Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds 9780231547314

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan
1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts
2. A Globalizing Organization and Chinese Christian Life
3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints
4. Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways
5. European Origins on Trial
Epilogue
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

GLOBAL ENTANGLEMENTS OF A MAN WHO NEVER TRAVELED

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

Columbia Studies in International and Global History Cemil Aydin, Timothy Nunan, and Dominic Sachsenmaier, Series Editors This series presents some of the finest and most innovative work coming out of the current landscapes of international and global historical scholarship. Grounded in empirical research, these titles transcend the usual area boundaries and address how history can help us understand contemporary problems, including poverty, inequality, power, political violence, and accountability beyond the nation-state. The series covers processes of flows, exchanges, and entanglements—and moments of blockage, friction, and fracture—not only between “the West” and “the Rest” but also among parts of what has variously been dubbed the “Third World” or the “Global South.” Scholarship in international and global history remains indispensable for a better sense of current complex regional and global economic transformations. Such approaches are vital in understanding the making of our present world. Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control Steven Bryan, The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan Richard W. Bulliet, The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions Simone M. Müller, Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks Will Hanley, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria Perin E. Gürel, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey

GLOBAL ENTANGLEMENTS OF A MAN WHO NEVER TRAVELED A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds DOMINIC SACHSENMAIER

CO LU M BI A U N I VERSI TY P R E S S

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup​­.columbia​­.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Sachsenmaier, Dominic, author. Title: Global entanglements of a man who never traveled : a seventeenth-­century Chinese Christian and his conflicted worlds / Dominic Sachsenmaier. Other titles: Seventeenth-­century Chinese Christian and his conflicted worlds Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Series: Columbia studies in international and global history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017048768 (print) | LCCN 2018013663 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231547314 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231187527 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Zhu, Zongwen, active 1652. | Scholars—­China—­Biography. | Christians—­China—­ Biography. | China—­Intellectual life—­17th century. | China—­Civilization—­Western influences. Classification: LCC CT3990.Z579 (ebook) | LCC CT3990.Z579 S23 2018 (print) | DDC 951/.032092 [B]­—­dc23 LC record available at https:​­//lccn​­.loc​­.gov​­/2017048768 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan 1 1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts 22 2. A Globalizing Organization and Chinese Christian Life 44 3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints 65 4. Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways 100 5. European Origins on Trial 130 Epilogue 153

Glossary 169 Notes 173 Bibliography 225 Index 253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

t was several years ago that I first thought of studying an untraveled man from a combination of microscopic and macroscopic perspectives. Like many research monographs, this book emerged over a number of years, along with other projects. As a member of an academic environment whose members have all kinds of responsibilities (many of which are probably as global and local as those affecting Zhu Zongyuan, the focal point of this book), I would hardly have been able to complete this work without grants of extra time. I already used parts of a 2010 sabbatical leave from Duke University (funded by the German National Research Foundation) to start conceptualizing this book. More recently, a program sponsored by an Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean government (AKS-2010-DZZ-3103) allowed me a sabbatical leave from Jacobs University for the academic year of 2014/2015. In addition to that, the University of Göttingen, where I became a professor in 2015, granted me an early sabbatical semester in 2017, during which I was able to complete this project. In addition to the extra time, this manuscript could not have been completed without the great support of a number of people. They include Joy Titheridge, a highly skilled translator (German-English) as well as Jin Yan and Fang Ruobing, who supported my research into specific areas of late Ming and early Qing history. Zhang Xiaogeng and Wang Hui did much bibliographic work for this book, working with

viii Acknowledgments

texts in Chinese and in Western languages. The same is true for Christoph Zimmer, who—along with Luisa Flarup, Cassjopeya Nolte, and Thalea Nolte—was more than reliable in formatting the text and making it ready for publication. I particularly want to thank them for helping me in the last stages of this project, when there was much formatting to do and little time left in which to do it. Martha Schulman copyedited the entire text, and I deeply appreciate her corrections, changes, and insightful comments. All this support did very much to improve the text. Many colleagues and friends contributed to this book, whether directly or indirectly. In addition to reading a wide spectrum of inspiring studies, I had many conversations on aspects of this project with scholars from a range of fields. They not only helped me further develop my research framework but also increased my understanding of various research areas that proved relevant to the book. These scholars include Roger Ames (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), Sven Beckert (Harvard University), Jerry Bentley (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), Liam Brockey (Michigan State University), Kenneth Dean (National University of Singapore), Kent Deng (London School of Economics), Prasenjit Duara (Duke University), Marian Füssel (University of Göttingen), François Gipouloux (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Pennsylvania State University), Hsiung Ping-chen (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Mark Juergensmeyer (University of California, Santa Barbara), Eugenio Menegon (Boston University), Jürgen Osterhammel (University of Konstanz), Martin Powers (University of Michigan), Wolfgang Reinhard (University of Freiburg), Axel Schneider (University of Göttingen), Nicolas Standaert (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (University of California, Los Angeles), Sun Yue (Capital Normal University), Peter van der Veer (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity), Wang Hui (Tsinghua University), and Zhang Xupeng (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). Some colleagues read parts of my manuscript and provided me with invaluable feedback and further suggestions. My special thanks go to Sebastian Conrad (Free University of Berlin), Fan Xin (State University

Acknowledgments  ix

of New York, Fredonia), and Wang Jingfeng (Shanghai Jiaotong University). I am also very grateful to the graduate students at the University of Göttingen who discussed some of these materials in class, a process that I experienced as a rewarding and stimulating congruence between research and teaching. All this support from members of the academic community shows that even if it is written alone, a historical monograph is the product of much interaction and outside stimulus. Its completion depends on the flow of ideas, perspectives, discussions, on controversies—and, not least, on inspiration and encouragement. I thus owe much gratitude to many scholars and students from around the world—at the same time, of course, I remain solely responsible for any erroneous statements that may be found in this book. The list of scholars with whom I exchanged views and who thus contributed to my work could be significantly extended—the more so because I was researching Zhu Zongyuan as a doctoral student. That work led to the publication of Die Aufnahme europäischer Inhalte in die chinesische Kultur durch Zhu Zongyuan (ca. 1616–1660) (The reception of  European contents into Chinese culture by Zhu Zongyuan, ca. 1616–1660), Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 47 (Nettetal, Ger.: Steyler, 2001). I wrote my doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Wolfgang Reinhard (University of Freiburg) and Nicolas Standaert (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), both of whom had a lasting influence on my academic development. As a doctoral student, I spent two years as a visiting research scholar and teaching fellow at the HarvardYenching Institute; Tu Wei-ming, who invited me there, was a crucial inspiration for me. Moreover, that earlier project benefited from conversations with many scholars, including Peter Bol (Harvard University), Willard J. Peterson (Princeton University), and David Mungello (Baylor University), who was the first person to point me to the works of Zhu Zongyuan. There is not much overlap between my German work on Zhu Zongyuan and Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled. The former focuses on Zhu’s Chinese contexts and pays great attention to topics such as Chinese rites and rituals, while this book is decisively influenced by the more recent literature in global and transnational

x Acknowledgments

history. It emphasizes the wealth of transregional interactions that both frame and shape the history of single individuals and regions. Many of the differences between the two books reflect my intellectual journey, which has increasingly led me toward scholarship that crosses boundaries. I am very glad that it appears as part of the series Columbia Studies in International and Global History that I now edit together with Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Timothy Nunan (Free University of Berlin). I deeply appreciate their collegial spirit as well as their reassuring and highly useful feedback on my text. Moreover, I want to thank Columbia University Press—especially Caelyn Cobb, Miriam Grossman, and Mike Ashby— for the dynamic and always helpful collaboration that led to the timely publication of this book. Finally, I wrote this monograph not just as a member of various ­academic communities but also as a member of a family. While I was working on the book, our two boys, Emil and Albert, were born—only sixteen months apart. They brought much happiness and liveliness to our house—and they were the reasons that my writing time at home shifted to very odd hours of the day and night. I certainly could not have completed this project without the love, encouragement, and support of my wife, Flora. In the midst of pursuing her own career and caring for two small children, she made sure I had enough time not only to work on this book but to follow other intellectual pursuits as well. This book is dedicated to her.

GLOBAL ENTANGLEMENTS OF A MAN WHO NEVER TRAVELED

INTRODUCTION Situating Zhu Zongyuan

A SEDENTARY BUT CONNECTED EXISTENCE In terms of his personal travels, Zhu Zongyuan led a rather ordinary life. Born around 1616 into a low-level literati family in the southern Chinese port city of Ningbo, he never departed from the core regions of his state. In fact, there is no indication that he ever left his home province of Zhejiang in southeastern China. Zhu’s home-based existence contrasts sharply with that of many contemporaries with more mobile biographies. During the seventeenth century and even before, distant travelers—traders, mercenaries, missionaries, advisers, and slaves—were not an unusual sight in many parts of the world. People who had crossed continents and oceans were common in the port cities of a world increasingly connected through long-distance trade. Chinese merchants, adventurers, and workers took part in this globalizing trade, often playing important roles in international economic hubs such as Nagasaki, Manila, Malacca, or even Goa.1 Zhu Zongyuan was not among them—although, as we shall see, he did not have a quiet and uneventful life. Nevertheless, Zhu’s connections to the outside world were somewhat unusual for Chinese society at this time, sufficiently so to make it worthwhile to view his life and work through both local and global historical lenses. It was Zhu’s involvement with globalizing Catholicism that brought him into close contact with a foreign religious and

2  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

institutional scholarly world. Far more than most members of his peer group, the regional elites in late Ming and early Qing China, Zhu was in contact with Europeans—mainly Jesuits but also some Dominican missionaries. Occasionally Zhu even used a Christian name, Cosmas, and his house seems to have figured as an important base for the dispersed Christian community in Ningbo and surrounding regions. The vast majority of his peer group, local elites, were not in such close contact with people from a distant land. Neither did they adhere to a teaching that had been brought over to China from afar just a few decades earlier. While Zhu may not have cared to gain a comprehensive understanding of society and religion in the distant West, he nevertheless participated in liturgies and masses whose different cultural context was obvious. He conversed with Jesuit missionaries who had clearly arrived in China from a distant land, and he was at least basically familiar with their versions of science and philosophical traditions. Moreover, he operated with a wealth of Christian concepts and biblical stories that were obviously rooted in a different cultural nexus. As a small but telling example, like many other pro-Christian texts, Zhu’s works also identify the far-off land of rudeya ( Judea) as the site of Jesus’s birth. Even a decidedly localized presentation of Christianity could not brush over the fact that the Holy Land was not in China. Moreover, Zhu had seen the Jesuit world maps and their brief, selective descriptions of the world’s continents. We know he had heard of the arrival of new powers in the greater East Asia region, since his works allude to the Spanish colonial presence in the Philippines. Zhu Zongyuan became intellectually engaged with Christianity: he was a prolific reader of the wealth of pro-Christian books and pamphlets published in Chinese around his lifetime. Their contents ranged from introductions of Christianity to annotated world maps and scientific works based on European approaches. Zhu even joined the thin ranks of Chinese Christian authors during the seventeenth century. He left behind two monographs and several other texts in which he presented his faith to a wider Chinese audience by relating it to aspects of Chinese tradition. He also offered extensive reflections on the foreign origins of Christianity as well as their implications for Chinese society and traditions. Zhu’s writings display a close familiarity

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  3

with Chinese history and thought, particularly with the official Confucian canon of learning. This is hardly surprising since around the age of thirty he successfully passed the provincial state examinations, an achievement that would have been impossible without many years of intensive Confucian studies. As an author, Zhu thus did not merely cover subjects that are typically regarded as parts of Chinese intellectual and spiritual traditions. He not only narrated biblical contents but also referred to a wide array of other subjects ranging from early modern European geography to ancient Greek philosophy. When working through all these fields, our Ningbo Christian was not driven by the objective of unfolding exotic curiosities of a distant world for his readers. On the contrary, Zhu—or Cosmas—pursued the ultimate goal of demonstrating that Christianity was worth the attention of his fellow scholars and other members of Chinese society. He did so chiefly by arguing that his new teaching, which in Chinese was translated as tianxue, or “Learning of Heaven,” was not only compatible with the Confucian tradition but also a way of returning to its pristine origins. In this context, he dealt with a number of intellectual challenges, including the question of whether Confucian values were intrinsically tied to Chinese society or could be seen as universal values. It would be misleading to assume that Zhu’s ultimate agenda was a cross-cultural synthesis that would be achieved through “dialogues between civilizations.” Modes of thought that differentiated the world into various civilizations were much less common in the 1600s than in the 1800s or 1900s.2 Certainly, cultural identities were not completely absent during Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime—for instance, in the growing string of global trading centers ranging from Goa to Malacca one can find many examples of individuals and groups who defined themselves as members of one particular culture within a pluriverse of religions and traditions.3 Yet people were far from categorizing the world into fixed civilizational realms characterized by unceasing differences. Ideas of this kind did not fill Zhu Zongyuan’s mind. He did not identify himself as a Chinese citizen in the modern sense, as a Confucian in a representative sense, or as a Catholic in an exclusive sense. Rather,

4  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

like many Chinese and European scholars of his time, his worldview boiled down to a monocivilizational vision. At least with regard to the crucial problem of defining a good and purposeful life, he believed that ultimately only a single universal teaching would be able to better the conditions of his own society and the world at large. One might argue that such an attitude hardly differentiated Zhu from people who believed in the cultural superiority of China. Yet what separated Zhu’s idea of a civilizational singular from some conservative Confucian circles in his home society was his belief in the necessity of looking outward. While Zhu Zongyuan’s close association with Christianity was somewhat out of the ordinary in seventeenth-century Chinese society and intellectual life, it would be going too far to understand him as a uniquely “cosmopolitan” figure in an otherwise inward-looking kingdom. Over the past few decades, historical research has further revised images of imperial China as an isolated land hidden behind great walls made of stone and cultural haughtiness.4 Such stereotyped, disparaging visions of the Chinese past became influential in the nineteenth century and onward—a time when Western domination and the spirit of progressivism fostered certain types of world historical narratives that were based on strong value judgments about non-Western cultures.5 For the study of early modern Sino-European relations this meant that at least implicitly the juxtaposition of a dynamic West with a stagnant and somewhat passive Middle Kingdom framed a large part of research literature in the field. Yet Zhu’s China was neither stagnant nor introverted. Even during the epochal crisis of the 1600s, the Ming or Qing state remained the largest economy on the planet, and in the eyes of scholars like Andre Gunder Frank it was even the center of a world economic system.6 With its estimated one hundred forty million inhabitants at the middle of the seventeenth century, China was more populous than Europe as a whole with its roughly one hundred million people. All this implied not only a wealth of global trade connections but also of people, technologies, and ideas between China and other parts of the world. This has great implications for the ways in which we define the larger historical contexts of Chinese Christians like Zhu Zongyuan.

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  5

There is no reason to assume that during the seventeenth century, Sino-Western relations were more intense than, for instance, connections between China and South Asia. Clearly, by the time of Zhu’s life, Chinese state-led discoveries and the foundation of outposts in lands as far as Africa had already been over for two centuries. Neverthe­ less, despite significant state restrictions on international trade and official immigration, large numbers of Chinese individuals ventured overseas every year. What is more, foreigners from many different societies were not unusual sights in many parts of the Chinese world— and not just in port cities. Also in subtler ways, the early globalization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was visible in much of Chinese society. Just one example is the biological exchanges of that time: American crops like the sweet potato came to China and were now transforming people’s lives.7 Although most people were probably unaware of the precise origins of these crops, they usually knew that they had been imported from outside. Taking a closer look at Zhu Zongyuan’s social circles, it would be wrong also to suppose that low-level scholars and officials during the late Ming and early Qing were more or less oblivious of distant lands and the growing webs between these lands and China. In fact, studies of Chinese libraries and the general book market during the early 1600s suggest that there was a high degree of interest in the outside world, at least among the educated. Annotated world maps produced by Jesuit missionaries in China sold well and were often reprinted, or integrated, into other geographical works published in East Asia.8 Likewise, in the realm of religions, faith systems, and spiritual teachings, the China of Zhu Zongyuan was not a solipsistic cultural universe. Along with Christianity, Islam enjoyed a clear presence in some Chinese cities, with mosques visible in Chinese cities ranging from Beijing to Hangzhou. Because of its strong role along Central Asian trading routes, Islam could even look back at a more uninterrupted history in China than Christianity. For example, the oldest Muslim prayer hall in Beijing, Cow Street Mosque, which had been founded in the year 966, was operating during Ming times and after.9 In addition to these monotheistic religions that had their organizational and spiritual centers clearly outside China, other teachings of

6  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

foreign origin had a strong position there. Buddhism, present in China from the early first millennium, had long played an important role, and though over the centuries it had experienced waves of persecutions and constraints, it was nevertheless an integral part of China’s cultural fabric.10 But its Indian origins had not been forgotten, and during the early 1600s a number of influential opponents of Buddhism again began to emphasize the fact that the Buddha was from a society outside the lands of Confucius. Some critics of Buddhism were especially concerned about its strong position within many Confucian circles. Other, more marginal faith systems of foreign origin, including Christianity, also had the possibility to prosper during the first half of the seventeenth century. During the calamities of that time that eventually culminated in the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644, state administrations were often dysfunctional and living conditions grew extremely uncertain. The overall political instability meant that state control was loosening, allowing Christian missionaries and publications to flow more freely through Chinese cities, towns, and villages. Moreover, the general crisis created an age of anxiety and uncertainty that made many individuals look for new sources of confidence and hope.11 While this mood affected all parts of society, there were also changes more specific to elite circles that aided the spread of new religions. For instance, many learned individuals began to identify less with the state and official orthodoxies and increasingly turned toward other teachings. While Christianity was not widespread on Chinese soil when the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in the late sixteenth century, by the 1630s about forty to seventy thousand converts were living in China.12 These numbers are only rough indicators, due to the shaky evidence of primary source materials and the difficulty of defining a convert in a society in which religious pluralism and syncretism were common. What remains certain is that Jesuit and, later, other missionaries managed to establish sizable Catholic communities in both the countryside and urban areas. Some of their missionary efforts aimed high, to the upper levels of Chinese society, and here they were not without success. The first generation of Chinese converts included a few

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  7

high-ranking scholar-officials like Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) and Yang Tingyun (1557–1627), who belonged to the late Ming upper crust. Zhu Zongyuan, who lived one or two generations later, did not have the same social standing as such exalted figures as Xu and Yang.13 Nonetheless, his family background, education level, and success in the provincial examinations distinguished him from the vast majority of Chinese converts, who belonged to much lower sections of society—in other words, Zhu was part of elite circles, but at the provincial level. His intellectual skills allowed him to read in a wide variety of genres typical of the late Ming book market, including translations of European works and newly authored texts about Christianity. They also gave him the opportunity to be a writer and to communicate regularly with Jesuit fathers across various provinces. Zhu served as a connector not only between his local Catholic community and other Chinese Christian groups but also between European missionary networks and his local circles in late Ming society. While Zhu functioned as a bridge builder in various regards, it would be problematic to describe his activities as contributing to an exchange between China and Europe at large. His advocacy of the Learning of Heaven certainly did not amount to any broad-based Europeanization program, which would become more common in China from the late nineteenth century onward. During the 1600s, Europe was not seen as an economic, political, and cultural might that would force China to change. Indeed, the European powers were not major factors determining the fate of seventeenth-century China. While the long decline of the Ming dynasty and the subsequent expansion of Manchu rule put the Chinese state under heavy strains, the political, economic, and cultural fundaments of China were not in danger of collapsing. Enough of the old order remained intact that the dynastic transition crisis was experienced largely as caused by homegrown woes.14 One did not conceptualize them as outcomes of China’s global entanglements.15 Undeniably, the arrival of Iberian and, later, other European forces, including corporations with territorial ambitions like the English East India Company, had caused visible changes in some Asian regions.16

8  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

Even territorial colonization such as in the Philippines, an archipelago in the former backwaters of Asian trade, existed in some parts of East Asia.17 Additionally, the Portuguese had taken direct control of an entire string of places like Hormuz, Goa, and Malacca, and they sought to establish an Indian Ocean–wide passport system.18 Yet after an initial shock to historically rooted trading networks, Chinese and other Asian merchants found ways to either arm themselves or circumvent Portuguese zones, forcing the latter to take a more collaborative approach with regional players. With the exception of the Philippines, European “empires” in Asia amounted to not much more than a string of strongholds in heavily contested waters. In other words, powers like the Portuguese more or less tapped into already existing Chinese, Indian, Muslim, and other networks, many of which remained powerful for centuries to come.19 These developments hardly seemed to matter to the mighty Ming state, especially since its administration did not put much emphasis on oceanic trade. Also, outside the relatively modest influence of its early modern empires, Europe did not enter the stage as a coherent force in China or elsewhere in Asia. Individual powers like Spain and Portugal, as well as some other countries later on, could perceive one another as competitors in Asia.20 What is more, the contenders for the lucrative Asian trade routes were far from being segregated into European and Asian camps, or along religious lines.21 Instead, the commercial and partly military competition over strategic points was an ever-changing pattern of coalitions among such diverse parties as, for instance, Iberian forces and Muslim sultanates. Just as Christian states were engaged in fierce wars with one another, the relationships among Muslim empires such as the Ottomans, the Safavids, or the Mughals were often characterized by bitter enmity.22 The same was the case with maritime Islamic empires such as the Sumatra-based Acehnese sultanate, which—with changing allies—expanded its rule and influence along the eastern Indian Ocean shores throughout much of the seventeenth century.23 We can observe similar patterns among the diverse networks of traders. Further, in the worlds of barter and gain, Chinese, Islamic, European, and other merchant groups formed ever-changing pacts. At times Chinese and European forces formed coalitions against other

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  9

Europeans, and while Portuguese forces relied on local Asian aides and auxiliary forces, several thousand Portuguese mercenaries were in service of various Asian states during the 1620s.24 Even in terms of religious alliances and allegiances, Europe was not a clearly identifiable agent—not even in a specific missionary theater like China. During the seventeenth century, frictions among Catholic missionaries were clearly visible in East Asia, both in the form of antagonisms between different Catholic orders and significant disparities among members of the Society of Jesus. In various agreements with the Holy See, the Portuguese crown had secured far-reaching powers over ecclesiastical matters in all its overseas territories, and it had done so largely by the early 1500s.25 Yet with the arrival of other European powers, this system—the padroado—did not result in a Portuguese monopoly over all Asia missions. In fact, Catholic priests operating under the Portuguese padroado and those with ties to other parts of Europe often clashed, as they did in the rivalry between the French- and the Portuguese-ordained missions that began heating up toward the end of Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime. Divisions of this kind could also extend into the relations between the Jesuits and their Chinese supporters. For example, in the struggles during the Chinese Rites Controversy over the acceptability of ancestor worship, different groups of European missionaries and Chinese converts would experience one another as opponents.26 All this suggests that we should not rush to conceptualize the specific world in which Zhu Zongyuan lived as an encounter zone between two clearly divided sides, China and Europe. The interactions framing the history of seventeenth-century Chinese Christianity were too complex to allow for simple bilateral models of this kind. The latter would also not adequately express the worldviews and mental maps of many important agents operating during that epoch. For instance, during the 1600s many Catholic missionaries did not necessarily think of Europe as a coherent civilizational realm, and—unlike many nineteenth- and twentieth-century protagonists—they did not differentiate crudely between the West and the rest. It is telling that some Jesuits likened the mission in Poland and its eastern neighbors to their work in Asian societies,27 or that some fathers regarded the local

10  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

populations in Brittany and New France as similarly uncultivated people in need of education and guidance for a better life and faith.28 What are the conceptual alternatives to placing Zhu Zongyuan between China and Europe? We cannot and should not view him from China-centered perspectives either. While he probably never traveled outside his home province, his work and life go beyond a local or Chinese context. He was part of other historical realms reaching beyond the boundaries of the Sinosphere—for example, his life has its place in the history of early modern Catholicism, which, as an institutionalized church and a range of faith systems, experienced tremendous change as it was spread around the world. In a more concrete way, Zhu Zongyuan’s vita was closely related to the history of a particular order in the Catholic Church, the Societas Jesu. Its members, the Jesuits, were already active on several continents at that point. Even though he never acquired any kind of official membership in the Society of Jesus, Zhu was in close communication and collaboration with Catholic missionaries for most of his life. In many regards he saw himself as someone pursuing a common cause with these fathers and their global networks. Again, however, that did not mean that he compromised his belief in the great values of Chinese civilization, most notably Confucianism. How, then, to do justice to both the decidedly local dimensions of Zhu Zongyuan’s biography and his transcontinental connections? This can best be done when seeking to combine microhistorical and macrohistorical perspectives. In order to make the global dimensions of his very local life more visible, one should not rush to aggrandize the former; we do not need to exaggerate Zhu’s global historical significance. We can acknowledge that, in many regards, he was a fairly conventional member of the elite in his native Ningbo. Except for his local responsibilities and his activities as a writer, he did not even play an illustrious role in the Chinese Christian communities of his time. Yet Cosmas Zhu can be regarded as a part of an encounter zone between manifold global and local structures. His writings belonged to two historical contexts, the global Catholic book and the prospering late Ming book market. The version of Christianity propounded in these texts fits into both the worlds of seventeenth-century Catholicism and the landscape of seventeenth-century Confucianism.

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  11

Likewise, his local Christian communities were part of a globalizing ecclesiastical organization even as they were deeply rooted in Chinese associational life. Many facets of Zhu’s life and work thus have their place in a variety of overlapping contexts. What is more, they contributed to intertwining these contexts with one another more than he himself could possibly have been aware of during his lifetime. Indeed, it is possible to see Zhu as one of the many points through which large systems like global Catholicism and late Ming China were touching—and shaping— each other. Such large interconnections actually depended on the roles played by rather unassuming individuals like Zhu. At the same time, Zhu and other connectors were not independent agents; rather, they experienced a wealth of pressures and constraints emanating from the encounter between such large power systems as the global Catholic Church and China as a state and society.

EVOLVING RESEARCH LANDSCAPES Any effort to explicate the complex global and local worlds of Zhu Zongyuan requires drawing on academic literature from a wide range of research areas. Many of the perspectives taken in this book are enabled by already existing work, by the kinds of questions that scholars have asked before about the history of Christianity in China and related themes. Academic work on Chinese Christianity between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries has taken important turns during the past few decades, and the same has happened in the study of wider Sino-European interactions. Generally speaking, historical scholarship has increasingly underlined the importance of Chinese converts in the formation of Chinese Christianity during the late 1500s and after. This was an important development, for until the 1980s many of the most influential studies had portrayed the Jesuits as the main creators of the complex Confucian-Christian synthesis that came to be called the accommodation method. According to this older view, single leading figures in the Jesuit China mission like Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) basically had all the skills needed to make Christianity

12  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

compatible with aspects of China’s cultural and sociopolitical fabric.29 Many authors basically presupposed that the famous Italian Jesuit and other leading figures in the China mission almost single-handedly created an erudite theoretical framework that drew on various texts ranging from key Confucian books to the Bible and ancient Greek thought.30 This Europe-centered interpretation of late Ming Christianity implicitly reduced the role of the Chinese side to little more than passive recipients of a cross-civilizational package provided to them by the European missionaries. Indeed, according to many perspectives of this kind, China merely provided the stage on which a “generation of giants” of missionaries figured as the main actors.31 Ironically, that same idea—that the accommodation method was solely manufactured by European missionaries—is also foundational to decidedly critical accounts of the Jesuit policies in China. A number of scholars who regard the Confucian-Christian synthesis of the late Ming and early Qing periods as a cultural imposition, a hijacking of history, share the notion that the Chinese side had little agency.32 Yet as a general tendency, scholarship has come to question such interpretative approaches. Many publications in the field now conceptualize the accommodation method not as a Jesuit creation but as the result of intensive interactions between European missionaries and Chinese scholars. Inarguably, most Jesuit missionaries mastered both contemporary and classical Chinese and had a formidable knowledge of Chinese traditions, but many researchers agree that they could not possibly have reached the degree of proficiency necessary to compose books in such elegant Ming prose as those appearing in the Chinese market under their names. 33 Without the active support from Chinese scholars it would have been unfeasible to offer the exegesis of Confucian texts that was necessary to make Christianity at least in principle acceptable to a learned Chinese audience. The Chinese coworkers who made this possible could be either converts or simply underemployed scholars specifically hired for this task. Presenting the European faith in learned written Chinese was of central importance to the project of showing the links of Christianity with Confucianism. Equally significant was composing pro-Christian

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  13

texts in a form that resembled that of Chinese works of a similar genre; simply translating European writings into Mandarin would not have been sufficient or effective. This was even more so as the proChristian literature of that time usually depicted the European faith as part of the inner potentials of Confucianism. Such a claim had to be substantiated by a sufficiently sophisticated familiarity with this tradition and the concepts, tropes, and texts foundational to late Ming and early Qing Confucianism. Many Christian publications contained a wealth of references to authoritative Chinese texts, ranging from the ancient Five Classics to commentaries from later dynasties. It appears that even the relevant aspects of European science would appeal to Chinese readers only if they were written in ways that showed a sophisticated knowledge of Chinese culture and textual traditions.34 In many regards, the perspectives from which the history of the accommodation method was written can be likened to those found in the history of European discoveries. Just as the local guides collaborating with the “discoverers,” as well as their native knowledge, had been rendered subaltern, so, too, was the role of Chinese scholars in forging a new Confucian-Christian synthesis. The increased attention that historians now pay to Chinese collaborators in Jesuit texts is, however, only a small part of a wider transformation in the research landscapes surrounding this field. As a more general trend, there has been a growing interest in the Chinese who were actively engaged in the creation of seventeenth-century Chinese Christianity.35 This shift has been accompanied by a change in the academic communities engaged in this field. The latter was long dominated by theologians, historians of European missions, and other scholars who usually had not mastered the Chinese language.36 Starting in the last quarter of the twentieth century, an increasing number of scholars entering this area of research have been either professional sinologists or scholars with a solid background in Chinese studies.37 These developments in Western academia have been paralleled by transformations in Chinese-language scholarship. While work on the history of Christianity had some prominent representatives (including the Catholic scholar Fang Hao) during the first half of the twentieth century, after Mao took over, the field was blocked or at least heavily

14  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

constrained on the Chinese mainland. From the 1980s on, and increasingly during the past few years, universities in the People’s Republic have become the sites of growing research activities related to the history of Ming-Qing Christianity,38 which was also now being studied with an eye on scholarship in other countries. As a consequence, a substantial body of literature is now available in Chinese that provides in-depth studies on a wealth of topics, reaching from single Chinese Christians to the varied Sino-European contacts of the period.39 Since only a small minority of historians in China read sources in early modern European languages and Latin, this scholarship focuses chiefly on Chinese texts. Together, these developments at Chinese, Western, and other universities have produced a wealth of publications based mainly on Chinese primary source materials. This offers a further departure from missionary-centered perspectives and at the same time a more detailed understanding of the locally specific historical contexts of Christianity in seventeenth-century China.40 All this means that the Chinese facets of Christianity are no longer predominantly treated as modifications of a European export product. The histories of Chinese converts are now increasingly studied as part of the Chinese rather than the European past. Scholars such as Erik Zürcher, Nicolas Standaert, and David Mungello have paid close attention to the intricate patterns of late Ming and early Qing society, politics, and culture.41 For instance, they and other researchers became more interested in the parallels and entanglements between the Learning of Heaven and the mushrooming of intellectual schools, political groupings, and religious movements during the crisis of the waning Ming dynasty. Similarly, the study of a whole range of closely related topics, from the history of science to the organization of Chinese Christian communities, has given more weight to local environments as shaping forces. As part of the same process, research has grown more sensitive to regional differences between the varied Chinese Christian communities.42 The growing emphasis on the overall Chinese context also rendered the image of Chinese Christianity during the Ming-Qing period increasingly complex. While before scholars had not paid much attention to the multifaceted character of Chinese Christians, from the

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  15

late 1980s onward researchers began to focus on a wider variety of converts. One initially paid much attention to established individuals like the “three pillars of early Chinese Christianity,” the scholarofficials Li Zhizao (1565–1630), Xu Guangqi, and Yang Tingyun, who all held the highest degree awarded in the imperial examination system ( jinshi).43 More recently, scholars have been drawn to investigating Christianity among other educated Christians and the Chinese peasantry and other social groups lacking access to significant levels of education.44 This turn away from the history of famous individuals toward the study of discourses and worldviews more common in broader and lower levels of society was not confined to the study of Chinese Christianity. Rather, the larger fields of intellectual history and the history of religions witnessed their own movements against elite-centered approaches; this meant that the ideas and beliefs of lower social strata began to be taken more seriously within historians’ guildhalls.45 In any event, historical scholarship has now grown more attentive to the different milieus and types of Chinese Christianity during the Ming-Qing transition period. As a result of a growing number of research projects in this field, our image of Christianity in China looks far more diversified—and less shaped by the Jesuit missionaries. The growing interest in these complex worlds of faith has led historians (from China and elsewhere) to conceptualize illiterate Chinese converts as cocreators of new forms of Christianity. This is important since, for instance, in many rural convert communities Christian sculptures, symbols, and elements of faith were merged with Buddhist and Daoist practices—something that, given their small numbers, the Jesuit missionaries could not control. Among such social groups, engagements and overlaps with Chinese popular religions had a major influence on Christian practices, as did beliefs in the power of magic, spells, and charms.46 This was a world of syncretism far removed from that of the erudite, often exegetical debates about Confucian and Christian concepts among missionaries and Chinese literati. In addition to rendering our notion of Ming-Qing converts more pluralistic, literature in the field now puts more stress on the varied facets of Jesuit life in China. Recent work dealing chiefly with the

16  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

European side of the China mission has put more emphasis on the huge diversities, discrepancies, and even conflict lines in the community of Jesuit fathers based in China.47 In addition, some publications have paid similar levels of attention to both the European and Chinese contexts in which individuals such as Matteo Ricci or Giulio Aleni (1582– 1649) were operating.48 Other studies have highlighted the highly diverse character of Jesuit activities in China, including scientific work, engagements in the Chinese bureaucracy, scholarly collaborations, along with regular liturgical work and occasional practices such as healing through the power of the cross.49 Likewise, the social circles in which the members of the Society of Jesus moved were not as carefully selected as the older literature made them seem. True, a few Jesuits like Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591–1666) worked many years at the imperial court, and most missionaries were in regular contact with elite milieus; still, many fathers actually spent most of their time with the lower strata of Chinese society.50 This is plausible given that a few dozen Jesuit missionaries in the Ming state had managed to convert tens of thousands of individuals by the 1640s. The Jesuits’ broad variety of social contacts and religious activities in China were actually carryovers from their own native lands. In large parts of Europe, it was common for the same cleric to practice Christianity in very different ways—for example, engaging in learned disputations and conducting exorcisms. In today’s world, we would more readily regard such elements as incompatible or even mutually exclusive, but in seventeenth-century Europe high culture and low culture were not as sharply divided.51 This was compatible with the spiritual landscape of contemporary China, where highly learned scholars often engaged in ritual forms that centuries later would be classified as “superstitious.”52 In any case, the transmission channels and contact zones of the China mission went far beyond bookish conversations among wellread men. Two very complex and pluralistic worlds were meeting each other, leading to an ever-changing wealth of new interpretations, syncretisms, and creative tensions.53 The Learning of Heaven could take many shapes, and much depended on individual Chinese converts and European missionaries as well as their social backgrounds,

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  17

their personal networks, local communities, and ultimately their specific religious interpretations.

QUESTIONS, LENSES, AND PERSPECTIVES This book takes one individual, Zhu Zongyuan, as a vantage point to look into the rich worlds of Christianity in seventeenth-century China and its varied contexts. As the book shows, the global and local environs in Zhu’s biography are not neatly separated into discrete parts; rather, they are entwined with one another in a complex pattern. On the one hand, local Chinese life during the late Ming and early Qing period was affected by exogenous forces, even outside port cities and trading hubs like Ningbo. On the other, the worldwide dynamics of the seventeenth century were not formed by detached global processes but were a composite of many interwoven local histories.54 Because of that, it is possible—even desirable—to examine the lives of individuals like Zhu Zongyuan not through only any one of the lenses of local history, regional history, and global history but through the three combined. To be sure, these levels of analysis are often closely connected: in fact, combinations of local and translocal perspectives are characteristic of large parts of the current literature associated with the term “global history.” More specifically, there has also been a growing interest in relating fields like microhistory and global history to one another.55 No matter what the perspective, not much research has been done on Zhu Zongyuan, and no substantial study of him has been available in English.56 Between the 1940s and the 1970s, Fang Hao, an important historian of Chinese Christianity, included Zhu in some reference works,57 but little has been written about him in Western languages.58 In China, the growing interest in converts during the Ming-Qing period has led to several recent studies on Zhu Zongyuan, including a number of theses or doctoral dissertations59 and some articles60 dealing with aspects of Zhu’s life and work. Bits and pieces of information about Zhu Zongyuan can be found across a wide range of sources, but together they do not allow for more

18  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

than a rough sketch of his life, typically with a few clear patches shining through a murky biographical etching. Hence even if it were the purported goal of this book to provide a biography of Zhu Zongyuan, the relative lack of sources on Zhu’s personal and professional life would provide frustratingly insufficient levels of insights into his individual development, his immediate surroundings, and close relationships. It would be even less possible to offer an account of his private hopes and fears, including the more personal reasons for his conversion to the Learning of Heaven.61 The greater part of this book takes up the main traces Zhu left behind: his writings. As mentioned, Zhu authored two monographs, several shorter pieces, and we also find his name on several introductions to other Christian works. I do not discuss the entire range of subjects covered in his oeuvre, prioritizing instead the parts of his works in which Zhu ruminates on the intellectual challenges emerging from the encounter between a local life and a translocal faith. Among those topics are, for instance, his reflections on the relationship between cultural specificities and ethical universalism and his account of the importance of foreign influences in the history of Chinese civilization. The following chapters discuss facets of Zhu’s life and, above all, his works in various local and translocal contexts. Each chapter takes one aspect of our Ningbo Christian as a starting point to analyze a variety of local and translocal entanglements. This approach permits me to investigate in detail key aspects of the great encounter of two large structures: the globalizing Catholic Church62 and the late Ming state and society. The interaction between these large frameworks and their dependent organizations was not necessarily a harmonious one, and the resulting friction could lead to unintended outcomes. Focusing on one particular individual as a nodal point in the complex networks that enclosed seventeenth-century Catholicism allows us, I believe, to become more sensitive to the various power patterns— ideological and institutional—that shaped this encounter. The Learning of Heaven, after all, was not the product solely of intellectual efforts and spiritual quests. Rather, hegemonic claims and institutional

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  19

control emanating from different parties were important in its formative period and beyond. Chapter 1 reconstructs the traces of Zhu Zongyuan’s biography from a combination of Chinese and European primary sources. It shows how regional and transregional circuits of exchange affected life in a port city like Zhu Zongyuan’s hometown of Ningbo. It also depicts important social and economic transformations that help us better grasp Zhu Zongyuan’s specific approach to the Learning of Heaven; among them are the decline of some literati classes and the privatization of Confucian learning in some circles. Partly related to this context, the chapter provides a picture of the epochal crises that framed Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime and culminated in the Manchu conquest of China, showing how, as part of the local elite and a member of a foreign religious organization, Zhu had to carefully navigate the calamities of his time. It becomes clear that in many regards, he was forced to live in a world of conflicting loyalties and irresolvable conflicts. Chapter 2 demonstrates that conflicted constellations and ongoing battles also characterized aspects of Zhu Zongyuan’s life in Catholic communities. The chapter further explores Zhu’s various roles as a Christian, many of which were entangled with his life as a Confucian scholar and a member of the upper echelons of Ningbo society. For instance, he was writing Confucian-Christian monographs and serving as a connecting point between his local Christian circles and the European missionaries stationed in many different parts of China. Yet the chapter argues that precisely because Christian life was not—and could not possibly be—strictly separated from Chinese communal and associational life, it was characterized by many inherent contradictions. Both sides of the Chinese-Catholic encounter had to make institutional compromises, and the final product did not always make the Learning of Heaven more acceptable to a Chinese audience. Like other pro-Christian texts, the writings of Zhu Zongyuan (which the chapter discusses in the dual contexts of the late Ming book market and the emerging global Catholic book market) were meant to work toward this goal. Still, they could not leave the disputed realities of seventeenth-century Chinese Christianity behind.

20  Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan

Chapter 3 discusses the inner tensions characterizing the Learning of Heaven on the level of ideas, concepts, and doctrines. I argue that the so-called accommodation method was not the result only of learned dialogues and neat epistemological syntheses but was a compromise resulting from the contact between two large power systems, each with its own hegemonic claims and internal struggles. On the Catholic side, a multifaceted world of contradictions and frictions went into the exchanges that led to the Confucian-Christian synthesis, whose main framework was established by the turn of the seventeenth century. The other side of this dialogue was equally complex, particularly in the highly diverse—and somewhat discordant—landscape of Confucian teachings within which anti-Christian initiatives sanctioned by the state remained a recurrent source of potential threats. Using Zhu Zongyuan’s writings and their specific historical contexts as its main reference, the chapter argues that the contours of the Learning of Heaven developed along the thin middle ground possible between the prerogatives of the global church on the one side and late Ming China on the other. In this complicated terrain, it was difficult for Catholicism to become sinicized in a manner that would allow it to blend neatly into the world of seventeenth-century Chinese teachings, or at least to strongly connect with any of the main Confucian camps of that period. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which Zhu Zongyuan sought to come to terms with the foreign origins of his faith. This was a formidable challenge since—for a variety of reasons—the Learning of Heaven put emphasis on key concepts, liturgies, and symbols that were not Chinese but obviously of European origin. In addition, various factors in late Ming culture and intellectual life made it almost impossible to downplay the outside roots of Christianity. While attending to these contexts, the chapter investigates how Zhu Zongyuan sought to sort out the relationship between universal values and Chinese culture, between the concepts of “the Middle” and “the foreign.” To make his argument, Zhu reached deeply into the repertoire of Confucian learning and Chinese historiography. As the chapter reveals, it is here—when making a case for cultural opening—that Zhu felt compelled to operate strictly in the highbrow mode of a well-educated Confucian scholar.

