Read Online Matteo Ricci by Michela Fontana - Free Book Online Page A

Pequim .
    The absolute ruler was the emperor, or huangdi , referred to as “the Son of Heaven,” who governed with the assistance of a bureaucratic structure of officials, guan in Chinese, recruited through a system of competitive examinations. 8 These officials were resident both in the capital Beijing and in the fifteen provinces of the empire, each administered by a governor 9 and a hierarchy of guan in charge of the prefectures, sub-prefectures, districts, and further territorial subdivisions.
    The emperor ruled a country larger than the whole of Europe, where the distances, the size of the provinces, and the number of the inhabitants of cities, towns, and villages reached orders of magnitude inconceivable for Westerners. China had a population of approximately two hundred million at the end of the sixteenth century. 10 The Ming dynasty, a name meaning “light,” had been in power since 1368, and the fourteenth emperor, Zhu Yijun, had been on the throne for nine years, his succession having taken place in 1573, before he reached the age of ten. He was known as Wanli, the “era name” he had chosen in accordance with custom on his accession, 11 at which point the numbering of the years started again from zero. As Ricci was informed, the year 1582 was therefore referred to as the “ninth year of Wanli” by the Chinese.
    Now familiar with some basic facts about China, Ricci set about learning Chinese with the aid of teachers and devoted his energies above all to the study of Mandarin, the language spoken by the educated classes 12 and very different from the local dialects used in all the provinces. Although well trained in the learning of new languages, the Jesuit found Chinese completely different from any classical or contemporary language he had ever studied, including the hardest. He described it to Martino de Fornari, 13 his professor of rhetoric at the Roman College, as “nothing like either Greek or German” and went on to give lengthy explanations of its characteristics and its difficulties for the learner. One of the peculiarities of Chinese was the absence of declensions, declinations, conjugations, genders, forms, tenses, and modes. The meaning of a phrase depended on the order in which the words were placed, with the aid of a few particles. Another was the fact of consisting mostly of short words of one or two syllables, whose pronunciation was an authentic riddle, as practically every word changed its meaning when pronounced in different tones. 14 While pronunciation was a torment, writing proved still more complex. Ricci described the ideograms, elaborate characters made up of numerous minute strokes of ink, as “tangles of different letters” and the writing as something impossible for anyone to believe without seeing or attempting for himself. The language was made still more elusive by the fact that many Chinese words written with different characters were very similar in pronunciation. As a result, communication was often ambiguous, and writing from dictation was almost impossible. As if this were not enough, the pronunciation of the same words in the different dialects changed so much as to make conversation between the inhabitants of different provinces difficult. As the Jesuit complained to his former teacher, “It is the most ambiguous spoken and written language ever to be found.” He noted on numerous occasions that in order to make themselves understood and clear up misunderstandings in oral communication, the Chinese would often use their fingers to draw the characters corresponding to their spoken words in the air or on the palm of their hand, thus showing that it was the written rather than the spoken language that unified the empire. Children learned to write by devoting their first few years of school to memorizing the basic characters, a demanding task that required constant practice. Ricci was not frightened by the scale of this undertaking, which was still more onerous for an