From: ftp.loc.gov
/pub/exhibit.images/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/i-rome_to_china/Rome_to_china
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                  *    A WIDER WORLD, II     *
                  *  How Rome Went to China  *
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By the later sixteenth century, the horizons of Rome's
intellectuals had widened enormously.  They now included not only
Rome, Greece, and Egypt but a Far Eastern culture that westerners
had hardly known since the days of Marco Polo, long before--
China.  From the 1540s, Jesuit missionaries in East Asia tried to
convert the Chinese and Japanese to Christianity, as part of the
Counter-Reformation drive to win the world back to Rome.  The
Japanese mission failed quickly, but the Chinese one seemed
immensely promising.  Jesuits like Matteo Ricci learned Chinese,
mastered the canon of classic Confucian texts, dressed as
mandarins, and joined the imperial court.  They showed the
Chinese intellectuals that the west had superior skills in some
areas that the Chinese recognized as vital, like cartography and
astronomy, and they translated accounts of western ideas and
Christian doctrine into Chinese for their converts.  For a time
their mission prospered.  Meanwhile the Vatican, which controlled
and managed the missionary enterprise, became a great repository
both of the works the Jesuits produced in Eastern languages and
of texts and works of art that they sent back.  By the middle of
the seventeenth century, the famous Roman Jesuit Athanasius
Kircher could try to study Chinese in Rome.  He insisted that the
Chinese tradition was as old and profound as that of the
Egyptians (indeed, he saw Chinese ideograms and Egyptian
hieroglyphs as deriving from the same roots).  Some argued that
Chinese culture was actually more moral and pious than European. 
Like earlier humanist efforts to find pagan sages who could teach
Christians basic truths, the Jesuits' Chinese enterprise, too,
eventually failed.  But the Vatican's holdings wonderfully
exemplify the fragile, fascinating bridge of texts and images
which the Jesuits built in order to reach, understand--and
convert--the most foreign of cultures.

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 Giulio Aleni, Wan-kuo ch`uan-t`u (Complete map of all nations)
                           In Chinese
                              China
                            ca. 1620

Matteo Ricci, the first Jesuit missionary to become adept in
Chinese, produced a map of the world, on Western principles, in
Chinese.  The Ricci map went through several versions from 1574
to 1603 and profoundly influenced western cartography.  Although
East Asia--and China in particular--is represented clearly and
with scientific precision, nevertheless several of China's own
cartographers, writing independently of the court, criticized the
configuration as an insult to China's centrality.  Sometime in
the 1620s Giulio Aleni had this abridgment of Ricci's map printed
and hand-tinted.  Aleni's name is in the left-most column of
Chinese on the upper half, above the Jesuit seal.

Barb. or. 151, fasc. 1a
china01                                                     HG.03

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                 Giulio Aleni, K`un-yu t`u-shuo
                           In Chinese
                              China
                            ca. 1620

Giulio Aleni, the equally skilled and effective successor to
Matteo Ricci in China, supervised this wood-block printing of a
book on the wonders of the western world, titled literally "An
Illustrated Explanation of Geography."  Here we see the Colossus
of Rhodes, guarding that Mediterranean harbor, an image quite
familiar to westerners from both classic and popular archaeology. 
The Chinese book shown here does not represent the best of
Chinese wood-block engraving but appears to be a cheap printing
(there is no publishing information given).  It was probably
sponsored by one of the churches that Aleni fostered in Fukien,
where low-cost and quick printing abounded.

Borg. cin. 350, fasc. 30                              fols. 75-76
china02                                                     HG.09

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               Michael Boym, Maps of Great Cathay
                             Europe
                              1652

The Jesuit Michael Boym based his album of eight maps of China on
his own experience of the country and on Chinese gazetteers.  The
opening page of his impressive album features the entire East
Asian subcontinent.  Although it does not depict the Korean-
Japanese configuration with scientific accuracy, it does give
details of China's river and mountain systems.  According to a
Vatican colophon, the work was purchased in 1729 by someone named
Riamonteger and was later deposited in the Borgia collection.

