.M.D'Elia, S.J., Vol.I, Roma (Libreria dello Stato) 1942, N245, pp.193-4. [Return to Text] 2. This was You Wenhui (Emmanuel Pereira) who later became a Jesuit brother. [Return to Text] 3. Fonti Ricciane, vol.II, 1949, N579, p.105. [Return to Text] 4. Ibid., N583, p.110. [Return to Text] 5. Ibid., N588, p.115. [Return to Text] 6. Ibid., N593, p.125. [Return to Text] 7. Lauren Arnold, Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: the Franciscan Mission to China and its Influence on the Art of the West, 1250-1350, San Francisco (Desiderata Press) 1999, Ch.X. [Return to Text] 8. v. Horst Rzepowski ‘Die Beitrag von Adam Schall von Bell zur Einheimischen Christlichen Kunst', in R. Malek. Ed. Western Learning and Christianity in China: the Contribution and Impact of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (1592-1666), Sankt Augustin (Monumenta Serica Institute) 1998, Monumenta Serica Monograph XXXV, II., 938-948. [Return to Text] 9. Ibid., N722, p.317. [Return to Text] 10. v. Donald Rabiner, 'Chinese Glass and the West' in A Chorus of Colors: Chinese Glass from Three American Collections, San Francisco (Asian Museum of Art)/ Seattle (University of Washington Press) 1995. [Return to Text] 11. Letter of Jartoux to Jean de Fontaney S.J. , Beijing 20/8/1704 in Lettres Edifiantes IX, Paris (le Mercier) 1730, 386-410 cf. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires Jésuites 1702-1776, ed. I. & J.-L. Vissière, Paris (Garnier-Flammarion) 1979, 147-155. [Return to Text] 12. v. Messe des Jesuites de Pekin, CD recorded by the Musique des Lumières, directed by Jean-Christophe Frisch,1998, Auvidis/Astrée E 8642. [Return to Text] 13.v. Antoine Thomas, ‘Iter Patris Ferdinandi Verbiest in Provinciam Leaotuno et Tartariam orientalem, institutum cum Imperatore Tartaro-Sinico anno 1682. Die 23. Martii. Ex eius Epistola.’ (facs. In The Far Eastern Catholic Mission, 1663-1711: the Original Papers of the Duchess d’Aveiro, Tokyo (Tenri Central Library) 1975, #80, III, 183-194. [Return to Text] |
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