Pepper (9 page)

The Jesuits and Pepper

Along with conquest, the history of black pepper is entwined with the Jesuits, the Catholic order most often associated with the European age of discovery. The Jesuits certainly went to Asia to win souls, but they usually followed in the footsteps of the pepper traders and traveled to their posts aboard pepper ships. Ignatius Loyola, the Spanish nobleman who founded the Jesuits in 1534, made traveling in the service of God one of the touchstones of the new order. Jesuits were expected to serve anywhere the pope or superior general requested. They had to function without a great deal of financial support or direct supervision, which landed them in quite a few awkward situations when they encountered civilizations far more sophisticated than their own, such as in Japan and China. In some ways, the Jesuits who went to China were the most sympathetic of all the Europeans who came to Asia in the heady early days of pepper-inspired ocean travel.

The Jesuits were not the first Christians to enter China. Nestorian Christians had established a church in China during the eighth and ninth centuries, and they became more numerous during the Yuan Dynasty, when openness toward foreigners resulted in more religious freedom. The Mongols were particularly attracted to this Eastern variant of Christianity that was condemned by Rome. Both Khublai Khan's mother and the wife of his brother H
leg
, who founded the Ilkhanid dynasty in Iran in 1259, were Nestorians. In the mid-thirteenth century, the pope in Rome sent out unsuccessful diplomatic missions to China, partly to persuade the Mongols to become allies against the Muslims, but Western Christianity only established itself in China near the end of that century when the pope appointed the Franciscan John of Monte Corvino archbishop of Beijing. Corvino reached China in 1294 (when Marco Polo was there) and built two churches during the thirty years that he spent in China, but his influence was limited. Both the Nestorians and Western Christians were swept out of China when the Ming dynasty, the last native dynasty to rule China, began its reign in 1368. Throughout Chinese history, periods of religious toleration alternated with xenophobia, when Muslims, Christians (Western and Nestorian), and Buddhists faced persecution.

In the sixteenth century, the peripatetic Francis Xavier, one of the first Jesuits, traveled throughout Asia and the Far East and even spent time in the remote Spice Islands. His travels largely mirrored the path of spices through India and Asia. However, Xavier never made it into China, the country he considered most important for his mission. He dreamed of converting the Chinese emperor to Catholicism. At the end of his life, he fervently believed that if the emperor could be converted, then China and all of its tributary port cities and kingdoms would become a Catholic realm. He wrote: “I hope to go there [China] during this year, 1552, and penetrate even to the Emperor himself. China is that sort of kingdom, that if the seed of the Gospel is sown, it may be propagated far and wide. And, moreover, if the Chinese accept the Christian faith, the Japanese would give up the doctrines which the Chinese have taught them.” He only knocked at China's door, leaving the job of converting the emperor to others. Xavier died on a small island near mainland China in 1552, and was buried in Goa, India, in 1554. Over the next two centuries, some two thousand Jesuits followed him to the East.

The Jesuit who is most often associated with China is Matteo Ricci, a tall, blue-eyed Italian, who was the first Jesuit to serve at the court of the Chinese emperors. An extraordinary polymath and a deeply compassionate man who truly wanted to understand China and its people, he adopted the garments of a Confucian scholar and spent five years translating into Latin the books of Confucius—the first time Chinese was translated into a European language. He eventually served at the court of the reclusive Emperor Wan Li in Beijing, who reigned from 1573 to 1620. Many of the Jesuits who followed Ricci served at the court of the emperor as well, and they, too, adopted the dress of the scholar in order to make themselves acceptable to the court and to elite Chinese society. In one of his reports to Rome, Ricci wrote that he had “two silk garments made, one for formal visits, and the other for ordinary wear. The formal robe, worn by scholars and notables, is of dark purple silk with long, wide sleeves; the hem, which touches my feet, has a border of bright blue silk half a palm in width and the sleeves and collar, which drops to the waist, are trimmed in the same way.… The Chinese wear this costume on the occasion of visits to persons, formal banquets, and when calling on officials.”

The Jesuits' presence at the court was largely tolerated because of their knowledge of Western science, notably astronomy and mathematics, and their ability to regulate and repair clocks. Exquisite and elaborate mechanical clocks, many of which were made by the finest clockmakers in England and France as gifts for the emperor, were festooned with jeweled toy animals and figures that moved and filled the air with warbling of birds and with melody. A famous automaton clock in the emperor's palace was named The Conjurer after the sleight-of-hand artists who had been enchanting the Chinese since the days when acrobats and magicians from Greece and Syria traveled to China along the old Silk Road. The clock featured a Greek temple with doors that opened when music played to reveal a figure seated before a table with two cups. The magicians's head and lips moved while he performed tricks with the cups. At the close of his act a small box appeared on the table and a bird popped out and sang.