Borg. cin. 531                                        general map
china03                                                     HG.11

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              Letter of appreciation to the Church
               In Japanese, with Latin translation
                              1621

This letter was written in 1621 by Japanese officials who
identify themselves as being from Gokinai, a word that referred
to five imperially controlled districts around the capital at
Edo, near Tokyo.   Such officially attached lands were
traditional bureaucratic institutions, not natural market or
temple towns.  Thus the signers would have been speaking as
functionaries, not as residents of a town.  They offer praise to
the Catholic religion.  A Latin translation is given on the same
sheet.

Barb. or. 152, fasc. 3
china04                                                    IGH.08

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                      Adam Schall von Bell,
                   Eight-part cosmological map

Adam Schall was the first European ever to have been a member of
the court bureaucracy in Peking.  As part of his duties as head
of the Office of Astronomy, he produced this large and truly
spectacular six-part cosmological map, accompanied by pictures of
astronomical instruments.  

Barb. or. 149
china05                                                     HG.07

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  Abraham Ortelius, Asiae Orbis partium maximae nova descriptio
                    Venice:  Donatus Bertelli
                              1567

Abraham Ortelius's "New Map of Asia," of which a detail is shown
here, was printed in 1567 on two flat sheets and shows the state
of European knowledge of Asia before the Jesuit mission. 
Ortelius included traditional terms and images drawn from Marco
Polo and other old sources, Tartar and Scythian place-names,
renditions of the desert tents of Mongolian Great Khans, and the
locations of Inner Asian states, such as Tibet and Tangut, that
fought the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 
Much of north Asia is left blank, and there is no Korea.  Two
names are used at once for China:  "Cataio" (central and central-
western China) and "China" (the south).  Quinsai and Zaiton,
richly described by Polo, are displaced to the north.  Ortelius
places a pair of lions in the Chinese heartland, but his map
lacks the corresponding lavish flora and fauna evident in Michael
Boym's later work.

Stamp. geogr. I 9
china06                                                     HG.17

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                ********************************
                *  MISSIONARIES AND MANDARINS  *
                *     The Jesuits in China     *
                ********************************
                    Objects china07 - china10

Rome not only collected the books from many foreign cultures; in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it became the center of
missionary enterprises that spanned the world.  In China, Jesuits
like Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall von Bell performed an
incredible task of translation and interpretation.  They learned
the language; they made converts, some of high rank; and, in
order to impress the cultivated Chinese elite with western forms
of knowledge, they translated into Chinese the classical western
science of cartography and the radically improved astronomy of
Galileo.  They also argued to their western superiors that
Chinese classics--like the Greek and Egyptian ones so prized by
some Roman scholars--had a core of values and tenets that matched
those of Christianity.  Eventually the Jesuits' openness to China
led them into trouble; but for the first century and more of
their mission, they did a remarkable job of bringing western
forms of knowledge to China and Chinese forms of thought to the
West.  The Vatican preserves remarkable materials from both sides
of this cultural exchange.

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        Adam Schall von Bell, Chien-chieh tsung-hsing t`u
          (Map of the main stars in the visible realm)

Adam Schall von Bell introduced the new astronomy of Galileo,
including the telescope, to China.  This single-sheet printed map
with explanatory text shows the stars visible in the sky of
northern China.

Barb. or. 151, fasc. 1c
china07                                                     HG.02

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               Sabatino de Ursis, T`ai-hsi shui-fa
                           In Chinese
                              China
                       Preface dated 1612

This elegant and finely engraved Chinese book on Western
hydraulics by the Jesuit Sabatino de Ursis reveals both the
importation of specific techniques and constructions to China and
the eagerness with which many Chinese accepted European technical
learning.  The list of sponsors, a preface by a well-known
convert who was the most skilled of all his peers in mathematics,
and the textual breaks before Christian appellations are all
evidence of the warm reception that Western technology received. 
Shown here is a traditional European force pump.

Barb. or. 142, fasc. 2, chuan 6                           fol. 9a
china08                                                     HG.05

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           Matteo Ricci, Hun-kai t`ung-hsien t`u-shuo
                           In Chinese
                           ca. 1610-20

Matteo Ricci's technical explanation in Chinese of European
astronomy was no doubt written with the help of his friend Li
Chih-tsao, who contributed a preface.  Notice the main circle's
division into the twelve houses, and their polar projection.  The
work contains a preface by Ricci, as well as one by Li Chih-tsao,
with a postscript by another Chinese friend.  The prefaces give
only the rough date "the end of the Wan-li reign" (i.e. ca. 1610-
1620).