Introduction: Situating Zhu Zongyuan  21

The focus of chapter 5 is the unusually detailed images of Europe and the Jesuits in Zhu’s works. Zhu paints Europe in the colors of Chinese Confucian ideals, and his portrait of that continent suggests the ancient Golden Age as described by Chinese classics. Similarly, in Zhu’s account, Jesuit missionaries appear as Confucian sages arriving from afar to a Chinese society that—as Zhu saw it—no longer allowed for the cultivation of true wisdom. As the chapter shows, such idealizations of Europe were being disseminated by other Chinese converts as well as by European missionaries. While they were not necessarily meant to be taken at face value by Chinese readers, they responded to other, very different, perceptions of Europe and Catholicism circulating in seventeenth-century China. As the chapter describes, Zhu was clearly reacting to changing modes of regional and global consciousness among educated Chinese circles and their increasing sources of information. Events such as the Spanish colonization of the Philippines provoked concerns in many Chinese circles that Christianity served the interests of the European powers. Concerns of this kind, I argue, may have been aggravated by the roles of ethnic identities in the organizational fabric of late Ming Catholicism. As against the universal ideals espoused by the Learning of Heaven, Chinese individuals remained de facto barred from becoming priests during Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime. The epilogue embeds the book’s main themes in wider global historical outlooks on the world during Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime. It takes up issues such as the changing roles of religions along transcontinental trade routes and illuminates their entanglements with different, often opposing, power structures. It shows that the history of the Catholic China mission was only a facet of much larger global transformations and encounters taking place in many parts of the world. In the end, the resulting contacts and frictions went through individual human beings, all of whom had their own hopes and fears, and all of whom had to negotiate their own ambitions with many obstacles and constraints. There was something exceptional about Zhu Zongyuan, but at the same time—in his interest in ideas distant from his world and his sense that they might apply to his own environment—he had many equivalents, across other religions and other locations.

1 A LOCAL LIFE AND ITS GLOBAL CONTEXTS

NINGBO: BETWEEN CHINA AND THE WORLD Zhu Zongyuan’s native city, Ningbo, is located at the mouth of the Bay of Hangzhou on China’s east coast. During the Ming dynasty, this city was part of Zhejiang province, just as it is today. At first sight, Ningbo might not have looked like an important transaction hub: it was surrounded by a thick wall more than eight meters high, and hardly any building in its center was taller than that.1 Yet for much of Ningbo’s history, this wall was less about preventing entry than about protecting the area inside as a place of intense encounters. In fact, as a port in a region with intensive commerce, the city was more connected to long-distance trading routes than were most other Chinese cities with a comparable population. For many centuries, Ningbo played an important role in the exchange networks connecting the lower Yangtze region with China’s vast compound canal system as well as the ocean. All kinds of goods passed through its port, including iron, ivory and pepper from the south, silk from the north, timber from Japan, and porcelain, lacquer, and paper made for overseas trade.2 After a period of relative decline, Ningbo’s significance rose again in the sixteenth century when the central government loosened restrictions on foreign trade and the harbor of nearby Hangzhou, one of China’s largest regional metropoles, started to silt up.3 In the latter half of the Ming dynasty, a number of factories, including some

A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  23

export-oriented ones, were established in Ningbo. Further evidence of the city’s burgeoning wealth were the seven new merchant towns founded in the city’s immediate vicinity between 1487 and 1560. During this period, Zhu Zongyuan’s hometown was once again one of China’s key ports—a status it kept with few interruptions until the early twentieth century. It also grew into a highly developed financial center and became the seat of major government offices.4 Ningbo could look back at a long tradition of being a connecting point between China and other regions. However, during much of Zhu Zongyuan’s life, in the first half of the seventeenth century, it was no longer as prosperous. The extended crisis of the weakening Ming dynasty and the ongoing consolidation of the Qing government greatly affected northern Zhejiang province.5 This aggravated an economic decline in the Ningbo region, where a slump in both domestic and overseas markets led to overproduction and inflation.6 Added to this, both the outgoing Ming and incoming Qing authorities severely limited foreign trade and imposed tight immigration regulations. But such policies were usually hard to enforce given China’s extensive coastline and how thinly spread state officials were. What is more, dysfunctional state institutions and corrupt officials opened up new possibilities for many groups, including European traders vying for their share of the lucrative trade flows. Still, during the mid-1600s Ningbo’s web of border-crossing exchanges was subdued—but it did not fade away entirely. Transcontinental connections and their long history in the region continued to affect Ningbo’s residents. For instance, foreign textiles and furniture remained fashionable among the upper echelons of Chinese society, in Ningbo and elsewhere.7 Other Chinese consumption habits were impacted by the global transformations of the time. Maize had already become a familiar crop in China despite its origins in Mexico. Another New World crop, tobacco, had become so common that in 1639 the Chongzhen emperor imposed the death penalty on its sale in the capital.8 The imperial court had grown greatly concerned about farmers, particularly those in the lower Yangtze region, abandoning the cultivation of staple foods in favor of a more lucrative harvest that literally would go up in smoke.

24  A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

In addition, a high proportion of the silver that went through Zhu Zongyuan’s hands was visibly of foreign origins: under the late Ming dynasty, use of Spanish silver coins displaying the portraits of European monarchs and other non-Chinese motifs was widespread in coastal areas.9 Yet these Spanish coins were not necessarily made from European silver: during Zhu’s lifetime about half the metal’s worldwide supply was extracted in places like Potosí in present-day Bolivia. The end of this silver’s long journey was often Ming China, which as a large economy absorbed much of the global silver output, albeit its government tried to restrict imports.10 Furthermore, Ningbo had long been a magnet for domestic and foreign migration, and under many dynasties the port hosted sizable communities of Muslims as well as other traders from distant lands. Late Ming sources tell us that in the urban centers of economically strong regions like the Yangtze delta, knowing a foreigner personally was not unusual for a large part of the population.11 Hence when Zhu Zongyuan was walking the busy streets of Ningbo, people of visibly non-Chinese descent would still have been a fairly common sight in a city in which production facilities and merchant activities had existed for long periods. Among the migrants were Portuguese and other European traders who had been residing on islands off the Ningbo coast since the early 1600s. They called Ningbo a name that reflected translocal networks of exchange: Liampo.12 The name, which came to be widely used by Europeans, was probably taken from the Cantonese pronunciation, the mother tongue of most of the Chinese who served as interlocutors for Portuguese traders in that time.13 The presence of Europeans in the region was one facet of an epoch beginning in the fifteenth century in which transcontinental contacts became both greater in scale and more sustained in character. The crisis around the middle of the seventeenth century slowed this process but did not reverse its more long-term transformations. New maritime connections between different parts of the world were being established, and long-distance trade became much more significant;14 the intensifying commerce in commodities like cotton, sugar, pepper, and other spices linked regions together in new ways.15 In China, where the state was able to regulate much of the translocal

A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  25

exchanges, as well as elsewhere in Asia, this trade was usually much less dominated by European powers than many previous world-historical accounts have suggested. European merchants and missionaries were just one part of a colorful world in which many different players interacted.16 To a certain extent, the growing importance of transregional trade had similar effects in economically powerful regions on different continents.17 Chinese economic centers such as eastern Jiangnan and Zhu Zongyuan’s home region, northern Zhejiang, had many parallels with European production and consumption centers like the Netherlands or England.18 In such regions, population densities could reach levels before unknown, and in some cases they have not been surpassed even today.19 Moreover, in both the European and Chinese economic centers, a growing commercialization triggered a particularly dense growth of specialized market towns, and a protocapitalist economy led to an increase in free-floating labor hired on both short-term and longterm bases.20 During much of this period both areas experienced a significant growth of cities, commerce, and the diffusion of powerful new technologies related to the intensification of global trade.21 In these and other locations, literacy rates were rising, and the growing transregionalization of markets was accompanied by a rising social mobility.22 These connections and shared transformations were accompanied by new flows of knowledge and expertise. Merchants from different parts of the world began to share information about markets and prices in distant lands, and in some parts of maritime Asia an indigenized version of Portuguese became the lingua franca.23 New technologies and related human skills were carried across societal boundaries, often by experts who left their homelands to offer their services to distant rulers. Likewise, fresh knowledge about remote cultures was being disseminated in many societies, stimulating a cultural curiosity—not only within the educated strata of European society but in other parts of the world as well, China included. Some scholars have come to think about these similarities and interconnections through concepts such as Eurasian entanglements or even ideas of a specifically Eurasian early modernity.24 We should

26  A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

be careful not to read too much sameness into these shared patterns— despite all the circulation, crucial aspects of societal order and political and intellectual culture in many world regions, including China and Europe, remained distinct.25 Nevertheless, when we embed the  history of seventeenth-century Sino-European relations in their global contexts, the two macroregions no longer appear completely distinct. Indeed, many travelers of that period spoke of encountering familiar elements in different parts of the world. For instance, Jesuit reports about China did not tend to portray the large and distant kingdom as wholly outlandish or exotic.26 Instead, their accounts were written from their lived experiences of growing global entanglements— entanglements that were especially visible in maritime trade hubs like Ningbo.

EPOCHAL CRISES Zhu Zongyuan’s China was not in any kind of Golden Age—on the contrary, much of his life coincided with an epoch of decline, death, and destruction. For decades, the state appeared on the verge of complete destabilization, particularly from the early years of the seventeenth century onward, when China was hit by various crises that fed into one another. They would eventually become a stream of rebellions and foreign invasion that washed away the Ming dynasty. The more detailed aspects of this story read like a drama. Already during the last decades of the sixteenth century, the imperial court atop the Great Ming’s institutional edifice was corroded by opposing factions, corruption, and intrigues. Some emperors, or Sons of Heaven, withdrew voluntarily into their own private worlds; some were forced to do so. One example is the Tianqi emperor (r. 1620–1627), who spent much of his reign doing carpentry while the country experienced a first nadir under the de facto autocracy of the eunuch Wei Zhongxian (1568–1627). Other emperors died young, leaving even younger and ill-prepared successors; more  generally, the incumbents of high offices changed like flickering lights. The constellation of forces in the Ming central government and the entire state apparatus became so convoluted, so

A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  27

conflict ridden, that even very capable officials ended up in despair.27 In this situation, an increasing number of officials withdrew from state service, searching for fulfillment in more promising arenas. Other scholars did not even aspire to a career in the government. We can count Zhu Zongyuan in their ranks. Yet infighting and state-sector paralysis were not all that plagued the ailing dynasty. Starting in the early years of the seventeenth century and worsening in the 1630s, a series of bad harvests struck large swaths of the country. A combination of droughts, floods, and locusts did their share to take away the livelihood of a large number of people throughout the Ming state. Epidemics followed on this trail of destruction, and they hit a population weakened by starvation and malnutrition. The tottering bureaucratic system could do little to mitigate these calamities, especially since the cash-strapped Ming state had escalating military expenditures, and there was no public credit system in place for the state to borrow from. As a consequence, the Chinese court mustered brutal efforts to increase tax revenue, often hitting the peasant and craftsmen base the hardest. A hungry state was seeking revenue from its hungry population: in Ningbo, taxes doubled in the final years of the Ming dynasty,28 despite the already dire sufferings of the local population. China’s condition grew more and more desperate. Contemporary sources tell of the selling of children, infanticide, murder, despair, and displacement. It is small wonder that banditry and uprisings exploded in many parts of the Ming state, including Ningbo and its hinterland. During the 1620s and 1630s, the conscription of men from adjacent counties to serve as soldiers in northern China repeatedly triggered mutinies and turmoil. At the same time, various government agencies undertook antipiracy actions, resulting in much bloodshed. In 1627 Chinese troops fought against the marauder Lin Qilao, who was said to be collaborating with Dutch forces and had apparently gone so far as to declare himself king.29 In the mid-1630s, there were fierce battles against Liu Xiang, who used the fortune he had made on maritime trade to build his own armed forces.30 Liu eventually took his own life on one of his ships, but only after a prolonged conflict that left many regions, including the coastal areas of Ningbo,

28  A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

utterly destroyed. Also in more general terms, social anxiety and despair soon turned into local instability and conflict.31 Across much of the Ming state, the situation was not much better. Groups of outlaws and rebels, initially modest in size, grew significantly in the 1630s when Zhu was reaching adulthood, and many marauding troops (often underpaid because of the fiscal crisis) became renegade soldiers, sometimes linked to religious cults like the White Lotus sect. Together with other desperadoes, they formed ever larger armed groups—with the result that, after a few years, rebel armies several hundred thousand men strong were active in parts of China, particularly the central and northwestern provinces. In the early 1640s, after failing to join forces, the leaders of the largest armies began systematically acquiring territory.32 The most prominent rebel, Li Zicheng (1606–1645), who had even proclaimed a new dynasty, conquered Beijing in the spring of 1644, leaving the last regular Ming incumbent of the Dragon Throne, the Chongzhen emperor, with few options. He hanged himself at the age of thirty-three from a tree in the Forbidden City. But Li Zicheng’s Shun dynasty proved to be short-lived. Not because what was left of the Ming came together to destroy it but because of another force that had been a threat for some time. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, an alliance of nomadic groups (chiefly Jurchen but including Mongols and other communities) had grown into a coherent striking force under a charismatic leader. By the 1630s, this force was even better organized and equipped with military technology and experience. That was when many of the groups rearranged themselves under the name Manchu and proclaimed a new dynasty. The new ruling house, called Qing, already occupied territories northeast of the Great Wall,33 but no one would have guessed that it would rule until the early twentieth century and would be the last dynasty in Chinese history. The Qing’s moment of opportunity came when Ming general Wu Sangui offered them a temporary collaboration in the summer of 1644. Wu, the military leader of the Ming’s northeastern forces, refusing to succumb to rebel-turned-emperor Li Zicheng, placed his last hopes in an alliance with the Manchus. But after taking the Chinese capital later in 1644, the Manchu leaders turned the tables, putting a

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child into the yellow robes reserved for the Son of Heaven. They managed to quickly consolidate their power and gain legitimacy among some mighty Han-Chinese allies.34 Over the next few years their combined troops spread to the south, with important parts of the empire such as the Yangtze delta and Zhejiang province largely having fallen by the end of 1646. Within a year or so, they held a firm grip on most of the Chinese state. To be sure, the Ming had not been completely eradicated into the late 1640s. Pockets of resistance, often centered on offshoots of the Ming imperial family, continued until the early 1680s, but long before that it was clear that the Ming had been consigned to history. The successful establishment of the Qing dynasty meant that a group that a generation ago had amounted to no more than seventy thousand warriors had conquered an empire that held ten percent of the world’s landmass and 35 percent of its population.35 The Qing leadership struggled to strike a balance between its goals of preserving its Manchu identity and redefining itself as the legitimate force ruling over China. Its early policies reflect this tension: on the one hand every Chinese male was forced to adopt the typical Manchu hairstyle of shaved forehead and long braid in the back 36 and, on the other, the new dynasty was eager to resume the Confucian state examinations, albeit now with a quota system guaranteeing a share of degrees and posts to Manchu aspirants. Parts of Chinese society, particularly in the north, showed a high degree of support for the Qing, particularly when it was apparent that the Qing would be able to reunite and reconsolidate the empire. In the south, however, there was more resistance, especially within educated circles. Hundreds of literati committed suicide when they realized that Ming rule could not be quickly reinstated after the collapse of Li Zicheng.37 Some regions put up a stiff fight when Manchu troops and their Chinese allies began moving south, but this armed opposition broke down when it became clear that no coordinated movement against the new rulers was likely to emerge. A growing wave of Chinese cities and regions surrendered voluntarily in order to avoid the harsh punishments of the new rulers. These waves of devastation and misfortune would also sweep over Ningbo, forcing people like Zhu to maneuver carefully to stay afloat.

30  A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

With much of China on fire, Zhu was likely not aware of the fact that the mid-seventeenth-century crisis had regional and global dimensions. 38 In fact, Zhu’s lifetime of about 1616 to 1660 coincided with a tempestuous, violent period that some historians call the global crisis of the mid-seventeenth century, as significant parts of the world witnessed major wars and uprisings. The most prominent examples are the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe, the dynastic transition in China, the Scottish and Danish revolutions, the Mughal civil war, and the successful revolts in Portuguese Brazil. The basically synchronic occurrence of these crises has triggered a wealth of world historical reflections and academic debates. Some scholars interpret them as the result of a combination of population growth and inflexible administrative structures that could not withstand economic and political challenges.39 Other explanations center on the availability of new military technologies,40 and several studies stress climate, focusing on the global cooling of the early and mid-1600s and its negative effect on harvests.41 The various theaters of crisis were not unconnected: warfare in one region could have significant effects on another. For instance, the Thirty Years’ War in Europe—combined with the nearly depleted silver mines in the Americas and the political crisis in Japan—meant that global demand for silver rose, leading to a shortage in China.42 This hit the Chinese economy in a very vulnerable spot and dealt another blow to the Ming’s strained tax system, aggravating the court’s fiscal problems. Moreover, the massive scale of fighting in the West hurt the Chinese economy as European consumption of silk declined ­d ramatically, weakening the corresponding Chinese export industries. During this period, of course, hardly anyone could fathom these connections or the underlying circuits of exchange that crossed the globe. Instead people suffered locally, whether in Hangzhou or Hamburg. Zhu Zongyuan was among them.

FINDING ONE’S WAY DURING STORMY TIMES Since Zhu Zongyuan died around 1660, he did not live long enough to see the end of all hostilities between the last Ming loyalists and the

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Qing dynasty. Yet for more than a decade, he lived in a world in which the worst calamities had ended. The institutional scaffolding of the Chinese state was changing, but, more important, it was regaining structure and stability. According to some estimates, the protracted death agonies of the Ming and birth of the Qing had cost around fifteen million lives: soon, though, these wounds seemed to have been afflicted in a bygone age. In these times, there were worse places to live in China, particularly further to the north and northwest, where natural disasters and warfare struck hardest. Yet Zhu’s hometown was far from spared by events that the contemporary European context might have described as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In the years of government collapse, particularly around 1644—after the Ming throne had fallen but before new rulers arrived in the south—a complex configuration of local elites, bandits, and militia competed for influence in the Ningbo region, at significant human cost.43 One or two years later, a storm of Qing troops swept over the region, and we have accounts of horrendous brutalities against civilians. One resident of Ningbo wrote of decapitated corpses lying on the street, pools of blood, and weeping survivors.44 This complicated situation did not come to a sudden end in 1646, the year the Manchus took over much of Zhejiang province. There was fierce fighting between groups willing to surrender and others determined to resist, like the “Eternally Loyal Army,” which was active in the mountains surrounding Ningbo.45 This tension culminated in 1647, when anti-Manchu forces supported by a freebooter based in the nearby Zhoushan Islands, planned an anti-Manchu insurrection. They were betrayed and the coup failed, leading to a wave of mass arrests and executions that affected large parts of Ningbo’s educated upper classes.46 In the aftermath of the failed coup, the Qing slowly managed to consolidate their authority over regional politics. Their forces rooted out the last pockets of resistance in the Siming Mountains near Ningbo, and at the same time they confirmed former Ming officials who had surrendered to them in their administrative positions. The new government quickly held new state examinations, which—in terms of structure and content—were widely based on the earlier

32  A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

system. The goal was to recruit a body of officials loyal to the new dynasty; hence the state also admitted candidates from provinces that had not yet officially surrendered.47 As it had during the Ming dynasty, Zhejiang province produced many successful examinees, with a very high proportion of them from counties adjacent to Ningbo.48 The new stability was briefly interrupted a few years later by the northern campaign of Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), which occupied the district of Ningbo, but Qing troops retook the region a few months later49—and from then on the city was untroubled by armed conflict. By that time, however, Zhu Zongyuan had almost reached the end of his short life. How did he fare during these frenzied and calamitous times? While we have a fairly detailed understanding of the fate of his hometown during the long Ming-Qing transition period, and we know that he belonged to the “conquest generation,”50 little information is available about Zhu himself. For instance, there is no account of his life in the local gazetteers (difangzhi) that covered the political, social, and cultural achievements of the regional gentry. These works provide information on local elites of the past and present, including the biographies of individuals who were of at least some significance in the region. Yet they are silent on Zhu Zongyuan: it might be that our Ningbo Christian was just not prominent enough to be included in works such as the Ningbo fuzhi, edited by Cao Binren in 1733. Or perhaps Zhu was omitted from this mid-Qing work because at that time Christians were considered a sensitive topic in the Chinese state. The scattered body of sources sheds light only on bits and pieces of Zhu Zongyuan’s biography, including his position on some of the most burning questions of his time. In searching for Zhu, we need to embark on a fact-finding mission that leads us to primary sources from divergent historical realms, ranging from global Catholicism to local Ningbo society. Working with fragmentary evidence, this detective work sometimes needs to get into a level of detail that can seem tedious. One example reveals the challenges of getting a grasp on Zhu Zongyuan— the question of his year of birth. Zhu’s birth year is not mentioned explicitly in any of the known sources. Fang Hao, a Chinese historian of around the middle of the

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twentieth century, was the author of what is thought to be the first scholarly biographical sketch of Zhu, assumed he was born around 1609.51 Fang reached this conclusion by piecing together bits of disparate information contained in Zhu’s works. A preface to an early edition of Zhu’s Responses to a Guest’s Questions notes the author was twenty-three when he wrote it,52 and a subsequent preface in a 1697 reprint gives the same age.53 Furthermore, the main text of Responses to a Guest’s Questions contains the observation that the Jesuits had been in China for fifty years.54 Local records consistently give the ninth year of the reign of Emperor Wanli (1581) as the year the missionaries arrived, and Fang Hao determined that the text was written around 1632, and thus twenty-three-year-old Zhu Zongyuan must have been born around 1609. However, the passage from the Responses to which Fang refers is best seen as a rough indication, not a solid historical fact. By commenting that the Jesuits had already been in the country for fifty years, Zhu was not seeking to make a historically accurate statement but to bolster his point that the foreign missionaries could hardly have had ulterior motives, since none had come to light during the decades since their arrival. We find another clue about Zhu’s birth in a manuscript history of Asia written in Portuguese by Antonio de Gouvea (1592–1677), a missionary in China from 1636 to 1665. At the beginning of the nineteenth chapter, de Gouvea reports that another missionary, Luigi Buglio (1606–1682), was temporarily entrusted with leading the large mission in Hangzhou after the death of João Froes (1591–1638).55 In the same passage, de Gouvea mentions that “Cosmas,” alias Zhu Zongyuan, traveled from Ningbo to Hangzhou to the Jesuit outpost that year to be baptized.56 Both events must have happened around the same time, and since Froes died in July 1638, this must also be the year of Zhu Zongyuan’s baptism. Assuming that the twenty-three-year-old Zhu was already a convert to the Christian faith by the time he wrote his Responses to a Guest’s Questions, having previously authored a smaller pro-Christian text titled Treatise on the Destruction of Superstition,57 he cannot have been born before 1615, and in all probability was born later.58 A third piece of evidence comes in the aforementioned preface to the Responses found in an early edition of the text that survived at the

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Bibliothèque nationale de France. Zhu’s work entered its collections as part of the old Bibliothèque royale but was long unknown there because it was catalogued under the wrong character.59 The preface’s author, Zhang Nengxin, mentions that he first saw the unpublished manuscript in the summer of 1640.60 Together the clues reveal that Zhu must have been twenty-three years old between 1638 and 1640 and therefore born some time between 1615 and 1617. Yet we do not know much about the concrete circumstances of Zhu’s birth or parentage. We can be certain that he was born into a family that, at least in the past, had belonged to the upper echelons of Ningbo society. Zhu Zongyuan’s grandfather, Zhu Ying, held various public offices, including that of assistant to the regional surveillance commissioner (ancha qianshi). This was a fairly high position in the kingdom’s administration—placing him, in the Ming bureaucracy’s rigid ranking system, at rank 5a in the imperial bureaucracy’s ninetier system.61 We can safely assume that Zhu Zongyuan’s family had not lost all influence since the glorious days of his grandfather. At the same time, we cannot tell to what extent the tragedies of Zhu’s era affected their standards of living and family relations. We do know, however, that as a young man, he had the means to receive a general education, which at that time only about 10 percent of the male population had. Subsequently, he had the privilege of an intensive Confucian edification geared toward the official examination system, in which he had considerable success. While Zhu did not attain the highest academic degree (this could be gained only in the triennial examinations held in the capital), he passed the lowest of the official three examination levels in 1646, which secured him an official title as an “officially registered student” (shengyuan). For a long time, the latter came with significant social prestige and a government stipend, which was originally meant to support study in the official state schools to prepare for the exams that led to higher degrees. Even with a steep rise in the number of officially registered students during the second half of the Ming dynasty, they still represented a small proportion of the Chinese population. In the mid- to late seventeenth century, estimates suggest that there were between thirty thousand and fifty thousand of these

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degree holders—of a population of one hundred fifty to two hundred million.62 Yet Zhu Zongyuan was not content with having climbed the first rung of the Chinese examination ladder. Two years later, in 1648, he passed the first examination for the rank of juren (literally, “recommended man”) held under the Qing dynasty. In the late Ming dynasty, this would have been even more prestigious since this degree was harder to obtain than it had been in earlier centuries because, while the number of lower-degree holders had swollen, the quota for juren remained capped. By the 1630s, only 2.6 percent of all officially registered students passed the higher provincial exams and became recommendees.63 Or to put it into a larger context, around this time the juren degree was held by about 0.03 to 0.05 percent of the total population.64 Zhu’s success in the imperial examinations gives us a sense of not only his knowledge base and social status but also his political stance during a decisive stage in seventeenth-century Chinese history. His participation in the examinations of 1646 and 1648—the first in his region held under the Qing dynasty—reveals that Zhu was not among the active opponents to Manchu rule in China, nor had he withdrawn into a path of passive resistance. To the contrary, Zhu must have accepted the new dynasty early on, and he probably belonged to the large section of Ningbo’s upper classes who supported the Qing in order to prevent the city’s destruction—even before the arrival of the Manchu troops.65 However, we do not know whether Zhu took this position out of conviction, despair, or another motivation.66 What we do know is that Zhu’s cooperation with the new government was not the norm in Ningbo scholarly circles in these years. As the 1647 plot to overthrow the Manchus’ rule over the city shows, a large number of local elites were far from accepting the new dynasty at the time Zhu Zongyuan passed his first exam and was awarded the state title of officially registered student. Even fellow Chinese Christians or people close to Christian circles were actively opposed to the Manchus and suffered consequences including the death penalty for their stance.67 One of them was Zhang Nengxin, who in 1642, only a few years earlier, was close enough to Zhu to author a preface for his

36  A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

Responses to a Guest’s Questions. Zhang’s text contains some of the most personal remarks about Zhu Zongyuan that have survived to the present day. This division among acquaintances was not unusual: many Chinese Catholics and missionaries ended up on opposite sides when it came to the question of how to deal with the new Qing rulers.68 It seems likely that those taking a different route would have accused Zhu of sycophancy and opportunism. Perhaps he explained his decision by arguing that now, above all, stability and peace were needed. Presumably later, during the 1650s, when Qing rule was finding balance and legitimacy, the personal tensions that divided families, friends, and fellow believers had eased. Passing the exams in the late 1640s was easier than it had been before and would be after: there were higher rolls for the juren examinations in the first round held under the Qing, which means a higher than usual proportion of candidates passed them.69 The new government was in dire need of new officers from the Han majority population—even as it adopted a quota system to build a group of scholar-officials of Manchu descent. In addition, the competition in the local Ningbo exams of 1646 and the provincial exams of 1648 in Hangzhou must have been more limited than usual. Many Ningbo literati had been arrested or killed during the Qing takeover; others may have gone into hiding or just refused to take a state examination under what they saw as an illegitimate government. In any case, even after having been awarded two degrees, Zhu, like many others, did not embark on an official career: his name does not appear on any corresponding list. We do not have any details—they remain invisible in the darkness of the past. However, we can at least exclude the possibility that Zhu’s career in public service was blocked because of his Christian faith. This is because the later Manchu circuit inspector of Ningbo and its surrounding regions, Tong Guoqi (d. 1684), whose wife was a convert, had long been associated with Catholic circles.70 Tong, a relative of the Shunzhi empress, was eventually baptized in 1675, yet even before that, he supported the construction of churches and was in close contact with missionaries and converts. Two ­pro-Christian books published at this time with Zhu Zongyuan’s

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involvement include prefaces by the circuit inspector.71 We can thus safely assume that Zhu enjoyed good connections with the new governing apparatus in the region.

LEARNING, BELIEVING, AND BELONGING During Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, a juren and his family enjoyed high prestige in their local community, which translated into a certain amount of influence. At the same time, however, the standing of an official career had changed significantly. Over a protracted period, the distinction between the learned gentry and merchant groups had blurred.72 This was especially conspicuous in wealthy Ningbo: already in the beginning of the Ming period, the arable land around the city had become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few families. As property ownership became a basis of economic activity, many members of the upper classes became Confucian entrepreneurs—that is, scholars who sought to profit from trade and agriculture.73 Such developments further eroded the traditional roles of scholar-officials. The changing elite structures did not produce only winners, of course. In a parallel development, many scholarly families declined financially, particularly those unskilled in the art of gain. In their ranks, the versions of Confucianism that prospered took a tough stance on wealth and power, even sometimes going so far as to reject the state.74 Many degree holders thus opted to involve themselves in the community without holding political office, becoming engaged with charitable organizations or religious groups, for instance. For some, this was out of necessity, since there were few available state positions; for others, it was by preference, since the Ming crisis made government service unattractive, sometimes even dangerous.75 In any case, a degree, no matter how hard earned, was no longer considered an entry ticket into China’s bureaucratic apparatus. All this had great repercussions for patterns of self-organization and the standings of various religions within China’s educated circles. As a general trend, a greater orientation toward the private sphere became apparent, not only with regard to professional and economic

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life but also in terms of religion and ethics. Forms of religiosity with a relatively distant relationship to the state—Buddhism, Daoism, and some syncretistic beliefs—experienced a revival even among the most elite milieus.76 This transformation was clearly visible in Zhu’s home region, which had long been home to influential lay Buddhist centers.77 In seventeenth-century Ningbo, Buddhist monasteries and temples enjoyed considerable financial support from wealthy families.78 Among these was the famous Louxin Temple, founded in the Tang dynasty and still in existence today.79 Zhu Zongyuan would have been well acquainted with the overlapping worlds of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism at a young age. Most probably some of his clan members or family acquaintances practiced Buddhism, while others were closer to Daoist priests, and a third group concentrated chiefly on Confucian texts. Zhu’ first book, Responses to a Guest’s Questions, reveals a solid understanding of these religions. Moreover, in a later work, A Summary of World Salvation, Zhu points out that he had long studied the “Three Teachings,”80 a term used for the Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions. Anything else would have been highly unusual, since aspiring young men during the late Ming dynasty were expected to be familiar with these teachings. Later on, like many Catholic converts from the upper echelons of Chinese society, Zhu turned against this pluralistic world, attacking the teachings of Buddha and Laozi and seeing his Christian faith not as departing from Confucianism but as its sole enrichment. The teachings of Confucius, or more generally the “School of Scholars” (rujia), constituted the backbone of Zhu’s education. Preparation for the imperial examinations required many years of intensive study of the Confucian classics and their commentaries; candidates also had to be well versed in Chinese history, rites, and classical literature.81 Zhu needed to know the official interpretation of the classics, which was still largely based on the teachings of eminent Song scholars such as Zhu Xi (1130–1200). Yet while there was an official line, a wide variety of Confucian schools flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century, and from reading Zhu’s works one gains the impression that he was intimately conversant with these currents as well.

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We cannot be sure whether Zhu was involved with any of the Confucian associations active in Ningbo during his lifetime.82 We know more about the circumstances surrounding Zhu Zongyuan’s interest in the Learning of Heaven, which led to his baptism at a rather young age. Zhu refers to his pathway to conversion in one of the rare passages in which he speaks personally. At the beginning of his second monograph, A Summary of World Salvation, he states that he had become painfully aware of the brevity of life, the vanity of worldly success, the limits of human cognition, and the idea that even the spirits must be subordinated to a higher being. He further adds that he had studied the Three Teachings carefully and eventually found that none of them offered a key to the real and correct meaning of life, at least not in their current state.83 After mentioning his reading of Christian books, Zhu writes, “I began, quite simply and without the slightest reservation, to stand up and say, ‘This is the Way! This is the Way!’ I used to deem my opinion right, and now it really is right . . . How did I come to be fortunate enough to hear of this principle?”84 In his earlier Treatise on the Removal of Doubts about Christianity, Zhu writes that he was awoken all of a sudden from an unreal world of dreams and appearances by the word of the Lord of Heaven. 85 This passage is embedded in a dream metaphor that forms the beginning and end of this brief text: in his introduction, Zhu describes his spiritual awakening ( jue) with the discovery of Christianity, and the text closes with the observation that if his audience would recognize the underlying principle of heaven and earth, they could likewise wake from their dreams and live in a different, higher reality. During Zhu’s time, accounts of a personal enlightenment were a common topos in various branches of Chinese literature, including Buddhist treatises, general reflections on morality, and neo-Confucian texts.86 Usually operating with the concept of having spontaneously found “the Way” (Dao), this trope had its origins in Buddhism, particularly the Chan branches prominent in China. We could thus read Zhu’s words as primarily a literary preamble, but there is no stronger reason to assume that our hero had not indeed experienced a feeling of sudden realization that he regarded as a defining moment of his life.

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It is quite possible that he converted very quickly, perhaps following an epiphany. Other personal considerations that may have prompted Zhu Zongyuan’s conversion to Christianity remain largely obscure. He might have been in search of a spiritual foothold in a time of social upheaval and political crisis, and he may have felt some dissatisfaction with the Confucian schools of his time. How such frustration then translated itself into a belief in the Christian God is a question that cannot be answered completely—the source material is too limited to come to a clear conclusion. We can be sure, however, that what may have been a rapid decision to be baptized does not mean that Zhu did not engage intellectually with the Christian religion—indeed, his oeuvre demonstrates just the opposite. Moreover, as in the case of many other Chinese Christians, we should not misread Zhu’s “conversion” to Christianity as a renunciation of all other traditions.87 Even under his new baptismal name, Cosmas, he continued to identify with Confucian teachings—and to their norms and values—as perfectly compatible with the word of the Lord of Heaven, the Christian God. This is not to say that he was uncritical of some interpretations of the Confucian tradition, just as he was staunchly opposed to Buddhism and regarded Daoism as not much more than a scam. However, it is far from clear whether his baptism conditioned such disapproval or merely gave it a new articulation. Jesuit sources reveal that Zhu Zongyuan did not grow up in a Christian environment and that he was the first member of his immediate family to convert. His parents, according to Antonio de Gouvea’s aforementioned manuscript, were initially opposed to the European religion, and Zhu Zongyuan did not tell them about his baptism until he had returned from Hangzhou. Yet de Gouvea adds that his parents became interested in Christianity after listening to their son, who then invited the Jesuit father Luigi Buglio to Ningbo. Zhu’s mother was apparently baptized during Buglio’s visit.88 Another unpublished Jesuit manuscript, the Sinarum Historia by Thomas I. Dunin-Szpot, probably completed around the turn of the eighteenth century, gives further information about Zhu’s family background.89 Drawing on seventeenth-century Jesuit sources, DuninSzpot reports a visit to Ningbo by João Monteiro (1602–1648) in 1641,

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mentioning the three brothers Peter, Cosmas, and Matthew “de familia Chu Literatorum”—that is, of the literati family Zhu.90 The Christian names of the three brothers indicate they had all been baptized. In fact, during the seventeenth century it was not unusual for entire nuclear families to convert together and to be christened at the same time.91 Dunin-Szpot further writes that the three brothers were known for their noble character and profound faith, and he emphasizes Cosmas’s intelligence, diligence, kindness, and friendly disposition.92 The Chinese names of Zhu’s brothers are not known for certain.93 While Zhu and his family were not among the first Christians in Ningbo, they were probably nonetheless considered early converts by later generations of Christians. Missionary activity in that city had started when Zhu was a child, with the Jesuit Rodrigo de Figueiredo (1594–1642) paying a visit to the Ningbo district in 1627. A year earlier, a Chinese convert had returned from Beijing and set up several communities in the countryside surrounding Ningbo.94 When de Figueiredo visited the city the following year, he seems to have baptized more than eighty believers, laying the groundwork for the Ningbo Catholic community95 to which Zhu Zongyuan later belonged. Presumably the Christian texts that Zhu indicates he had read at a very young age came from the collections of other Catholics in his hometown.96 Zhu Zongyuan was evidently a prominent figure in the Ningbo Christian community particularly after 1647, when the change in dynasties was consolidated. In addition to his connections with the new political leadership and, presumably, with significant parts of the local elites as well, Zhu maintained close relations with European missionaries. Several such visits are recorded: for instance, in addition to fathers like João Monteiro, Zhu Zongyuan invited the younger Manuel Dias (1574–1659), then head of the mission station in Hangzhou, to visit his home city.97 Later, the presence of Jesuit missionaries in Ningbo and its vicinity thinned out. From 1646 to 1650, Martino Martini (1614–1661) was the only Jesuit father in the entire province of Zhejiang, and he would have been able to visit the city only sporadically.98 There are no records of Jesuits visiting Ningbo during the 1650s, but it is possible that Francesco

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Brancati (1607–1671), who lived in nearby Shanghai beginning in 1649, came a few times.99 In other words, the extreme staff shortage that had plagued the Jesuits in China since the 1640s also affected the community in Ningbo. This meant limited opportunities for personal contact with missionaries, particularly for a man living outside centers of Christian activity such as Beijing, Shanghai, or Hangzhou. During his final years, Zhu Zongyuan moved closer to Dominican missionaries, who had begun concentrating their missionary activities on Zhejiang and Fujian provinces.100 The Dominican activity worried the Jesuits, leading to calls for reinforcements. In a 1651 letter to the order’s superior general in Rome, for instance, Franceso Brancati requested more missionaries to prevent the mendicants from taking over the Jesuit mission in Zhejiang.101 Relationships between the two orders had been tense since the Dominicans’ arrival in the 1630s, with the Jesuits often seeing their activities as not only competition but also a disruption of their China mission.102 The Dominicans’ visits to important places such as Ningbo were likely perceived in Jesuit circles as a Dominican intrusion into a Christian community that had long been under Jesuit tutelage. Political as well as interecclesiastical rivalries reaching back to Europe made the already strained relationship even more difficult from the mid-1640s onward. To what extent did Zhu Zongyuan know of the global and local competition between various branches of the Catholic Church, and how concerned might he have been? These questions are difficult to answer: we can safely assume that Zhu was aware that the ecclesia catholica was not always a haven of love, friendship, and harmony. For one thing, it was common for highly educated converts to be drawn into at least the theological aspects of the rivalries that existed all the way up to the Holy See. For example, the Jesuits would sometimes ask learned converts for their opinions on the Rites Controversy and other contentious issues.103 The Dominicans organized meetings with Christian scholars in various locations, including Zhejiang, at which they discussed their arguments with the Jesuits. One such gathering is known to have taken place in Ningbo in 1659, with as many as seven Dominican missionaries participating.104

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It is unknown whether Zhu attended this meeting, for his health may already have deteriorated. We only know that a year later, it was the Dominican Juan Bautista de Morales (1597–1664) who recorded Zhu’s untimely death. In fact, Morales himself gave Zhu Zongyuan the last rites, and he did so in Ningbo.105 As Morales notes in his Relatio et Libellus Supplex, written in Zhejiang and published as part of a larger work in 1699, Zhu Zongyuan died in 1660.106 The passage identifies Zhu as a learned man who was highly knowledgeable about Christian matters and the author of the Responses to a Guest’s Questions, Zhu’s mostread work.