The clocks especially fascinated the two Manchu emperors who, between them, ruled China for nearly 120 years—Kangxi (from 1662 to 1722) and his grandson Qianlong (from 1736 to 1795)—during the Qing dynasty. At one time more than four thousand clocks filled the halls of the emperor's palaces in northern China, the Forbidden City, and the Summer Palace in Beijing, and Jehol, the lavish palace northeast of the imperial city that was used for hunting expeditions and to escape the summer heat.

The idea of Jesuits wearing elaborate Chinese gowns wasn't entirely accepted by the powers in Rome, although Ricci did originally receive approval from his superiors in Macao and Rome to change his attire from that of a Buddhist monk to that of a Chinese scholar. To the uninitiated, it could be quite shocking to see a Jesuit wearing the garments of a Chinese scholar, the most elite class in China's rigid hierarchial society. In 1699, Father De Prémare, a French Jesuit, met Father Joachim Bouvet, a French Jesuit who famously served at the court of the Kangxi emperor and personally tutored the emperor in astronomy and geometry. De Prémare wrote in a letter that Bouvet “had all the Marks of Distinction … which … Envoys of the court … have in this Empire; our Countrymen were not a little surprised when they saw him … “

Like Xavier, the Jesuits living in China believed that they could convert the emperor to Catholicism. So they quietly performed their scientific work in the hope that one day the emperor would be persuaded to convert, an astonishing expectation given that the emperor was considered the Son of Heaven, the intermediary between heaven and earth, and the supreme ruler of a civilization more than three thousand years old. Many Jesuits lived among the elite and had privileges that grew out of their personal relationship with the emperor, although some of the Jesuits were not welcomed at the court, and there were periods when they and other Christian missionaries were persecuted in China and its neighboring kingdoms. Then, churches would be destroyed, books burned, and missionaries thrown in prison or banished, although there were worse punishments. Some missionaries were killed by strangulation or were beheaded.

Converts received particularly bad treatment. A French Jesuit named Father Pelisson, who was based in Canton, describes a period of persecution that he had learned about from a Spanish Jesuit named John Anthony Arendo, who lived in the capital of Cochin-China, a kingdom between what is now North Vietnam and Thailand. The ruler of that kingdom, “who is but young, and extremely superstitious,” the Jesuit wrote, “is wholly devoted to the Chinese Bonzes, or idol-Priests, whom he invited into his kingdom. He has two uncles; and these he consults on all occasions. One of them is a professed enemy to our religion.” In early 1700, the king ordered the destruction of all churches, the Father related, and the houses of the five missionaries in the city were ransacked and their servants seized. All of the missionaries were imprisoned except the Spaniard Arnedo, who was given a little garden near the palace and the title of “mathematician.” He was allowed to go wherever he pleased. Obviously, there were certain advantages to being a scientist-missionary.

Despite the occasional backlash against Christians, the Jesuits' relationships with Chinese emperors in Beijing generally saved them from harsh treatment. Kangxi was particularly close to his Jesuits, and the French Jesuit Father Bouvet, who looked like a member of the emperor's court, was among those who tutored Kangxi and traveled with him. Another polymath Jesuit named Father Dominique Parennin, a Frenchman, accompanied Kangxi on hunting and military expeditions and persuaded the ruler that more accurate maps of the empire were needed, prompting the emperor to order the French Jesuits to survey the entire Chinese empire to produce a map. Still other Jesuits were court painters and architects who attended the Qianlong emperor and helped design some of the buildings in the famous Summer Palace in Beijing. Ultimately, it wasn't the Chinese who banished the Jesuits, but the Catholics in Rome.

The brouhaha erupted over something called the Rites Controversy, an extraordinarily long-running and ultimately ruinous debate over Chinese offerings to the dead, part of the ritual for venerating ancestors. Scholars also performed such ceremonies to honor Confucius, which usually included dedicating a tablet to him. Rome saw the practices of burning paper money and offering food and incense to the dead as forms of pagan worship and great offenses to Christianity. Rome wanted the rituals banned. At its core, the debate was about the Church's ability to accept cultures other than those of Western Europe. Ricci and many of his successors believed that the rites were not religious and therefore should be tolerated. They understood that in order to convert the Chinese to Christianity some sort of accommodation was necessary, especially rituals at the heart of an ancient moral and ethical system involving Confucius. Ricci was a rare proponent of multiculturalism, a man four hundred years ahead of his time. The controversy raged for years, and finally, in 1742, Pope Benedict XIV issued a bull, a solemn edict, confirming that he would never allow the rites to be put into practice. There could be no commingling of Chinese culture and Catholicism. No other pope challenged his ruling until the twentieth century.

The Jesuits created quite a few enemies among the other Catholic orders. Thirty-one years after the Chinese rites were forbidden to be practiced, Rome banned the Jesuit order altogether, and it was not reinstated until 1814. An oath against the Chinese Rites was required by missionaries until well into the 1930s. It wasn't until 1938 that the Church changed course and finally allowed the rites to be practiced by Chinese Christians.