Barb. or. 142, fasc. 3, chuan 2                   fols. 32b - 33a
china09                                                     HG.06

=================================================================

        A. P. Ferdinand Verbiest, Astronomia Europea sub
     Imperatore Tartaro-Sinico C`am Hy [K`ang-hsi] Appellato
                   ex Umbra in Lucem Revocata
         European-style binding of miscellaneous pieces
              Various dates: 1668, 1671, 1697, etc.

Adam Schall's assistant, Verbiest, labored in a strange mode not
quite Euclidean and not quite Chinese, as he pondered questions
of the Chinese "I-ching" and geometric form.  Aside from being a
fortune book, the "I-ching" was the mainstay of an ancient
philosophy of number and symmetry.  It deals much with the
numbers three and six, as seen in Verbiest's hexagons and
triangles.  He has larded his pages with sayings from that
classic, apparently in his own hand.  This pull-out page is one
of many working notes that were bound together with Verbiest's
printed eclipse predictions and his apologia of western astronomy
for the Manchu court.

Borg. cin. 397                                     fol. 142 recto
china10                                                     HG.10

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              Folding red-colored letter of praise
                for Father Tseng (Alvaro Semedo)
                              1637

A group of prominent men in Canton gathered to produce a formal
letter of respect to Father Tseng (the Jesuit Alvaro Semedo),
calling him "Great Teacher and Priest, Master Tseng, Great Person
Removed from Office."  The last phrase refers to Semedo's
imprisonment and banishment by the court in 1616, along with
other Jesuits.  Many fled to Macao, just outside Canton, but
started returning to their posts throughout China when the furor
subsided in 1620.  In 1637, the date of the letter, Semedo was
about to depart for the West.

Barb. or. 154, fasc. 1a
china11                                                     HG.08

=================================================================

                   Philippe Couplet (attrib.),
      Catalogus librorum sinicorum a PP. Soc. Jesu editorum
                   Manuscript on three sheets
                           ca. 1670-90

This three-part manuscript catalog shows the books published and
owned by an unidentified branch of Jesuits in China.  On the
reverse of sheet "C" is the signature of Philippe Couplet (1622-
1693), which was discovered while examining the manuscript in
preparation for shipment to the Library of Congress for the 1993
exhibition.  This allows us to deduce (in the absence of any
other information) that Couplet, an important biographer and
historian of the mission as well as sponsor of important Latin
translations of Chinese classics, supervised its production.

R.G. or. 13 (Stragrande)
china12                                                     HG.13

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  Giulio Aleni, T`ien-chu chiang-sheng ch`u-hsiang ching-chieh
       (History of the life of Christ, with illustrations)
                           Chin-chiang
                 Fukien: The Chin-chiang Church
                              1637

The Jesuit Giulio Aleni brought western iconography to China,
where it was used as the Chinese themselves had used
illustrations, especially in Buddho-Taoist teaching.  Here we
have an intricate block-printed book of illustrations used as an
aid to proselytization.  Numbers in the text portion at the
bottom of pages refer to figures and arrangements in the scenes
of Christ's life.

Prima Racc. III 339                         illustrations 7 and 8
china13                                                     HG.14

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           Francisco Varo, Arte de la lengua mandarina
                    Edited by Pedrodo Pinuela
                      In Spanish and Latin
                             Canton
                              1703

In 1649, the Spanish Dominican Francisco Varo arrived in Southern
China.  Seeking a more direct way to master the language, he
wrote "The Art of Mandarin Language" in Spanish.  Here we see
displayed the addendum, "Brevis methodus confessionis
instituendae," written by Father Basilis of Glemona from the
apostolate of Shensi province, in northern China.  It is
important evidence of missionary practices.  Its romanized
version of the common spoken Cantonese rapidly taught new
missionaries how to perform rites and sacraments and hear
confessions for potential converts in Chinese by rote; this tool
was a Dominican answer to the Jesuits's method of long
preparation in literary Chinese.

R.G. or. III 246, item 7                    addendum, fols. 3b-4a
china14                                                     HG.15

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                        *****  END  *****

Note:  This file has been edited for use on computer networks. 
This editing required the removal of diacritics, underlining, and
fonts such as italics and bold.  

kde 02/93