2 A GLOBALIZING ORGANIZATION AND CHINESE CHRISTIAN LIFE

A WRITER’S TRACES Toward the end of his life, Zhu Zongyuan could not look back at an exceptionally large oeuvre; nevertheless, he had created a good number of texts. Two monographs and several published essays formed the main body of his writings; he also contributed to pieces written by Chinese converts and European missionaries. The texts Zhu authored almost exclusively endorsed the Learning of Heaven—that is, they deal with an amalgam of religious, ethical, and political questions. Yet in contrast to some other converts, he never delved deeply into subjects like European mathematics or world geography; nor was he active as a writer on other topics that were common in China around his lifetime, ranging from popular literature to travel guides. Zhu himself certainly did not conceive of his writings as specifically “Christian,” and neither should we. To be sure, he shared key elements of the Gospel with his readers, but all his texts were written within the orbit of Confucianism, and they were meant as an intervention in what Zhu saw as a critical period in that tradition. Generally, we can situate Zhu Zongyuan’s works in two major landscapes of book production and circulation. On the one hand, they belong to the history of seventeenth-century Chinese books. On the other, they need to be understood in the context of the global spread of Catholic

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books during of that period. The Chinese book market of the late Ming and early Qing period was impacted by the general crises of that time, but it was nevertheless flourishing. In fact, Zhu Zongyuan’s home region of eastern Jiangnan and northern Zhejiang province was an important hub of Chinese book culture. Here a comparatively high ­educational level among the general population, especially in some urban areas, guaranteed a strong readership base. This is small wonder since average living standards in this economically powerful region had long been among the highest in China, and the same had been the case with literacy rates. By and large, however, the book market as it had evolved since the middle of the Ming dynasty reflected the fragmentation of a high culture that had been quite strictly detached from popular culture.1 Now the two flowed into each other, as the wealthy bought books in genres ranging from novels to pornography. At the same time, the market conditions continued to be favorable for religious books and morally edifying texts ranging from examination primers to Buddhist literature. For instance, literature in favor of spiritual syncretism and a rapprochement between Buddhism and Confucianism was common at the time Zhu was writing. In this environment, pro-Christian works like Zhu Zongyuan’s were thus not out of the ordinary. While it was less common to profess Christianity than Buddhism, literature looking to synthesize different religions constituted a flourishing genre. Like other religious texts, whether Christian or otherwise, Zhu’s usually used rather colloquial language. However, while he kept his tone approachable, Zhu included such a wealth of hidden or overt references to the Confucian classics in some text segments that only the highly educated could have grasped their meaning. Perhaps less surprisingly, also as physical products, Christian books in China did not break with Chinese conventions at the time. While movable type was becoming more conventional, the literature associated with the Learning of Heaven was usually produced by copiers and engravers who carved it in mirror image on wooden blocks—scraping off the surface of the block around the characters.2 During Zhu’s

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lifetime, the city of Ningbo, along with places like Suzhou and Hangzhou, was one of the centers for the manufacture of books.3 We should not, however, neglect the second major historical context in which Zhu Zongyuan’s works were situated: the global Catholic book market. Indeed, by the time Zhu was writing his books in Ningbo, texts affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church were being printed in many languages, from Mesoamerican tongues in the West to Japanese in the East.4 In most of the world, the Christian literature translated into non-European languages was chiefly liturgical or devotional texts. China was the exception, since a substantial body of texts produced by  Jesuit missionaries, their converts, or mixed teams dealt with fields like European science or geography. According to one estimate for the seventeenth century, of a total of 590 publications, at least 120, or about 20 percent, focused on subjects not directly related to Christianity.5 The Jesuits very quickly sought to use the favorable conditions of the Chinese book market for their advantage: there were, after all, few parts of the world where a substantial portion of the population could both read and afford to buy books.6 The Jesuits’ dissemination of European science, cartography, mnemotechnics, and other areas of knowledge into Chinese formed part of their proselytization effort. Since a substantial part of China’s upper classes was eager to learn about erudite traditions from afar, the hope was that this would create trust and build acceptance for the spread of Christianity. In some cases, like the highly prominent converts Xu Guangqi and Li Zhizao, this indeed worked—their interest in European science probably was the beginning of their conversion processes.7 In many texts, the Jesuits were far from hiding their own cultural background behind a screen of universal science and ConfucianChristian syntheses. For instance, already at an early stage important European theological works were at least partly translated into ­Chinese8—without much consideration whether the outlandish concepts in this literature would alienate a Chinese readership. How successful this combined policy of enculturation and translation was on a wider scale, however, is hard to assess. It is undeniable that as the seventeenth century progressed, it became increasingly difficult to

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gain converts from the highest level of Chinese society. An assessment of private late Ming collections suggests that works about European science were often purchased by nonconverted Chinese readers, whereas most religious works by Chinese Christians and Western ­missionaries seem not to have achieved such wide distribution.9 Much of the openly pro-Christian literature in China thus probably circulated mainly among believers and perhaps in their immediate surroundings. Here China was in line with the global Catholic book during the seventeenth century. Across the ecclesiastical world, Christian texts were produced first and foremost for an in-group of converts, and in many different languages they put forth the key contents of Catholicism, usually in a localized way. Zhu Zongyuan’s writings share many narratives, topics, and concepts with a large number of other Christian texts published under the names of either Jesuit missionaries or Chinese converts. An author’s originality was not a primary concern, and the charge of plagiarism was not a big fear during the late Ming.10 How can we go about situating Zhu’s writings? We can see them as nodes in the production of Chinese Christian texts during the transition between the Ming and the Qing dynasties. He adopted many elements from existing literature in this genre, and others in turn drew from him. In fact, Zhu contributed to publications by a number of missionaries—including parts of Thomas à Kempis’s (ca. 1380–1471) De Imitatione Christi, which were translated into Chinese by Manuel Dias. They were published posthumously, in 1680, as a book titled Golden Book on Contempt of the World (Qingshi jinshu).11 Zhu also arranged for the printing of another full-length publication by Dias, the Detailed Explanation of the Ten Commandments of the Holy Learning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shengjiao shijie zhiquan),12 For this book, Zhu wrote one of the prefaces, in which he describes the essence of the Pentateuch and particularly praises the Ten Commandments, which in his view surpassed the wisdom of all books ever written. There is also an introduction by Zhu Zongyuan in João Monteiro’s Notes of the Learning of Heaven on the Distinction between [Orthodox and Heterodox] Ways of Showing Respect (Tianxue bianjing lu), in which he describes respect as the root of all virtue.13 True respect, Zhu writes,

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should be shown not only to one’s parents and to worldly leaders but also and above all to God, who created the universe and looks upon mankind as his children. When a man worships the Lord of Heaven with all his heart, he will, Zhu writes, be morally cleansed and saved from eternal damnation. Zhu also edited this text by Monteiro as well as Tianxue sijing (The four mirrors of the Learning of Heaven) and Introduction to the Learning of Heaven (Tianxue lüeyi) by the same author. Furthermore, Zhu was involved with producing the Anthologies of SelfCorrection (Tizheng bian) by Girolamo de Gravina (1603–1662), a Jesuit who was partly stationed in Hangzhou. Moreover, he contributed to  a  translation of the early modern scholastic Francisco Suárez’s (1548–1617) works with which the Jesuit Martino Martini was occupied from 1648 to 1650. Martini’s work remained unfinished, however, since he was summoned to Rome in 1651.14 Zhu Zongyuan wrote a number of texts on his own.15 His first published writing appears to have been a short piece—no more than seven or eight double pages on the typical woodblock prints of his time, which put two pages on one sheet of paper. The brief work is titled Treatise on the Destruction of Superstition (Pomilun). The work broadly outlines the idea of the essential unity of Christianity and Confucian teaching. Except for a few minor modifications, this text is identical to the Treatise on the Removal of Doubts about Christianity (Tianzhu shengjiao huoyi lun). The exact date of the publication of this latter work is not known because only a reprint from 1680 has been preserved.16 The response to this brief publication seems to have disappointed the young Zhu. Zhang Nengxin mentions in his aforementioned introduction to the Responses to the Questions of a Guest (Da kewen) that Zhu Zongyuan decided to write this second, lengthier pro-Christian text when his Treatise failed to have the desired effect.17 Zhang, who would later find himself on the opposite side of the Manchu question, relates an interesting tale about the fate of the second manuscript. The original draft of the Responses to a Guest’s Questions, a book-length publication, apparently got lost. This happened after Zhang first saw the manuscript at the house of his friend Feng Shihu in the summer of 1640, when the group had already harbored

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suspicions about jealous individuals or evil spirits. Two years later, Zhang was visited by Zhu Zongyuan, and another acquaintance, who had just returned from a trip to southern China, Qian Fagong, happened to be present.18 It eventually turned out that Qian had copied Zhu’s text prior to his departure; relieved, the group burst into laughter. Zhu then wrote another ten chapters in the following year and asked Zhang Nengxin to look over the text.19 This first substantial work by Zhu Zongyuan, numbering fiftyeight double pages, is written as a dialogue between a Christian and a guest interested in his host’s faith but unfamiliar with that religion. The guest’s role is limited largely to questions and objections that presumably reflected common reservations about Christianity in contemporary literary circles. In Zhu’s work, such objections are invariably followed by much longer disquisitions on the part of the host. The dialogue begins with fairly general subjects such as the question of how Christianity could be reconciled with the primacy of Confucianism or the concept of China’s doctrinal triad (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism). The exchange then goes into greater detail on a number of topics. Various Confucian concepts are discussed in the light of Christian ideas, with the fictitious host sharing the Jesuits’ dislike for neo-Confucian schools. Buddhist ideas and customs are censured from a Christian-Confucian point of view, and so are Daoist ones. Much of the text focuses on the relationship of the Christian liturgy to Confucian rites, with a detailed discussion near the end about whether Christianity, an allegedly “barbaric” teaching, should be integrated into Chinese culture. In this passage, Zhu seeks to provide evidence for the integrity and good intentions of Western missionaries. The text concludes with the host’s lamenting the folly of the common people who refused to be converted and were therefore doomed to eternal punishment. The dialogue form lets Zhu introduce Christian elements in incremental steps, so that the second half of the book is where he discusses biblical themes, theological concepts, and the Catholic liturgy. The overall composition of the text reflects the changing attitude of the guest, which shifts from skeptical curiosity

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to the occasional concession, and, finally, to a real interest in the Christian faith. Thus one of the guest’s final questions is, “Should I decide to follow this course, what would I need to do?” Both figures in the Responses lack individual characteristics; even the shift in the guest’s attitude to Christianity is expressed purely in terms of the content of his questions, not through an emotional response. This form—a hypothetical dialogue arranged according to various themes—belongs to a tradition of Chinese texts and was very popular during the late Ming. In fact, an increasing number of examination essays in dialogue form were published at the end of the Ming period, which perhaps even went back to Buddhist influences.20 It also resembled a European genre of fictitious intellectual dialogues, one common in European scholarly and political texts in the period. Indeed, Jesuits stationed in different parts of the world used this genre,21 as did Matteo Ricci’s famous opus The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven first published in 1603. Zhu’s work can thus be placed in both a Chinese and a European cultural context, or, for that matter, somewhere between the two.22 Zhu Zongyuan’s second major work, the sixty-six-double-page A Summary of World Salvation (Zhengshi lüeshuo), is not structured as a dialogue. Instead, Zhu introduces Christian ideas to the reader in twentyeight chapters. In his introduction to A Summary, he describes the formal differences between his two major texts as follows: “In the beginning I enjoyed debate and published the Responses to the Questions of a Guest. Now I have arranged the main themes into many sections and named [the book] A Summary of World Salvation.”23 A Summary of World Salvation was likely published in a single edition during the early Qing dynasty, but the exact publication date is not known. Although a chapter about the creation of the world contains the sentence “only 6,844 years have passed from the creation of Heaven and Earth to the current Jiashen-year in the reign of Shunzhi [1644],”24 this specification does not necessarily mean the book was published in that year. It is in fact highly improbable that a work recognizing the new dynasty could have been published then in the Yangtze delta, which remained under Ming control until well into 1645. Moreover, in the quoted passage, Zhu writes that unlike his new

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book, he composed the Responses in their particular form because he had “enjoyed debate in the beginning.” The term shi (beginning) clearly refers to Zhu’s youth and implies that he wrote his Summary during a different stage of his life. Given the fact that Zhu did not write the Responses until shortly before 1640, it is not very likely that, just a few years later, Zhu would have implied that a significant interval of time had elapsed. Hence the mention of the first year of Emperor Shunzhi’s reign is presumably intended simply to make a concrete reference to the reign of the time. Since the Shunzhi period continued until after Zhu Zongyuan’s death, all we can be sure of is that Zhu wrote this work before he took ill in 1659 and that the book was probably published shortly after the manuscript had been completed. Zhu’s Summary is structured as follows: Following a vivid passage describing the importance of preparing in this life for the afterlife, the first chapters contrast the Learning of Heaven with the major teachings of China. Established by the Lord of Heaven himself and proclaimed on earth, Zhu argues, Christianity alone was without flaw. Confucianism, in contrast, although initially promising, had gone astray; Buddhism and Daoism are simply heresies. This is followed by a presentation of biblical themes such as the creation, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the theory of original sin, which Zhu sometimes links to the Confucian tradition. The next group of chapters focus on Christianity’s importance in an individual’s preparation for life after death, interwoven with descriptions of heaven and hell. The text then turns to rites: Zhu repudiates Buddhist and Daoist rituals on various grounds, treats Confucian practices in a more balanced manner, and, finally, introduces aspects of the Catholic liturgy to the reader. He then offers passages on a number of themes, including the importance of suffering, the difference between China and the rest of the world, and the high moral standards of the Jesuit missionaries. The final chapter depicts the imminent end of the world as described in the Revelation of Saint John and is likely intended to have a psychological effect on the reader. In contrast to all Zhu’s works mentioned thus far, his brief essay The Rites for the Veneration of Heaven and of the Gods of Earth and Harvest Serve to Venerate the “Lord on High” ( Jiaoshe zhi li suoyi shi shangdi ye)25 is not

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written explicitly from a Christian point of view. The text, just six pages in length, avoids the use of any specifically Christian terms like “Learning of Heaven” (tianxue) or “Lord of Heaven” (tianzhu). Nonetheless, Zhu takes an essentially Christian view of the Chinese state rituals. In the style of Confucian discourse, Zhu attempts to demonstrate that two of the most important imperial sacrifices were in fact tributes to the “Lord on High” (shangdi) mentioned in the Confucian classics. “The Rites” appears to be a published examination essay, something that was common in the late Ming.26 Not many works written by Chinese converts survived their authors when it came to circulation. Zhu was one of the authors distinguished enough to be an exception to this general rule. The reprints of the Treatise on the Removal of Doubts about Christianity and Responses to a Guest’s Questions in 1680 and 1697, respectively, demonstrate the continuing relevance of his publications.27 These reprints came out when the Jesuit communities faced a shrinking number of elite converts and were grappling with financial constraints. In the midst of such a situation, it was preferable to reprint older texts rather than to commission new ones.28 This meant that Zhu’s texts were still being read in Chinese Christian communities at the end of the seventeenth century—in fact, these publications, in particular the Responses to a Guest’s Questions, were subjects of debate in the context of the Rites Controversy. This controversy revolved around the question of whether Chinese rituals like ancestor worship could be practiced after conversion. The majority of Jesuits had long argued that customs of this kind were merely symbolic gestures without any religious significance, which is why they could be tolerated by the church. Other groups, particularly the mendicant orders, fundamentally disagreed with this policy. They defined ancestor worship and other rituals as elements of non-Christian religions, which would make their practice by baptized Christians a heresy. This translated into a wider friction in the Catholic Church—a friction that was conducted in Western languages and fought out largely without Chinese participation. In any case, the shock waves of the Rites Controversy were wide and high

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enough to reach the Holy See in Rome on several occasions. It took a long time to heal, well into the eighteenth century.29 Zhu’s works had an interesting afterlife in this controversy, in the use of passages from his works to argue against the Jesuit interpretation of Chinese ancestor worship. A brief passage from the Responses played a particularly important role in this context: in it Zhu has the fictitious guest ask whether Christians are permitted to bow down before sculptures of their ancestors. The figure of the host replies that it is by all means appropriate to honor one’s forebears for their virtue. However, the text continues, the practice of supplicating sculptures in the ancestral temples for good fortune and protection from misfortune was sacrilegious, since it implied that the deceased were regarded as divine rulers.30 The opponents of the Jesuits in the Rites Controversy pointed to this statement as evidence that the Jesuits misrepresented the role of these ceremonies as purely secular performances. In other words, Zhu’s disparaging attitude toward certain forms of ancestor worship was utilized as supporting evidence that a good Catholic should find this entire tradition unacceptable. The Franciscan China missionary Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero (1602–1669), for instance, composed a memorandum in September 1660 in which he quoted from various works, including the aforementioned passage in the Responses, as a confirmation of his hypothesis that the Chinese veneration of ancestors was steeped in superstition and thus should not be practiced by converts.31 Similarly, Domingo Navarrete (1618–1689), a Dominican missionary in China who later became archbishop in the Caribbean, wrote in 1676 that in his Responses, Zhu Zongyuan had himself come to the conclusion that Chinese ancestor worship was not compatible with Christianity.32 Another Dominican active in China, Juan Bautista de Morales (who reported Zhu’s death) likewise refers to a Latin translation of the same passage in Zhu’s work.33 Following this citation, Morales notes that Zhu Zongyuan proved that the Jesuits were wrong in portraying ancestor worship as a purely symbolic act without a trace of superstition. The Dominican further adds that as a Chinese scholar, Zhu’s

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understanding of his own cultural context was much deeper than that of the European missionaries, and thus his opinion carried more weight. He stresses that Zhu’s position was no isolated case but one shared by thousands of other educated Chinese Christians. Some critics of Chinese ancestor worship even charged the Jesuits with altering the most contentious passage in the original text in a new edition of the Responses. The accusation that passages in the Responses had been modified or removed altogether by the Jesuits was also made in a letter from the Jesuit father Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688), a major figure in the China mission, to Alessandro Filippucci (1632–1692), who in addition to other responsibilities then served as the superior of the mission station in Guangzhou. The letter, dated February 1685, indicates that the Dominican Gregorio López had complained about such modifications to a member of the Society of Jesus.34 In some rare documented cases, Zhu’s thought in and of itself was subject to criticism. For instance, the Franciscan Lucas Tomás, in a letter of 1701, describes the content of Zhu’s Summary and Responses as being informed by superstition, without, however, providing any further explanation for his point of view. 35 Yet it might well be that among European missionaries and in the ecclesiastical controversies in Europe, the afterlife of Zhu Zongyuan’s work consisted mainly of one contentious passage regarding Chinese ancestor worship. By contrast, in the Chinese Christian communities Zhu’s oeuvre probably continued to be read more widely. At least the fact that two of his works were reprinted in 1680 and 1697, respectively, suggests this. In that sense, Zhu’s works had a different history of reception in different languages. And they did so in spite of the fact that not a single one of them had been fully translated from its original Chinese into another tongue.

NEGOTIATING ENTANGLED COMMUNITIES Zhu Zongyuan’s written works circulated in many parts of China and even Europe. His personal influence, however, did not reach far beyond his home city, Ningbo, and even there he was not a towering figure

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whose reputation defined an era in local history. Nonetheless, his high climb up the imperial examination ladder likely gave him status and esteem in the local Christian communities. Indeed, the Catholic communities founded by the Jesuits did not challenge social hierarchies, unlike some more radical late Ming religious movements. In other words, official titles meant something to most Chinese Christians, and they also widely determined the social standing of an individual in their communities. In any case, a juren degree holder was not a common sight in the local Christian communities of that time. Some rare statistics from 1636, roughly a decade before Zhu passed his consecutive local and provincial examinations, reveal his exceptional status in local society. According to a contemporary estimate, there were then about forty thousand converts in China, but merely eleven carried the juren title, with about two hundred ninety having passed lower-level state examinations. 36 At the time, these numbers were roughly equal to the proportion of degree holders in Chinese society at large; in the decades to come, however, the proportion of Christian higher-degree holders started to shrink, which may have boosted the standing of distinguished men like Zhu Zongyuan. We do not have much information about specific positions Zhu Zongyuan held in the local Christian communities during the latter stages of his life, particularly after having succeeded in the 1648 provincial examinations. We do know that he drew the attention of Jesuit fathers and others who visited Ningbo and saw gaining the support of local elites as an essential part of their wider missionary strategy in China.37 This was still the case after the 1630s, when the number of converted scholars declined throughout much of Chinese society, and the Jesuits increasingly started relying more heavily on the imperial court in Beijing rather than on the patronage of local elites. The fact that Zhu’s name is mentioned in various Jesuit records as one of only a handful of Christians in Ningbo suggests that he had an exalted role. The same source that granted us insights into Zhu’s family also offers clues to his role among Ningbo Catholics. Thomas I. Dunin-Szpot’s manuscript reports that João Monteiro stayed with various people, including the three brothers Peter, Cosmas, and

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Matthew, since no church or Jesuit residence had yet been built in the city. He goes on to mention favorably the abundance of Christian statues in the brothers’ homes.38 Zhu’s home may have served as one of the regular meeting places for Christian communities in Ningbo; in fact, Zhu mentions that believers and missionaries regularly met at his house.39 This would not have been exceptional—particularly during the political turmoil of the late Ming and early Qing period; communal activities, including catechetical instruction and joint prayers, were often held in private homes. Depending on the availability of an ordained priest, even Mass could be celebrated there. Zhu’s contributions to Catholic life were not limited to Christian community building, however. Making use of modern parlance, we could call him a networker, a person who maintained close contacts with influential European missions throughout the Chinese state. The few recorded visits to his house by Jesuit fathers or Dominican brothers were likely only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, since Zhu in fact produced several texts in collaboration with Jesuit scholars, including such distinguished figures of the China mission as Manuel Dias the Younger, João Monteiro, and Martino Martini. This must indicate not only some kind of mutual appreciation but also personal meetings and at least a regular exchange of letters. In Chinese society, Zhu Zongyuan’s connections were more or less confined to his home region. He was not a man of a caliber of Xu Guangqi capable of intervening repeatedly on behalf of the Jesuits at the imperial court. Jesuit sources do not mention Zhu explicitly as a community organizer (huizhang) or “catechist,” referring to the converts who ran Christian communities, or networks thereof, and in many regards functioned as quasi-official representatives of priests who in some cases even had the power to baptize. Nor did Zhu belong to the handful of Chinese coadjutors who played an important role in the organization of the China mission.40 Nevertheless, we can be certain that Zhu was very important for maintaining a communication channel between European missionaries and the Ningbo communities. In many regards, the Chinese Catholic communities can be viewed as a synthesis between late Ming associational life and Christian parish traditions. This synthesis was not necessarily harmonious: many

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tensions between global and local structures and between the Catholic Church and Chinese society remained unresolved, not only in China but in other parts of Asia. Around the time when Zhu Zongyuan was born, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were about eighteen hundred Catholic priests throughout Asia. With a few exceptions, all these religious travelers were born on European soil. This compares with a total presence of fifteen thousand Portuguese in that same region, a number that includes people categorized as mestizos, individuals born in mixed marriages between Portuguese and locals. Never again would the proportion of clerics among the overall number of European dwellers in Asia be so high.41 Still, the ratio of clerics among the overall Christian population in Asia remained much lower than in Europe. After all, a total of about 1.5 million Christians lived in Asia at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but only a few regions had native-born priests and hence did not rely exclusively on members of the European clergy. In addition to societies like Japan, this included the Christians in Kerala, which had existed prior to the beginnings of European naval expeditions to the east of the Cape of Good Hope and hence had local clerical traditions. In a bureaucratically organized religion like Catholicism, the new communities of converts had to be included in the church’s administrative framework. As part of an extension of a European pattern onto the world, the Asian church was organized into clerical units such as parishes and dioceses. And, just as they had in the heartlands of Latin Christendom, the church’s branches collaborated closely with worldly powers to ensure the stability of its administrative frameworks. In an age of European expansionism, this meant that the church was closely conjoined with European colonialism and overseas trade, but the two organizational architectures never fully blended. Across West and East Asia, a string of dioceses were established during the early seventeenth century, with Goa as a religious center with its own archbishop and about six hundred clerics.42 Other important nodes in the Catholic ecclesiastical network included Macao, which—in addition to its economic and military functions—had long been an important center for Catholic activities in the entire region. Missionaries destined for China, Japan, and other regions nearby usually received

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further education in language, local culture, and missionary practice in Macao, and many missionaries whom Cosmas Zhu met in Ningbo had spent significant amounts of time in this hub for the exchange of goods, knowledge, and faith. Yet while the ecclesiastical organization followed European models, the church as a social and political institution could not possibly replicate its European patterns in most of Asia. In many states, from the Mughal Empire to Japan, the Jesuits and other European missionaries depended on an endorsement by rulers who were not Christians, while at the same time they needed to set up their own administrative structures without direct support from state authorities. In many regards, the Jesuit China mission was a typical case in this wider pattern. The Jesuit headquarters in Rome supported the effort to create an institutional hierarchy to organize the newly founded Catholic communities in China. It was clear from the beginning that this ecclesiastical organization would need to be built and run completely independently from the Chinese bureaucracy—in fact, the best possible outcome was that bureaucracy’s interfering not at all in the network of Christian parishes. The European fathers had long struggled with the idea of ordaining a Chinese clergy, which was the main reason Chinese Christian communities were so short of priests, a situation that obtained throughout Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime. At no point in the seventeenth century were there more than forty Jesuit fathers active in China, but the number of both converts and Catholic communities kept growing. Toward the end of Zhu Zongyuan’s life, there were about four hundred regular congregations in China, spread out over many provinces and climate zones. Christian groups existed in the larger metropoles, in cities, in villages, and in hamlets. For instance, of Zhejiang’s eleven administrative districts, there were only three without a Christian community in the middle of the seventeenth century.43 Along with communities comparable to parishes, one could also find a variety of more specialized organizations such as brotherhoods for fervent believers or penitential communities practicing flagellation, fasting, and abstinence.44 For a number of reasons, the idea of building up a substantial Chinese clergy—a much-discussed topic during that period—never

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materialized in the seventeenth century. As a consequence, the Jesuit fathers were spread thin, particularly around the middle of the century, when many of their personnel were occupied with activities in the capital. Although modern scholarship tends to stress the missionaries’ work with the elite and their Confucian-Christian dialogues, publications, and scientific inquiry, much of the time of many individual fathers was absorbed by regular parish work among flocks consisting largely of illiterate people at the lower ends of Chinese society.45 In this system, many responsibilities, ranging from prayers and other facets of communal life to even some priestly functions, were being delegated to Chinese auxiliaries. Nonetheless, the European fathers tended to reserve certain tasks, such as the offering of the Eucharist and penance, for themselves.46 During their short stays in local Christian communities, they offered key sacraments and took the opportunity to engage in a wide range of additional activities, ranging from checking on local community leaders to dealing with administrative tasks. How can we understand this constellation of European missionaries acting as parish priests who were hardly available to their Chinese parishioners? It would be misleading to assume that this pattern was systematic in the sense of having been carefully considered and planned. On the contrary, it evolved from a combination of factors, many of which had been unforeseeable at the time Matteo Ricci and other early missionaries arrived on China’s shores. The configuration of Chinese Christian communities—and their connections with European priests active in China—had resulted from the encounter of a globalizing church with a powerful political entity, the Ming state. For instance, the Chinese state put severe constraints on the number of European missionaries on its soil, often limiting their activities as well. At the same time, the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century had not reached a consensus on how to become a worldwide network. This slowed the formation of a Chinese clergy, which in later centuries would figure as a bridge between the Vatican and the communities located in China.47 Meanwhile, the church relied on Chinese converts assuming responsibility for administrative, liturgical, and doctrinal matters. This grew out of necessity, but it also fit with the

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Jesuits’ policy in many parts of the world, including Europe. In many societies, the fathers’ ambition was to turn laypeople from passive recipients into active cocreators of the church.48 In many regards, therefore, the situation in China was hardly comparable to conditions in Europe. In the world of Latin Christendom, almost all the territory covered by the Catholic Church was divided up into parishes and bishoprics. This meant that Jesuit activities were framed by a fairly dense network of higher- and lower-level clergy as well as long-standing local Christian traditions. In comparison, China was largely a terra nova for the Christian cause, and only a few dozens of priests had to cater to around a hundred thousand converts—spread over a population and territory larger than their equivalents in Catholic Europe. Moreover, in contrast with Europe, all the priests in late Ming China were not natives but visibly came from a distant part of the world. There is evidence that Jesuit missionaries instrumentalized their own unusual appearance as well as the unfamiliar looks of some of their Christian imagery, even making them part of their proselytizing strategies. The ethnic identities, staged exoticism, and performative character of the irregular visits of European priests to their Chinese believers are something we need to look at more closely.49 Given all these factors, it makes sense that Chinese customs and traditions figured prominently in many Christian communities.50 Indeed, the Jesuit missionaries tolerated a certain localization of the Christian faith. They not only accepted many forms of ancestor worship but also even went as far as associating local deities with Christian saints. Nevertheless, during their visits the fathers often recorded dismay at what they saw as unacceptable forms of Christian belief. For instance, some missionaries observed with alarm traditions of religious syncretism in many strata of Chinese society. Particularly in the countryside, Christian images and symbols were frequently integrated into a religious pluriverse that could also include elements from Buddhist and Daoist schools.51 In other words, many individuals prayed to the Christian God or Catholic saints, in search of help and support, but at the same time they beseeched local deities or Buddhist bodhisattvas. Many missionaries became increasingly aware

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that baptism did not necessarily amount to what the church would consider a true conversion. In other words, not everyone submitted to the concept of an almighty God that did not allow for the worship of other deities before him. Particularly in more-remote areas, these combined forms of worship—all of which would be considered heresy according to Catholic dogma—were hard to control. Not only in rural China but also in more privileged circles, there were forms of Christian self-organization that European missionaries found problematic. For example, the Jesuits sought to prohibit the practice of some Christian organizations charging membership fees. 52 Other local elements were more welcome by the fathers: they happily tolerated that more than a few Christian communities shared central characteristics with influential and commonplace Chinese associations. In such communities, members of the middle and upper levels of society tended to have an accentuated role. Because of widely held misgivings about state service, an increasing number of independent charities and academies (shuyuan) were founded during the 1500s and early 1600s. 53 Despite their having historical precursors, the late Ming academies, in their number, size, and character, were experienced by contemporary observers as a somewhat new phenomenon. 54 Privileged individuals could join groups ranging from mutual-aid organizations to moral debating clubs often linked to private academies.55 These academies served primarily as sites of intellectual debate, learning, and the careful study of texts, but scholars also engaged in communal work related to social welfare and infrastructure projects—tasks that became progressively more important as the village institutions set up during the early Ming period declined and the state’s fiscal situation deteriorated. In the eyes of some scholars writing in the final years of the Ming dynasty, participating in such organizations was the only remaining path to staying upright and cultivating the Dao in times of chaos and corruption. 56 Christian communities thus joined a preexisting landscape of associations that were often equally focused on collective recitals, communal work, moral introspection, and self-cultivation. In fact, there were clear links between many newly founded Christian communities and

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Chinese organizations. For instance, some converts who had previously been involved with Buddhist groups founded Christian associations. Moreover, some Christians among China’s Confucian-trained elites established associations whose membership was more limited to the upper levels of local society. They espoused ideals like moral selfcultivation as a contribution to political stability, and in this regard they resembled many Confucian groups.57 The overlaps between Christian communities and other associations were reflected in their terminology. Many Christian groups were referred to using the term hui, one that was commonly used for other associations in China as well. What is more, the heads of Christian communities were called huizhang, and the heads of comparable Chinese associations carried the same title. We do not have a detailed understanding of most Christian hui, but there are many reasons to infer that many of them were deeply affected by local traditions. In more privileged Christian circles, for example, Confucian contents continued to be discussed along with Christian elements, inasmuch as the Learning of Heaven was regarded as a direct return to—rather than an aberration from—the master’s Way. At first sight, it seems as if in terms of organizational culture and social interactions, Christian communities did not truly deviate from the world of Chinese associations, or large segments thereof. Whereas we have many reasons to assume that Christian communities fit into the pattern of contemporary Chinese associations, we should nonetheless not view them solely through local lenses. This is less because the religion they practiced had come to China from a distant land and more because some core elements of daily life and organizational structures of Christian communities were linked with a global organization, the Catholic Church. In contrast to his counterparts in other associations, the Christian community leader was a de facto part of—and responsible to—a global network. Like elsewhere, also in Chinese communities the Jesuits set up checks and balances, with mutual controls between Chinese auxiliaries and occasional visits by European missionaries. This system served many purposes, not last of which was ensuring that a community leader would not take

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localization too far. The parameters acceptable to the church could not be overstretched, or such at least was what the missionaries tried to ensure. The Jesuits sought to enforce a minimal standard of Catholic practices in all Chinese communities. They tried to make sure all Chinese baptismal candidates renounced other religions and were familiar with their new faith’s core doctrines. Religious instruction continued throughout converts’ religious life, and the Society of Jesus worked to ensure converts performed key liturgical elements such as confession. Many leading Chinese Christians also saw these elements as crucial, so it is not surprising that in his various writings Zhu Zongyuan explains important liturgical practices including the sacraments and defends them against potential objections.58 The insistence on the observation of core doctrines, liturgies, and standard texts was a worldwide policy of the Societas Jesu, from Hudson Bay and Patagonia to South Asia, China, and Japan.59 While many of its key prayers and rituals were translated into Chinese, in the case of essential doctrines, the Society of Jesus did actually little to accommodate the conveyed Christian message and symbolism with Confucianism or other elements of Chinese culture. For example, such aspects as the virgin birth, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection were made centers of Christian communal activities, and not marginalized. This practice differed from the far more Confucianized ways in which the Learning of Heaven was being presented in many scholarly texts and intellectual conversations. In other words, the doctrinal and liturgical cores stood firm in the life of Christian communities in China. Perhaps more important, they were kept firm through a system of connections and control that reached from local auxiliaries to Chinese catechists, on to individual missionaries, and eventually to the global headquarters of the Jesuits in Rome. Around these firm cores, many kinds of accommodation took place, with the widely known Confucian-Christian synthesis at the top. And around these same firm cores, Christian communities in China operated in a manner that resembled a wide range of other Chinese associations. Yet the cores themselves were left

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largely untouched by the efforts to accommodate, integrate, and localize Catholicism in China. If we take the intricate nature of local Christian life seriously, we also need to deepen our understanding of figures like Zhu Zongyuan and allow him all his complexity. To be sure, Zhu remained deeply rooted in his hometown throughout his life, and his biography needs to be understood from local historical perspectives. But he also belonged to the global networks of Catholicism, including the Society of Jesus. The global and local worlds in which Zhu lived were not separate; there was no clear division of commitments, identities, and responsibilities. However, that does not mean they were in complete harmony. Many facets of Zhu’s life were shaped by hybrid systems that were the result of complex encounters between global and local forces. Many contradictions and tensions remained, and traces of them can be found in Zhu’s writings.

3 A TEACHING SHAPED BY CONSTRAINTS

MULTILAYERED ENCOUNTERS Zhu Zongyuan was not an initiator of cultural translation. While he developed ideas of his own, he did not pose as an author who had created a new theological framework. At a time when book publications were not necessarily meant to present novel ideas, Zhu’s texts were not intended to display breakthroughs to a readership hungry for intellectual excitement. He operated within the main structure of the Learning of Heaven as it had already been defined, remaining ideologically loyal to the main approaches taken by Chinese-Jesuit Catholicism. The pro-Christian texts he would have read included pamphlets, longer essays, and monographs that remained influential for decades or centuries to come. An example is the well-known text The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, published under the name of Matteo Ricci in 1594.1 It was these early Chinese scholars and Jesuit missionaries who worked out the main framework for translating Christianity into the cultural contexts of China, a framework that came to be known as the accommodation method. This “method” rested upon the assumption that the true principles of Confucianism were ultimately compatible with the Christian message. The latter, presented as the Learning of Heaven, would help retrieve an original wisdom contained in the Confucian classics, which supposedly had been lost in the centuries after Confucius’s death in 479 b.c.e. As a revealed message of the divine

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creator, Christianity would be able to provide the ethical certainty and ontological confidence necessary to purge the landscapes of Chinese intellectual life of the presumed bad influences of teachings such as Buddhism and Daoism. In this sense, the words transmitted by Confucius and the word of God were being interpreted as ultimately compatible with each other. There has been a tendency to misconstrue the actual agenda, societal basis, and the origins of the accommodation method. For one thing, it was not meant to cover the entire spectrum of Catholic beliefs and practices in seventeenth-century China, and it was of little interest to converts in villages, hamlets, and among the urban poor— groups that provided the bulk of the Catholic flock during this period.2 Instead this complex intellectual framework was intended for Chinese elites, the social group in China with the closest attachments to the teachings of Confucius. The rapprochement with Confucian teachings not only facilitated conversations with the upper reaches of Chinese society but also made it more likely that the state would tolerate the  Catholic endeavor. This was important for a religious order like the Jesuits, some of whose members had found inroads into the Chinese bureaucracy. In this context one may think of figures like the court astronomer Adam Schall von Bell or the group of Jesuits whose technological expertise provided indirect military support to the late Ming and the succeeding Qing dynasty.3 Other than providing an overall framework for the enculturation of Catholicism, the accommodation method offered a wealth of Chinese terms to convey Christian concepts that ranged from reincarnation to heaven, from sin to hell. Many of these expressions had a much older history—not only in Confucian schools but also in Chinese Buddhism. In any case, by the 1620s, when Zhu had acquired his reading skills, a canon of Christian expressions had already solidified. The canon was not uncontested, with some terms remaining controversial among European missionaries for many decades to come. But by and large the conceptual worlds of Jesuit Chinese Catholicism stood firm by the second decade of the seventeenth century. Converts like Zhu Zongyuan no longer needed to find new terms and concepts to express a foreign teaching,4 but individual writers could still contribute as their faith

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evolved. Like some other learned Christians, Zhu sought to add his own elements to an existing canon of literature. The accommodation method was not single-handedly created by leading Jesuits, as some older historical literature tended to suggest. But neither was it solely the product of a Chinese reinterpretation, or localization, of Catholic beliefs and practices. It is more accurate to say that the Confucian-Christian synthesis emerged from a complex set of encounters. In thinking about its nature, two caveats apply: First, it is crude, even misleading, to view this encounter as primarily a contact between Europeans and Chinese. To do so would be to understate the rich diversity of both realms; the Chinese Buddhists, for instance, did not participate in the cultural dialogue leading to the Confucian-Christian synthesis, and neither did important European groups such as the Protestants. Instead, the accommodation method should be seen as the outcome of dialogue among particular agents— members of the Society of Jesus and representatives of the Chinese elite. In addition, it would lead in the wrong direction if we were to think of the Confucian-Christian framework as an intellectual edifice that had been independently designed from an infinite number of possibilities. The accommodation method was not merely the result of scholarly dialogue, and its main outline was not shaped solely by intellectual choices and predilections: many factors of power, ranging from laws to hegemonic ideas, fed into its creation. Together they had put many ideological and institutional constraints on the European and Chinese agents involved in the translation of Jesuit Catholicism into the cultural landscapes of late Ming China. To start with, China was in a deep crisis from the late 1500s onward although it was not a completely disintegrating society and polity. In fact, its strength allowed the state to dominate interactions with Europeans. This relationship expressed itself in different ways and was visible in a variety of settings, even including Macao, which in the historical literature is usually seen as part of the Portuguese Empire. In reality, however, the wider power relations between the Portuguese settlements in Macao and imperial China remained, with the Chinese government demanding an annual rent and controlling access to the city’s hinterland. Sino-Portuguese relations were also symbolized by

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the inscription on the gate leading to the Chinese mainland, which in bold letters admonished the sojourner to “Fear Our Strength and Respect Our Virtue.”5 While we can see Macao as a creation of European colonialism and a center of global Christianization efforts,6 the Portuguese stronghold also reflected the relatively weak position of the Iberian powers and the Catholic Church vis-à-vis established powers in Asia, particularly China. Additionally, for the China mission the regulatory capacities of the Chinese state remained a force to be reckoned with, even in the worst years of the Ming-Qing transition period. At the peak of a major crisis, Chinese governmental agencies continued to impose strict regulations and at least partly carry them out when dealing with European traders and missionaries in China.7 Moreover, the Jesuits were subject to repeated hostilities from the side of state officials, which usually started with written attacks and at various times could lead to local arrests or even China-wide repressions. One example is the wave of anti-Christian persecutions in Nanjing around 1616, which remained relatively modest in scope but could well have led to a statewide repression that would have seriously threatened the Jesuit presence in China. All this made it necessary for the Jesuits to take the Chinese state structure and its core dogmas seriously as they worked on a sinified version of their faith. Perhaps many Jesuit fathers would have had a genuine appreciation of Confucian teachings under different circumstances, but the Chinese state orthodoxy simply could not be ignored. If the Jesuits wanted acceptance from official channels and respect from the echelons of society close to these channels, they needed to present their religion as a force contributing to the Chinese School of Scholars (rujia) rather than challenging it. Certain rituals and core values could not be tested without jeopardizing the mission at large. At the same time, the cultural and political landscapes of late Ming China allowed for the presentation of Catholicism as a Confucianized Learning of Heaven. Yet also on the Catholic side, many constraints remained; as mentioned, the Jesuits had their own theological frameworks and institutional checks and balances. Moreover, they had to formulate their

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Confucian-Christian synthesis while fighting battles against powerful opponents inside and outside the Catholic Church who were scandalized by the tolerant attitude of many Jesuits toward Chinese rituals like ancestor worship or by the equation of Chinese concepts with Christian ideas. In many regards, the Jesuit ways of sinicizing Christianity were at least partly shaped by the society’s opponents. As a subunit of the Catholic Church and as a global network, the Society of Jesus was not entirely free to choose the directions in how it wanted to convert its faith into the conceptual worlds of China. Viewing these factors together, it becomes obvious that the Confucian-Christian synthesis could not possibly have been created like a new inscription on a blank page. Instead, it had to emerge from a complex pattern of limitations, expectations, and constraints. Translating the Jesuit fathers and their religion into the complex fabric of late Ming society was not just a linguistic task, nor did it involve solely the conceptual work of deciding which elements of China’s spiritual and scholarly landscape could be combined with Catholicism. Rather, behind all these intellectual challenges lay institutional and political ones. And like the organizational aspects of Christian life in China, the resulting compromises did not necessarily amount to a fully coherent theological structure. Many contradictions remained in the synthesis called the accommodation method, and they resulted partly from the fact that the two primary sides framing this encounter were not direct equivalents of each other. On the Eastern side, there was the Ming or Qing state as an imperial formation, a territorial polity, and a cultural landscape. On the Western side, there was the Society of Jesus as a transcontinental network entangled with both the globalizing Catholic Church and European colonial powers. Both structures were experiencing important changes during the seventeenth century.

PRESSURES WITHIN AN EXPANDING ECCLESIA During Zhu’s lifetime, changes to the organizational setup of the Catholic Church in Asia put the China-related activities of the Society of Jesus under constant pressure. The slow decline of the Portuguese

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Empire, too, meant the arrival of new Catholic agents in the Ming state who made it difficult to defend the Jesuit accommodation framework back in Rome. While the padroado, a series of arrangements between the Vatican and Portuguese government, guaranteed the Lusitanian crown a high degree of suzerainty in ecclesiastical matters this system started to disintegrate after the second decade of the seventeenth century. The Portuguese empire tried to fight back, and for a while the inquisition in places like Goa was occupied largely with the persecution of European missionaries operating outside the padroado’s legal framework.8 In some regards, the founding of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 needs to be understood in the context of shrinking Portuguese influence and the coming of European contenders in the region. The Propaganda Fide was to further emancipate the church from the Iberian empires as well as from all their European successors. It sought to establish a new mission system, with its own colleges and regional headquarters.9 In its effort to create an alternative structure outside the control of the Portuguese Empire, the Propaganda Fide even sought to set up an independent administrative framework.10 Moreover, the Vatican reversed earlier policies that had given the Society of Jesus, operating within the framework of Portuguese rule, exclusive rights to proselytize in China and Japan. An important stage was reached in 1633, when Pope Urban VIII issued a papal constitution granting Catholics from all nations and orders access to the Far East.11 This meant that an increasing number of Spanish nationals were now missionaries in China, a sharp departure from padroado regulations that had barred even Spanish members of the Societas Jesu from entering China. It was this restrictive policy that was responsible for the typically high number of Portuguese, Italians, and Germans in the ranks of the Jesuits serving in China.12 Such policies not only led to tensions between the Vatican and the Portuguese Empire13 but also made China an arena of aggravated rivalries between different branches of the Catholic Church—for example, the Jesuits and the Franciscans. Increasing the potential for conflict was the fact that the papacy did not centrally coordinate the

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Catholic Church’s proselytizing efforts—individual orders ran their own administrations in Europe and beyond, and various subunits of the Catholic Church were often as global as the church itself. Many orders had a history of missionary efforts beyond Europe, followed its own policy, and struggled with internal rivalries as well as tensions between the centers and the missionaries on the ground.14 The Society of Jesus was among the most successful globalizers in early modern Catholicism. In 1626, when Zhu Zongyuan was a child of ten, the Jesuits had 444 colleges worldwide, plus another 100 seminaries and schools catering to more than 15,000 ordained members.15 Soon after its founding in 1534, the Society of Jesus committed itself to a global agenda, and as early as 1540, Francis Xavier, its first overseas missionary, embarked for India.16 In the subsequent decades, the Jesuits grew into a well-organized worldwide network, with operations ranging from South America to Japan.17 The society expected its fathers to travel and work wherever they were dispatched, and by the early seventeenth century between 8 and 12 percent of its members were stationed overseas, constituting a fairly tightly organized global web of educated men living in celibacy. An individual Jesuit’s journey could hence lead to many world regions ranging from Patagonia to Southeast Asia. The society’s missionaries were stationed in dramatically different climate zones and cultures, and they usually needed to learn local languages. As a worldwide network, the society represented a broad range of linguistic expertise, while at the same time its global organization operated in Latin and some early modern European languages. Since the Jesuits allowed for a localization of their faith to some degree, this meant that the lived forms of Christianity practiced by members of the society could vary significantly between those working with native Americans in the Amazon Basin and those trying to convert daimyo in the Land of the Rising Sun.18 At the same time, the diverse sociopolitical bases of their constituents in turn influenced the organizational nature of local Jesuit enterprises. For instance, in South Asia, Jesuit missionaries were based mainly in colonial coastal cities, and since there was a large population of Catholics there, their ecclesiastical life resembled partly that of Europe. By contrast, in societies like China

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the Jesuit fathers were foreign residents working with and for communities scattered throughout a huge empire. Yet the Society of Jesus also had a global architecture that was divided into a complex branch of regional assistancies and, below them, subordinate provinces and vice-provinces. These smaller organizational units were usually administered by several colleges and other missionary strongholds. The fathers Zhu Zongyuan knew, for instance, belonged to the vice-province of China, which was part of the Portuguese assistancy, which in turn had developed out of the province of India and the vice-province Japan.19 The governance structure of units and subunits was complicated, with no clear division of authorities, tasks, and responsibilities. This granted an important role to the society’s visitors, or visitatores, in Asia. The visitors, of whom Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) is arguably the most renowned, oversaw the administrative and religious lives of Jesuit-led communities in Asia20 and served as the chief representatives of the society in the region. In addition to its religious pursuits, the Society of Jesus was also active economically.21 Regional units such as the China mission were chronically underfunded, with insufficient and irregular flows of contributions from its official patron, the Portuguese crown. The Jesuits used their Chinese lay brothers’ familiarity with Asian societies and their own social connections to raise additional revenues.22 For instance, in Japan, where, from the middle of the sixteenth century, it enjoyed some territorial rights in the important port of Nagasaki, the Society of Jesus helped Portuguese traders gain further access to the Japanese market. At the time the Jesuits were forced to leave Japan, they had a substantial portion of the trade between China and Japan in their hands, much of which went on outside official channels along routes that merchants chartered by the Portuguese crown could not fully penetrate. The profits went to fund their missionary activities, of course, but trade involvement could also help missionary endeavors more directly. In Japan, in fact, the Jesuits were partly tolerated because of their importance to international trade, but this meant that local support for the society dwindled after the arrival of Dutch and other non-Portuguese competitors in the 1600s.23

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Compared with other global religious orders, the Jesuits strongly emphasized education, which usually included language and cultural instruction. They believed firmly in the importance of local knowledge, whether for proselytizing, making political connections, economic, or other purposes. The Society of Jesus operated a string of schools and colleges around the globe whose instructors were skilled bridge builders between European and local forms of knowledge. Before being dispatched to their assignments, missionaries underwent rigorous training at these schools, aware that this educational base would give them social respect and cultural authority that would be beneficial for their work. Yet the policy of respect for—and active engagement with—other forms of cultural heritage was not merely a strategic tool in the hands of soldiers of the church. In the worldview of many Jesuits, cultural differences were God ordained and hence perfectly compatible with the universal spread of Catholicism. While the fathers believed deeply in the monopoly of the Christian God and often opined that unconverted societies would be subject to eternal damnation, they did not see proselytizing for the Catholic faith as equivalent to spreading European lifestyles and sociocultural values.24 Generally speaking, this differentiated early modern missionaries from their nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors. This culturally ecumenical outlook characterized the actions of the Society of Jesus in different parts of the world. Of course, the degree to which Jesuits believed that it was desirable to combine Christian contents with local elements varied from context to context. For example, in the Americas, many Jesuits shared the sense that these vast landmasses constituted a “new continent” that could be remade according to Western principles.25 But even here parts of the society strongly resisted Iberian royal programs to completely remodel native American societies. Some even founded “reductions,” settlements designed to shield indigenous people from colonial exploitation. In many Asian theaters during the seventeenth century, however, European influence was limited, making a remodeling of local society through European might impossible.26 The sheer geopolitical weight of states like the Mughal Empire or the Ming dynasty required an accommodationist approach, particularly for a missionary network

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trying to reach out to monied or ruling elites, including the potentate himself. This can already be seen in visitor Alessandro Valignano’s Instructions of 1579, in which the head of the Asia mission admonishes his subordinates against attempting “to persuade these people to change their habits, and their behavior, as long as they are not evidently contrary to religion and morality.”27 Guidelines of this kind were implemented in various ways. For example, in India, Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) studied Sanskrit texts and lived much like the Brahman caste. Other fathers also moved toward the Indian caste system hoping to gain acceptance from the upper echelons of Hindu society.28 A few Jesuits in India even entered the Mughal court, joining a cosmopolitan and interreligious group of advisers. Some members of the society had high expectations: when in 1579 the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) invited three fathers to reside near him for several years, they hoped for another Constantinian shift, referring to a mass Christianization triggered by the conversion of the supreme ruler.29 This did not occur, and another court mission dispatched in the early 1590s also failed. Further south and one or two generations later, the Portuguese father Henrique Henriques (1520–1600) actively contributed to the growth of Christian texts in Tamil and built a rapprochement with local customs and traditions, largely with upper castes. By 1600, the embattled but flourishing Jesuit mission in Japan had already produced a substantial body of literature and started training the first cohort of indigenous clergy.30 Jesuit missionaries made efforts to link key Christian concepts and liturgical practices with local traditions, and some Japanese court elites as well as local rulers and daimyo did accept the Christian faith. Attempts to convert the shogun and emperor, however, were not successful. Seen from this perspective, the accommodation method in China was part of the broader proselytizing approach taken by the Society of Jesus as a global religious network. Like Matteo Ricci in China, there were also intellectually highly influential figures in other arenas of the Jesuit Asia mission, and here, too, Jesuit localization strategies triggered opposition from other branches of the Catholic Church. In fact, the Jesuit accommodation policies in Asian territories opened a Pandora’s box of theological controversies that were unresolved for

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centuries, with the question of which cultural practices were acceptable and which ones were not proving highly controversial. An example is de Nobili’s partial carryover of Hindu castes into Christian communities, which was contentious in the India mission for a long time.31 In the European centers of the ecclesia catholica, arguably the most visible dispute over the limits to the nativization of Christianity was the Chinese Rites Controversy. The debates surrounding the acceptance of certain Chinese rites, particularly ancestor worship among Christian converts, appeared to be centered on theological issues. In reality, however, they were often closely tied to power struggles between rival networks within a global church. Inside and outside the church, many individuals, institutions, and power centers watched the adaptation of Christianity to Chinese cultural contexts with highly critical eyes. As previously mentioned, the Dominicans active in the China mission remained opposed to any major rapprochement with Confucianism, and they lobbied for their opinion in Rome. 32 Other critics of the Jesuit approach included individual authorities like André Palmeiro (1569–1635), a visitator who oversaw many Asia missions.33 The Jesuits were thus operating under unfavorable, if not fault-finding, scrutiny when trying to define their version of Chinese Catholicism. This forced them into theological contestations with rival Catholic factions, some of which spilled over into the wider public, beyond church walls. More important, it put further constraints on the terms, concepts, and ideas that would be acceptable to the Jesuit side in the encounters leading to the Confucian-Christian synthesis. To be sure, not only its opponents put limits on the Jesuit position when developing the accommodation method together with their Chinese interlocutors. The society itself did not allow for a random search for apt ways to translate Christianity into the cultural contexts of China. The Jesuits brought to the table their own institutional culture, their own theological preferences, and their own intellectual traditions, which were different from those of other branches of the Catholic Church.34 In a nutshell, the Jesuit perception of Chinese intellectual traditions was framed largely by earlier scholastic traditions. Interestingly, the efforts of the latter at combining ancient Greek philosophy with the Christian message were themselves shaped by an intercultural encounter. Scholastics’ inspiration for dealing with the towering

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heritage of Aristotelianism and Platonism came partly from Muslim scholars such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna, ca. 980–1037) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës, 1126–1198). One important idea was that a natural light, a lumen naturale, had guided the great philosophers of the past to the higher truth of the creator; this was taken further to the belief that these philosophers would have confessed to the one and only God had they had the chance to hear his word.35 The Jesuit missionaries in China made these linkages explicit: for instance, in his Western-language writings and letters, Matteo Ricci connected his admiration for ancient Confucianism to Christianity’s traditional relationship to ancient Greece and Rome. If on the Jesuit side a complex world of contradictions and overt tensions went into the exchanges leading to the accommodation method, the other side of the dialogue was equally complex. This was particularly the case with the landscapes of Confucian teachings, which appeared particularly diversified during the late Ming period. Confucianism remained foundational to the Chinese state, and state institutions had the power to sanction religious practice and the presence of foreign missionaries on Chinese soil. Yet there were new versions of Confucianism that developed outside the state framework or purported to be independent from it. In this complicated pattern it was difficult to find solid ground for the Learning of Heaven. But for a religion coming from afar that at the same time aspired to official recognition and reached out to elite circles, it was absolutely necessary to find close connections with the worlds of Confucianism.

CONTESTED LANDSCAPES: CONFUCIAN TEACHINGS IN LATE MING CHINA What did Confucianism look like in this period? To assume it was characterized by a high degree of coherence is to misconstrue it, even though the suffix “ism” seems to suggest a clearly articulated ideological program. Yet the concept of “Confucianism” didn’t exist in late Ming China or before, nor was there a close terminological equivalent. The term was manufactured during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its Western-language form came from the

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Latinized terms “Confucius” and “Confucianos” coined by the Jesuits in the early modern period. This Latinization blended the last name Kong with the Chinese term for “master” (fuzi).36 Like the Westernized name, the debate among Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century about whether Confucianism should be seen primarily as a religion or a philosophy37 reflects the influx of foreign categories and concepts. In fact, this question, which stems from a different cultural nexus, can be seen as a distortion of the original teaching. In seventeenth-century China, there were several terms for “Confucianism,” but the teaching was not named after Confucius. In fact, it was usually referred to in far more general terms like “School of Scholars” (rujia). Newer—although already centuries-old—schools had names like “Learning of the Way” (daoxue) or “Learning Involving Human Nature and Principle” (xinglixue).38 These expressions are indicative of the ways in which the Confucian teaching was perceived in the Chinese state and society. Generally speaking, elite circles tended to regard it as the only teaching capable of bridging the gaps between programs of personal growth and a broader sociopolitical stability. The School of Scholars’ role as a kind of state orthodoxy in many dynasties, including the Ming and following Qing periods, was what made it so important.39 Because of the imperial examination system, Confucian teaching was closely linked to the bureaucracy, the institutional scaffold of the Middle Kingdom. Since knowledge of Confucian ideas was key in the selection process of officials, this teaching was intrinsically tied to the Chinese state at multiple levels, from elite education to the ritual worlds of the imperial court. Unlike Latin Christendom, Confucianism was not organized into a discrete church but was conceptually and institutionally an intrinsic part of the Chinese government. Since Confucianism was largely—albeit not exclusively—transmitted through educational institutions, it was mostly members of the privileged classes who identified with its agenda. Moreover, unlike Christianity, Confucianism did not have standard initiation rituals such as baptism or a clearly defined membership. One could not convert to Confucianism; instead, one had to embark on a process of selfcultivation using Confucian texts and practices. In this process, it was common for individuals to draw on other spiritual resources as well,

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notably Buddhism or Daoism.40 This meant that the demarcation line between Confucianism and other teachings was undefined; compared with Christianity it was also unguarded. In contrast to the Catholic Church, no inquisition was enforcing standard doctrines of faith, and no priesthood was watching over the commitment of its common souls. However, this is not to suggest that the Confucian realms in China did not have concerns about doctrine. While there was no jealous God or a strict division of the world into those who accepted the word of the master and those who did not, individuals and entire schools or religions could be branded “heterodox” (xie) and forced to demonstrate that their viewpoints were “upright” (zheng).41 But since no central institution had the authority to stigmatize alleged heterodoxies, all kinds of movements branded one another as xie while arguing for their own interpretation of what it meant to truly follow the ancient master Confucius. Yet particularly a newly arriving and centrally organized teaching like Catholicism was in danger of being identified as a potentially harmful element by state authorities. The latter could be alarmed especially if a religious network obviously challenged some core principles of Confucianism as a state orthodoxy. Thus doctrinal questions were never the sole factors necessitating a Confucian-Christian synthesis: potential political pressures from the side of China’s state authorities were also a major factor.42 Confucian thought and state policies overlapped, which meant that the Jesuits and their Chinese converts needed to adhere to a host of legal restrictions and other state mandates. They even had to take part in Confucian state rituals, inasmuch as no teaching whose representatives were claiming to contribute to China’s sociopolitical well-being could opt out entirely of such participation. The late Ming dynasty was a period in which syncretism flourished, perhaps because life in an age of socioeconomic crises and cultural insecurities led many scholars to move interpretations of Confucianism in new directions. To put it in another way, the landscapes of Confucian interpretations looked particularly colorful during the late Ming period. This process was aided by a flourishing book market as

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well as the emergence of elite circles who were less committed to certain forms of tradition than their forefathers. The Confucian schools’ fragmentation was aided by the wider state crisis. The ailing bureaucracy had few resources, and perhaps not much ambition, to bring its scholar-officials ideologically into line. In that sense, the mushrooming of Confucian schools during the late Ming period was at least partly related to the crisis of the School of Scholars as a state teaching. This position of Confucianism as an official doctrine had been fortified beginning in the Song dynasty (which ended in the 1270s), when thinkers like Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi sought to revitalize Confucian teachings, which had long been declining.43 Their reorientation of Confucianism was based on a particular interpretation of the development of the School of Scholars—and by implication the ethical and political conditions of China—since ancient times. According to this vision of history, there had once been an age in which moral integrity and political stability had reached a crescendo. Yet this ideal epoch had been followed by times of decay, which eventually culminated in the Warring States period, when the Middle Kingdom’s political unity had given way to a restless system of competing militarized states. Many Song and Ming Confucians regarded Confucius as a figure who had found the strength to cultivate himself to a level that met the highest criteria of the earlier ideal age. However, Confucius himself had failed as an official—his higher values were unable to mitigate the decadence of his time. Although he had not become another great emperor, according to the neo-Confucians he had passed the Way (Dao) on to a small circle of select followers. The neo-Confucian interpretation of the past furthermore assumed that in the bureaucratic empires after the Han dynasty, which lasted from 206 b.c.e. to 220 c.e., even this personalized transmission of the Dao from Confucius to a coterie of disciples had been lost. It was seen as the historical mission of Confucian scholars to return to this Way, primarily through individual learning.44 Although they claimed to have rid the teachings of heterodox additions and to be transmitting the original Way again, the neo-Confucians were not

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actually returning to classical Confucianism. On the contrary, these Song- and Ming-era thinkers were entering new philosophical territory, often integrating Buddhist and Daoist elements, even as they claimed to make these religions superfluous.45 For instance, they now conceptualized the inherent moral potential in each human being as cosmic forces. Even the neo-Confucian concept of passing the Way down personally from master to student (daotong) may itself have come from Buddhism,46 along with practices of self-cultivation that involved quiet sitting and meditation. In any case, the pursuit of ethical ideals was no longer seen as a set of social activities but as requiring individuals to pay more attention to their inner spiritual growth and maturation. While the twelfth-century neo-Confucian scholars had emphasized self-motivated learning, this changed when the state turned text selections and commentaries by thinkers like Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi into the basis of a reinvigorated official examination system. In the imperial bureaucracy’s hands, neo-Confucian teachings became state orthodoxy, which meant that learning was mainly about career purposes. The official examination channels were based on a notion of personal growth that was largely tantamount to the careful, meticulous study of standard texts. From the sixteenth century onward, a complex series of social transformations widened the distance between the state apparatus and large segments of the educated elite. An increasingly corrupt bureaucracy and a rigid examination system no longer seemed appealing to members of the privileged classes, whose intellectual and personal lives were becoming more diverse. Not surprisingly, elite attitudes toward the Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy also changed, with these state-ordained versions of Confucianism increasingly seen as ossified, as frozen in time and hence unable to respond to the calamities of the present. As part of these shifting constellations, more scholars started to cultivate Confucianism on their own terms. Many of them returned to the idea that the lost Way could be found through individual effort. In a sense, they continued important traditions of Song learning while taking them in new directions, even radicalizing some of them. One of their main arenas of change concerned the relationship with the

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state. Many Song versions of neo-Confucianism, which then were rendered subaltern in the official examination system, had already articulated a certain distance between scholar-officials and rulers, challenging the imperial court’s claim to ethical authority by identifying Confucius—rather than the ancient sage-kings—as the ultimate source of morality.47 Throughout the second half of the Ming dynasty one can observe a growing doubt about whether the state had the ultimate mandate over ethical and political learning. One prominent thinker speaking to this idea was Wang Yangming (1472–1529), one of the founding figures of the “Philosophy of Heart and Mind” (xinxue).48 Wang pointed to the state orthodoxy’s failures to produce a moral elite up to the high standards of ancient Confucianism: “Our time seems to understand the way of sages well enough, and yet when I look around I see no sages.” 49 During Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, Wang Yangming’s school had a strong group of followers in the lower Yangtze delta, including the Ningbo region.50 Parts of Wang’s philosophy fit well with social transformation in this and other regions of the Chinese state. For instance, his distancing from state service spoke to the situation of local elite families that had begun engaging in merchant activities and whose offspring were no longer fixated on the idea of a career in the service of the state. In the first half of the seventeenth century, there were prominent scholars in Zhejiang like Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) who argued that commerce was among the foundations of the state and should be appreciated in this capacity. But the Wang Yangming school and its branches spoke not only to the affluent classes, whether old money or new, they also spoke to the growing class of impoverished scholars without hope for an official appointment. Both groups became more receptive to the idea of emancipating Confucian teaching from its role as China’s state orthodoxy. The widespread skepticism about the official education channels came down to the opinion that true education could no longer be viewed as a process of conforming to state authority. Although such notions had been inherent in the thinking of Zhu Xi and other neoConfucian writers of the Song era, the state education system had not paid them much attention. Now many late Ming scholars were focused

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on ideas of individual development, and Wang Yangming and his ­followers took these person-centered ideals even further. They made it clear that development did not necessarily require the gradual absorption of Confucian wisdom through diligent, text-based studies. Moral progress, they opined, could come spontaneously, and one’s innate moral potential could be realized in a moment of unprompted learning, an idea clearly influenced by Buddhist notions of sudden enlightenment. In the final stages of the Ming dynasty, many influential scholars went further than highlighting a distance between Confucian learning and the state sector. They also redefined and relativized the authority of the Confucian textual heritage. For a number of schools, the classical texts of antiquity were not articulations of absolute, timeless standards but merely checkpoints on the path toward self-improvement. Other thinkers went even further. For instance, the philosopher Li Zhi (1527–1602), who was an eccentric but nevertheless highly influential figure in late Ming intellectual life, stressed that Confucius’s ideas were time bound and hence could not be taken at face value: “Even if Confucius reappeared today, there would be no means of knowing how he would judge right and wrong.”51 Given that returning to the old, lived wisdom of ancient Confucianism could take many different roads, it is little wonder that other teachings also played a role in an individual’s path toward self-cultivation. Although it had not been unusual in the past for individuals to investigate other teachings in addition to Confucianism, religious syncretism reached a new peak in the late Ming period. Some of the most widely read thinkers, including Wang Yangming and Li Zhi, spent years in Buddhist circles.52 Like many other scholars living around that same time, they openly turned to Buddhism or Daoism in order to stabilize the School of Scholars. Many authors stressed that at their core, the three great teachings of China shared a unity, with each offering a different way of grasping the same reality.53 In this sense, the great revival of Buddhism from the sixteenth century onward was not necessarily seen as antithetical to Confucianism. Many Buddhist schools and prominent individuals linked their own faith to the search for lost Confucian ideals. For example, Yuan

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Zongdao (1560–1600) and Jiao Hong (1540–1620) argued that Buddhist writings were commentaries elucidating the words of Confucius and thus moving the present closer to the ideals of the past. 54 Zhu Hong (1535–1615) believed that Confucian and Buddhist values differed only in their details. He, too, espoused the opinion that key facets of the bygone golden age could be regained through the wisdom of the Buddha.55 By the mid-sixteenth century, the concepts of some Confucian syncretists and Buddhist scholars had converged so much that the boundaries between the two camps had blurred.56 Wang Yangming, for instance, maintained that self-cultivation must begin with one’s innate moral knowledge, and for him this meant that it was possible to grow through the study of other teachings. In any case, the great Ming scholar was convinced that much united the founding fathers of China’s three great teachings, and that all three had been led astray from their original path.57 Thinkers such as Wang Ji (1498–1583) justified their combinations of Confucianism and Buddhism by arguing that the latter was close to the original Confucian Way.58 Buddhism was often said to help an individual scholar liberate himself from social conventions and political constraints, something considered crucial on one’s journey toward true personal growth and moral maturation. But Wang Yangming and many other literati attracted to Buddhist teachings were still fundamentally committed to the School of Scholars. They distanced themselves from various Buddhist schools interpreting the world—and the self—as an illusion. Withdrawing from society was not an option for committed neo-Confucians, and they were adamant that humans lived in a world that needed to be seen as the ultimate reality. This philosophical commitment to the world also reflected itself in terms of a political agenda, albeit only in the widest sense: morally mature people were expected to contribute to a flourishing family, state, and human community.59 This work could be done by fostering public education, for instance, and some unconventional Confucians even turned to disseminating righteousness and integrity among a wider population via venues such as the popular theater.60

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In this social and intellectual climate, independent Confucian academies flourished, often representing particular branches within Confucian learning.61 For example, there were academies such as the Three Teachings Are All One Society, founded by Lin Zhaoen (1517– 1598).62 As its name suggests, the society was a site of exchange of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ideas, working to foster a syncretic approach. Other institutions, like the Donglin Academy, founded in the 1580s in Wuxi, focused more specifically on the study of Confucian texts as a key to moral guidance. One of its early influential figures, Gu Xiancheng (1550–1612), distanced himself from the Wang Yangming school’s ideal of spontaneous learning, although he supported Wang’s focus on moral self-reliance. To some extent, the intellectual thrust of the Donglin circle can be read as an effort to combine a critical spirit à la Wang Yangming’s idea of spontaneous learning with the established patterns of Confucian textual learning represented by the Zhu Xi school.63 The Donglin sought to uphold individual scholarly morality and true Confucian values, raising a critical mirror to the face of an ethically and politically failing state. Some of its most prominent members served in Beijing and sought to intervene at the court when the political crisis intensified under the eunuch Wei Zhongxian’s reign of terror. This led to a government crackdown that included torture and even execution of several Donglin members as well as the destruction of the academy.64 Although the Donglin buildings had already been burned to the ground when Zhu Zongyuan was starting to write, that academy’s intellectual and political views continued to resonate. Scholars who remained close to Donglin agendas were often decidedly against combining Confucianism with Buddhism or any other religion. Instead, they tried to stabilize the moral, social, and political conditions of China through a purer version of Confucianism, hoping to return to past Confucian ideals by winnowing out idle metaphysical speculations.65 They were not alone in seeing new ethical approaches and syncretism not as a potential rejuvenation of the School of Scholars but as a sign of decay.66 There were many who held other religions at least partly responsible for the moral degeneracy of the civil service, and in the final years of the Ming dynasty, concerns of this kind were

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aggravated by the role of popular Buddhist and Daoist cults in the widespread uprisings of peasants, workers, and marauding soldiers. But the forces striving for a narrower, more essentialist understanding of the Confucian tradition were only a part of a very colorful field in which all kinds of schools and interpretations blossomed. To reemphasize, during Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, the claim that the ethical and political program of Confucianism could be actualized through synthesis with another teaching was not uncommon, nor was the idea that such a synthesis would help China regain sociopolitical stability. The bulk of such syncretizing movements operated on a Confucian-Buddhist axis, but Daoism was also very influential. What is more, groups such as Chinese Muslims increasingly began publishing in Chinese, seeking to relate their faith to the conceptual worlds of the School of Scholars. Historically, Islamic communities in the Chinese empire had sought little inroads into elite culture. Now, this changed. However, unlike the Christian communities, Muslim accommodationists did not pursue a main objective of converting large numbers to their own faith but of showing that their own pursuits were rooted in both Confucian and Islamic traditions.67 Given all this, the accommodation between Confucianism and Christianity seems to fit into the turbulent landscape of syncretisms as the Ming era drew to a close. Key elements of the Christian accommodation with Confucianism resembled the linkage of other religions with the School of Scholars. Like representatives of other religions, Christian converts argued that the Learning of Heaven would help Chinese society return to a supposedly lost state of high moral integrity and political stability.68 Many Buddhist circles professed the goal of restoring the values of Confucianism in order to help recover its lost ideals.69 The Daoists also argued that they would be able to return China to an ancient society, usually envisioned as a simple society uninfluenced by the spoils of civilization.70 However, in several regards Christianity stood out from the other Confucian syncretisms in late Ming China. For one thing, it endeavored to combine the Confucian tradition with concepts new to its Chinese audience.71 Daoism was roughly coeval with Confucianism and was indigenously Chinese; Buddhism could face some criticism as a

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religion of foreign origins. Yet in most parts of society, its presence in China for more than one millennium—and its local adaptations— meant it was usually regarded as Chinese.72 Even Islam could look back on several centuries of unbroken history on Chinese soil and on longexisting Chinese communities in certain regions.73 Second, where the Chinese syncretists’ eclectic approach allowed them to draw on a variety of teachings, Christian syncretism was exceptional in its insistence that Buddhism and Daoism were harmful to Confucianism and had to be purged. The Christians’ denunciations of Buddhism and Daoism were similar to the demands of “purist” Confucian groups, but, of course, Christianity itself was outside traditional Confucian ideas. Nonetheless, the Learning of Heaven claimed that it could reconsolidate the essence of the School of the Scholars by infusing it with new elements.74 When seen from the pattern of Confucian possibilities, the Chinese version of Catholicism endorsed by the Jesuits hence made both syncretic and puristic claims. It thus did not clearly belong to any of the major Confucian camps during the period, which was not ideal with regard to garnering strong support from any of the existing groups of Chinese literati. This dual character of the Learning of Heaven was partly the inevitable consequence of coupling the Christian God to Confucianism and of combining allegiance to Rome with expressions of loyalty to the Chinese state.

ZHU’S ACCOMMODATIONS When the young Zhu took pen in hand to sketch his first pro-Christian texts, the scaffold to adapt the Jesuit version of Christianity to Chinese circumstances had already been constructed. It was built by a relatively small group of individuals, mainly European fathers and Chinese scholars who were not necessarily converts. Many people, including opponents of Chinese-Christian accommodation inside the Catholic Church and the Chinese state, left an imprint, so lasting that for several decades it was virtually impossible to make major changes to the accommodation developed in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Zhu

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Zongyuan hence did not attempt to shift the existing framework of accommodation. In his texts, the relationship between Confucianism and the Learning of Heaven nevertheless receives much attention. Indeed, Zhu’s first major work, Responses to a Guest’s Questions, begins with the fictitious guest stating that the three teachings of China can be traced back through their long traditions to a common source. The guest then proceeds to ask what Christianity could possibly add to this doctrinal triad, which he likens to a traditional Chinese tripod.75 In his reply, the host denies that the three teachings are equal or even share a goal: In order to determine the soundness of a teaching, you must first reflect upon the term “teaching.” “Teaching” is called the cultivation of the Way. The Way follows man’s spiritual nature and has its origins in heaven. . . . Daoism makes emptiness and Buddhism nonexistence76 the root [of their teachings]. Confucianism makes uprightness the root [of its teaching]. Emptiness and nonexistence are to uprightness as fire is to water or east is to west; they have nothing in common.77

In and of itself, this passage reads like a typical statement by a Confucian purist during this period. Zhu identifies the “cultivation of the Way” as Confucianism’s main agenda, using the term xiudao,78 which plays an important role in texts like the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), one of the four key texts of the neo-Confucian canon. The charge that Buddhism and Daoism revolved around emptiness or nonexistence was not out of the ordinary in circles trying to cleanse syncretism from the School of Scholars. In addition, Zhu connects the origins of Confucianism with “heaven” (tian). This was also a common formulation in staunch Confucian circles, a concept found frequently in the Confucian classics. It is only in the following passage that Zhu mentions the Learning of Heaven, writing that Confucius appealed to people in a very touching and clear manner. He adds that the ancient master’s ethical values were very similar to those of the Learning of Heaven. However, the text continues, Confucius had left only scant explanations on key

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questions such as the relationship between life and death, the existence of spirits and gods, and the common origin of existence.79 These gaps could—although he does not yet say so—be filled by the word of the Lord of Heaven. The latter concept (tianzhu) referred to the creator god in much of the pro-Christian literature of the time, and it also does so in Zhu Zongyuan’s works. A few pages later, Zhu finally points directly to Christian beliefs. He does this initially by alluding to a famous passage in the Great Learning (Daxue), another of the Four Books of neo-Confucianism.80 This passage relates the state of affairs at the time of the early emperors to ideals of self-cultivation; it lists various levels of personal growth, ranging from self-cultivation and regulating one’s family to the teloi of governing the country and bringing peace to the world. In this way, a person is defined as a political being, yet in a somewhat particular sense: moral maturation is seen as the root of all possible communal and political contributions. With an eye to the Great Learning, Zhu writes, “The good method and upright manner of self-cultivation and self-denial are the one important rule of regulating, governing, and bringing peace. Thus respectful veneration of the Lord of Heaven is the true distinction, the true lifeblood of Confucianism, for rewards and punishments after death are what truly follow after Confucianism.”81 Through his allusions to the Great Learning, Zhu underlines that the Lord of Heaven’s words could do more than merely return Confucianism to its spiritual purity and conceptual orthodoxy. In his eyes, a reinvigorated Confucian teaching could perfect the individual once its agenda was embedded in a deeper meaning found in the afterlife. Like many of his contemporaries, Zhu believed that a rejuvenated Confucianism would have the ethical heft to stabilize the political situation of the ailing Ming state. In Zhu’s eyes, the moral rectification of the individual was the only foundation for the restoration of social order. This may partly explain why he does not address questions of statecraft or the art of governance. Unlike the writings of other Christian scholars such as Xu Guangqi,82 none of Zhu’s texts contain a plan for political and social reform. Dissimilarities in their biographies may account for this difference: unlike Xu, Zhu was not a scholar-official holding an exalted

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position in the imperial bureaucracy. Questions of governance were not part of the responsibilities of his daily work. And though he was entangled with the new and old elites of Ningbo, he did not hold a major office and hence was freer to pursue his ideals in a more intellectual manner. This was also safer in a time in which political allegiances, or even a clear stance on issues of day-to-day politics, could be hazardous. In the longer context of the Confucian tradition, it was far from unusual for a politically concerned individual to write primarily about ethical issues and devote little attention to concrete political concerns. With the exception of the Mencius, none of the classics contained concrete political programs, and many of the great Song thinkers were concerned primarily with moral integrity and scholarly uprightness. This was further accentuated during the late Ming dynasty, when a growing number of scholars no longer sought social well-being and political stability in traditional officialdom, even as they searched for more personalized, spiritual answers to a key question: the meaning of being a good Confucian. In his Responses to a Guest’s Questions, Zhu even goes one step further, arguing that in addition to guidelines on good living, the Learning of Heaven also contained a method of good afterlife or death, and that the two were interrelated. By prompting people to reflect on their own mortality, Zhu writes, his teaching would motivate them to mend their ways and change their lives for the better.83 He continues, “[One may observe that] to venerate the Lord of Heaven is to sincerely follow Confucius’s words and to heed his instructions. If one says that the teachings of Confucianism are alone sufficient and that one has no need of the Learning of Heaven, one is not only committing a crime against the Emperor of Heaven but in fact also against Confucius himself.”84 After ruminations that would have sounded conventional in purist Confucian circles, the claims staked by the Learning of Heaven move to the foreground. Here terms like “Lord of Heaven” and “Emperor of Heaven” appear frequently—as do references to the afterlife. Zhu’s assertion that a traditional understanding of the School of the Scholars is tantamount to committing an offense against both Confucius and the Lord of Heaven was unusual for a Chinese literatus.

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In this passage, Zhu arrives at a clear judgment about scholars who failed to convert to the proper faith following Catholicism’s proclamation in China. According to this reasoning, they were not only violating the principles of a creator god but also could no longer be considered to belong to the School of the Scholars. Here Zhu combines the Christian condemnation of heresies with Chinese schools’ frequent allegations of not following true Confucianism. In his other book-length publication, A Summary of World Salvation, Zhu Zongyuan begins with an exploration of the relationship between this life and the next. He writes that worldly distinctions in property and social status cannot be compared to the gulf between life and death. Even if wealth were attainable for every individual, Zhu continues, it would still be nothing but the fruit of human labor. He adds that in view of the impermanence of the world, he cannot understand why most people either do not face up to their own mortality or adhere to false doctrines. When crossing a vast ocean, one is aware of the dangers and obstacles and takes the necessary precautions— how, then, could one traverse the ocean of one’s existence with nothing but a reed to cling to? This rhetorical question was an adroit allusion to a Zen Buddhist legend, often depicted in Zen paintings. It tells how the movement’s first missionary in China, Bodhidharma (Damo), after a fruitless audience with Emperor Wu (464–549) of the Liang dynasty, crosses the Yangtze on a single reed to take up missionary work in the north.85 In addition, Zhu makes critical remarks on Daoism, and he does so by turning against the search for immortality, which—mainly as an exercise of physical and spiritual refinement—was a widespread practice in various Daoist schools. Zhu argues that the objective of an immortal body was merely a projection of human aspirations that did not exceed the bounds of our consciousness. The search for immortality in this life, therefore, did not point to a higher truth and hence was a vain affair.86 After contrasting earthly pleasures with the bliss of eternity, Zhu continues, In essence, the situation in dealing with the contingent matter of life and death is such that the ordinary Confucians transmit them but do

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not discuss them, whereas the “two gentlemen” [Buddhism and Daoism] discuss them but are far from reality. . . . Yet if something is being transmitted but not discussed, how, then, can the principle be clear? If it is discussed but is far from reality, this only multiplies one’s misconceptions. I shall now examine the Six Classics:87 They contain the main insights [regarding the relationship between life and death], but the Confucians are not able to explain them. . . . If one wants to know the upright way of life and death, one must commit oneself entirely to the Lord of life and death. When I was born, from whom was this given? When I die, who shall take this away?. . . The ignorant and uneducated all know that heaven begot this people [mankind] and that it is not the blue heaven88 that begot this people but that it is the Lord of the blue heaven who begot this people.89

This section contains key elements of the way Zhu linked Christianity to Confucianism. Among them is the idea that in the Chinese classics, the essence of knowledge about the existence of the creator was contained in concepts such as heaven (tian). In Zhu’s eyes, this higher dimension of ancient Confucian wisdom was ignored by contemporary scholars, and Daoism and Buddhism were simply pitiful and unsubstantiated human forays into a higher reality, whose proponents were enunciating nothing but thoughtless “twitterings.”90 For him, these two religions’ search for physical immortality and sudden enlightenment were a rebellion against heaven and its lord, who had bestowed the human body and mind upon mankind.91 As a term for “rebelling against heaven” Zhu uses the classical expression beitian—but in his case it means more than breaking with the ideal of a harmony between humankind and the universe, which had long been a standard Confucian interpretation of that term, even across different schools. In Zhu Zongyuan’s text, it refers as well to the renunciation of the Lord of Heaven, or the Christian God understood as an anthropomorphic deity. In another passage, Zhu then offers a more direct interpretation of the relationship between the School of Scholars and the word of God: Because men did not perfect their spiritual nature, the Lord of Heaven mandated [ming] sages to establish a teaching in order to

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have them [the people] follow it. Just as the Middle Kingdom had Yao, Shun, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius, other states also produced early sages. The people flouted the wise words and would have nothing of them; they did not know to honor and preserve them. The Lord of Heaven had no choice but to come down himself in order to instruct the world.92

The global outlook in this passage is striking: Zhu states clearly that “other states also produced early sages.” This meant that China’s ancient wisdom could no longer be regarded as exceptional; instead, China became one of many different cultures that had naturally drawn closer to God. This implied that the Confucian classics and the words of the master himself were far from unique; instead they were merely part of a pattern found in different cultures. Neither in this passage nor elsewhere is there any attempt to define how the wisdom of classical Confucianism was related to the ancient teachings in other parts of the world. Nor is there any attempt to sketch a potential transcultural outreach of the School of Scholars. Combining Christianity with Confucianism while also ruminating about the potential global contributions of this great Chinese tradition was not on Zhu Zongyuan’s agenda. Only much later, toward the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would prominent Chinese thinkers like Kang Youwei (1858–1927) or Liang Qichao (1873–1929) formulate visions of Confucianism that inclined in such directions.93 However, by that time the geopolitical context as well as the intellectual climate inside and outside China had changed greatly. While he does not treat Confucianism as a teaching that could enrich other world regions, Zhu nevertheless places the origins of classical Confucianism in a global timeline. The preceding passage could also be read as China’s early sages being naturally destined, rather than ordered, to develop a teaching compatible with the truth of a Lord of Heaven. However, the following sentences make the idea of a divine creator deliberately intervening in the landscapes of human teachings explicit. Zhu opines that God descended to this world in order to put teachings in human societies back onto their correct path. Since he explicitly states that teachings in other parts of the

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world were facing their own crises, he renders the standard neoConfucian assumption that the proper Way had been lost into a global problem. According to this logic, Christianity was not a foreign teaching but the consummate way early Confucianism had been pointing toward. Moreover, Confucius retained the status of having followed the Way, which in Zhu’s works becomes the will of the creator, as far as humanly possible. For a Confucian reader who was already critical of combining Buddhist or other outside elements with the School of Scholars, Zhu’s interpretation would have been difficult to accept. After all, those scholars who favored removing what they deemed harmful Buddhist elements from the Confucian fabric typically believed that Confucianism had emerged from a self-enveloping civilizational process inseparably connected with the social and political structures of China. But this view was no longer tenable if one assumed that the ancient Chinese sages—like sages elsewhere—followed a mandate from a God who transcended cultures and intervened across the world. This latter assumption was certain to raise eyebrows among those Confucians who agreed with Zhu’s anti-Buddhist rhetoric. Here the dilemma of the Learning of Heaven and its uneasy position between syncretic and antisyncretistic Confucian schools becomes visible again, and it does so in a particularly clear manner. Those who would have supported Zhu’s claim that Buddhism needed to be overcome to regain Confucian stability were likely to criticize him vehemently for his take on the global or metaphysical contexts of Chinese culture. Zhu anticipates this criticism in that same passage and discards any counterarguments as cultural haughtiness: “how can our China be so boastful, arrogant, and self-satisfied as to drown in the traditional accounts?”94

READING SACRED TEXTS AND CULTIVATING ANCIENT WISDOM In Chinese Confucianism, just as in many other script-based traditions, the exegesis of classical texts allowed continuity to be reconciled with change, since traditional texts could be reinterpreted and

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adapted to the present day.95 The world of classical scriptures was an important arena for foreign teachings to prove that their messages and concepts were ultimately compatible with the textual heritage of Confucius and his forefathers. Already in the first millennium, much ink, scholarly meticulousness, and intellectual fervor had gone into attempts to show the congruence between Buddhist sutras and Confucian classics. Other religions, including Islam, had long followed suit. In that sense, it is hardly surprising that seventeenth-century European missionaries and Chinese Christians would make similar attempts. Clearly Zhu was concerned with this question, seeking to provide evidence that his Learning of Heaven was ultimately compatible with the Confucian classics. Some aspects of the late Ming academic climate facilitated this attempt, while others rendered it more complex. For one thing, the basic question of what role the classics should play proved highly controversial—arguably far more controversial than during earlier centuries. There was a new uncertainty about the roles of the Confucian classics emerging from differences between groups like the Wang Yangming school and the state-endorsed, official versions of Confucianism. In some heated debates the definition of ethical cultivation and ultimate moral authority was put at stake. The controversies over this topic implied the question as to what role Confucius and the sages of the past should play in the present. This subject, in turn, had implications for the legitimacy of the examination system and the Chinese state apparatus at large. The official examination system—and the Zhu Xi school closely associated with it—upheld that the Confucian classics were edited by Confucius himself and needed to be the main guides on the path of self-cultivation. This idea was not only based on the ancient master’s historical roles but also embedded in an anthropocosmic vision. The Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy in particular believed that the cosmic principle (li) manifested itself in the classics in a particularly clear manner. Through a prolonged—indeed, continuous—study of these texts, a person would not only become more mature but also could actualize their innate cosmic principle. In the ideal scenario, the scholar and the classical text would enter a relationship forged by a connectedness through

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cosmic forces, and this relationship would cause the Way to be brought forth in and through an individual. In contrast, many scholars felt that the officially sanctioned branches of neo-Confucianism had declined into a pedantic, stale study of texts driven not by the quest for self-perfection but by careerism. As part of its counterprogram, the Wang Yangming school emphasized that the main sources for moral learning needed to be found and mobilized in an individual’s mind and heart: uninspired, overly meticulous studies of the Confucian classics were not the road to moral growth,96 for self-cultivation could take place in a sudden, highly individual manner. Wang saw the study of the classics as more of an opportunity for critical introspection, a source of self-assurance on the path to self-development.97 Some scholars went even further than Wang Yangming and raised the question of whether the classics needed to be read at all. Li Zhi, who remarked that “Confucius never instructed anyone to learn from Confucius,” was particularly pointed.98 In this intellectual climate, no small number of scholars turned to Buddhism with the aim, among other things, of rescuing Confucianism from what they saw as its ossification.99 A number of commentaries were composed in which the sutras were placed on a par with Confucian texts.100 In fact, most syncretists, regardless of which path they started from, challenged the idea that the classics could be studied only within the Confucian tradition. In other words, they thought it possible to use other teachings, most notably Buddhism, to bring to light the spiritual treasures contained in these texts. Jiao Hong, for example, a member of the Taizhou school, based his Buddhist- and Daoist-influenced philosophical pluralism on a precise interpretation of the Confucian classics. This was part of his criticism of the Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy. Other groups sought to take a middle ground between the Wang Yangming school and the official Confucian state learning. Several protagonists of the Donglin Academy did not go as far as many syncretists, but they agreed with Wang that true learning should not be confused with a slavish attitude toward the Confucian classics.101 The more purist Confucian circles tended to distance themselves from the Song commentaries, which, during the Ming period, were

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often studied more intensively than the classics themselves. Instead, they returned to the works of the Han dynasty in their search for a historically sensitive understanding of the “canonical” texts.102 The guiding assumption was still that the real message of the classics had been obscured, but the blame was placed not on the official orthodoxy but on the profusion of syncretism. The tangle of commentaries and interpretations of the classics was compared to dust on a valuable mirror that needed to be cleaned.103 The Buddhists were criticized for considering their sutras to be equal to the classics, and the Wang Yangming school was the subject of similar attacks. A number of scholars opined that with their exegesis, the followers of Wang Yangming deliberately sought to influence people along Daoist and Buddhist lines.104 Zhu Zongyuan wrote as a part of this complicated landscape of schools, networks, and thinkers arguing over the right access to the classics. Unlike some later converts, his works do not provide an exhaustive list of every passage in the classics of relevance to Christianity.105 In fact, he used only isolated quotations from various important Confucian texts including the Four Books of neo-Confucianism. The greatest density of citations can be found in Zhu’s work Treatise on the Removal of Doubts about Christianity, where he underpins his arguments with passages from two of the Five Classics, the Book of Songs and the Book of Documents.106 In that same short text, Zhu Zongyuan makes an argument that had been made by Ricci107 before but nevertheless may have struck many Chinese readers as highly unusual. He started by pointing to the commonly held assumption that the Confucian classics had not survived in their original form, in part because of the book burning by the Qin emperor in 213 b.c.e. The question of how to deal with the problematic transmission of the texts had been the subject of controversies during Han times, and these debates became more fervent in the late Ming period.108 Yet Zhu goes one step further: he writes that Judea was the only place where the written records had been handed down without interruption from the very beginning and were therefore without flaw.109

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This statement went further than suggesting the compatibility of the Bible and the Confucian classics: it supported the claim of the superiority of the Christian exegesis and its textual basis. If Zhu’s reader was to follow this argumentation, he or she had to accept not only that teachings equal to those of China had existed in other civilizations but also that in the case of Judaism and Christianity, this knowledge was better preserved. This was a serious claim given the great Confucian pride in authority through historicity. In addition to the Treatise, Zhu also considered Confucian texts and the issue of their authority in his two main monographs. In Responses to a Guest’s Questions, he argues that Christianity alone was able to show the proper way to understand the content of the classics. This was extremely important, he writes, for while the canonical Confucian texts contained the knowledge of the right way, they failed to present it in a clear and unequivocal fashion. Moreover, the wisdom of the classics was out of reach for scholars who had lost the true way and found themselves in a situation as if moving about in a haze.110 Zhu continues, “Once one has accepted the Learning of Heaven, one then knows that in our Six Classics and Four Books every sentence is full of certainty and that every sentence has a handle [that opens the gateway to a higher meaning]. And the superficial scholars have verily understood nothing of it at all.”111 Zhu’s observation that every sentence of the classics “has a handle” is in principle not unrelated to the belief in the possibility of spontaneous learning as it was propagated by the Wang Yangming school and other camps. Handles, after all, can be utilized in a brief moment, opening doors to other rooms or to an outside world. Zhu also opines that the wisdom manifest in the classics did not need to be attained through a prolonged process of continuous educational traversal across shelves of commentaries. However, in contrast to various neoConfucian schools, Zhu saw access to the true, deep contents of the classics as coming not from the unfolding of a cosmic principle that was inherent in particularly clear form in the Confucian texts and human nature. Rather, an external force provided the keys to true learning: the word of the Lord of Heaven.

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With his emphasis on the word of God as a handle to the sacred texts of Confucianism, Zhu divests the classics of their character as a main source of values and moral politics, reducing them to documents that bear witness to ancient sages and point to a higher existence. The true textual authority, the true key to real learning, came from elsewhere. While Zhu does not explicitly say this, his statements clearly meant that the Confucian classics could no longer be regarded as unique: they were comparable to other prerevelation forms of wisdom found in a variety of world regions. What all this amounted to was the assumption that there was now a higher textual authority than the Confucian classics themselves. How do Zhu’s ideas on the classics, which were shared by many other Christians in China during the period, fit into the overall intellectual context of the late Ming period? In terms of his general exegetical direction, Zhu was certainly of one voice with many significant Confucian schools of the time when he stated that the present age no longer had the right approach to the classics and could not even claim a correct understanding of the traditional texts.112 In the context of late Ming intellectual life, this was not an unusual argument to make. Going beyond that, many schools propounded that they would ultimately be able to reveal the true meaning of the classics. In that sense, Christianity shared many characteristics with other interpretations of the Confucian classics during this time, as well as during other epochs of Chinese history. Yet when we look more closely at the context of Zhu’s argument, we again recognize the uneasy position of the Learning of Heaven within the Confucian environs of his time, in part because its position toward the Confucian classics fit uneasily between two different main camps. On the one hand, the European religion’s criticism of syncretic approaches and its claim to have rediscovered the true content of the classics was similar to forces such as the Donglin party or the “Restoration Society” (fushe).113 Missionaries and converts frequently accused the neo-Confucian interpretations of the classics of being influenced by Buddhism. On the other hand, as a scriptural culture affiliating itself with the Confucian tradition, Christianity had much in common with the syncretic interpretations of the classics

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found in some circles that also followed Buddhist schools. They differed, of course, in that the Buddhists usually sought a strictly personal approach to the classics and did not associate a higher truth with the kinds of universal categories as the Christians did.114 In Buddhism, after all, the word of the sutras was not conceptualized as a creator god’s word, so no text could be seen as a general handle that opened the door to the true spirit of the ancient Confucian records. Also in its relation with the Chinese classics, the Learning of Heaven hence found itself in an ambivalent position. This was observed by even some contemporary opponents of the foreign religion. For example, Wen Xiangfeng (1577–1642) stated in his 1616 text Critique of the Western Barbarians (Chufen xiyi yi) that while Christianity opposed Buddhism as a corruption of Confucianism, its exegesis of the classics likewise led to a vulgarization of the School of the Scholars.115 As a general pattern, critics of Christianity supported their arguments with quotes from the classics and accused missionaries and converts of using these works selectively, deliberately misrepresenting their message to falsely build up the European religion. Yet in addition to this dilemma, the suggested Confucian-Christian synthesis raised other challenging questions. Was this really a synthesis between equal parts, or did it not give primacy to the Learning of Heaven? And what was the relationship of the latter with Chinese civilization? Was the Lord of Heaven truly a divine being towering far above the cultural differences of this world? Or was his message, as presented to seventeenth-century China, closely wedded to concepts and contents from Europe? And if the latter was the case, what did the accommodation method imply for Confucianism’s claims to historicity? This was not just a theoretical question but also pointed to many practical issues.

4 FOREIGN LEARNINGS AND CONFUCIAN WAYS

WHOSE INSTITUTION? EUROPEAN CULTURE AND THE GLOBAL CHURCH The so-called accommodation method suggested a congruence between ancient Chinese Confucianism and a God who transcended all the civilizational boundaries of this mortal world. This relationship was portrayed as immediate, so in principle no other culture, including Europe, needed to figure as an intermediary. Yet the role of culture was not as clear-cut as an isolated look at the Confucian-Christian synthesis might suggest. The Jesuits did not intend that Christianity be completely hidden behind a sinicized Learning of Heaven, and the Chinese audience did not receive the Christian message as the word of a culturally neutral God. Instead, in various regards the foreign origins of Christianity were accentuated in the Jesuit China mission and its organizational structures and cultures. References to the foreign origins of Christianity were actually part of the wider proselytizing strategy pursued by the Society of Jesus in China. Instead of relying only on the concept of a culture-transcending God, the Jesuits emphasized their “exotic” background, and they did so across their interactions with very different parts of Chinese society. In villages and among the urban poor, the fathers did not present Jesus and the church entirely in Chinese clothes. In fact, they disseminated biblical stories including the information about the

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places in which Jesus of Nazareth lived. Moreover, they insisted on keeping core elements of Catholic symbolism, liturgy, and music even in the most remote outposts of Chinese Christianity. To be sure, Chinese converts were cocreating their lived versions of Christianity, but the fathers did not practice or permit a complete localization of all aspects of ecclesiastical life. The few large church buildings that were erected in seventeenth-century China can be taken as a material manifestation of such cultural policies; they were often built largely in European style and added visibly outlandish elements to the cityscapes of places like Hangzhou or Shanghai. At the lower levels of Chinese society, not only Catholic culture but also the Jesuits’ ethnicity played a role in missionary strategy. The different look of the European fathers could also cause difficulties in daily life—for instance, when innkeepers or ferrymen hesitated to serve the foreigners or even made threats to report them to state authorities.1 Yet the Jesuits’ unusual appearance could also work in favor of their missionary goals; in fact, sometimes they were actively translated into proselytization policies. For instance, Niccolò Longobardo, one of the early Jesuits in China, reported in 1599 that he often had a Chinese collaborator visit hamlets and villages before his own arrival to announce the impending visit of a “preacher from the distant West,” which was supposed to garner interest.2 Manuel Dias recorded a visit by Rodrigo de Figueiredo to the Ningbo region and adds how the strange appearance of the European priest, along with the altar and related imagery, attracted a large crowd in the hamlets and villages surrounding Zhu Zongyuan’s hometown. This kind of initial fascination with the eccentric may often have paved the way to conversations between village dwellers and missionaries.3 Also in other regards, the visibly different ethnicity of the Jesuits, as well as their foreign cultural backgrounds, played a role in the China mission—a role that has not been sufficiently investigated by modern scholarship. There were in fact no native priests in China during Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, and because of the small number of European missionaries in the country, the vast majority of Christian communities saw a priest twice a year at most.4 Some religious functions, including baptisms, were carried out by Chinese coadjutor

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brothers who were meant to assist the society’s priests.5 Moreover, the number of unordained Chinese Jesuit brothers remained extremely limited, with a total of only twenty-eight individuals being able to join the Society of Jesus in this capacity over a period of one hundred years.6 Christian communities throughout the Ming state were thus largely supervised by Chinese laypeople, who took care of worldly affairs and attended to communal life as well as catechetical instruction. However, key liturgical elements such as the sacraments of the Eucharist or penance could be offered only by an ordained cleric. One can imagine the performative character of these visits by European missionaries, particularly in the less-privileged and more remote communities to which a large majority of Chinese Christians belonged. Imagine the power of the arrival of a foreign-looking man whose infrequent appearances meant that key liturgical elements, which entire communities of Christians had awaited for months, could finally be carried out. But it was not only among the uneducated and poor that the Jesuits emphasized their foreign origins. They did so in educated circles as well, albeit differently. Their dissemination of European science, mnemotechnics, and other subjects into the Chinese language was not just information; it had the lure of erudite traditions from afar, which many in China’s upper classes were eager to learn about. The Jesuits hoped that these secular arts would raise levels of appreciation for the Leaving of Heaven7 and create trust and acceptance for their main cause, the spread of Christianity throughout the Chinese state. Indeed, often it was European science—and the fact that its lands of origins were remote from Chinese shores—that for the Jesuits opened many doors to elite mansions, including the imperial court itself. The Jesuits were disseminating idealized information about Europe, and at the same time many of their publications emphasized that they came from a geographically distant world. This was a message conveyed in the widely circulating Jesuit world atlases such as Giulio Aleni’s Chronicle of Foreign Lands (Zhifang waiji), which was published in 1623.8 Such texts usually contained some information about single European states, such as Italy or Spain, and they also made it clear that Christianity had its strongholds far from China’s shores. The

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makers of these Jesuit world maps did not necessarily want to convey an adequate picture of the world with all its cultural and religious diversity.9 Yet at the same time many of these texts were far from presenting the Far West as another cultural China. For instance, in one of his books Aleni presented in some depth the division of knowledge common at European universities, making no attempt to portray it as epistemologically close to the Ming state’s institutions of higher learning.10 There were different terms for the Jesuits’ native lands. In addition to mentioning single countries, the Jesuit world maps often used terms such as “Western countries” or the “Great West.” In many proChristian texts the Jesuits used expressions like “learning from the Far West” (taixi zhi xue) or “Western learning” (xixue).11 The Jesuits thus did not downplay their religion’s distant origins, but even if they would have wanted to do so, the late Ming cultural context would have made that impossible. In seventeenth-century Chinese society, it would have been nigh unthinkable to present a hitherto unknown doctrine without a reference to its geographic origins. In fact, there was a strong tradition of labeling teachings according to their lands of origin, and the concept of the “West” was already in use. Since the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), Chinese Muslims had denoted Islam as “Western learning” or “learning from the Far West,” written using exactly the same characters as those adopted by the Ming-era Christians for their teaching. Also in the case of Islam, both religious and nonreligious texts of Arabic origin had long been categorized under “Western learning.” Even official Ming works referred to the background of Islamic astronomy as “Western.”12 In that sense, the Jesuits were hardly creating a new category when they referred to their own faith and knowledge as “Western learning.” Moreover, historically it was not only Islam that had been associated with the concept of the “West” in China. In fact, even Buddhism, long a part of China’s spiritual landscape, could be connected with the expression “West” and remained so for many centuries. In this context, we may recall that one of the most famous late Ming novels, dealing with the travels of a seventh-century monk to India, was titled Journey to the West (Xiyouji).13 However, the influence and visibility of

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European texts were growing quickly in late Ming society. This meant that the association of “Western learning” with Islam slowly but surely dropped out of the picture. The term increasingly came to refer to the spectrum of European works circulating in China. In other words, in the final years of the Ming dynasty, “Western learning” began to refer to the writings that were translated or authored under the names of Jesuit missionaries.14 All this clearly accentuated the foreign background of the Learning of Heaven, and in this aspect it was not easily reconcilable with the main message in the Confucian-Christian accommodation. The latter, it should be noted, was centered on the idea that the Jesuits meant chiefly to disseminate the message of a God who towered over all cultural differences, and that they did not seek to import another culture into China. This tension between Christianity as a universalizable word of God and as an element of European culture remained unresolved. No major theoretical work was published in Chinese that discussed in depth the relationship between the global and the local, the transcultural and the European in the Jesuits’ version of Christianity. Yet we must not project history backward and read more recent meanings of the “West” into the Jesuit China mission. In China in the 1600s, “the West” connoted largely a cardinal direction in a world in which China had no reason to feel marginal, and in which the fear of lagging behind did not yet fill the hearts and minds of much of the educated elite. To put it simply, in seventeenth-century China, the West did not have the undertone of might, progress, and dynamism.15 The Learning of Heaven remained a small teaching from distant lands, which converted a slight proportion of the overall population and interested a sizable section of China’s educated circles; the latter chiefly through its connections with Jesuit scientific and cartographic works, however. All this meant that neither the Jesuits nor the Chinese side conceptualized the connections between Catholicism and Europe according to the haughty logic of hegemonic worldviews that defined Western civilization as superior to all other cultures in the world. Unlike in the nineteenth century, Christianity was neither helped nor burdened by being presented as a necessary ingredient of the West understood as a teaching civilization. Acceptance for the

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Learning of Heaven as a foreign teaching needed to be created through other means, and in some circles this could be an uphill battle.

A SELF-SUFFICIENT CHINA? There was no alternative to presenting the Learning of Heaven as a foreign teaching. But late Ming society provided rather favorable conditions to a newly arriving religion, and in addition some more drawnout developments within neo-Confucian thought worked in favor of the idea to open China and Confucianism to a foreign teaching. Since the Song in particular, many Confucian circles tended to see the realization of ethical consciousness as no longer chiefly an outcome of ancient Chinese history. They had come to believe that such values were not merely transmitted from the Chinese past but were part of a higher reality. Many thinkers now considered virtues like benevolence or propriety as aspects of cosmic forces that tied human nature to the universe at large. In other words, a number of Confucian scholars believed that the ultimate source of morality was not confined to China as a historically grown state and culture. This outlook made it easier to argue that teachings from different parts of the world could— and should—be viewed as of aid to China in a return to stability. Moreover, seeking information about other world regions was not uncommon in seventeenth-century China. The more privileged members of society were particularly interested in acquiring additional knowledge of distant lands and cultures. An example of this widespread mood is the success of the annotated world maps introduced by the Jesuit missionaries. Although these geographical depictions somewhat diminished the Ming state and glorified European countries, the maps caused a sensation among intellectuals and indeed even with the emperor himself.16 Published around the turn of the seventeenth century, they appeared in several editions, reflecting the strong demand for them on the Chinese book market.17 However, there was also criticism of the Jesuit maps. For instance, a late Ming text by Wei Jun (ca. 1553–1626), a scholar-official active in the anti-Christian initiatives in 1616 carried the title “Ricci’s Fallacy and Its Deceptiveness.”18

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One error, according to Wei, was that Matteo Ricci’s map did not put China in the exact middle but only very close to the center.19 Similarly, a high official of the Nanjing Board of Rites, Shen Que (1565–1624), objected to the designation “Great West” (daxi) on Jesuit maps and other documents—because, he argued, only the Ming could be called great.20 Anti-Christian texts of this kind were not broadly representative among intellectuals, but some literati groups were expressing objections to the influx of foreign elements; these groups were typically driven by the desire to return to an assumed Chinese cultural essence. As Ricci noted in his accounts, for many learned individuals, China was not just a greater culture but culture and civilization itself.21 Even long-settled Buddhism faced the charge that since it did not stem from a Chinese root it could only worsen the political crisis and cultural malaise of the time. Interestingly, some Buddhists presented their faith as an effective defense of the Way against perilous teachings from the West. When the Jesuit Aleni arrived in Fujian around 1633, the Buddhist monk Huang Zhen called on Buddhists and Confucians alike to resist the new heresy.22 The landscapes of late Ming intellectual life were thus clearly complex. In many disputes on the relationship between China and other cultures, certain key terms stood at the center, and they played an important role in Zhu Zongyuan’s reflections as well. Words such as yi, qiang, and rong, for example, originally referred to peoples living in particular in areas outside ancient China’s core regions. Starting already in the nineteenth century, much of Western academic literature rendered these terms as “barbarian.”23 Yet while there are reasons for using this term, the original ancient Greek concept of “barbarian” that later entered many European languages does not fully grasp the connotations of these Chinese terms.24 Certainly, in times like the Ming-Qing transition many scholars and intellectuals referred to the peoples outside China as less civilized. Terms like yi and qiang, or even the geographically more neutral term wai (outside, foreign), were frequently related to concepts such as zhi (unformed) and pu (unrefined).25 On the other hand, some segments of Chinese society, including parts of the most educated circles, did not agree that there was an unbridgeable civilizational gap between China and its neighbors. These

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disagreements did not matter only intellectually, and the question of civilization was not merely a scholarly controversy. These themes were tied to a grave point at issue: the problem of whether ethnic groups like the Manchus could possibly have a mandate to enter the imperial palace and rule over the Chinese state.26 Similarly embattled, and crucial, were words like zhongguo (Middle Kingdom), zhong (center), and hua (flourish) and their derived expressions such as zhonghua (flourishing center). In the context of the seventeenth century, we should not misread words like zhongguo and assume they pointed to China as a nation-state in the modern sense.27 To be sure, long before the beginning of the Ming dynasty, the concept associated with zhongguo had come to mean a territory based on the Middle States prior to the Qin unification in 221 b.c.e.; it also stood for a continuous cultural flow from the ancient period onward.28 At the same time, prior to the early twentieth century when the Chinese historical consciousness was reshaped in the context of nation-building efforts,29 the term zhongguo carried a wide and malleable meaning. It referred much more to a central state in the Asian system than to Chineseness in a narrower sense. Again, the political dimensions of this conceptual trend were significant: it was still semantically possible to define groups ranging from the Manchus to the Jesuits as intrinsic parts of zhongguo. In terms of their self-presentation, the Jesuits did not fit the role of uncultured students of Chinese civilization, nor was that a role they aspired to. At the same time, they were opposed in some Confucian circles that objected to the idea of accommodating Confucian traditions to foreign learning. Zhu Zongyuan could not ignore the outside origins of his teaching—he in fact included a typical question in his Summary of World Salvation: “If one rejects the inherited traditions of this place [China] and adopts a teaching newly established by barbarians in order to save oneself from transgressions, is this not a violation of all that is righteous?”30 Zhu Zongyuan devotes some lengthy passages to this topic, not just in A Summary but also in his first monograph, Responses to a Guest’s Questions.31 In both works, Zhu discusses Christianity’s cultural background toward the end of each text, as if to dispel any last doubts that

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may be harbored by the reader. His main approach is to maintain that China’s ancient masters never believed—or practiced—any form of cultural isolationism. Zhu seeks to debunk the notion of China’s cultural self-sufficiency by pointing to imported elements that enriched the lives of his readers. For instance, in the Responses he points to the Arabic influences on the Chinese calendar as well as imported firearms from Vietnam.32 This last was not accurate, but until after the end of the Ming dynasty a theory held that China came into possession of firearms through the Yongle emperor’s (r. 1402–1424) conquest of Annam in the early 1400s.33 These arguments were a reminder that China had benefited from foreign elements in a number of instances, that as a culture it could not live off its own substance alone. The facts Zhu mentions were commonly accepted; even those in conservative scholarly circles generally acknowledged the foreign origin of certain products and skills. Many words for imported goods or ideas indicated their foreign origins, containing syllables such as hu or yang, which referred to China’s inner Asian and maritime frontiers. Another example Zhu refers to in his Summary is the widespread pharmaceutical imports into China—the implied message was that people trusted foreign products to benefit their health, and he thus turns to the reader with the following question: “If we can derive benefit in cases of illness and disease, how can we suspect something that is not homegrown and therefore reject it?”34 It was of course a long way from the reception of individual skills or items to the adoption of a new religious doctrine or system of values. Zhu therefore also seeks to deconstruct the notion of China as a monolithic cultural block that could not be juxtaposed with other civilizational realms. For example, in his Responses to a Guest’s Questions he addresses the differences between Chinese and other languages, which in his time was often regarded as the dividing line between the civilized and the uncivilized world. Zhu alludes to such sentiments by having the guest argue that writing and language were surely evidence of a distinction between China and the barbarians.35 The host replies as follows:

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If one holds this view of languages, [the objection can be made that] the pronunciation of our [ancient kingdom of] Yue36 is not the same as that of the local language of [the ancient kingdoms of] Yan and Zhao.37 Can one, then, like the people of the south, point to those in the north and call them “rope snobs”? And like the people of the north, call those of the south “island barbarians”? If one holds this view of writing, [the objection can be made that] today’s standard characters are not the same as the antique tadpole script.38 Could earlier epochs then describe subsequent generations as savage tribes? Could people today scoff at their ancestors as savage tribes? It has the same meaning whether it is called fu [福] or zhi [祉], whether it is called jue [厥] or qi [其].39 . . . When places are separated by one hundred thousand miles, how could they be made to be identical?40

In this passage, Zhu makes clear that Chinese as a language and a writing system was not homogeneous in space and time. Just as there were great regional varieties in pronunciation between various parts of China, the meaning and shape of Chinese characters could change significantly throughout history. This was particularly the case before the standardization of characters under the Qin dynasty (221–206 b.c.e.). Zhu goes further, however, when he points to the tensions and prejudice between different Chinese regions. For instance, as early as the fifth century terms containing the word “rope” were being used pejoratively, labeling people in parts of northern China in an allusion to the queue that was a common male hairstyle in some regions.41 Even older were concepts like “island barbarians,” used pejoratively in the first millennium b.c.e. for peoples living south of the Chinese borders and later for southern Chinese people.42 According to some interpretations, it was particularly in the Ming period when regional identities took a competitive, sometimes antagonistic turn in literati circles. There is evidence that the notion of civilizational gaps figured in the tensions between scholar-officials of the Yangtze delta and those of northern China. One reason may have been the Chinese state’s practice of noting the regional origins of its officials and deploying them accordingly—for example, as a hedge

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against corruption, officials from the south could not hold positions in the civil and fiscal ministries because southeastern China represented the biggest fiscal resource.43 All this fed the polarization to which Zhu Zongyuan alludes. Through his examples and rhetorical questions, Zhu Zongyuan hoped to impress upon his readers that the notion of a unified and unchanging Chinese culture was not tenable. The implicit argument was that China was so diverse that it was impossible to categorically distinguish between the Chinese and the non-Chinese world.

DELIBERATING THE “MIDDLE” In his effort to render the definition of China less fixed and more inclusive, Zhu Zongyuan goes beyond these few examples, crafting passages that approach the subject in more scholarly and intellectually sophisticated ways. Consider the lengthy passages in his Responses to a Guest’s Questions that deal with concepts such as “middle” and “outer”—concepts important in classical Confucianism. Perhaps Zhu felt that if he could demonstrate the full extent of his scholarly capabilities, his learned critics might lend him an ear. In any case, while much of his works are written in an accessible style that did not require an exceptionally high educational background, here he shifts to a more elevated level. These passages contain so many allusions and indirect quotations that only a reader deeply rooted in the Confucian textual tradition could grasp and appreciate them. Many years of Confucian education, particularly in the branches corresponding to the late Ming state examination system, were necessary to grasp even the author’s basic points. The core message of these text segments would have been as inaccessible to a majority of seventeenth-century Chinese citizens as they are to most modern readers, whether from China or not. Here Zhu’s reflections on China’s transcontinental encounters grow extremely local, not only in a spatial but also in a societal sense, since the number of potential readers who could follow his line of argument was very small. An example of a highly learned passage is the following section from Zhu’s Responses. The host replies

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to the guest’s objection that in the Confucian Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) nothing is more important than the distinction between Chinese and others: When Confucius compiled the Spring and Autumn Annals, [he distinguished between] the barbarians and the Middle States, but he elevated some of them to [the status] of the Middle States. This is why he wrote, “The baron of Chu sent Jiao with a diplomatic request.” He elevated [him] and recorded the aristocratic title. [Confucius distinguished] the Middle States from the barbarians, but he [demoted some] of them to that level. This is why he wrote, “The count of Zheng attacked Xu.” [Confucius] deliberately used the title. He made particular use of titles to emphasize [moral judgments]. Those he judged worthy, it was so because of filial piety, piety toward their older brothers, loyalty, honesty, charity, upright conduct, and modesty—not because of their geographical nearness. Those he held in low esteem, it was so because of their greed, oppression, tyranny, cruelty, contempt, and barbarism—not because of their geographical remoteness.44

A direct translation of this passage does not suffice to unlock its meaning. To understand the ideas, one must also excavate various layers of the knowledge worlds of late Ming Chinese literati. First, one must know the relevant body of authoritative works from which many of the direct and indirect quotations in this passage were taken. Yet it does not suffice to recall which texts were being read during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is, second, crucial to consider how they were read by the audience Zhu Zongyuan wanted to reach. This in turn requires a familiarity with the world of commentaries on the Confucian classics read in the late Ming era. As a third step, we can then discern the meaning of single text segments as well as the intended message of the cited paragraph at large. In terms of the core body of scriptural knowledge it referred to, Zhu’s paragraph was based on the canon of thirteen Confucian texts. Compiled in the twelfth century, these figured importantly in the imperial examinations. This canon included the so-called Four Books,

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whose importance was greatly emphasized from the Song period onward, along with texts that were much older and had long been deemed essential in selecting Chinese scholar-officials. These included works such as the Book of Changes (Yijing) and the historical texts Book of Documents (Shujing) and Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu). The Spring and Autumn Annals, which is the key to retrieving the meaning of the quoted passage, is an extremely brief history of the state of Lu from 722 to 481 b.c.e. The book’s standing was elevated by the fact that beginning in the Tang dynasty (ca. 618–907), three commentaries on this work were included in the corpus of the Thirteen Classics. One of these canonical commentaries, the Zuozhuan, provides a supplementary account of political and military events, while the texts Gongyangzhuan and Guliangzhuan, which are also commentaries, are more catechetical in nature and focus mainly on the supposedly normative statements made in the Spring and Autumn Annals.45 Outside the official Confucian canon one used in addition several other texts in order to gain access to the meaning of the Spring and Autumn Annals. Among them was the Rich Dew of the “Spring and Autumn Annals” (Chunqiu fanlu) by Dong Zhongshu (179–104 b.c.e.).46 One last crucial work for the Ming-era reader was the commentary by Hu Anguo (1074–1138), then a standard work for preparing for the civil service examinations.47 The Spring and Autumn Annals was considered particularly important since its authorship was attributed to Confucius himself. While modern research often sees the Annals as little more than purely factual records of political events, Confucian exegetes sought to uncover Confucius’s moral assessments of these events. For instance, Dong Zhongshu’s highly philosophical work proceeded on the assumption that Confucius had revealed the “Way of heaven” (tiandao) in his comments on political developments and that his words offered insights into the core questions of the present.48 This outlook was still fairly common even more than one and a half millennia later, in seventeenth-century China. Confucius’s messages, most literati still believed, were contained in the semantics and structure of the text. Decoding them required combing the subtlest textual irregularities for deeper meanings that would offer an authoritative message

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for the present day. In particular, any mention or omission of titles or dates was seen as an explicit statement by Confucius. Many scholarly and administrative battles were fought over the appropriate exegesis of single passages in the Spring and Autumn Annals—not surprising, since their elliptical nature left them open to various interpretations and they were tied to major political questions. With this textual background, it becomes possible to interpret brief quotes such as “The baron of Chu sent Jiao with a diplomatic request” in the cited passage, but one must proceed on three levels. First, one needs to recall the general historical circumstances of the Spring and Autumn Period between the late eighth and early fifth centuries b.c.e. Second, it is important to take a closer look at the events quotes of this kind refer to. Finally, the Confucian interpretation of both these ­historical aspects and the actual wording of the Annals need to be considered. To start with the broader historical setting of this period, during the late eighth century b.c.e., the Zhou dynasty had already lost the last vestiges of any real power over the various fiefdoms, but its nominal claim to universal rule persisted, especially with regard to its ritual function. The ruler of the house of Zhou was discursively recognized as the only Son of Heaven in the Chinese world and beyond, even though the Zhou kingdom had effectively given way to a shifting group of politically independent states in competition with one another. Roughly one hundred seventy Middle States (zhongguo) emerged from this situation in the eighth century b.c.e., although this number dwindled dramatically in subsequent years. Because their ruling families had received their territories as a fief from the Zhou, they had the right to participate in certain imperial ceremonies.49 The Middle States at that time did not necessarily include large states on the periphery such as Qi in the northeast, Qin in the west, Jin in the northwest, and Chu in the south. But with the exception of Qin, whose heyday came later, it was precisely these outer states that formed the centers of the ever-changing coalitions vying for supremacy.50 Their rulers laid claim to the title of king (wang) and asserted they could protect China against foreign peoples. With the exception of some hybrid forms in the south, the culture of the upper classes of

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these outer states was in fact very similar to their equivalents in the Middle States, as was the administration of these territories. As the ritual supremacy of the Zhou dynasty waned, the sense of unity of the Middle States also degenerated, becoming a facade that could be put on when politically expedient in an unscrupulous power struggle. While during the Spring and Autumn Period the opposition between China and foreign peoples continued, the distinction between Middle States and peripheral Chinese states appears to have had very little political importance. Jin, for example, was accepted among the Middle States early on and assumed the role of protector of the Zhou dynastic supremacy; the outer states also sought to make it clear that they were fighting for the security of the Middle States. In this historical environment, many teachings, including Confucianism, gained popularity. Confucian learning took hold initially among segments of the Middle States nobility. Stripped of their former glory and surrounded now by menacing power centers, the lower nobility placed special importance on the moral, spiritual, and ritual traditions of the Middle States.51 The concept of the “middle,” with all its ethical, political, and civilizational connotations, thus figured prominently in many Confucian texts, including the Spring and Autumn Annals. All this historical background affected the interpretation of the Confucian classics in later periods, including the Ming. Many scholars were inclined to project onto the Spring and Autumn Annals’ terminology— which draws a clear line between Chinese and foreign peoples—an equally stark distinction between the Middle States and peripheral states, describing the latter as “outer states” (waiguo). The author of the Annals did not consistently distinguish between rulers of the Middle States and those of the outer belt, which reflected a tendency in the fifth century b.c.e. to regard the Middle States and the peripheral states as an interactive unity. Later Confucian exegesis, however, attached great importance to any terminological shifts that were interpretable as relevant to the distinction between the “middle” and others. Any deviations were regarded as explicit, normative comments and moral instructions by Confucius. The commentaries interpreted variations of wording in the Annals as a clear change in status of the

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country or ruler in question. For instance, an omission of a terminological description of the status of a ruler or country was believed to signify a hidden message by the master himself. Many commentators devoted much scholarly effort to extracting the moral lessons of Confucius from the unadorned wording of the Annals. The aforementioned quotation “The baron of Chu sent Jiao with a diplomatic request [to Lu]” is an example of a passage of this kind. It is found in an entry in the Spring and Autumn Annals regarding the ninth year of the reign of Prince Wen of Lu (617 b.c.e.) and refers to a diplomatic mission by the state of Chu.52 Of the four peripheral states, the southern state of Chu was the furthest from the states of the central plain. Chu grew much stronger during the reigns of King Mu (d. 614 b.c.e.) and his successor, Zhuang. Its rulers were said to have shown great skill in the battle for the smaller states of the central plain.53 In the Annals’ record for the year 617 b.c.e., the ruler of Chu is given the title “baron” (zi). As the Rites of Zhou tell us, this was the fourth of a series of five aristocratic titles ( jue) that in theory were all conferred by the central ruler.54 Yet as later scholarship has established, the term zi was not used so strictly for Middle State rulers: contrary to the Confucian exegesis, it was also used as a title for leaders of conquered barbarian states.55 In the exegetical traditions of the late Ming period it was believed that during the Spring and Autumn Period only in the Middle States was it common practice to confer titles in the case of diplomatic missions.56 In the Annals, a mission from Chu fifty-three years previously had not been accorded this honor. Only the name of the official is given57—and in the only diplomatic mission from Chu after 617 that is mentioned in the Annals, the king of the southern outer state is also called baron.58 The exegetes therefore concluded that, by using this title, Confucius was acknowledging the good governance and high morals of Chu’s rulers, thus admitting Chu in spirit among the Middle States.59 Hu Anguo’s twelfth-century commentary, an authoritative text for the Ming era, offers the following explanation for the use of “baron”: “When [Jiao] joined a diplomatic mission, [Confucius] made a change [to the tradition] and elevated him by recording an aristocratic title. Here he wrote the title of this ruler and the name of this official, called

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him ‘diplomatic envoy,’ and proceeded to make him comparable to the other barons.” 60 Since the three canonized commentaries to the Annals do not expound on the title “baron” in their exegesis of this passage, Zhu Zongyuan’s sentence “[Confucius] . . . elevated him by recording an aristocratic title” can be read as an allusion to Hu Anguo. To refer to Hu Anguo’s work in an effort to relativize the concepts of the “middle” and the “outer” was a daring step. Indeed, Hu Anguo’s commentary had been written shortly after the Song court had fled to the south following the expansion of the territories under the rule of nomadic peoples in northern China. Hu’s text thus contains numerous passages that drew a clear line between the concepts “middle” and “barbarian.” This is why the work was also quoted during the Nanjing persecution (1616–1617) to support the charge that the Jesuits posed an outside cultural threat.61 Other relevant aspects of the cited passage were discussed in one of the classic commentaries, the Gongyangzhuan. That work explains the use of the envoy Jiao’s name by suggesting that Chu had begun to have officials authorized by the central ruler (daifu):62 “Who is Jiao? Jiao is a high official. Chu had no high officials—why is this written? Chu now began to have high officials.” 63 Zhu’s quotation may also have reminded knowledgeable and attentive readers of the commentaries on the entry in the Annals about the twelfth year of Prince Xuan’s reign (596 b.c.e.). Here the Chu ruler is also called baron, while the head of the Middle State of Jin is not. By way of explaining this terminological choice, the Zuozhuan, the Gongyangzhuan, and the Chunqiu fanlu cite the elevated morality of Chu’s rulers even before mentioning the state’s military superiority. If Zhu Zongyuan’s first citation of the Spring and Autumn Annals was an example of what he saw as the explicit elevation of an outer state to the middle, his second citation provides an example of the degradation of a Middle State ruler. The sentence “The Count of Zheng attacked Xu” is the ninth entry for the fourth year of the reign of Prince Cheng (586 b.c.e.) in the Spring and Autumn Annals. The Zuozhuan speaks only of other events in relation to this passage, and the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries make no remark. However, the passage is

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interpreted at length in Dong Zhongshu’s Rich Dew of the “Spring and Autumn Annals.” The background to “The Count of Zheng attacked Xu” in the Spring and Autumn Annals was the offensive by the state of Zheng, a smaller Middle State whose ruler had long held the title of count (bo), against the outer state of Xu. Some commentators, including Dong Zhongshu, had already suggested in their discussions for the previous year (587 b.c.e.) that the Annals’ terminology implied a reproach on the behavior of Jian, the old Count of Zheng. For that year, the Spring and Autumn Annals plainly states, “Zheng attacked Xu.” 64 According to Dong, this omission of the title of the ruler of the Middle State Zheng expressed the master’s criticism.65 The Count of Zheng’s offense was assumed to be his breaking of an alliance with Xu. When Jian died the following year,66 his son and successor attacked Xu just a few months later. This constituted a serious violation of the later Confucian directive that called for a three-year period of mourning and prohibited, among other things, military activity.67 In the eyes of many commentators, etiquette also demanded that the successor be called only “son” (zi)68 during the first year of mourning. This was to show that, because of his personal loss, he was only reluctantly assuming the duties of ruler. Dong Zhongshu therefore saw the formulation “The Count of Zheng attacked Xu” as a sharp rebuke on Confucius’s part. He writes in the Chunqiu fanlu, “The Spring and Autumn Annals regards the [mutual] goodwill [of father and son] as wanting and also shows that he had lost his heart for his son. This is why he is not given the name of ‘son.’ [The Annals] calls him ‘Count’ of Zheng in order to put him to shame. . . . In the present case, the Count of Zheng did not display the gratitude befitting a son. . . . The fact that he failed to be called ‘son’ at all during his lifetime is because of his negligence of propriety.” 69 Zhu took his citations of the Spring and Autumn Annals from a large pool of potentially relevant passages containing supposed elevations and degradations of rulers or states. Zhu probably arranged his choice of quotations as an antithetical play on words: the use of zi in the first note raises the king of the outer state of Chu to the ranks of those who ruled over the Middle States, while in the second instance it expresses

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a rebuke.70 Zhu’s allusions and quotes are thus intended to directly support the conclusion of that text segment: “Those he [Confucius] judged worthy, it was so because of filial piety, piety toward their older brothers, loyalty, honesty, charity, upright conduct, and modesty— not because of their geographical nearness. Those he held in low esteem, it was so because of their greed, oppression, tyranny, cruelty, contempt, and barbarism—not because of their geographical remoteness.”71 To put it another way, Zhu aimed to prove that Confucius himself had applied the term “middle” to rulers of kingdoms that did not belong to the Middle States at the time. He also sought to demonstrate that Confucius defined the concept of “barbarian” purely in moral terms, thus implying that in Confucius’s view, foreignness and lack of culture did not necessarily coincide. Zhu endeavors here to convince his readers that Confucius himself had not worried about a distinction between China and the outside world. On the contrary, according to Zhu’s depiction, Confucius was a critical observer who cared only about propriety and moral integrity, not about Chineseness. By implication, claims of cultural supremacy appeared as aberrations of an original Confucian Way, as did China-centered worldviews. Hence, in this passage Zhu directly criticizes the linking of claims to civilization with the notion of China as a polity and society. As an alternative, he advocates an understanding of Confucian values that does not see them as intrinsically tied to Chinese history. True values, the argument goes, are, at least implicitly, defined as superseding geographical, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. Ideas of this kind were meant to support Zhu’s advocacy of the Learning of Heaven as a means of restoring the original values of Confucianism. They were intended to add to the credibility of Christianity—a teaching that had originated far from China. Translated into a modern conceptual world, one could conclude that Zhu Zongyuan was making an argument against cultural supremacism and in favor of some version of ethical universalism. This was certainly a possibility when it came to interpreting the meaning of terms like zhongguo or yi, which, as discussed, did not at that time refer exclusively to Chinese culture or foreign ethnicity.

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Yet as we have seen, Zhu’s justification of this view was rooted in Confucian exegesis. A single paragraph could lead through a layered landscape of textual traditions. In this case, the reader had to be intimately familiar with seventeenth-century debates as well as Song, Tang, and Han commentaries on a fifth-century b.c.e. classic that referred to an even earlier past. Without this intricate canonic knowledge, without awareness of Zhu’s multitiered historical claims, neither the explicit ideas in the passage nor Zhu’s real argument for a Confucian-Christian synthesis could have been understood. Most of Zhu Zongyuan’s works, indeed most of the pro-Christian literature, did not operate on this level of cultural sophistication. Many key texts advocating a sinicized version of Christianity, including much of Matteo Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, were accessible to cultural outsiders and Chinese people who did not belong to that society’s most educated circles. Usually the main points were conveyed in a plain manner, without an abundance of allusions and hidden references to a wide range of Confucian literature. Even in these texts only cultural insiders would be able to grasp the more nuanced references, but the main message was not closed off to readers from different cultural backgrounds. As a consequence, the general ideas discussed in many pro-Christian texts remain accessible to the modern reader, even in translation. Much of the oral communication between Jesuit fathers and Confucian scholars likely took place at such a level of mutually accessible erudition. Passages like Zhu Zongyuan’s reflections on the “middle,” however, belong chiefly to the internal debates that were triggered on each side of the Confucian-Christian encounter, mainly within well-read circles. For instance, within the Catholic Church the question of rites sparked a range of theological disputes at a high level of scholarly complexity; they were not meant (even in translation) to reach Chinese literati, nor were they intended to be followed by the general European populace. Similarly, many elite Chinese converts and their critics were debating aspects of the Christian faith at a high level of academic complexity that was not intended for outsiders, including the Jesuit missionaries. Even after several decades in the Chinese world, few if any European fathers would have been intellectually

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equipped to join the debate on concepts such as the “middle” with a similar level of cultural nativism as scholars like Zhu Zongyuan.

SEEKING AID FROM HISTORY The knowledge world of a late Ming scholar close to the official examination system was not limited to Confucian classics. A scholar would also have been familiar with great historiographical works such as Sima Qian’s (ca. 145–86 b.c.e.) famous Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) that were outside the Confucian canon. The interpretative reading of such works followed a similar logic as with Confucian works like the Spring and Autumn Annals. For example, it was common to seek a deeper meaning and counsel for the present day in the great historical works of antiquity72 and to try to deduce moral ideals from the study of the past. Moreover, as in the study of core Confucian texts, commentaries on these works were also accorded great authority. Zhu Zongyuan refers to historiographical works in a number of his texts. In A Summary of World Salvation a lengthy paragraph alludes to the very beginning of Sima’s opus magnum, particularly his depiction of the early Chinese past. Here the great Han historian focuses on the five “legendary emperors,” the last two of whom, Yao and Shun, are mentioned in the Book of Documents (Shujing) along with their successor, Yu.73 In Sima Qian’s account, these early emperors shone as a moral triumvirate, as the ideal of self-cultivation and good governance.74 In fact, in his account of Chinese history, Sima Qian grants only Confucius the same, highest level of virtue and wisdom. He paints this era of the early emperors as simple and poor in cultural refinements, but all the richer in peace, harmony, and morality. Many Chinese historiographical works, including widely read texts in the late Ming period, disseminated a similar image of the most distant Chinese past. Alluding in part to this idealized ancient epoch, Zhu writes in his Summary, “The great Shun also received [as attributes] the two words ‘eastern barbarian’ [dongyi], the great Yu was also described as a ‘southwestern barbarian’ [qiang], You Yu was also described as a ‘western barbarian’ [rong].”75

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Again the reader was expected to be familiar enough with a landscape of authoritative works and commentaries so that he or she would be able to understand immediately what texts Zhu Zongyuan was referring to and what message he wanted to convey. Emperor Shun, whom many sources categorized as among the three ideal emperors, was indeed termed an “eastern barbarian” (dongyi) in a set of important texts. An entry in the Mencius, one of the Confucian Four Books and a part of the Thirteen Classics, reads, “Shun was an eastern barbarian,” and this is followed in the same section by the words “King Wen was an eastern barbarian.”76 Shun is also called a barbarian in the later Zhengyi commentary on Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian.77 According to Sima Qian and others, Shun was a peasant from what is now Shandong whose morality and talents inspired people to settle in his vicinity.78 Recognizing Shun’s perfection, King Yao, so the saga goes, gave him his two daughters in marriage and bequeathed him his title. In Sima Qian’s work—but not in the Mencius—is also the information that Yu, as a qiang, a person from a “barbarian” area located southwest of the Middle States, was given the title of king by Shun after Yu prevented a major flood.79 Information about the origins of You Yu, the third individual Zhu Zongyuan mentions in this brief passage, can again be found in Records of the Grand Historian and relevant commentaries. You Yu was a very different historical figure—an official who lived in the seventh century b.c.e. and helped Prince Mu of Qin win a decisive victory over western tribes (rong). In the fifth chapter of his book, Sima Qian mentions that You Yu grew up with the “western barbarians,” but his forebears had come from the outer Chinese state of Jin. However, the Zhengyi commentary leaves it open whether You Yu was indeed originally of barbarian descent. In any case, his knowledge was believed to have played a key role in securing the Chinese state of Wu’s victory over the Central Asian rong.80 When recounting the personal history of early Chinese emperors, neither the Records of the Grand Historian nor the Mencius sought to fundamentally change notions of barbarians. Nor did they seek to redefine the relationship between Chinese and non-Chinese; rather, they sought to convey the idea that true moral principles remain

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identical over vast distances of space and time. Zhu Zongyuan, however, was heading in a different direction. By referring to the glorious emperors of China’s early past, he sought to underline that some of the most respected individuals in Chinese history were from non-Chinese groups. This specific interpretation of the passage needs to be seen as part of a long debate on the relationship between China and its others—a debate that was particularly salient at times like the midseventeenth century, when the Middle Kingdom faced the prospect of being ruled by a non-Han ethnic community.81 In the same paragraph as that discussed in the preceding Zhu Zongyuan further challenges this categorical distinction between Chineseness and foreignness. He continues, What is described as “barbarian” is described as such chiefly because of the remote location [from China]. In taking up this definition of “barbarian,” people usually flaunt famous names and cultural assets [of China]. If we consider famous names and cultural assets [as the main attributes of Chineseness], how could the activity and the luxury of later generations outweigh the honest peasants’ lack of clothing and shoes? How could the pearls, jade, and brocade garments of the singers and prostitutes outweigh respect for one’s parents, respect for one’s older brothers, and the hard work in the fields? Furthermore, regions such as our [ancient kingdoms] Wu and Yue were not included in Chinese maps in former times. The people of these regions had “disheveled hair and tattooed their bodies”82 and had neither gowns, official’s hats, nor cultural assets. How could one dare to describe them as “barbarian states” and to disdain them up until the time when culture [and morality] was very rich?83

Zhu builds a distinction between a decadent present and an idealized past in order to stress the point that the concept of the “middle” was ethically—not ethnically—defined. In the quoted passage, Zhu gives further examples to add weight to his claim that the boundaries between the Chinese and non-Chinese worlds were not clearly definable. The

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connotations of concepts such as the “middle” and the “outer” had shifted in the past, arguably, as Zhu demonstrates with the examples of Wu and Yue. With both cases, he points to ancient states in his own region that had long ceased to exist. The state of Wu was located in the Yangtze delta, where it centered on locations now part of the presentday cities of Suzhou or Wuxi. The Yue of antiquity encompassed Zhu’s home city of Ningbo; it attained the height of its power in the early fifth century b.c.e. and ceased to exist after it was conquered by the state Chu in 333 b.c.e. 84 In fact, Zhu Zongyuan describes himself in the introductions to his books as being from the ancient state of Yue (guyue). This was not uncommon: throughout the epochs of imperial China, scholars identified themselves with the ancient names of their region. To return to Zhu’s main point, the kingdoms of Wu and Yue originally were not part of the Middle States. He stresses the slight semantic tension that emerged with the evolution of the meaning of zhongguo from the “ideal of the Middle States” to the politically unified Middle Kingdom following the first Qin emperor’s conquests during his unification of China, which was completed in 221 b.c.e. These examples were meant to reiterate that the concepts of zhongguo and zhong had broadened over the course of history. To insist strictly on the Middle States seen through the eyes of Confucius, Zhu’s argument goes, would be to exclude many regions of late Ming China. Surely, the Middle Kingdom had grown throughout the ages. Zhu Zongyuan’s second line of argument continues in the same direction. He points to the luxurious and sometimes licentious lifestyles common among privileged sectors of late Ming society85 and compares them with Confucian values such as respecting one’s parents and older brothers. In fact, the language of respect for one’s parents, respect for one’s older brothers, and the hard work in the fields (xiaodi litian) alludes to a criterion for a distinction awarded during the Han dynasty. Officials had to propose young men who proved themselves in their work in the fields and observed Confucian family virtues as candidates for the civil service examinations.86 In contrasting the honest country life under the early emperors with more recent

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excesses, Zhu is relying on a common trope of his time. Many groups in late Ming China, especially educated circles, invoked earlier forms of human society, believing them to be better and more moral. Speaking broadly, this outlook was shared by the main branches of the Confucian and Daoist traditions, although they came to different conclusions about the period of the early emperors.87 Many currents of Daoism and Confucianism agreed, nevertheless, that the simpler and purer forms of social order were to be found chiefly in China’s own past rather than among foreign peoples. When objecting to flaunting “famous names and cultural assets” as the main attributes of Chineseness, Zhu suggests a comparison with societies outside China that were often denigrated as less civilized, as barbarian. The passage continues, Furthermore, the region in the Far West that is called Europe is essentially no different from our region when it comes to written works and learning, as well as concepts and achievements, . . . If one knows with certainty the true lord, cultivates oneself, and is attentive to one’s behavior, one’s moral consciousness is flourishing [or “Chinese” or “civilized”: hua]. If one carelessly loses sight of one’s origins, acts lasciviously, and is not just, one’s moral consciousness is barbaric [yi]. If one draws distinctions not on the basis of moral consciousness but according to geographical regions, then [it must be said] those whom we may call self-styled arbiters do not live in the real world.88

At the end, when Zhu describes the immoral as yi (barbaric) and the virtuous as hua (flourishing; Chinese; civilized), he explicitly concludes that the highest form of human society is not necessarily to be found in China. In Zhu’s definition, the concept of hua did not apply exclusively to the flowering of human civilization attained in China or any other region but instead encompassed all individuals and societies of extraordinary virtue throughout all regions of the world. With this usage of hua, Zhu seems to be articulating a concept of the “middle” that did not necessarily include the common people

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but focused on a moral elite. This was not an unusual argument to make: interpretations of the “middle” centered around notions of elite and morality can be traced as far back as the ancient period.89 Zhu’s reflections stand in a tradition spanning many centuries. They also need to be seen in the context of those seventeenth-century voices seeking to create intellectual space for a new group of rulers coming from outside China’s core lands. It is significant that toward the end of the passage, when he refers to knowledge of the true lord, Zhu goes beyond Confucian values in his criteria for hua by incorporating a basic condition of the Learning of Heaven. As seen in the previous chapter, for Zhu the idea of the restoration of Confucian order and integrity through Christianity seems to lead inevitably to the conclusion that drawing closer to the Lord of Heaven is a criterion for being civilized. This had great implications for conceptualizing the relationship between China and other cultures. In a passage in the Responses to a Guest’s Questions, Zhu brings a personalized God into the picture when discussing this problem. He notes, “Furthermore, although the regions are different, there are not two heavens and earths, nor two suns and moons, nor two days and nights; and so neither are there two [divine] rulers, two gifts and offerings, two [eternal] rewards and punishments. Therefore, if one divides [mankind] into the Chinese and the ‘barbarians,’ this is as a view from inside a well.”90 The reference to the narrowed worldview one would have from inside a well is an allusion to the Daoist classic Zhuangzi.91 Its subject and images are not dissimilar to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In the Zhuangzi, a frog believes his well to be a complete and perfect world, until he meets a turtle who tells him about the vast open sea. As the Zhuangzi explicitly states, the turtle represents the wise man, and the sea the endlessness of the Dao that the wise man has begun to enter. This metaphor thus invited Chinese readers to become aware of the narrowness of their outlook and to take a broader view of the world. In Zhu’s work, however, the world outside the well changes from being a metaphor for the unfathomable Dao to being a symbol of the Lord of Heaven, the all-in-one God.

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ON NARROW PATHS THROUGH THE CONFUCIAN CLASSICS In his two main books, Zhu Zongyuan confronts his readers with a complex reevaluation of the concepts of “middle” and “outer.” He does this to address the fact that the Learning of Heaven came from a different world region, both in terms of its symbolism and its self-representation. Ultimately, Zhu sought to prove that the great authorities of the ancient period, particularly the early emperors and Confucius, had no disdain for the non-Chinese world. In essence, Zhu argues that what counted in the eyes of China’s early sages was moral integrity— and not Chineseness. According to his reading of original Confucianism, real values and civilizational standards necessarily transcended ethnic, cultural, or political boundaries. Zhu was not alone in making this argument regarding the Learning of Heaven: there is evidence that other Chinese Christians writing in the same period were heading in similar directions, and terms such as yi that are often translated as “barbarian” but could also connote “cultural outsider” were subjects of debate among converts.92 Individual pro-Christian texts were certainly adding their own specific flavor to these themes, but at the same time we need to view them in the context of a long history of controversies on the relationship between China and the outside world. By the time Zhu held his writing brush in his hand, Chinese scholars and bureaucrats had debated similar topics for centuries, if not even longer. This was the case with, for example, the early Chinese Buddhists: like the Learning of Heaven, their religion undeniably had foreign origins. Already at an early stage, during the Northern Wei period (385–535), Buddhists were facing persecution. Much of this had to do with the taxation of Buddhist monasteries, but anti-Buddhist movements were also attacking it as a foreign faith.93 Facing at least partially comparable pressures as the Christian communities a millennium later, some Buddhist circles reacted similarly.94 In older Chinese Buddhist writings, one can thus find text elements that were akin to some of Zhu Zongyuan’s thoughts. An example can be found in Master Mou’s Treatise Settling Doubts (Mouzi lihuolun), a text

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that allegedly goes back to a converted scholar living in the latter stages of the Han dynasty but was more likely authored during the fifth century.95 Not unlike Zhu Zongyuan, the author framed the text as an imaginary dialogue meant to familiarize the reader with his teachings. Moreover, like Zhu he also argued that some of China’s cultural heroes were foreign born: both texts give You Yu as an example. In another parallel, the author provides examples of the successful integration of foreign elements into Chinese culture and society. Another pro-Buddhist text from the same period, the Treatise of White and Black (Baiheilun), compares sinocentrism to the limited view from a well—just as Zhu does.96 Much like Zhu, many early Buddhist texts objected to civilizations being denigrated according to geography, language, or writing. For example, several authors argued that every human being was equal and that customs and languages were merely superficial characteristics. One final similarity: the author of the Treatise Settling Doubts depicts India as a country of perfect peace and harmony, much the way that Zhu portrays Europe. He even goes so far as to suggest that India, not China, was the true center of the world and the universe.97 Parallels of this kind should not of course tempt us to ignore the significant differences between the early phase of Buddhism in China and Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime. The sociopolitical order of China underwent profound transformations during the roughly twelve centuries that lay between both periods, and so did scholarly culture. As part of these changes, important concepts such as zhong (middle) and yi (barbarian) came to carry profoundly different meanings.98 Nonetheless, there were remarkable continuities: in seventeenth-century China, these concepts still figured prominently in debates over the acceptability of a teaching that had arrived from afar, even if long ago. Yet not only religions funneled the debates on the question of civilization and its implications for the relationship between China and the world. Outside conquests and new dynasties of nomadic origin could also trigger similar concerns, and they did so throughout many periods of Chinese history, including the Southern Song (1127–1279) and the Yuan (1279–1368) dynasties. It is thus hardly surprising that concerns about the “middle” and cultural outsiders flared up again in

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the early and mid-1600s, when the newly formed Manchus posed a growing threat outside the Great Wall. Hence in Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, the disputes about the dichotomy of a cultural inside and outside were more intense than during many other epochs. Facing the threat of a foreign takeover of the former Ming state, many Chinese scholars drew particularly rigid lines between the civilization of China and the world beyond.99 For example, one observer argued that the nomadic peoples on China’s northern frontiers were incompatible with the lifestyles of China because they were not sedentary cultures.100 Some voices went further, unabashedly referring to these peoples pejoratively as uncivilizable others. Interestingly, these staunch defenders of an essential Chineseness bolstered their argument by referring to ancient texts—including the Mencius and the Records of the Grand Historian, the very texts that Zhu and other accommodationist scholars used. Even in other parts of Asia, the political developments in China prompted new ruminations on concepts such as “middle” and others.101 For example, after the Qing takeover of China, some Korean scholars argued that the civilizational center (zhong or zhonghua) of the entire macroregion had shifted. In their eyes, after the collapse of the Ming dynasty, Korea now was to uphold the true ideals of Confucianism and civilization at large.102 As an intellectual position, this was not entirely dissimilar from Zhu Zongyuan’s portrait of Europe as an ideal Confucian society. In all likelihood Zhu held his ethically universal and ethnically accommodating views not only with an eye on European missionaries and their faith. He must have felt similarly about the Manchus, since he obviously did not see them as a major threat to China’s cultural existence and did not oppose their rule, as some Christians did.103 In fact, Zhu was part of the very first cohort of candidates to pass the provincial examinations in Zhejiang in 1647 under the new Manchu rulers. During this first round of official examinations under the Qing, the new government accentuated themes like how to ground ManchuHan relations in a spirit of Confucian unity. Perhaps Zhu Zongyuan made use of some of his reflections on the “middle” that he had already put on paper prior to Qing rule in China.

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Zhu had no interest in glossing over the foreign background of the Learning of Heaven, nor would it have been possible to completely meld Catholic symbolism and practices into the Chinese world. Rather, he set himself the task of broadening the acceptability of a teaching that retained much of its European origins in its daily practice and intellectual self-presentation. Zhu did this not by treading the lines of modern multiculturalism; he would never have suggested that cultural differences should be seen from a neutral, relativizing perspective. Instead, in his efforts to create space for the Learning of Heaven, he put forward a transregional understanding of Confucian key concepts such as the “middle” that he defined as the true root of this tradition. This pattern of thinking challenged the idea that the pathways of self-cultivation and civilization had inevitably to lead through Chinese history. If the same, or even a higher degree of morality could be built elsewhere, what about these other world regions? What were the conditions of these distant lands? And in what ways could they possibly affect life in China?

5 EUROPEAN ORIGINS ON TRIAL

A PEACEFUL HOMELAND? The Western origins of Christianity were not just a philosophical problem. There were also reports and rumors that raised concerns about the trustworthiness of the message the Jesuit fathers had brought to China. After all, Catholicism had clear connections with European powers in regions surrounding the Ming state, especially the Portuguese and Spanish Empires. Not only the well-read elites became increasingly aware of the presence of Europeans in East Asia. Likewise, not only educated Chinese came to know more and more about the Christian God worshipped by the people from the Far West. Even within the lower strata of Chinese society, news circulated about Iberian traders, merchants, and mercenaries, and it did so increasingly along with images of other Europeans operating in the vicinity of China, including the Dutch and the British. Although some publications provided information about single Western countries, in late Ming and early Qing China, it was not uncommon to lump various Europeans—whether missionaries or traders— into one cultural or ethnic category. A variety of terms circulated—for instance, during the 1500s “Franks” (folangji) emerged as a common connotation for all Europeans.1 Even the category of “Europe” existed during Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, with ouluoba being among the most common transliterations into Chinese. This term came partly from

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the missionaries themselves, who used it, for example, in their published world maps, which in addition to referring to Europe provided information about individual European states while downplaying conflicts among them.2 The Far West was still a distant world, however. Unlike the age of high imperialism and later, Europe was not a central player in Chinese economic, political, and intellectual life; it was simply not of great general interest, and there were no efforts to systematically collect a large amount of facts about it.3 Nevertheless, in Chinese society there was some information about developments like European colonialism and violent conflict in the seas surrounding China. Such knowledge was certainly not compatible with the idealized Confucian-Christian selfpresentation of Catholicism in China, and its transmission channels into China were remarkable. The Jesuit cartographic works and other reports about Europeans did not contain any substantial information about the Portuguese, Spanish, or other European empires. Giulio Aleni’s world map, for example, was silent about European ambitions in the wider region: his discussion of the Philippine island of Luzon mentions the abundance of giant eagles and poisonous snakes, but not Spanish rule.4 Yet Confucian-educated scholars and officials were rarely a source of firsthand information, either, since they seldom ventured outside their own state.5 Thus most news concerning its maritime neighbors entering China came primarily from traders and coolie labor, eventually reaching a large number of people, including the Confucian elite, which in late Ming times increasingly intermarried in merchant circles, particularly in places like the lower Yangtze region and adjacent coastal areas.6 The sea remained a formative factor for the society and economy of places like Ningbo, and a dense network of short- as well as longdistance connections linked them to Asian and global circuits.7 Merchants and especially early kinds of migrant workers ventured abroad, and Chinese migration to Southeast Asia intensified steadily despite alternating waves of tightening and loosening government control, peaking during the Ming-Qing transition crisis around the middle of the seventeenth century.8 The one million Chinese who left for Southeast Asia between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries

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meant that there were sizable groups of Chinese residents in many, small and large, trade hubs in East Asia, particularly Southeast Asia and the Philippines.9 In the words of John E. Wills, “the Chinese were everywhere, even though the Ming state forbade all maritime voyages by Chinese.”10 In many places, therefore, Chinese workers and traders had contact with people from other regions, including Middle Easterners, South Asians, and Europeans. At the same time, overseas Chinese typically maintained close ties with their native land. Unsurprising, then, that word about the situation in Southeast Asia traveled back into Chinese society. Such reports contained knowledge of Europe and Europeans that was rather different from the portraits of a Far West dominated by the Learning of Heaven. On the contrary, they told of a violent world of permanent struggle over market share and economic gain, a complex story of shifting fortunes and alliances.11 Europeans were part of this world and had been since at least 1512, when Portuguese forces captured Malacca, whose ruler had previously been a Chinese vassal. Already at that time, they encountered Chinese settlers there, and through them the message of this act of violence came back to China, where even thirty years later Portuguese negotiators were being asked by court envoys why Malacca had been subjugated.12 Incidents of this kind did not abate during the seventeenth century. For instance, the Philippines, where the Spanish had established a colony in the sixteenth century, counted fifteen thousand Chinese living in Manila alone. Chinese revolts there were crushed in two separate massacres in 1603 and 1639, and these incidents attracted much interest in China. The first massacre was described by the Ming traveler Zhang Xie in great detail in his widely read work Investigation of the Eastern and Western Seas.13 Matteo Ricci, while residing in the Ming state, noted the killing of more than ten thousand Chinese.14 What is more, there was knowledge of the many Chinese slaves in the Iberian empires—a phenomenon so common that all Asian slaves in the Spanish Empire were called Chinos.15 There were also incidents with Europeans closer to China’s mainland. On Taiwan, where Chinese settlements had existed prior to the arrival of the Europeans, complaints about Dutch rule and their high

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tax demands grew so loud that they became known in the Chinese core regions.16 Among other things, this caused difficulties for the Jesuit father Giulio Aleni, who had personal connections with Dutch sailors. In addition, the fierce competition among the Europeans, such as the Dutch attempt to seize Macao from the Portuguese in 1622, was noted by some Chinese observers.17 There were also smaller military actions undertaken by Europeans on Chinese soil. An example is an expedition led by John Weddell that, in defiance of all Chinese and Portuguese prohibitions, sailed up the Pearl River in 1637, retreating only after inflicting damage on the coastal areas and skirmishes with Chinese war junks.18 Nor were ordinary relations between Chinese and European merchants particularly harmonious. During the late Ming, European traders often portrayed their Chinese partners in an extremely negative light,19 while, on the other side, there was no shortage of reports about unscrupulous behavior and ruthless profiteering by European traders. At least in some parts of Chinese society, the Europeans gained a reputation as smugglers and pirates who were active off the coast of southern China. These included Iberians who were integrated into a hundred-year-old Japanese buccaneer network that operated chiefly off the coasts of Fujian and Zhejiang, as noted in various Chinese records. The Ming government even broke its own policy not to support Chinese traders and established a military presence in the Pescadores in 1624.20 In any case, in some parts of Chinese society, the Jesuit missionaries were not distinguished from European merchants and conquerors; consequently, not a few people viewed them with distrust.21 Some critical voices pointed to the economic activities of the Society of Jesus: indeed, the fathers were able to supplement their annual contributions from Rome through business operations like money lending.22 And of course outside convert circles, there was general concern about the Learning of Heaven, its foreign clerics and its alien symbolism. Fostered in a climate of political insecurity and societal anxiety, this concern lay, among other factors, behind repeated incidents in which missionaries or mission stations were attacked by the local population.23

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Remarkable rumors abounded. In some Chinese regions, people whispered that Europeans engaged in cannibalism, eating local children—hearsay that may have been triggered by the Portuguese practice of purchasing children for labor.24 Moreover, there is evidence of repeated claims that the Portuguese were planning to invade China.25 In 1606 unconfirmed information about an imminent invasion, in which the Jesuits were said to be involved, caused panic throughout the Pearl River delta region, with repercussions including the outbreak of revolts among Chinese residents in Macao.26 Among members of the educated elite, too, the Jesuits could be suspected of spying, and in this case they were accused of making clandestine preparations for a European invasion of China, of using their teachings to rob the Chinese population of its powers of resistance.27 Such claims were made during the persecutions against Christians in Nanjing (1616–1617), and the Jesuit Alfonso Vagnoni was forced to disclose in detail the source and channels of the mission money in Macao. In addition, the fathers were said to be bribing their followers in order to organize revolts in China.28 It was contended that the insurrections planned by the Jesuits were timed to break out simultaneously with an invasion from abroad: On the pretext of trading, these barbarians rented a piece of land in Luzon, then persuaded the local people to follow their doctrine, and finally took possession of Luzon. They always proceed in this way: conversion is simply a preliminary step leading up to occupation. The astronomy, calendar, cannons, sciences, and technology . . . are merely pretexts for spreading their doctrine throughout every province and prefecture; their object in diffusing their doctrine in this way is to reach a position in which they will be able to take over China.

This text was written in 1638 in the context of anti-Christian persecutions in the province of Fujian,29 and similar arguments had played a role in the earlier anti-Christian events in Nanjing: the Catholics were deemed a subversive sect paving the way for military action, and also here the example of the Philippines and its main island, Luzon, was brought forward.30

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The charge of a planned invasion was mostly idle talk, but ironically that did not mean it was completely unfounded. Decades before, there had been brief discussions about invading the Chinese state—for instance in 1580, the Spanish council in Manila actually endorsed a plan to conquer China together with the great unifier of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598); according to the plan, the Jesuits were to serve as interpreters. Manila requested military support from Spain for this audacious undertaking, but Madrid never approved it.31 Given China’s military strength, such plots were just not feasible, even at the peak of the late Ming crisis a few decades later.

IDEALIZING IMAGES Not that the charge of attempting political destabilization was leveled only against foreign teachings: in an age of growing insecurity, there were frequent accusations that a particular religion led directly or indirectly to revolts during the late Ming period. For instance, the scholars Wang Gen (1483–1541) and Lin Zhaoen, who were both closely affiliated with Buddhist circles, were linked to the White Lotus sect (bailian jiao) because of the populist bent of its teachings and the religious symbols it used.32 In fact, given the cataclysmic situation on many fronts, late Ming people were preoccupied with worries and fears other than those concerned with the Europeans. Nevertheless, official and popular apprehensions about the potential dangers emanating from the Learning of Heaven were strong enough to warrant at least some kind of a rejoinder; European missionaries and Chinese Christians could not remain silent in the face of the charges levied against them—Zhu Zongyuan also reacted to allegations against the Jesuits and of their secret plots. Most Christian missionaries and converts did not respond directly to these charges. In theory, it would have been possible to present Christianity as a God-inspired religion whose values would remain in deep opposition to all evil of this world, including atrocities committed by Europeans in Asia and elsewhere. This would not have been far-fetched, since teachings based on the Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man figured largely in

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seventeenth-century Catholicism, including Jesuit thought. Similarly, all the major Confucian schools were formulating their ideals based on a critical evaluation of the contemporary condition—not on the assumption that their teachings had already brought about the best of all possible worlds. Yet the pro-Christian literature as well as the geographical knowledge spread by the Jesuits in China did not engage with topics like European colonialism in any significant manner. In addition, the crisis Catholicism was facing back in Europe was more or less covered up in China. It is almost out of the question that Zhu had heard of the strong currents of anticlericalism and antipapalism in Europe, nor would he have had any notion of the militant church or the strong antiecclesiastical sentiments in parts of Europe. It is even unclear whether Zhu was cognizant of the Reformation, which, for more than a century before his writing, had split Latin Christendom and grown into a much wider crisis of intellectual, political, and spiritual authority. That a major war was raging in Europe, and that this conflict, at least on the surface, also was fought over the political positions of Catholicism, remained an obscured fact in China. To put it in a different way, it is likely that Zhu never learned of the Thirty Years’ War that was ravaging Europe precisely at the time he was writing his texts. The global dynamics connecting Zhu’s society with the Thirty Years’ War33 were unknown, and general knowledge of the conditions in Europe was scant. What kind of imagery, then, did the Christians come up with when encountering distrustful voices speaking of colonial projects in the greater China region? In a word, many proChristian publications sought to propagate an idealized image of Europe. Excessively positive descriptions of political and social conditions there had been a common topos in Chinese-language missionary literature since Matteo Ricci’s lengthy description of the manu­ factured realities of his homeland in The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. 34 In this foundational text, a model for much of the pro-­ Christian literature to come, Europe was at least partly described as a place in which Confucian ideals had long been realized. Missionaries like Giulio Aleni and Alfonso Vagnoni also portrayed Europe as having idyllic sociopolitical conditions and perfect ethical standards.35 To

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avoid undermining their idealizations with too many specifics, many Jesuit texts provided little information on European history and described only isolated aspects of European thought.36 These greatly reduced representations of Europe continued in the writings of some Chinese converts, including texts by prominent figures such as Xu Guangqi, one of the “three pillars” of Chinese Catholicism.37 Zhu Zongyuan was no exception. In his Responses to a Guest’s Questions, Zhu depicted the continent far to the west as a place of peace and virtue where people did not pocket money they found on the street, did not lock their doors at night, where seventy states coexisted in harmony and not one dynasty had fallen for more than sixteen hundred years. The soil, he wrote, was fertile and rich, the animal species many and varied, and veritable mountains of natural resources were available. The overall wealth of Europe could be seen in its grand homes and palaces adorned with gold and precious stones, the beautiful clothing, and the exquisite food and drink. Zhu continued that the intellectual achievements of European scholars and their technological advances were outstanding.38 Key parts of Zhu’s descriptions allude to a famous passage in the Book of Rites (Liji). This work, which belongs to the Five Classics of Confucianism, likewise tells of a society in which doors did not need to be locked at night—a society where people loved their family members, treated strangers with respect, and where there was enough work for all able-bodied. According to the Book of Rites, political stability in this society was guaranteed and social harmony complete because the Great Way (dadao) prevailed. 39 People lived in harmony with one another and in congruence with nature; they were not driven to selfish actions that would inevitably inflict pain on others. Confucian tradition did not put forth this perfect society as a utopian vision but as a true account of a long-bygone world. Basically all Confucian schools agreed that the golden age had existed several millennia before, but that it had been lost because the Way was no longer transmitted.40 By contrast, Zhu Zongyuan’s ideal world existed in the present, albeit in a geographically remote location. His portrait of Europe is essentially a projection of time onto space—China’s ideal golden age onto contemporaneous Europe. He makes it clear that in

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Europe the social and political conditions of the present were essentially identical to the order of China under the great emperors in the past. But his picture of European society should not be likened to those accounts of “noble savages” that became influential in eighteenth-­ century European political philosophy. Zhu’s repeated references to the advanced state of scholarship, science, and technology in the Far West made it clear that Europe was not akin to the idealized early agricultural societies under the early emperors. Instead, its similarity to the great lost age invoked by Confucian literature lay in its moral qualities and stability. The main message of Zhu’s portrait of Europe was that the Learning of Heaven would be able to perfect Confucianism and stabilize the situation in China. It also implied that late Ming China compared unfavorably not only with a distant past in the early dynasties but also with contemporary Europe. Following this portrait of Europe, Zhu contrasts the homelands of the Jesuit fathers directly with the situation in his own homeland; he addresses points ranging from political order to the living standards of the general population and determines that China is inferior to the Far West.41 He even arrives at the conclusion that “if someone takes the thought and customs of such people and despises them as barbarians, I am afraid that these are not the barbarians.” 42 To a certain degree, Zhu’s depiction of Europe can be read as a Confucian rapprochement with the Learning of Heaven. At the same time, however, the comparisons with late Ming society suggest that his account of Europe was more than a philosophical abstraction, that he wanted his readers to take it at face value. As we shall see, Zhu mentions others’ concerns about European violence in his works, but his portrait of Europe remains untouched by those concerns. He offers up a vision of a land of bliss, an ideal world that supposedly existed in reality and hence could serve as a model for his readers’ own ethicopolitical visions for China. The distorted—indeed fictional—account of Europe was possible only because of the knowledge landscapes of the time. No scholar in Ming China had the international networks and the expertise to systematically contrast other ideas of Europe with the image propagated by pro-Christian texts. As mentioned, only sporadic evidence of European

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militancy and involvement in conflicts in East and Southeast Asia was available, and Chinese scholar-officials could not do much more than make educated guesses. To make matters worse, the information about Europe itself was channeled by European missionaries who had their own agenda. All these factors fed into the dissemination of an extremely distorted, if not even entirely fictional, image of Europe in China. In these circumstances, the Society of Jesus played out its advantages as a global organization that could systematically gather and disseminate information about other societies, cultures, and religions.43 In the two centuries following its establishment, the Jesuits built a nexus for the collection, interpretation, and transmission of knowledge, a network based on flows from and among missions in distant lands and regional hubs like Macao, flows that eventually arrived at the center—Rome.44 The society’s headquarters in Rome even established a system of newsletters with reports about missionary experiences throughout the world, and these newsletters circulated across its provinces.45 Feeding into this information base, Jesuit college instructors engaged in sometimes transcontinental exchanges concerning theological, philosophical, and scientific questions.46 This body of available global knowledge based on epistolary communication was certainly unrivaled by local elites in China, Japan, India, or anywhere else. The global information accrued by Jesuit fathers thus had the potential to fascinate educated circles in different parts of the world, particularly in societies with flourishing book markets. In Europe, Jesuit publications about places in which they had missions and literature based on these publications were translated into a variety of languages, often becoming best sellers.47 This also included political and historical accounts that partly described events such as the fall of the Ming dynasty through ecclesiastical interpretations, likening their root causes to the alleged origins of the religious wars in the world of Latin Christendom. Many European readers, however, read the Jesuits’ descriptions of other world regions mainly with a keen interest in newly available information on distant societies and cultures.48 Outside Europe, there was equal excitement about this information: in late Ming China, annotated Jesuit world maps containing a wealth of information could sell out of several editions within a single year.49

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Their global knowledge earned the Jesuit fathers social respect and cultural authority, which was beneficial for their religious ambitions. The main purpose of systematically gathering information about distant societies and cultures, however, was to directly enhance missionary endeavors. To this end, an exaggeratedly polished image of Europe was helpful. It was intended to build cultural trust and raise acceptance levels of the Learning of Heaven.

FATHERS AS SAGES Word of European violence in the region was evidently substantial enough in a port city like Ningbo that Zhu had to address it in several of his works.50 In fact, his portrayal of the Jesuits in Responses to a Guest’s Questions opens with a discussion of rumors about a planned European invasion. The work contains Zhu’s lengthiest discussion of this subject, one that evolves into a longer account of the missionaries’ moral character. Regarding the accusation that the Jesuit fathers harbored subversive intentions, Zhu tells readers they should look at the past: “The previous [missionaries] have died, their successors have grown old, and the alleged plans have not yet appeared—how long must we [then] wait?”51 Zhu further maintains that no one has ever heard of the Jesuits holding secret meetings—and that such gatherings would be impossible anyway since the fathers traveled using only Chinese transportation. Furthermore, rumors that the missionaries were masters of alchemy and possessed the art of making silver and gold52 were simply false, because there was absolutely no possibility of finding any evidence in support of such claims. Zhu writes, “So it is really not the case that they are planning destruction. Are these, then, scholars who do not live up to their standards and deceive the people with words, [when] they are supplied with food and ration payments from their country over a distance of ten thousand perilous miles?”53 For Zhu, additional evidence of the Jesuits’ good intensions was that Christianity was already present in China during the Tang dynasty ­(618–907) in the form of Nestorianism ( jingjiao)54 and had

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not been harmful then. The background to this assertion was the discovery of the Nestorian stele in Xian in the year 1623—since then, Jesuits and converts often spoke of Christianity’s long presence in the Middle Kingdom. The Nestorian tradition in China thus permitted the European religion to be represented, at least to some extent, as a part of the Chinese past. Evidence of Christian roots in China’s own culture was not without its impact on society at the end of the Ming: the discovery of the Nestorian stele appears to have led to a wave of conversions.55 Moreover, Zhu continues, the missionaries did not all come from a single country, thus it could be asked just whose plans the order was executing. And given the ninety thousand Chinese miles separating the continent from China, invasion by Europeans was strategically impossible.56 Other evidence against a supposed role of the Jesuits in a subversive plot focuses more on the personal qualities of the fathers. Zhu argues, for example, that the Jesuits were great scholars who could hold high office in their home countries but who were nevertheless led solely by the truth of God and their desire to teach it. Their renunciation of fame and fortune proved their honesty, and their readiness to suffer the trials and tribulations of long journeys,57 illness, and persecution revealed their pure intentions: Anyone who advances theories in order to deceive people is always reliant on the power to manipulate people’s emotions. The Western scholars hold steadfastly to their teaching. . . . When a sovereign seeks to coerce them, they are steadfast and virtuous, just as metal and stone cannot be bent. They love only that which has deep [roots], believe only that which is supremely honest. For this reason, their [attitudes and beliefs] remain the same unto death. . . . The Western scholars remain abstinent throughout their whole lives, they deny themselves, and work hard day and night, much more than most people. They wear the proper scholarly robes and hats at all times. . . . When they speak, the expression on their faces is as friendly as the spring and as honest as the autumn. They are friendly and helpful in all things, but without the desire to gain favor.58

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Zhu proceeds to explain that the missionaries were concerned only with spreading their teaching, and drank of suffering as if it were sugared water. Furthermore, they lacked all arrogance, bore humiliation and violence without resistance, and had absolutely no thirst for revenge. The passage closes with the following question: “How can there be anyone under heaven who would neglect his own life and yet be intent upon deceiving others?59 With its emphasis on virtues like human warmth, wisdom, and propriety, Zhu’s portrait of the Jesuits reveals fundamental aspects of the Confucian concept of the consummate person. Qualities like adhering to one’s principles and accepting suffering for the sake of spreading the proper teaching were also propagated in a wide range of Confucian texts.60 Together with other aspects of personal growth, they tended to be defined as the basis for communal action and the foundation of human coexistence.61 In times of crisis like the late Ming era, several Confucian schools, including the Donglin Academy, particularly emphasized virtues like resoluteness and unwavering loyalty to one’s values, even at the risk of death.62 Zhu Zongyuan hence follows the practice common among Chinese Christians of describing the Jesuits as “scholars from the West” (xiru). As mentioned earlier, eminent missionaries like Matteo Ricci and Giulio Aleni were frequently referred to in this way,63 and the Jesuits also used this term to describe themselves. Over the entrance gate of the Jesuit residence in Nanjing, for example, hung a plaque inscribed, “Residence of the scholars from the Great West (daxi rushe).64 All this was part of the presentation of Christianity as “Western learning.” Certain Chinese intellectual trends worked in favor of applying the concept of the scholar (ru) to the European fathers. Some classical texts used the term ru for a cultivated individual, one who was in harmony with his true self, society, mankind, the world at large, and heaven.65 In late Ming China, the term did not necessarily connote a state of self-perfection; it was in use more as a term of honor for individuals who had dedicated themselves to the Confucian tradition. The Jesuits’ depiction as ru was facilitated by the fact that in the Ming era generally, the ideal Confucian scholar did not necessarily have to hold political office. This appreciation of Confucianism as a teaching outside

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official channels was rooted in a centuries-long development.66 As a general intellectual climate, this pattern continued through much of the Ming period.67 During this time, many influential circles in the Confucian orbit were praising key Buddhist scholars for their scholarly standing, albeit they were not necessarily sufficiently steeped in the Confucian tradition to pass the state examinations.68 Additionally, Chinese Islamic writings referred to Muhammad as a great Western sage, and in this context they were applying Confucian terminology.69 There were thus many precedents and parallels to the claim that the Jesuit fathers in China embodied the highest Confucian values.70 In several of his writings, Zhu seeks to bolster this idea. For example, in a passage in the Treatise on the Destruction of Superstition, he refers to the Jesuits in the following manner: These people are all intelligent, wise, loyal, honest, warmhearted, compassionate, and friendly. Their words lead people to sudden enlightenment [wu]. No one is unmoved and does not turn as if touched by a spring breeze. Why is their human nature alone so different from that of other people? Because what they give and what they take are clear and the method of teaching is perfect.71

This passage is rich in allusions. For instance, the analogy of the spring breeze leaving no one untouched is clearly reminiscent of a passage in the Analects of Confucius. Here the master likens the relationships that gentlemen of great personal integrity ( junzi) have with others to the interactions between grass and wind. When the wind blows, the grass must bend.72 In other words, the Jesuits are described as consummate human beings in the Confucian sense, people who, by virtue of possessing the only proper teaching, can influence others by the sheer force of their personality, just as the sages of old had. Moreover, Zhu holds that the European fathers had the personal power to trigger an immediate insight or sudden enlightenment in the people they personally encountered. The concept of sudden enlightenment and the corresponding terms wu and wujue were used frequently in neo-Confucian philosophy. The concept probably goes back to Buddhist influences, but in late Ming times it was used by a wide range of Confucian schools. Even

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Gao Panlong, the leader of the traditionalist Donglin Academy, told of an experience of such sudden, intuitive learning.73 The implications of Zhu’s words are clear: as profound thinkers and charismatic individuals, the Jesuits are directly related to the ideals of the morally accomplished individual laid out in the Confucian classics. This representation of the European fathers as Confucian gentlemen is entangled with Zhu’s painting of Europe in the colors of the lost golden age in Confucian thought. Both need to be seen in the context of the wider claim that Christianity, the Learning of Heaven, continued the Confucian Way that had been lost in China. This message becomes explicit in the following passage of the Treatise on the Destruction of Superstition: “What a shame! We have lost the heavenly learning that was originally universal, and believe mistakenly that it is a teaching from the countries of the West. . . . There are those who raise a hue and cry that [we] should awaken anxiously and think [about our true condition] with trepidation. Thus we have forgotten what we share in common [with the Jesuits]. Instead we exclaim that they are different.”74 Reading through these descriptions, it is perhaps not too surprising that in the Responses Zhu Zongyuan goes even a step further and applies the term “sage” (shengxian) to the Jesuit missionaries. He writes, “When the Western scholars teach, their entire morality overall is as [high as] it was during the three dynasties. Most of these figures are without a doubt sages.”75 Terms that can be translated as “sage” such as shengren and sheng­ xian had undergone significant transformations in meaning.76 Originally, sheng had been used only for the ideal rulers—Confucius and the reigning emperor believed to form an axis between mankind and the universe. The meaning of the term was broadened in neo-Confucian philosophy, where it now referred to the personal perfection of the individual.77 From the Song era onward, becoming a sage by cultivating oneself through intensive study was considered a feasible goal, but the path toward self-cultivation was conceptualized differently during the late Ming period. In many currents of Confucian thought, becoming a sage, reaching the highest level of individual maturity, was no longer thought to derive primarily from service to the state. Instead, many schools emphasized the primacy of reaching unity with

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the universe. This was achieved through a search for harmony with the cosmic principle (li), which invested the sage with charisma and influence in the world.78 All of this created space for the Jesuits to connect themselves with this social ideal. Yet the question of to what degree book learning was a necessary channel for self-cultivation was a controversial topic and remained so for many centuries. During the first half of the seventeenth century, more conservative schools endorsed the idea of official education as the main path to self-completion and the sage’s service to society.79 Others took radically different, unconventional approaches that were much more focused on individual pathways. Wang Yangming, for example, stressed that the way to sagehood lay in the refinement of man’s innate moral knowledge, and the Taizhou school went as far as to argue that even the most common and uneducated person was capable of attaining the highest form of human perfection.80 Li Zhi even joked that book learning was an obstacle on the path to personal maturation.81 In Zhu’s account, true self-cultivation had to be pursued via individual devotion to the Lord of Heaven. From that perspective, Zhu describes the Jesuit missionaries as supreme human beings who, through their moral authority and personal qualities, stood out from the rest of late Ming society. In his Summary, Zhu explicitly links Christianity to the ideal of sagehood, writing that the way to attain this highest stage of human development is through the Learning of Heaven. He takes this further by arguing that even the common people were capable of reaching this state—if they accepted the key elements of the Christian faith.82 In his statements, Zhu Zongyuan contributes to a common topos in the pro-Christian literature of this period—one that was also disseminated by the European missionaries themselves. For instance, Giulio Aleni developed this approach very clearly in his Learned Discussions at Sanshan [Fuzhou] (Sanshan lunxueji).83 In this work the renowned father even argues that the Chinese sages had remained within the bounds of their human possibilities, since only Christianity had the power to bring people to perfection as sages. Similarly, Matteo Ricci had earlier remarked that the true Confucian gentleman must of necessity follow the “Learning of Heaven” because of its divine origin.84

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In Zhu Zongyuan’s depiction of the Jesuits, the missionaries figure as individuals who can lead China back to the ideal of the ancient three dynasties, a state of complete social harmony and general wellbeing. In other words, as agents of the proper teaching, the Jesuits become new wise men bringing order, peace, and prosperity to a crisis-ridden Chinese state that seemed to have lost its Way. As in Zhu’s portrait of Europe, this idealization is possible because he glosses over any kind of individuality. Zhu does not mention any particular Jesuit by name or present one as a specific example at any point in his work. Zhu’s choice not to introduce individual missionaries, their biographical backgrounds, their familiarity  with China, and their writings cannot be put down to a distance between missionaries and Chinese Christians.85 After all, Zhu Zongyuan was in close contact with Jesuits when he was writing the Responses. Neither was it unusual to publish personal information about individual missionaries in the mid-seventeenth century. For example, the converts Han Lin (1601– 1644) and Zhang Geng (ca. 1560–1647) provided ninety-six profiles of Jesuit missionaries in their 1648 book Evidence of the Christian Faith.86 Zhu’s avoidance of depicting individual Jesuits promoted a schematization that facilitated their association with an idealized image—after all, a sociopolitical ideal usually has no individual traits. Ultimately, Zhu’s missionaries do not appear as representatives of a teaching from another part of the world but as ideal Confucians. This corresponds to his desire to portray the core of Christianity not as a foreign teaching but as the divine consummation of Confucianism. Yet Zhu’s possibilities of doing so were limited.

THE LIMITS OF INTEGRATION Despite all the efforts to underline the compatibilities between Christianity and Confucianism, many aspects of the Jesuits’ life and work remained radically at variance with Chinese codes. For instance, the European fathers’ vow of chastity was in breach of the Confucian duty to produce offspring. And most saliently, the Jesuits were part of organizations—whether the global Catholic Church in general or

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the Society of Jesus in particular—that had their centers outside the Ming or Qing state. This institutional membership distinguished the European fathers from the broad spectrum of figures in China who in other regards were comparable to them. For example, the group of Muslim scientists employed by the court in Beijing, who in the course of the seventeenth century were increasingly replaced by Jesuit experts, maintained only loose ties with the outside world of Islam.87 Likewise, the Buddhist scholars who stressed connections with Confucianism were usually rooted only in the Chinese cultural context, without significant connections to Southeast Asia or any other region in which Buddhism was highly influential. In his depiction of the Jesuits, Zhu Zongyuan does not deal with Catholic institutions like the priesthood, even though some of his writings suggest that he must have been familiar with them. The same is the case with Catholic symbolism, liturgy, music, and architecture—all these facets of ecclesiastical life were known to Zhu, but he does not take them up when introducing the Jesuits to his readers. He also does not elaborate on the organizational setup of the Catholic Church, whether outside or inside China. Explaining more of the institutional cultures of the ecclesia would likely have only added to the waves of distrust Zhu Zongyuan was trying to combat. It would have shown the limits to which the European fathers could—and wanted to—present themselves in a Confucian manner. Not only theological concerns but also many aspects of Catholicism as an organized religion stood in the way of its complete localization in China, and Zhu must have been aware of them. In fact, under close observation, the organizational structure of the Learning of Heaven looked nothing like an adaptation to Confucian paths and patterns. Although there were some basic similarities between Christian organizations and the world of late Ming academies, the Christians, unlike the latter, maintained a profound division between clergy and common parishioners. What is more, this division ran along ethnic lines, since Chinese individuals were long barred from the sacrament of becoming a priest. During Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, the Society of Jesus admitted Chinese individuals only at the level of coadjutor brothers, and even this was limited by strict

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policies. Until the early seventeenth century, only Chinese males who had been born in Macao and educated by the Jesuits were eligible to become coadjutor brothers; after 1627 some mestizos were also allowed to join their ranks, but all of them were from Macao.88 Only in the 1670s did the Society of Jesus begin to ease this policy. While the admission of Chinese coadjutor brothers into the Society of Jesus was strictly restrained, only a single Chinese individual in the entire Catholic Church was ordained as a priest before Zhu Zongyuan passed away in 1660. The Dominican Luo Wenzao (1616–1691) received the sacrament of priesthood in Manila in 1654. Luo later returned to Qing China and was eventually appointed as a bishop responsible for large parts of central China,89 but even he managed to ordain no more than a handful of Chinese priests. In that sense, not much changed in the seventeenth century—the plans for a Chinese clergy that important individuals like Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628) lobbied for in Rome never materialized.90 Priesthood remained a European privilege, and many Jesuits were adamant about defending that system. Similar ethnic policies characterized much of the church around the world. In seventeenth-century European colonialism and Catholicism, certain forms of ethnic consciousness went beyond simple patterns of pride, discrimination, and prejudice. In very complex—and by no means uncontested—ways they were becoming aspects of global institutional systems and thus of worldwide power constellations. This becomes particularly apparent if we regard the Catholic Church of that time as an organization that was expanding in conjunction with the Iberian and other European colonial powers. Both the globalizing church and the European empires were debating the question of what role ethnic and cultural diversity should play in an organization that was scaling up in scope, size, and complexity. The dominant voices in these debates were seldom in favor of inclusivity in the sense that we use that term now. An individual’s conversion and dedication to the Catholic cause thus did not necessarily lead to equal opportunities in the church. Instead, for most non-European converts, the path to a career in the church was full of obstacles. This pattern can be observed from the Americas to East Asia: in the

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Philippines, Spanish missionaries staunchly opposed native priests; the first church councils in Mexico effectively banned all non-Europeans from the priesthood, revising this policy in 1585 to open the door to people of “mixed blood.”91 In general, “blood” was a concept with great social and political implications, and in many cases older, local discrimination patterns were now translated into global dimensions. For instance, the notion of “pure blood” (limpieza de sangre) had played an important role in the repeated waves of inquisitions targeting conversos, or “new Christians” with Jewish ancestors. These occurred initially on the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century and soon thereafter in other parts of the Portuguese Empire.92 In Goa, the inquisition was established in 1560 with its primary target Jews or conversos.93 Equally problematic conceptions of blood affected indigenous peoples in many additional parts of the world, particularly when they became subjects of European-dominated structures. For much of the early modern period, a majority in the church’s leading circles was committed to the idea of global mission but opposed to Native Americans, Africans, and Asians entering the clergy. In a  sense, this combination of inclusivism and exclusivism was also reflected in the spatial arrangements of colonial cities. As in Europe, foreign or other ethnic communities tended to be segregated into distinct quarters.94 In places like Goa and Macao, one allowed nonEuropean individuals to rise to wealth, honor, and influence, but in general, non-European ethnicity barred a large number of successful individuals from full participation in the upper echelons of colonial society. We should be cautious not to understand these forms of ethnic hierarchization in terms of the full-fledged racist systems of nineteenthand early twentieth-century imperialism.95 During the seventeenth century, no brutally hierarchizing science determined biologically based differences among groups.96 Moreover, during the 1500s and 1600s, differentiation among single ethnic groups was not a matter of a consistent principle. Even in European-controlled ports like Macao or Malacca there was no rigid segregationist policy like the ones that would be possible two centuries later. In many regards, Iberian

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colonial societies were more comparable to caste societies than to fully developed race societies.97 Policies related to the question of how to deal with ethnic and cultural differences were very controversial, even within the upper echelons of globalizing institutions like the Catholic Church or the Portuguese padroado. For instance, in its constitutions, the Society of Jesus declared its opposition to the notion of the “purity of blood” that was so influential in the Iberian world. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, had been open to the admission of new Christians, and he supported the idea of ordaining priests in some parts of the world beyond Europe. Ignatius’s declared objectives were influenced by philosophical humanism and stemmed from a commitment to a global mission that was also culturally open. Later, a number of Jesuits, including fathers stationed in China, did not follow their society’s founder in this regard: they remained opposed to the idea of building up a local clergy. There were times, in fact, when it seemed as if a sizable force within the Catholic Church would come to support the ordination of priests regardless of the categories of blood and cultural belonging. In the early sixteenth century, for example, both the Papacy and the Portuguese king accepted the idea of ordaining non-Europeans as priests.98 Yet opposition to creating a multiethnic clergy remained very strong in various levels of the Catholic clergy, and consequently in most parts of the world no significant number of native Jesuit priests emerged. Between 1549 and 1773, only one South Asian man successfully made his way to priesthood in the Society of Jesus; in other parts of Asia as well as the Americas, Africa, and Oceania, native Jesuit fathers remained sparse exceptions.99 The highest number of native ordained priests was in Japan—about fifteen in the late 1500s and early 1600s— after much debate.100 But since the Japanese mission was hit by a governmental crackdown soon after, this model could not emerge as a paradigm in other parts of the world. Moreover, the chief protagonists behind the ordination of Japanese priests were not interested in establishing a universal pattern. Alessandro Valignano, who supervised the Jesuit East Asia mission beginning in 1573 and was actively establishing Japanese seminaries

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at that time, was not operating from the idea of human equality. In some of his writings, he referred to the “dark races” as “stupid and vicious,” but he identified the Japanese as “white”—an intended honor he also conferred upon the Chinese.101 And he knew this classification was controversial—as Valignano himself mentioned, many Europeans, particularly Portuguese missionaries, found the latter idea hard to bear since they regarded Japanese and Chinese as “blacks.”102 The reasons many missionaries resisted the prospect of Chinese candidates for the priesthood did not necessarily center on ethnic prejudice. They feared that Chinese individuals attending seminaries in Asia could not possibly be educated to a degree sufficient to join the Society of Jesus in Europe. Many Jesuit fathers—as well as other influential figures in the Catholic Church—were skeptical the Chinese could study subjects such as theology, philosophy, and European science in sufficient depth. Moreover, they were not convinced that Chinese translations could replace the Latin texts, and for the time being, Chinese versions of European works were in short supply. Many Jesuits were particularly uneasy about whether the Chinese fathers could acquire proficiency in Latin, the lingua franca of the upper echelons of the Catholic ecclesia. Attempts to lower the standards for Chinese priests received little support, and the idea of dispatching sizable numbers of talented young converts to European seminaries proved hard to translate into action.103 In the eyes of many fathers, and perhaps also in their hearts, Latin remained the language of the priesthood. A genuinely multicultural clergy that did not share the same theological lingua franca seemed to these fathers like an erosion of the spiritual and intellectual fundaments of their religion. Jesuits who opposed the idea of Chinese converts joining their ranks as priests made other arguments as well. Some European missionaries were concerned that native priests would not fit neatly into the centralized system that characterized the Society of Jesus as a globalizing organization. A few fathers suggested that a native clergy would be subject to Chinese social hierarchies that would challenge their standing in Christian communities. They were disquieted by the prospect of native priests taking independent action or reaching out to Chinese society in ways that could not be managed or controlled by Rome or

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Macao. In this connection, some Jesuits pointed to experiences with Japan, where, in their view, some native priests had proven to be not as reliable as they would have expected from a European father. Many Jesuits defined their society as a global network that relied heavily on clear lines of command, which, they opined, could be better enforced if they were not composed of a multicultural and multiethnic body. In other words, the idea of a globally diverse priesthood was often perceived as a potential erosion of a community of trust the society had built. For many important Jesuit and other missionaries, even as they were taking their faith to all corners of the world, Catholicism remained centered on Rome. In spite of global missionary ambitions— or perhaps precisely as part of them—there was a great reluctance to rely on a non-European clergy to uphold the mission, and this stance also affected the Chinese theater of the Society of Jesus. While as theologians most Jesuits approved of a Confucian reinterpretation of Christianity as the Learning of Heaven, they continued to be loyal to their European homelands in terms of political, ethnic, and cultural belonging. A majority of the fathers were particularly concerned that in organizational terms, their religion would be diluted into a sinicized Learning of Heaven. All this remained an unresolved tension in the history of seventeenth-century Catholicism in China, a tension that went through individuals like Zhu Zongyuan who were well aware of many problematic aspects of ecclesiastical life. Apparently unable to bridge this gap between the Europe-centered aspects of Catholicism and its claim to nativization in China, Zhu chose to paint Europe and the Jesuits exclusively in the vivid colors of Confucian ideals. This may have been a solution to philosophical and theological problems, but Zhu surely must have felt that the organizational challenges surrounding Jesuit Catholicism in China were more complex.

EPILOGUE

DISCORDANT HARMONIES Global history does not necessarily abandon detailed local perspectives for the sake of large-scale thinking. Global historians also do not merely write the history of mobility or unchained connectivity. Great interconnections affected not only travelers but also the vast majority of people living sedentary lives: in seventeenth-century China, many individuals experienced the transcontinental transfer of ideas, goods, and germs. They include the Chinese peasant who started planting sweet potatoes and the urban dweller who became a tobacco smoker— as well as they and many others when it became harder to pay taxes because of globally shifting silver prices. Transcontinental linkages remained the unknown cause of such transformations even as newly available information about different parts of the world reached Chinese society, particularly the educated circles. Yet while many late Ming readers were avid consumers of geographical knowledge, they seldom ventured to distant lands. The same is true for the converts to foreign religions—including Christianity—who were increasing relatively quickly owing to the sociopolitical crises of early seventeenthcentury China. Although such religions had an impact on the lives of their followers, they did not necessarily add much kinetic energy to them.

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Historically speaking, the spread of a foreign religion in China was not out of the ordinary. More unusual was the steady presence of European missionaries on Chinese soil, from the late sixteenth ­century onward. This not only led to a wealth of exchanges between learned individuals from both parts of the world but also meant that a significant number of Chinese individuals—whether they lived in the countryside or in a large city—came into direct contact with a foreign organization: the global Catholic church. Of course, Christianity had existed in China before: Nestorians had been present there around the seventh century, and the Catholic Church had founded some missionary outlets during the Mongol period (1279–1368), when travel across the Eurasian landmass was facilitated by their powerful rule. But at  no point in history had Christian communities in China been so closely wedded to an institutional network that was becoming a global organization. Under the umbrella of the Catholic Church, many Chinese were now in regular contact with European priests who functioned not only as individual missionaries but also as representatives, administrators, and regional principals of a large institution. The Chinese dealing directly with Europeans remained deeply rooted in their home society and politics—even intellectually, floating into a detached world beyond local commitments was not an option. Zhu Zongyuan was among the Chinese Christians who played a somewhat exalted role between the upper levels of the Jesuit China mission and his local society. His successes in the Chinese state examination system gave him prestige in his hometown, Ningbo, and ensured that he had close connections with that city’s Confucian circles. At the same time, he was an active member of the local Christian communities; he regularly corresponded with European missionaries and even hosted many in person. Moreover, he coauthored a number of texts with both Chinese converts and Jesuits, and his works contain prefaces written by members of both groups. While the one documented trip in his lifetime took him only from Ningbo to the provincial capital of Hangzhou, about three hundred fifty li to the west (175 kilometers), we nevertheless need to count him as one of the transcontinental connectors of his time. Zhu was both a subject of the Chinese state and its education  ­system and someone with responsibilities vis-à-vis the Jesuit

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subprovince of China as well as the ecclesia catholica at large. But he was more than a liaison between seventeenth-century Catholicism and Chinese society in the Ming-Qing transition period: he was among those learned Chinese Christians seeking to come to terms with the foreign dimensions of their faith rather than downplay them. Unlike most other convert-authors in seventeenth-century China, Zhu discussed an entire range of problems resulting from the European origins of Catholicism in an unusually open and detailed manner. He spoke against allegations that the Jesuit fathers were the vanguard of a European invasion and presented an image of Europe that was compatible with his own agenda. What is more, he spent much of his scholarly energy arguing that Confucian ideals were not inseparable from the Chinese state and society and hence could also be put into effect through other teachings. Like many Chinese converts, Zhu was convinced that in their essential values and highest aspirations, Confucianism as the Chinese state ethos and Catholicism as the Learning of Heaven were ultimately one and the same. Thus Zhu had loyalties to two institutionalized worlds—and he believed they could and should be brought together. To be sure, there were developments on both sides working in favor of a synthesis. For instance, certain neo-Confucian and Latin Christian schools during the seventeenth century put a great emphasis on individual moral responsibility and the emancipation from older institutionalized forms of authority.1 We do not need to go as far as the world historians William McNeill and John R. McNeill, who labeled Luther the German Wang Yangming,2 but we can agree that the rising emphasis on individual conscience was related to an increase in commercialization, urbanization, and literacy in both China and Europe from the sixteenth century onward. In addition, roughly around the same time there was a drawn-out crisis of teachings closely associated with state apparatuses—not only in parts of Europe and East Asia but also in the Middle East and South Asia. Nevertheless, Zhu Zongyuan’s world of dual affiliations was not a harmonic, fully congruent one. Many contradictions remained in the intellectual and organizational edifice of the Learning of Heaven, including the Confucian-Christian accommodation. Yet even as a scholarly framework, this had not emerged from an intellectually

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independent cross-cultural dialogue between Europeans and Chinese, nor was it simply a Christian adaptation to Chinese realities on the ground. Instead, it was born from friction: we need to see it as a discordant compromise resulting from the encounter of two large systems—the globalizing Catholic Church and the Chinese state, both of which were characterized by their own cultural imperatives3 and hegemonic claims and which had core principles that could not be transgressed without sanction. Without doubt, these cultural imperatives were not monolithic blocks. Indeed, both the Chinese state and the Catholic Church were facing their own crises: During the late Ming dynasty, the shaky conditions of the state loosened the ties between many Confucian schools and the bureaucratic system, creating new opportunities for alternative interpretations, one of which was the Learning of Heaven. At the same time, the pluralization of Confucianism opened up arenas of contestation. Nor was the Catholic Church under the challenges of the Reformation a world of peace and harmony: orders from the Franciscans to the Jesuits were engaged in institutional and theological confrontations, and even within single orders, there was a wide range of opinions about how to shape main arenas such as the China mission. Nevertheless, the inner diversities of both late Ming China and the Societas Jesu did not mean that contacts between the two could take any possible direction. Both the Catholic Church and the Chinese state had boundaries that could not be transgressed without penalty and core principles that could not be compromised. In seventeenth-century China, Confucian circles retained their claim to being ultimately responsible for the welfare of China as a political, societal, and cultural system. More purist Confucian schools were staunchly opposed to influences from any other teaching, particularly to religions from outside China. Moreover, the state apparatus was always a potential source of repression. Highly educated Christian converts were especially constrained by Confucian orthodoxies and orthopraxies, including participation in state-endorsed rituals that could not be abandoned without the risk of political persecution. Many watchful eyes inside and outside China’s official channels observed

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the language and behavior of Chinese converts and European ­m issionaries—who were repeatedly subject to state sanctions and political retribution. On the Catholic side, European missionaries were concerned that the localization of Christianity would go too far. Books on the Learning of Heaven, no matter whether they were authored primarily by missionaries or by converts, could not explore a range of theological choices without any constraints; instead, they were checked by their compatibility with the doctrines of the church in general and of the Society of Jesus in particular. Moreover, the Jesuit fathers set up an administrative system that attempted to ensure that core elements of the Catholic faith and liturgy were being practiced throughout China. This system depended heavily on Chinese associates, but for a variety of reasons, throughout Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime the road to priesthood remained barred to Chinese individuals. Although there were only a few dozen Jesuit fathers stationed in China at any one time, they formed a network at the top of the very diverse landscape of converts in China and saw it as their task to ensure that Chinese Catholics did not transgress the boundaries acceptable to Rome. Ethnic consciousness played a role in the seventeenth-century China mission, and so did entanglements between the church and European colonialism.4 Nevertheless, the mind-sets framing late Ming Christianity differed greatly from those of the age of Western imperialism two centuries later. The same was true of the global power constellations shaping the encounters leading to the reformulation of Catholicism as the Learning of Heaven. The latter remained a relatively small teaching from the West that had converted a minor proportion of the overall population. It also interested a part of China’s educated circles—however, chiefly through scientific and cartographic works. During the seventeenth century, Sino-European contacts did not take place in a climate of opinion favoring the idea of the West as advanced and China as lagging behind. Connectors like Zhu Zongyuan found themselves positioned in the middle of two power structures, one of which was centered at the Dragon Throne and the other at the Holy See. Both the late Ming state and society and the Catholic Church had control mechanisms and

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ways of ensuring doctrinal coherence, which meant that the synthesis resulting from this encounter could be defined only along a fine line of theological, liturgical, and organizational possibilities—a fine line that ran along a zone in which the two systems could converse in the spirit of mutual acceptance. We should not downplay the intellectual fervor, spiritual devotion, and cultural openness of the missionaries and Chinese scholars involved in creating the intellectual framework in which Confucianism and Catholicism could meet. Yet we should also recognize that outside this specific framework there were no fundamental alternatives, particularly for an order like the Society of Jesus that sought to gain acceptance within the higher levels of the Chinese state. The encounters conditioning the history of seventeenth-century Christianity in China were so complex that it would be misleading to define them as interreligious dialogues. On an institutional level, we should not assume that there were simple analogies between the Chinese and Catholic sides engaged in the Learning of Heaven. First, the organizational setup of the Catholic Church was by no means akin to the landscapes of Confucian schools, and second a much wider range of players, including state institutions, were involved on the Chinese side. Independent of this difference, it is also somewhat questionable to apply the concept of “religions” to the contexts of late Ming society  since the distinction between religious faith and nonreligious thought, between philosophia and religio, was peculiar to monotheistic religions, particularly the worlds of Latin Christendom.5 Although the Jesuit missionaries interpreted the landscapes of contemporary Chinese schools through these lenses, the reality was far more complex.6 What are the alternatives to situating Zhu’s life and work in a history of encounters between religions? One possibility is to operate with the term “civilization” instead. In fact, the history of the Jesuit mission in China has often been portrayed as a contact between ­d ifferent cultures or civilizations. Yet we still need to be cautious, because concepts like “culture” and “civilization” are also constructs of the modern age.7 This is particularly the case if we apply them to  entire world regions and at least implicitly treat concepts like

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“Chinese civilization” or “European culture” as coherent or even uniform bodies. The notion of intercivilizational contacts tends to downplay the inner diversity of each side, the reality that world regions like Europe and China were actually pluriverses. Perhaps more important, this conceptualization suggests that the Catholic China mission opened a stream of mutual, open contact between China and Europe. Assuming this, however, would mean ignoring the fact that the information flows between the two regions were channeled by a very limited number of agents. In China, knowledge about Europe depended almost entirely on the works of Jesuit missionaries. Granted, their writings were not confined to religious contents but also encompassed other fields of intellectual activity, ranging from astronomy to geography and from science to mnemotechnics.8 Yet the fathers never aimed at disseminating a comprehensive image of Europe in China,9 offering only a fraction of the rich world of ideas found in the booming European book market.10 Nor were they interested in providing a realistic portrait of the Europe they knew. Their goal, after all, was not to feed material into a burgeoning intercultural dialogue but to proselytize for their faith. Only greatly reduced and highly filtered information about Europe reached the Chinese public, including converts like Zhu Zongyuan. In all likelihood, Zhu did not know much about either the Reformation or the Thirty Years’ War that raged in Europe during his lifetime. He was also probably unaware of the fact that the ongoing religious wars in Europe had begun to undermine the idea that religion was the crucial source of morality and political stability. Moreover, probably no one had alerted him to the reality that the increased knowledge of other cultures available in parts of Europe was feeding into a growing insecurity about mankind’s unity under a Christian God. And certainly he was unaware of thinkers like René Descartes (1596–1650), who wrote around the same time and postulated scientia and rationality as the only remaining roads to stability, given that ecclesiastical and political institutions had been thrown into turmoil. Most likely, Zhu was also ignorant of the fact that orders like the Society of Jesus were reaching out globally in part because of the crisis of their church in Europe. In all probability, Zhu had no information about the vicious

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struggles within the Catholic Church and the mounting attacks against the Jesuits from groups like the Jansenists in France. However, it would also be wrong to regard Zhu Zongyuan as a scholar ready to engage in cross-cultural reflections who was hindered only by the sparse information available to him. While the Europe of his time was undergoing important transformations, most probably Zhu Zongyuan would have not been keen on acquiring a broad knowledge of this distant continent’s history, society, and intellectual life. With his publications, Zhu did not intend to build bridges in an intercultural encounter, and it was not his aim to provide or obtain a maximum of facts and figures about this other realm. Indeed, his books and essays were not meant to be translated into other languages. They were written in Mandarin, and at the same time they were enriched by a world of concepts, ideas, and allusions accessible only to a reader who had climbed comparatively high on the Chinese, particularly Confucian, educational ladder. Zhu Zongyuan was writing from a late Ming world that was experiencing major turmoil, climate disasters, and political unrest, and he was looking for a way to stabilize that world. For him, the dogmas brought to China’s shores by Jesuit missionaries were a key to reinvigorating Confucian learning, stabilizing society and calming the political storms of his time.

WORLDS OF CONTEXT In what historical contexts can we place Zhu Zongyuan, given that he never traveled? As we have seen, we can view him through the lenses of local history as well as situating him in the wider context of Chinese history during the Ming-Qing transition period. Beyond that, his activities as a writer and Christian community member belong to the history of Catholicism as a globalizing institution. In addition, his experience fits into a much broader historical context: global religious expansion and intercultural encounters. Long before the arrival of the Jesuits, many religions had been disseminated throughout large parts of Asia. Some branches of

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Buddhism and Islam, for example, had begun to spread over wide geographical distances. The fourteenth-century explorer Ibn Battutah moved widely within Muslim communities in his voyages between northern Africa and China.11 In places like Mughal India, different religions and ancient written traditions were coming into contact on a scale, magnitude, and depth that in various regards would outmatch the seventeenth-century encounters between Chinese and Europeans. In these cases as well, cross-cultural contacts stimulated a wealth of erudite debates and nourished new landscapes of religious syncretism. Already during that time, many people found themselves in the role of connectors, interlocutors, and negotiators between traditions and societies. Like Zhu Zongyuan, they experienced the implications of an increasingly interconnected world in a very direct manner, and all of them had to come to terms with them in one way or another. Nevertheless, the European missionaries were not simply joining a historically colorful but now static religious landscape in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During that period, many kinds of intercultural contacts were actually intensifying, particularly along the major Asian trade arteries. For instance, during the seventeenth century Chinese Buddhist missionaries were becoming active in large parts of Southeast Asia, often traveling—just like European priests—with merchants they could rely on.12 Moreover, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Islam experienced a period of strong growth, its second after a first wave of expansion between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries. In this second wave, new followers of Muhammad, Allah, and the Koran were being created in very different parts of the world, ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to Iran and from the Balkans to present-day Indonesia. Both waves of religious expansion and outreach led to sustained learned exchanges among representatives from different world regions. To be sure, there were significant differences in the paths and patterns through which Islam and Catholicism spread during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, a closer look at the proliferation of both makes us recognize some shared patterns and even entanglements. For instance, in large parts of Asia, the two religions spread via close connections between missionary and

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commercial activities.13 Christian missionaries traveled with European merchants just as Sufi and other Muslim itinerants accompanied traders of Arab and other backgrounds. Moreover, just as with their European peers, Muslim merchant networks sometimes pressured rulers of local trade hubs to convert. And like Christianity, Islam could provide communities of trust and credit to fellow religious travelers and traders in distant lands.14 Many economic associations were held together across vast distances by a shared allegiance to either the Bible or the Koran. We may even go one step further and interpret the growth of Islam and Catholicism during this time against the background of the growing significance of merchant cultures and psychologies in the wider Indian Ocean world. It is perhaps little wonder that in an age of increased competition and personal pressures, particularly religions that accentuated individual salvation rapidly gained followers.15 Moreover, religions with strongholds in many different locations were appealing to an ever-more mobile world in which many local cultural traditions were being relativized while at the same time the demand for reliable transregional networks was growing.16 As the lived experiences of many individuals—particularly in trade-­intensive coastal regions—began to cover greater distances, the demand for an equally widespread faith network grew as well. Yet no matter whether in the case of Islam or Christianity, the growth of religious communities across a colorful landscape of societies and languages did not dispel cultural differences. In fact, religious syncretism and attempts at intercultural reconciliation were far from unusual during this period. Now that religions were large webs, they faced new challenges, particularly the question of how they could maintain an equilibrium between universal divine claims on the one hand and, on the other, locally specific political demands and cultural realities. Both Christian and Islamic communities saw the emergence of debates on the relationship between the universal and the particular. In both cases, there were tensions between those branches that were more open to religious syncretism and those that adhered to a narrower, more rigid interpretation of their faith.17 Among Islamic groups, it was particularly the Sufi missionaries who endorsed forms of religious syncretism that reconciled Islam

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with Buddhist, Hindu, and other elements. And on the other side, many seventeenth-century religious travelers sought to return various Muslim communities along the Indian Ocean rim to versions of Islam that were understood as normative. These groups tried to counter the fragmentation of their religion into different culturally specific communities that could challenge the idea of a universal umma. In this connection, the struggles over the accommodation policy in the Jesuit China mission, particularly the famous Rites Controversy, can be understood as an instance of a much larger pattern describing multiple religions around this time. Like Christians, Muslims were faced with different camps arguing over local adaptations of  their faith, over the limits of accommodation to local customs and traditions. In many cases, the feuding groups then appealed to a superordinate religious authority to serve as a final judge. An example is a letter from a seventeenth-century Sumatran scholar who consulted his teacher in Medina to resolve a theological dispute.18 Yet no matter on what side one stood on the question of cultural accommodation, it was an undeniable fact that religious identities were increasingly embedded in universal worldviews rather than tied to particular locales.19 In turn, these transformations in religious worldviews were conjoined with changing understandings of the human habitat. In Japan and Portugal, India and Vietnam, there was a growing sense of a finite world, at least within learned circles. In many languages, new vocabularies of universalism reflected the experience of a world that was simultaneously getting larger and smaller.20 Newly available knowledge about other cultures could even lead to epistemological crises and religious problems. A famous example is the struggle among European scholars to reconcile facts from Chinese historical records with the important genre of European universal histories based on Christian timelines. What was to be done with the events registered in Chinese sources that obviously predated the most common computations of biblical events such as the deluge?21 It took much time and effort to recalculate biblical chronologies in a way that made them compatible with Chinese primary sources. The task of balancing universal and particular claims was not confined to the realms of knowledge and faith: it had parallels in the economic and technological sectors, for the expanding worlds of

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economic gain confronted established local concepts, measures, and conventions;22 at the same time they created a need for commonly accepted standards. Furthermore, technological skills and governmental practices were spreading across a wide range of societies. It is not possible to clearly disentangle the social carrier groups of new technical knowledge and religious faith, in part because, in an age of intensifying elite circulation, the employment of experts at foreign courts was fairly common.23 As a general trend, in large parts of Asia there was an increasing demand for foreign advisers; this was driven partly by the realization that more functional bureaucracies would help advance a state’s position in the complicated game of international commerce and competition. Especially after the 1550s, rulers in many regions began recruiting experts for commercial, scientific, technological, and military activities. Some built on traditions established by earlier nomadic empires and their heirs. For instance, the Mughal court in India under Akbar (d. 1605), one of its greatest rulers, employed not only Jesuits but also Sufis, Shiites, and other highly skilled individuals who adhered openly to different Gods from the majority population and often had missionary ambitions.24 Once again, when looking at a much wider pattern, the Jesuits working in the service of the Chinese emperor no longer seem so unusual. In fact, their service in the Forbidden City should be seen as part of a broader development that transgressed religions and was common across Asia. Serving as skilled labor, the Jesuits were supplying several rulers with a wide range of technologies and scientific knowledge. This included the introduction of field artillery, which around the middle of the seventeenth century helped states like China and the Mughal Empire grow at the expense of smaller states. Like many of their Muslim counterparts, the members of the Society of Jesus who served as foreign experts were not interested primarily in monetary compensation. Instead, they hoped to gain privileged access to the cream of local society and create direct inroads for their faith. Since missionaries, experts, and traders from different religious backgrounds were operating at the same time, they encountered one another. This was less so in the larger provinces of empires like China and India but very much so in trading centers like Goa, Malacca,

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Guangzhou, and Nagasaki. Most long-distance travelers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries needed to stop at such places to change ships or wait for favorable winds. Port cities of this kind offered vivid scenes of multicultural coexistence—scenes of a magnitude unknown in Europe at the time.25 Here human beings from very different backgrounds and faith systems—Fujianese, Gujaratis, Arabs, and Armenians, to name only a few—lived with one another, sometimes in a culturally open atmosphere.26 For instance, in Macao and other Portuguese strongholds, Europeans married predominantly Chinese women, thus the number of residents of mixed ethnic backgrounds rose continually. Arab merchants also frequently intermarried with local families, often passing their religion on to the next generations. Still, many belonged to diasporic networks knit by shared ethnicities, religions, homelands, or ancestors and served as transregional communities of trust in a trading world as colorful as it was ruthless.27 The dynamism in the cultural and religious pluriverse of maritime Asia was known to European traders and missionaries. As the Jesuit fathers made their way to China, they would have observed not only the great religious cohabitation in these trading hubs but also the rapid growth of Islam.28 There is evidence that at times Jesuits engaged in debates with Muslim scholars in the intercultural hubs along the Indian Ocean rim.29 They also had some disputations with Muslim scholars in China; however, here both Christianity and Islam were in a much more marginal position, leading to far fewer encounters between these two monotheistic traditions.30 In addition, there are records of disputes between Jesuit fathers and Buddhist scholars in parts of China and Southeast Asia, where Chan Buddhism also experienced a missionary boom.31 The Jesuits were well aware of the fact that religious dynamism did not transform all regions of Asia equally and unequivocally. They observed that compared with the coastal areas of the Indian Ocean or parts of Japan, Chinese society provided much less fertile soil for the spread of monotheistic religions. In the end, despite all the crises during the drawn-out transition phase from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, the Middle Kingdom remained a centrally administered state and the largest economy on the planet. Its civilizational patterns were not

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shaken enough to trigger the Chinese masses to undertake a search for new gods or new spiritual strongholds. And among traders, the diasporic Chinese networks usually remained strong enough to provide trust, shelter, and opportunities in distant lands—which reduced pressure and incentives for an individual merchant to convert to religions such as Islam or Christianity. Yet the failed ambitions of early modern European missionaries to transform China into a chiefly Christian society do not indicate a uniquely inward-facing society. Quite the contrary, with visible communities of Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, and other believers, the patterns of religiosity in the Ming or Qing state were far more colorful and globally entangled than those in Europe during the same period. In the Catholic lands between Lisbon and Warsaw, the presence of such overseas proselytizers would have been unthinkable. Rome struggled with how much to concede culturally when globalizing Catholicism, but it would not have allowed Muslim, let alone Buddhists or followers of other foreign beliefs, to build missionary networks in Europe. The same was true for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant rulers and churches. In terms of its religious tolerance, China was thus more similar to formations like the Mughal Empire or the Ottoman Empire than to the world of Latin Christendom, which in its own homelands was far from accepting global religious pluralism.32 Through their personal experiences, Jesuit and other missionaries in several Asian regions must have been aware of the wider religious dynamics characterizing the time—dynamics that spanned entire oceans and continents, just like the individual missionary’s life. Perhaps Jesuit fathers deployed in the Far East were actually more aware of transcontinental currents and entanglements than the modern scholars studying those missionaries are today, for the latter have been trained chiefly as regional experts, whereas the early modern missionaries needed to act and interact in networks that crossed cultures and continents. Moreover, neither the Jesuits in China nor their Chinese interlocutors perceived the other side as a detached, exotic realm; nor did they assume that the contacts resulting from the arrival of European missionaries in the Ming state were exceptional in any major regard.

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The striking parallels in the spread of Christianity, Islam, and other religions across parts of early modern Eurasia should not lead us to assume that different faith systems and religious organizations were growing more similar to one another. Certainly, Islamic and Christian networks faced largely equivalent challenges in their transcultural expansion, and we can observe to some degree comparable responses across various creeds. However, there was no significant convergence in the ways in which a particular religion like Theravada Buddhism, Sunni Islam, or Catholicism, including its branches, was organized. Since each religious web during the epoch had distinctive features, the discussion of which religion was unique wouldn’t lead into promising directions. What was particular about Catholic missionary efforts was the global scope of their organization, which was based on great administrative capacities and specialized personnel. This also differentiated Catholicism from Protestant and other branches of Christianity, which for a variety of reasons were slower to embark on global proselytizing endeavors. 33 During Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, no other religion operated with proselytizers from Patagonia to Hokkaido and from Baja California to Bali.34 While these missionary enterprises were not centrally coordinated, they were clearly part of a centrally organized institution, the Catholic Church. Yet as the case of the seventeenth-century China mission indicates, this central organization was not necessarily a source of coherence and prowess when it came to gaining new converts. Zhu Zongyuan could not possibly have grasped even a fraction of the global dimensions surrounding his lived experiences negotiating between China and the globalizing church. Yet he must have felt the shock waves triggered by such large systems coming into direct contact with one another. He knew of the repeated attacks on the Learning of Heaven by some local scholars and state authorities, and he probably witnessed some of the internal disputes among European missionaries, who did not always agree about how to proceed with the China mission. He certainly noticed ecclesiastical policies, including the fact that Chinese converts remained barred from the priesthood. But we cannot tell exactly how he felt about them—he left only monographs, essays, and introductory writings; we have no personal

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data, no letters, diaries, or autobiographical notes. So we do not know about Zhu Zongyuan’s feelings and private thoughts. We cannot say how he perceived his multiple roles as a connector between local politics and his Christian communities, or between Chinese society and European missionaries. Did he feel burdened by them, or did he enthusiastically serve in these capacities, convinced that this was his personal mission, his singular contribution to the world?

GLOSSARY

The terms and names included in this glossary are listed with the traditional Chinese characters in use during the seventeenth century. Added information is given in parentheses in some cases for ease of comprehension. ancha qianshi 按察佥事 Baiheilun 白黑論 bailian jiao 白蓮教 beitian 背天 bo (count) 伯 cangcang 蒼蒼 Cao Binren 曹秉仁 Cheng (ancient prince) 成 Cheng Yi 程頤 Chongzhen 崇禎 Chu (state) 楚 Chufen xiyi yi 處分西夷議 Chunqiu 春秋 Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露 Da kewen 答客問 dadao 大道 daifu 大夫 Damo (Bodhidharma) 達摩 Dao (the Way) 道 daotong 道統 daoxue 道學 daoyi 島夷

daxi (Great West) 大西 daxi rushe 大西儒舍 Daxue (Great Learning) 大學 difangzhi 地方誌 Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 Donglin shuyuan 東林書院 dongyi 東夷 Fan Ye 范曄 Fang Hao 方豪 Feng Shihu 馮石滬 fushe (Restoration Society) 復社 fuzi (master) 夫子 Gao Panlong 高攀龍 Gongyangzhuan 公羊傳 Gu Xiancheng 顧憲成 Guliangzhuan 穀梁傳 guyue (ancient state of Yue) 古越 Han Lin 韓霖 Han shu 漢書 Houhan shu 後漢書 hu (prefix) 胡 Hu Anguo 胡安國

170 Glossary hua (flourish; Chinese) 華 Huang Zhen 黃貞 Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 hui (association) 會 huizhang 會長 Jian (Count of Zheng) 堅 Jiangnan 江南 Jiao (ancient emissary) 椒 Jiao Hong 焦閎 “Jiaoshe zhi li suoyi shi shangdi ye”  郊社之禮所以事上帝也

Jin (state) 晉 jingjiao (Nestorianism) 景教 jinshi 進士 jue (aristocratic title) 爵 jue (awakening) 覺 junzi (person of great integrity) ​君子 juren 舉人 Kang Youwei 康有為 Kong (family name of Confucius) 孔 Kouduo richao 口鐸日抄 li (cosmic principle) 理 li (unit of distance) 里 Li Zhi 李贄 Li Zhizao 李之藻 Li Zicheng 李自成 Liang Qichao 梁啓超 Liji 禮記 Lin Qilao 林七老 Lin Zhaoen 林兆恩 Liu Xiang 劉香 Louxin (temple) 樓心寺 Lu (state) 魯 Luo Wenzao 羅文藻 ming (to mandate) 命 Mingzhou 明州 Mouzi lihuolun 牟子理惑論 Mu (king of Chu) 穆 Mu (prince of Qin) 穆（繆） Ningbo 寧波 Ningbo fuzhi 寧波府誌 Niujie Libaisi 牛街禮拜寺

ouluoba 歐羅巴 Pomilun 破迷論 pu (unrefined) 樸 Qi (state) 齊 Qian Fagong 錢發公 qiang (cultural outsider) 羌 Qin (state) 秦 Qingshi jinshu 輕世金書 Qita (temple) 七塔寺 rong (cultural outsider) 戎 ru (scholar) 儒 rudeya 如德亞 rujia 儒家 sanjiao 三教 Sanshan lunxueji 三山論學紀 Shangdi 上帝 Shen Que 沈搉 Shen Yue 沈約 sheng (sage) 聖 Shengchao poxieji 聖朝破邪集 Shengjiao xinzheng 聖教信證 shengren 聖人 shengxian 聖賢 shengyuan 生員 shi (beginning) 始 shibosi 市舶司 Shiji 史記 Shujing 書經 Shun (emperor) 舜 Shunzhi 順治 shuyuan 書院 Sima Qian 司馬遷 Siming (mountain range) 四明 Songshu 宋書 suolu 索虜 suotou 索頭 Suzhou 蘇州 taixi zhi xue 泰西之學 Taizhou (school) 泰州學派 tian (heaven) 天 tiandao 天道 Tianqi (emperor) 天啓

Glossary  171 tianxue 天學 Tianxue bianjing lu 天學辯敬錄 Tianxue lüeyi 天學略義 tianzhu ​天主 Tianzhu shengjiao huoyi lun ​ 天主聖教豁疑論

Tianzhu shengjiao shijie zhiquan ​ 天主聖教十誡直詮

tianzhujiao ​天主教 Tizheng bian ​提正編 Tong Guoqi ​佟國器 wai (outside) ​外 wang (king) ​王 Wang Gen ​王艮 Wang Ji ​王畿 Wang Yangming ​王陽明 Wanli (emperor) ​萬曆 Wei (period) ​魏 Wei Jun ​魏濬 Wei Zhongxian ​魏忠賢 Wen (Prince of Lu) ​文 Wen Xiangfeng ​文翔鳳 Wu (emperor of Liang dynasty) ​ 梁武帝

wu (emptiness) ​無 Wu (state) ​吳 wu (sudden enlightenment) ​悟 Wu Sangui ​吳三桂 wujue (sudden enlightenment) ​悟覺 Wuxi ​無錫 xiaodi litian ​孝弟力田 xie (heterodox) ​邪 xinglixue ​性理學 xinxue ​心學 xiru (scholar from the West) ​西儒 xiudao ​修道 xixue ​西學 Xixue fan ​西學凡 Xiyouji (novel) ​西遊記 xu (emptiness) ​虛 Xu (state) ​許 Xu Guangqi ​徐光啓

Xuan (ancient prince) ​宣 Yan (state) ​燕 yang (prefix) ​洋 Yang Tingyun ​楊廷筠 Yao (emperor) ​堯 yi (cultural outsider) ​夷 Yijing ​易經 Yong (river) ​甬 Yongle ​永樂 You Yu ​由余 Yu (emperor) ​禹 Yuan Zongdao ​袁宗道 Yue (state) ​越 Zhang Geng ​張賡 Zhang Nengxin ​張能信 Zhang Xie ​張燮 Zhao (state) ​趙 Zheng (state) ​鄭 zheng (upright) ​正 Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) ​ 鄭成功

Zheng Xuan ​鄭玄 Zhengshi lüeshuo ​拯世略說 Zhengyi (commentary) ​正義 zhi (unformed) ​質 Zhifang waiji ​職方外紀 zhong (middle) ​中 Zhongguo ​中國 Zhonghua ​中華 Zhongyong ​中庸 Zhougong (Duke of Zhou) ​周公 Zhoushan (islands) ​舟山 Zhu Biyuan ​朱弼元 Zhu Xi ​朱熹 Zhu Ying ​朱瑩 Zhu Zongwen ​朱宗文 Zhu Zongyuan ​朱宗元 Zhuang (king of Chu) ​莊 Zhuangzi ​莊子 zi (baron) ​子 zi (son) ​子 Zuozhuan ​左傳

NOTES

Works are cited in full on first appearance in each set of chapter notes; subsequent references to the same work in a set of notes are abbreviated. The only exceptions in citation style are the main works of Zhu Zongyuan. They are abbreviated in all occurrences in the notes, as follows: Responses: Da kewen [Responses to the questions of a guest] Summary: Zhengshi lüeshuo [A summary of world salvation] Treatise: Tianzhu shengjiao huoyi lun [Treatise on the removal of doubts about Christianity] In provisions of page numbers in citations to Zhu’s works, the letters a and b indicate, respectively, the left-hand or right-hand side of a double-leafed page spread.

INTRODUCTION: SITUATING ZHU ZONGYUAN 1. For a historical overview of overseas Chinese, see Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2. For critical inquiries into nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of “culture,” see Andrew Sartori, “The Resonance of ‘Culture’: Framing a Problem in Global Concept-History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 4 (2005): 676–99. 3. On topics such as religious and cultural pluralism in commercial hubs, see, for example, Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 182–221; Sanjay

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History, 2nd ed. (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 274–78. See, for example, Paul S. Ropp, China in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. chapter 1. A substantial comparison between the European and the Chinese economies of the time—as well as an assessment of the relationship between the two— is provided in Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For insightful accounts of these entanglements between China during the Ming-Qing transition period and the world, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); John Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a brief overview, see Theodore N. Foss, “Cartography,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, 752–70 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Cow Street Mosque, or Niujie Libaisi, was expanded under the Kangxi emperor and is still operating today. See, for example, Wolfgang Franke, “Notes on Some Ancient Chinese Mosques,” in Documenta Barbarorum: Festschrift für Walther Heissig zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Walther Heissig, Klaus Sagaster, and Michael Weiers, 111–26 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983). Thomas David DuBois, Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15–34, 94–105. A classic historical account of the early phase of Buddhism in China is Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1959). For more on these aspects of these aspects of the late Ming, see, for instance, Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 153–262. Nicolas Standaert, “Chinese Christians: General Characteristics,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:380–403. Research on Chinese Christians had long been constrained by a certain generational bias—in 1994, David Mungello was still writing on this problem, “Whereas the first generation of Christians, which included the Three Pillars, has received a great deal of attention, the second generation (which included Han Lin and Zhu Zongyuan) and the third generation have

Introduction  175

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

remained shadowy, ill-defined groups” (The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994], 70–71). In the meantime, more studies on these generations of Chinese Christians have appeared, but they remain less studied than historical individuals like Yang Tingyun, Li Zhizao, or Xu Guangqi. On European colonialism during this period, see Wolfgang Reinhard, A Short History of Colonialism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2011), 20–83. Certainly, global entanglements did frame the Manchu invasion of the world’s largest polity and economy. See Evelyn Rawski, “Beyond National ­History: Seeking the Ethnic in China’s History,” Crossroads 5 (2012): 45–62. See also Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2005). On the Manchu conquest of China, see also Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Recent research accentuates the political and territorial ambitions of corporate agents such as the East India Company. See Philip J. Stern, The Company-­ State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Reinhard, Short History of Colonialism, 23–24. For a discussion of such facets of the Portuguese Empire, see Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, 274–78. R. Bin Wong, “The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia,” American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 447–69; Frédéric Mauro, “Merchant Communities, 1350–1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy, 255–86 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The Spanish Philippines, which basically figured as an outpost of Spanish colonialism in America, were a constant source of competition with the Portuguese Empire. This rivalry intensified during the Portuguese Restoration War, which coincided with the decline of the padroado in East Asia. Based on earlier agreements with Rome, the padroado granted the Portuguese crown wide-ranging authority over ecclesiastical matters in its territories in Asia as well as some other parts of the world. Masashi Haneda, “Framework and Methods of Comparative Studies on Asian Port Cities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Asian Port Cities, 1600–1800: Local and Foreign Cultural Interactions, ed. Masashi Haneda, 1–12 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009).

176 Introduction 22. All three empires had roots in the earlier Mongol and Timurid Empires. See John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, 1400–2000 (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 1–156; Parker, Global Interactions, 39–67. 23. Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, 141–45. 24. For the latter, see Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, 269–74. 25. Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, Volume II: 1500 to 1900 (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2005), 430–32. 26. On Chinese positions in that controversy, see Nicolas Standaert, Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012). 27. Ludwik Grzebień, “The Perception of the Asian Missions in Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century Poland During the Period of Re-Catholicisation,” Monumenta Serica 59, no.1 (2011): 177–89. Of course, such perceptions of eastern Europe also existed in the modern period, but then they were based on the idea of a gap between more and less advanced societies. See, for example, Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 28. Dominique Delandres, “Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits’ Missionary World,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, ed. John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 261. 29. On the varying ways in which historiography dealt with leading missionaries like Matteo Ricci, see D. E. Mungello, “Reinterpreting the History of Christianity in China,” Historical Journal 55, no. 2 (2012): 533–52. 30. See, for example, Matteo Ricci [Li Madou], The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, trans. Douglas Lancashire, Peter Hu Kuo-chen, and Edward Malatesta (San Francisco: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985). An earlier example following the same hypothesis is Johannes Bettray, Die Akkommodationsmethode des P. Matteo Ricci S. J. in China (Rome: Universitas Gregoriana, 1955). 31. Alluding to George H. Dunne, Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962). 32. For instance, Qiong Zhang, “Demystifying Qi: The Politics of Cultural Translation and Interpretation in the Early Jesuit Mission to China,” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia H. Liu, 74–106 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 279. 33. See, for example, Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese,” in O’Malley, Bailey, Harris, and Kennedy, The Jesuits, 352–63; D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 15–30. 34. For example, the first Jesuit work dealing with Western astronomy published in Chinese seems to have failed on the Chinese market since it was a fairly

Introduction  177

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

direct translation of a European work. A subsequent version, which in terms of composition, structure, and format was much closer to Chinese traditions, was successful. See Rui Magone, “Portugal and the Jesuit Mission to China: Trends in Historiography,” in Europe and China: Science and Arts in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Luís Saraiva (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), 29n46. Mungello, “Reinterpreting History,” 533–52. This is not to suggest that Europeanists were prone to taking Eurocentric perspectives. In fact, many scholars with a Europeanist training grew highly critical of Eurocentric perspectives. See, for example, Luis J. Luzbetak, The Church and Cultures: New Perspectives in Missiological Anthropology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988). See, for example, Paul Rule, “China-Centered Mission History,” in Historiography of the Chinese Catholic Church: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed.  J.  Heyndrickx, 52–59 (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, 1994); Nicolas Standaert, “New Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in China,” Catholic Historical Review 83, no. 4 (1997): 573–613; Erik Zürcher, “From Jesuit Studies to Western Learning,” in Europe Studies China: Papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology, ed. Ming Wilson and John Cayley, 264–79 (London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995). For more, see Kaiyuan Zhang, “Chinese Perspective: A Brief Review of the Historical Research on Christianity in China,” in China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future, ed. Stephen Uhalley Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu, 29–39 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). For instance, dealing with individual Chinese Christians, Mao Ruifang, Wang zheng yu wanming xixue dongjian [Wang Zheng and the eastern spread of Western learning during the late Ming] (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2011). Examples of studies on wider topics are Huang Yinong, Liangtou she: Mingmo qingchu de diyidai tianzhujiaotu [The two-headed snake: The first generation of Catholics in the late Ming and early Qing] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006); Li Shixue, Zhongguo wanming yu ouzhou wenxue: Mingmo yesuhui gudian xing zhengdao gushi kaoquan [European literature in late Ming China: Jesuit examples, their sources, and interpretation] (Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian chubanshe, 2010). Through a broadening scholarly base, the range of Chinese historical documents consulted in the study of Christianity in China has grown significantly wider. For an overview, see Adrian Dudink, “Chinese Primary Sources,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:113–60. Earlier examples by these authors include Mungello, Forgotten Christians; Nicolas Standaert, Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China: His Life and Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1988); Erik Zürcher, Bouddhisme, Christianisme et société chinoise (Paris: Julliard, 1990). See also Yu Liu, Harmonious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (New York: Lang, 2015).

178 Introduction 42. Earlier academic publications did deal with specific Chinese regions, but there was a tendency to focus on missionaries. These include Auguste M. Colombel, Histoire de la Mission du Kiang-nan: En trois parties, 3 vols. (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique à l'Orphelinat de T'ou-sè-weè, ­1895–1905); Fortunato Margiotti, Il cattolicesimo nello Shansi dalle origini al 1738 (Rome: Edizioni Sinica franciscana, 1958). More recent examples by sinologists are Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Erik Zürcher, “The Jesuit Mission in Fujian in Late Ming Times: Levels of Response,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. E. B. Vermeer, 417–57 (Leiden: Brill, 1990). 43. The main study on Yang is Standaert, Yang Tingyun. A broad range of studies on Xu (influenced mainly by new methodological trends) is Catherine Jami, Peter M. Engelfriet, and Gregory Blue, eds., Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) (Leiden: Brill, 2001). An older sinological study of Xu is Monika Übelhör, “Hsü Kuangch’i (1562–1633) und seine Einstellung zum Christentum: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der späten Ming-Zeit (Teil 1),” Oriens Extremus, 15, no. 2 (1968): 191–257; Monika Übelhör, “Hsü Kuang-ch’i (1562–1633) und seine Einstellung zum Christentum: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der späten Ming-Zeit (Teil 2),” Oriens Extremus 16, no. 1 (1969): 41–74. 44. For example, Gail King, “Candida Xu and the Growth of Christianity in China in the Seventeenth Century,” Monumenta Serica 46 (1998): 49–66; Feng-chuan Pan, “Moral Ideas and Practices,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:653–67. Regarding Christians from lower social strata, primary source materials containing testimony about locally or socially specific faith systems are scarce, so many studies need to rely on prayer books for learned converts and missionaries as well as Jesuit reports. An example of a study based on the former is Li Jiubiao, Kouduo richao: Li Jiubiao’s “Diary of Oral Admonitions”; A Late Ming Christian Journal, trans. Erik Zürcher (Nettetal, Ger.: Steyler, 2007). Other important works in the field are Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Zhang Xianqing, Guanfu, zongzu yu tianzhujiao: 17–19 shiji fuan xiangcun jiaohui de lishi xushi [Local government, lineage, and Catholicism: A narrative history of the church in 17th- to 19th-century rural Fuan] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009). 45. Anthony Grafton, “The History of Ideas: Precepts and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 1 (2006): 1–32, particularly 10–11. The field of intellectual history has also become more open to the study of transcultural and global encounters. See, for example, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

Introduction  179 46. Li, Kouduo richao. 47. For example, Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007); Liam Matthew Brockey, The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014). 48. A good example of a biography based on roughly equal use of Chinese and European primary source materials is R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 49. For more, see Magone, “Portugal and the Jesuit Mission,” 3–30. 50. Brockey, Journey to the East, chapter 8. 51. For an introduction based on recent scholarship, see Timothy Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648–1815 (New York: Viking, 2007), chapters 7, 10. 52. On this latter categorization, see Vincent Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (2006): 307–35, particularly 320–22. 53. The recent research trends I have been describing further erode the idea that through the China mission two separate, quasi-monolithic cultures— Confucian China and Latin Christendom—came into contact. In 1982, the French sinologist Jacques Gernet published a work treating European and Chinese culture as monolithic, unsynthesizable entities. He argued that the mission was doomed to fail since the European and Chinese conceptual worlds stood too far apart to be able to truly communicate and reach crosscultural syntheses; Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), originally published as Chine et christianisme: La première confrontation (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 54. On global and transnational history in general, see for example Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016); Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). See also Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Cultural and Religious Exchanges,” in Architects of World History: Researching the Global Past, ed. Kenneth R. Curtis and Jerry H. Bentley, 108–33 (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); and Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2015). 55. See for example Hans Medick, “Turning Global? Microhistory in Extension,” Historische Anthropologie 24, no. 2 (2016): 241–52; Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 573–91; Anne Gerritsen, “Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrup, 213–26 (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Natalie Zemon Davis, “Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a

180 Introduction

56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

Global World,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (2011): 188–202. More generally on the relationship between microscopic and macroscopic perspectives see Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon, 2007); and Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The MicroMacro Link in Historical Research,” History and Theory, 40, no. 3 (2001): 347–59. In a Western language, the main work available on Zhu Zongyuan thus far is my own book in German (which covers different topics from this monograph): Dominic Sachsenmaier, Die Aufnahme europäischer Inhalte in die chinesische Kultur durch Zhu Zongyuan (ca. 1616–1660), Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 47 (Nettetal, Ger.: Steyler, 2001). Fang Hao, Zhongguo tianzhujiaoshi luncong jiaji [A compilation of the history of Catholicism in China] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1947); Fang Hao, Zhongguo tianzhujiao shi renwu zhuan [Figures of Chinese Catholic history] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), 2:91–98. In French, this unpublished thesis deals largely with aspects of Zhu Zongyuan’s thought: Okamoto, Sai, “La crise politique et morale des mandarins du sud à l’époque de transition” (PhD diss., Université des lettres, Paris, 1969). In his seminal work on the Manchu conquest of China, Frederic Wakeman Jr. briefly discusses Zhu Zongyuan, based largely on Okamoto’s text: Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 735–36. Li Yeye, “Mingmo qingchu jidujiao shengsiguan zai zhongguo de chuanbo yu jieshou” [The spread and reception of Christian perceptions of life and death in China during the late Ming and early Qing periods] (M.A. thesis, Shanghai Normal University, 2008); Wang Zeying, “Lun zhu zongyuan zhi tianru guan” [On Zhu Zongyuan’s perception of heaven and Confucianism] (M.A. thesis, Ningbo University, 2011); Hu Jinping, “Lun zhu zongyuan dui yuanzui de jieshi” [On Zhu Zongyuan’s explanation of original sin] (M.A. thesis, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 2007); Wen Liqin, “Zhu zongyuan sixiang yanjiu” [A study of Zhu Zongyuan’s thought] (M.A. thesis, Zhejiang University, 2007); Zhao Dianhong, “Qingchu yesuhuishi zai jiangnan de chuanjiao huodong” [A study on Jesuits’ proselytizing activities during the early Qing period in Jiangnan] (PhD diss., Jinan University, 2006). Mo Zhengyi, “Mingmo qingchu zhedong rushi zhu zongyuan xixue guan yanjiu: Jianyu huang zongxi sixiang bijiao” [A study of the eastern Zhejiang scholar Zhu Zongyuan’s opinion of Western studies: A comparison with Huang Zongxi], Guoxue yu xixue guoji xuekan 11 (2016): 95–105; Wang Zeying, “Mingmo tianzhujiao rushi zhu zongyuan shengping kao” [Investigating the biography of the late Ming Catholic scholar Zhu Zongyuan], Ningbo jiaoyu xueyuan xuebao 5 (2010): 96–98; Gong Yingyan, “Mingqing zhiji de zhedong xueren yu xixue” [Scholars from eastern Zhejiang and Western learning during the late Ming and early Qing period], Zhejiang daxue xuebao 3 (2006): 60–68; Zhu Pingyi, “Piwang xingmi: Mingqing zhiji de tianzhujiao yu ‘mixin’ zhi jiangou” [Enlightening the deluded and awakening the bewildered:

1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  181 Christianity and the term mixin in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China], Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 84, no. 4 (2013): 695–752. 61. In the case of more prominent Christians, materials are available that enable the historian to reconstruct larger parts of their biographies. This is most notably the case with the so-called Three Pillars of early Chinese Christianity. See, for example, Willard J. Peterson, “Why Did They Become Christians? Yang T’ing-yun, Li Chih-tsao, and Hsü Kuang-ch’i,” in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh, 129–51 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982); Standaert, Yang Tingyun. A creative way of compensating for scarcity of sources on single individuals through fictional additions to an academic investigation is Mungello, Forgotten Christians. 62. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have come to explore the global facets of early modern Catholic history. See, for example, R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); R. Po-chia Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Reformation World (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), chapters 20–23.

1. A LOCAL LIFE AND ITS GLOBAL CONTEXTS 1. While ordinary people usually lived in single-story houses, the dwellings of wealthier families tended to be two stories high. See Fu Xuancong, Ningbo tongshi [A general history of Ningbo] (Ningbo: Ningbo chubanshe, 2009), 3:291, 428. 2. For a history of Ningbo’s overseas trade, see Li Qingxin, Mingdai haiwai maoyi zhidu [The overseas trade system during the Ming dynasty] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2007). On the porcelain trade, see Stacey Pierson, “The Movement of Chinese Ceramics: Appropriation in Global History,” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2012): 9–40. 3. See, for example, Yoshinobu Shiba, “Ningpo and Its Hinterland,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner, 391–440 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977). 4. Under the Ming, Ningbo was the seat of offices such as the Maritime Trade Supervisorate (shibosi), and later it also functioned as the garrison headquarters of the Qing troops in Zhejiang. See Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 250–51. 5. For a detailed account, see Fu, Ningbo tongshi, 3:185–235, 4:3–25. 6. More can be found in John E. Wills Jr., Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1622–1681 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

182  1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Press, 1974), 6–10; Brook, Praying for Power, 252–53, works on the assumption that the time of crisis in Ningbo lasted from only 1628 until 1655. Zheng Yangwen, China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2012), chapter 6. Some of these goods came from Europe. In an age in which imperialism did not yet frame Sino-European interactions, we need to see these facets of European life in China as an indication of China’s cultural openness and not as a sign of Western superiority. For related thoughts on this topic, see Jerry H. Bentley, “Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern World,” in Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, ed. Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley, 14–31 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), see particularly 20–23. Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 121–23. John E. Wills Jr., “Maritime Europe and the Ming,” in China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions, ed. John E. Wills Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 54. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–21; Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 152–84. See also Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 166–208. Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 264. Already in the middle of the sixteenth century João de Barros, a Portuguese historian, referred to the name Liampo as an incorrect transliteration. See João de Barros, Ásia: Dos feitos que os portugueses fizeram no descobrimento e conquista dos mares e terras do Oriente; Primeira década, ed. António Baião (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1988), 336–37. A more local designation for Ningbo was Mingzhou, and in written texts the city was often referred to as Yong, after its main river, or as Siming, alluding to a nearby mountain range. On the names for Ningbo, see George M. H. Playfair, The Cities and Towns of China: A Geographical Dictionary (Taipei: Ch’eng Wen, 1971), 353–54. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2006). Numerous historians have written global histories of single commodities. See, for example, Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985).

1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  183 16. John R. McNeill and William McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), 155–212. 17. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830; Volume 1: Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830; Volume 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially 494–576. Lieberman also points to significant peculiarities of the Chinese experience, such as an early beginning of cultural integration. 18. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 19. Geoffrey Parker, “Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered,” American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (2008): 1053–79, particularly 1059. 20. Fan Shuzhi, Mingqing jiangnan shizhen tanwei [A study on the cities in the south of China during the Ming and Qing dynasties] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1990). 21. Joseph F. Fletcher, Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia (Brookfield, Vt.: ­Variorum, 1995), 3. 22. Victor Lieberman, “Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 463–546, particularly 464–70. 23. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History, 2nd ed. (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 292–93. This status of Portuguese as a lingua franca continued even well into the period of Dutch domination; see Wolfgang Reinhard, A Short History of Colonialism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2011), 35. 24. The notion of a global or Eurasian early modernity has been the subject of rather heated debates, particularly since the 1990s. An overview of key debates is provided in Bentley, “Early Modern Europe,” 14–31. For further critical discussions, based partly on different Eurasian regions, see, for example (criticizing the usage of both concepts “early” and “modern”), Kenneth Pomeranz, “Areas, Networks, and the Search for ‘Early Modern’ East Asia,” in Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800, ed. David Porter, 245–70 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Examples of earlier contributions to this debate are R. Bin Wong, “The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia,” American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 447–69; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62. 25. A brief, interesting discussion of this topic is provided in Rainer Hoffmann and Hu Qiuhua, China: Seine Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zum Ende der Kaiserzeit (Freiburg: Rombach, 2007), 312–16.

184  1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts 26. For a brief overview, see Dominic Sachsenmaier, “The Cultural Transmission from China to Europe,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, 879–905 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 27. For a general overview, see, for example, William Atwell, “The T’ai-ch’ang, T’ien-ch’i, and Ch’ung-chen Reigns, 1620–1644,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7, Part 1: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, ed. Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 585–640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 28. Fu, Ningbo tongshi, 3:185–86. 29. Fu, Ningbo tongshi, 3:190. 30. Wang Ji, ed., Chongzhen changbian [Chronicle of the Chongzhen era] (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1967), 3770–71. 31. More is available in Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2:624–33. 32. For a recent account of these developments, see Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 242–59. 33. Kent Guy, “Who Were the Manchus? A Review Essay,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 1 (2002): 151–64. 34. The most detailed account of the Ming-Qing transition available in English is still Wakeman, The Great Enterprise. 35. Lynn A. Struve, “Introduction,” in The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time, ed. Lynn A. Struve (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–2. 36. For a brief discussion of this policy, see Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1991), 38–39. 37. Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 600–604. 38. Evelyn S. Rawski, “The Qing Formation and the Early Modern Period,” in Struve, Qing Formation, 207–35; Evelyn S. Rawski, Early Modern China and Northeast Asia: Cross-Border Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 39. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Others put a stronger emphasis on the crisis of political order resulting from more direct relations between the center and the peasantry; see Lieberman, “Transcending East-West Dichotomies,” 525–29. 40. McNeill and McNeill, Human Web, 199. 41. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013). 42. On the scholarly debate on this topic, see Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 208, 289n140.

1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  185 43. John E. Wills Jr., “Contingent Connections: Fujian, the Empire, and the Early Modern World,” in Struve, Qing Formation, 167–203, see especially 186–89. 44. Fu, Ningbo tongshi, 3:4. A translated selection of first-hand accounts of the Qing atrocities during the conquest of China is Lynn A. Struve, ed., Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers’ Jaws (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). 45. Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 734–36. 46. For more, see Jin Wei, “Jieqiting ji de xueshu jiazhi” [The academic value of the Jieqiting ji], Shixue shi yanjiu 1 (1997): 2–15; Lynn A. Struve, “The Southern Ming, 1644–1662,” in Mote and Twitchett, Cambridge History of China, 641–725, especially 693–94. 47. Zhongguo renmin daxue qingshi yanjiuyuan suobian, ed., Qingshi biannian [Chronicles of the history of the Qing dynasty] (Beijing: Beijing renmin daxue chubanshe, 1985), 1:123. 48. Cheng Xiaoli, “Qingdai Zhejiang juren yanjiu” [A study on Juren in Zhejiang province during the Qing dynasty] (M.A. thesis, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 2009), 11. 49. Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 573n187. 50. On the concept of the “conquest generation,” see Lynn A. Struve, “Chimerical Early Modernity: The Case of ‘Conquest Generation’ Memoirs,” in Struve, Qing Formation, 335–80. 51. Fang Hao, Zhongguo tianzhujiao shi renwu zhuan [Figures of Chinese Catholic history] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), 2:91–92. 52. Zhu, Responses, 1a. 53. On this preface, see Adrian Dudink, “The Rediscovery of a Seventeenth-­ Century Collection of Christian Texts: The Manuscript Tianxue jijie,” SinoWestern Cultural Relations Journal 15 (1993): 1–26, particularly 11. 54. Zhu, Responses, 47b. Original version with foreword by Zhang Nengxin, reprinted in Guangzhou in 1697. 55. Several individual Jesuits’ biographies can be found in the following historical works: Louis Pfister, S. J., Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jésuites de l’ancienne mission de Chine, 1572–1773, Tome 1: XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1932); Joseph Dehergne, “Les chrétientés de Chine de la période de Ming (1581–1650),” Monumenta Serica 16, no. 1-2 (1957): 1–136. 56. Antonio de Gouvea, Asia Extrema: Segunda parte, livro 1 (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2005), chapter 19. On this work, see Noël Golvers, “Bibliographies of Western Primary Sources,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:200–204. 57. In his preface to Zhu Zongyuan’s Responses, another Christian convert, Zhang Nengxin, mentions Zhu’s initial authoring of the Treatise. See Zhu, Responses, 3a.

186  1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts 58. Fang, Zhongguo tianzhujiao, 92, also quotes Chinese translations of excerpts from the mentioned passage by Gouvea but fails to take the time frame into account. The beginning of chapter 19 of Asia Extrema does not give the exact year, but it can be deduced from the date of Froes’s death. 59. Dominic Sachsenmaier, “How and Why I Became a World Historian,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrup, 32–42 (Hoboken, N.J.: WileyBlackwell, 2013). Other copies of Zhu’s work have survived. 60. Zhu, Responses (ca. 1642 ed.), 1a: “It was in the summer of 1640 that this book was shown to me for the first time by Mr. Feng Shihu.” The subsequent text of the introduction makes it clear that the Responses had not yet been published at this time. 61. On the entry of Zhu Zongyuan’s grandfather, Zhu Ying, who obtained the juren degree in 1573, see Adrian Dudink, “Chinese Primary Sources,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:18. There is also brief mention here of Zhu Zongyuan and his main works. 62. The higher figure is provided in John W. Dardess, Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 87; the lower one in Willard J. Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368– 1644, Part 2, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, 708–88 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), see particularly 713. 63. Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Examinations in Late Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 140–43. 64. Peterson, “Confucian Learning,” 715. For the early Qing, see also Ping-ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 184. 65. On the scholars sitting for the early Qing examinations, see Duan Lihui, “Ming yimin de shenfen rentong yu kedi xuanze” [Ming loyalists’ identity recognition and their choices vis-à-vis the imperial examinations], Henan shifandaxue xuebao 2 (2009): 191–94. On the pro-Qing forces in Ningbo, see Brook, Praying for Power, 264. 66. One graduate thesis submitted at the Sorbonne in Paris during the 1960s suggests that Zhu Zongyuan’s reflections on the concepts of “middle” and “barbarian” were written as an endorsement of the Manchu takeover, not at last in order to gain acceptance by the new rulers; see Sai Okamoto, “La crise politique et morale des mandarins du sud à l’époque de transition,” (PhD diss., Université des lettres, Paris, 1969). Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 734–36, follows this interpretation, yet Zhu’s works contain no supporting evidence for this, and his main reflections on this topic appear in his Responses, published in 1642, well before the Manchu conquest. 67. On Zhang Nengxin’s fate as well as on Zhu Zongyuan sitting for the early Qing examinations, see Gong Yingyan, “Mingqing zhiji de zhedong xueren

1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  187

68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

yu xixue” [Scholars from eastern Zhejiang and Western learning during the late Ming and early Qing period], Zhejiang daxue xuebao 3 (2006): 60–68. See also He Zongmei, Mingmo qingchu wenren jieshe yanjiu [Research on scholars’ associations during the late Ming and early Qing period] (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2003), 300. Paul Rule, “The Jesuits and the Ming-Qing Transition: How did Boym and Martini Find Themselves on Opposite Sides?” Monumenta Serica 59, no. 1 (2011): 243–58. Elman, Cultural History, 140–43. Zhou Yan, Mingmo qingchu tianzhujiaoshi wenxian xinbian [New compilation of materials from Chinese Catholic history during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties] (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2013), 1:429–33. On Tong Guoqi (giving a different date for his baptism), see Arthur W. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 2:794. Manuel Dias the Younger [Yang Manuo], Tianzhu shengjiao shijie zhiquan [Detailed explanation of the Ten Commandments of the holy learning of the Lord of Heaven]. See also Girolamo de Gravina [Jia Yimu], Tizheng bian [Anthologies of self-correction] (Hangzhou, 1659). The former also includes a preface by Zhu Zongyuan. References in the present volume to Manuel Dias are to the younger Dias, known by the Chinese name Yang Manuo and not to be confused with his contemporary Manuel Dias the Elder (ca. 1561–1639). On both younger and elder Manuel Dias, see Henrique Leitão, “The Contents and Context of Manuel Dias’ Tianwenlüe,” in The Jesuits, the Padroado and East Asian Science, 1552– 1773, ed. Luís Saraiva and Catherine Jami, 99–122 (Singapore: World Scientific, 2008), 99–100n1. On Manuel Dias the Elder, see Isabel Pina, “Manuel Dias Sénior / Li Manuo,” Bulletin of Portuguese / Japanese Studies 15 (2007): 79–94 Feng Xianliang, “Mingqing jiangnan de fumin jieceng jiqi shehui ying­ xiang” [The wealthy social strata and their social influence in the Jiangnan region during the Ming-Qing period], Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu 1 (2003): 44–56. Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua: Wanming de xiaofei shehui yu shidafu [The taste of luxury: The late Ming consumer society and the elite] (Taipei: Lianjing chuban gongsi, 2007); Brook, Praying for Power, 252–53, 266–68 (in particular on the gentry in Ningbo). Xu Lin, “Mingdai zhongwanqi jiangnan diqu pinshi de shehui jiaowang sheng­ huo” [On the social relations of poor scholars in Jiangnan during the middle and late Ming dynasty], Shixue jikan 3 (2004): 34–37. On social change during the Ming period, see Brook, Praying for Power, 311. See also Elman, Cultural History, 153. On the cultural diversity of the second half of the Ming period, see Peter K.  Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

188  1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Press, 2008), 261–65. Erik Zürcher, “The Jesuit Mission in Fujian in Late Ming Times: Levels of Response,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. E. B. Vermeer (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 419, speaks of a “spectacular revival” of Buddhism toward the end of the Ming period. Kristin Yü Greenblatt, “Chu-hung and Lay Buddhism in the Late Ming,” in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, 93–140 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), see particularly 122. Shiba, Ningpo, 423–24; Brook, Praying for Power, 253–64. Fu, Ningbo tongshi, 3:435–36. The temple’s name has changed from Louxin to Qita Temple. Zhu, Summary, 1a–1b. Further information on the preparations for the examinations can be found in Peterson, “Confucian Learning,” 709–12. For an overview, see Fu, Ningbo tongshi, 3:418–19. Zhu, Summary, 1a–1b. Zhu, Summary, 2a–2b. Zhu, Treatise, 1a–1b. Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Neo-Confucian Cultivation and the SeventeenthCentury ‘Enlightenment,’ ” in de Bary, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 183. On Wang Yangming’s enlightenment experience, see, for instance, Tu Wei-ming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472–1509) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 95. On the term “conversion” in the context of the worldview of pro-Christian scholars, see D. E. Mungello, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), 144. On various forms of religious conversion generally, see Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). Gouvea, Asia Extrema, chapter 19. Gouvea makes it clear that Buglio traveled to Ningbo soon after receiving the invitation. On Buglio’s visit, see also Le Petit Messager de Ning-po (Ningbo: Vicariat Apostolique du Tche-kiang Oriental, 1911–1939), 173–74. Dunin-Szpot’s work consists of two volumes covering the periods 1580 to 1640 and 1640 to 1657. On this work, see Golvers, “Bibliographies,” 196–97. Thomas I. Dunin-Szpot, “Sinarum Historia” (1690), 2:10. See also Fang, Zhongguo tianzhujiao, 93. On Monteiro’s long stay in Ningbo, see Pfister, Notices biographiques, 245–46. Erik Zürcher, “Giulio Aleni et ses relations avec le milieu des lettrés chinois au XVIIe siècle,” in Venezia e l’Oriente, ed. Lionello Lanciotti (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 124. Dunin-Szpot, “Sinarum Historia,” 2:10. As it was not uncommon for siblings to share one of the two characters of their given names, it is possible that Zhu Biyuan of Ningbo is Zongyuan’s brother. Zhu Biyuan’s name can be found with Zhu Zongyuan’s on a list of

1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts  189

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 1 04. 105.

106.

scholars who contributed to one of João Monteiro’s texts. See João Monteiro [Meng Ruwang], Tianxue sijing [The four mirrors of the Learning of Heaven] (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Fu Sinian tushuguan, 2000). On the publication and its date, see Xu Zongze, Mingqingjian yesuhuishi yizhu tiyao [An overview of the translated and composed works by Jesuits during the Ming-Qing transition period] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1949), 337–39. A certain Zhu Zongwen of Ningbo, who, like Zhu Zongyuan, passed the juren examination in 1648, cannot be one of the other siblings, since there is evidence that he was actively involved with Buddhism as late as 1651. The examination list can be found in Zhejiang tongzhi [History of Zhejiang], Siku quanshu ed. (ca. 1736), 522, 699. In 1651, Zhu Zongwen published Liuxiang yi­xian [A summary of (Buddhist) monasteries on the Liuxiang River]. See Timothy Brook, Geographical Sources of Ming-Qing-History (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1988), 171. Nicolas Standaert, “Creation of Christian Communities,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:543–75; see also Pfister, Notices biographiques, 258. Dehergne, “Les chrétientés de Chine,” 19. Gouvea, Asia Extrema, chapter 19, reports that Zhu decided to travel to Hangzhou after reading Christian books, telling his parents of his baptism only on his return. On this visit and Zhu Zongyuan’s having issued the invitation, see Mungello, Forgotten Christians, 19. See also Gouvea, Asia Extrema, chapter 19. Le Petit Messager de Ning-po, 236–38. On Martini, see Mungello, Forgotten Christians, 19–28. There is evidence that Giulio Aleni visited Ningbo in 1648, but no details are available; Dunin-Szpot, “Sinarum Historia,” 2:85. On Brancati, see Dehergne, “Les chrétientés de Chine,” 35. Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 102–6; Benno M. Biermann, Die Anfänge der neueren Dominikanermission in China (Vechta, Ger.: Albertus, 1927), 92–93. Joseph S. Sebes, “Philippine Jesuits in the Middle Kingdom in the 17th Century,” Philippine Studies 26 (1978): 192–208, particularly 196. On the Dominican mission to China, see Menegon, Ancestors. Erik Zürcher, “Jesuit Accommodation and the Chinese Cultural Imperative,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello (Nettetal, Ger.: Steyler, 1994), 31–32. Biermann, Dominikanermission, 98. Fortunato Margiotti, Relationes et epistolas fratrum minorum hispanorum in Sinis qui a. 1684–92 missionem ingressi sunt, vol. 8 of Sinica Franciscana (Rome: Collegii S. Antonii, 1975), 180n15. Morales left Zhejiang for Manila that year (1659). See also Biermann, Dominikanermission, 94. Juan Bautista de Morales, Relatio et Libellus Supplex, in Apologie des Dominicains missionaires de la Chine, ed. Alexandre Noël, 29–106 (Cologne, 1699), see

190  1. A Local Life and Its Global Contexts particularly 74. On Morales, see José María González, Historia de las misiones dominicanos de China (Madrid: Imprenta Juan Bravo, 1955), 1:21–25.

2. A GLOBALIZING ORGANIZATION AND CHINESE CHRISTIAN LIFE 1. Li Bozhong, “Mingqing jiangnan de chuban yinshuaye” [The publishing and printing industry in Jiangnan during the Ming-Qing period], Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu 3 (2001): 94–107. See also Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 22. See also Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 245–48. 2. Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 197. 3. Li, “Mingqing jiangnan,” 94–107. 4. R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 182–86. 5. Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuits in China,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester, 169–85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), see particularly 177–78. 6. On the fact that some Jesuits were impressed by the spread of literacy in China, see Brook, Troubled Empire, 200. 7. Willard J. Peterson, “Why Did They Become Christians? Yang T’ing-yun, Li Chih-tsao, and Hsü Kuang-ch’i,” in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh, 129–51 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982), see particularly 140. 8. For an overview, see Adrian Dudink and Nicolas Standaert, “Apostolate Through Books,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, 600–631 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 9. Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 185, and Nicolas Standaert, “Note on the Spread of Jesuit Writings in Late Ming and Early Qing China,” China Mission Studies (1550–1800) Bulletin 7 (1985): 22–32. 10. See Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in WoodblockPrinted Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 140–42. 11. Zhu’s name is mentioned at the end of the introduction. On this book, see Xu Zongze, Mingqingjian yesuhuishi yizhu tiyao [An overview of the translated and composed works by Jesuits during the Ming-Qing transition period] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1949), 50–52.

2. A Globalizing Organization and Chinese Christian Life  191 12. Manuel Dias the Younger [Yang Manuo], Tianzhu shengjiao shijie zhiquan, 2 vols. (Hangzhou, 1659), 5a–5b. Zhu mentions that Dias had sent him a copy of the book, which proves that he was not directly involved with its composition. On Zhu’s involvement, see Fang Hao, Zhongguo tianzhujiao shi renwu zhuan [Figures of Chinese Catholic history] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), 2:93. On this and the following publications in which Zhu was involved, see Louis Pfister, S. J., Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jésuites de l’ancienne mission de Chine, 1572–1773, Tome 1: XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1932). See also Xu Zongze, Mingqingjian yesuhuishi. 13. João Monteiro [Meng Ruwang], Tianxue bianjing lu (1642), 10a–12b. This edition includes introductions by Zhang Nengxin, Shui Rongbao, and others. 14. Thomas I. Dunin-Szpot, “Sinarum Historia” (1690), 2:89, entry for 1648, also stresses that Zhu Zongyuan helped Martini with translation work. 15. A list of Zhu’s works can be found in Fang, Zhongguo tianzhujiao, 91–97, and in Huang Yinong, “Zhongxiao paifang yu shizijia: Mingmo tianzhujiaotu wei xuelian qiren qishi tanwei” [Tablet of loyalty and filial piety versus the cross: A study on the life of the late Ming Christian convert Wei Xuelian], Xinshixue 8, no. 3 (1997): 43–94, particularly 76–77. See also Wang Zeying, “Mingmo tianzhujiao rushi zhu zongyuan zhuzuokao zongshu” [A review of studies on works by the Catholic Confucian scholar Zhu Zongyuan], Sanxia luntan 5 (2010): 55–59. 16. This reprint was edited by Stanislao Torrente. On Torrente, see Joseph Dehergne, “Les chrétientés de Chine de la période de Ming (1581–1650),” Monumenta Serica 16, no. 1-2 (1957): 1–136; on this publication, see Xu, Ming­ qingjian yesuhuishi, 175–76. 17. Zhu, Responses, 3a–3b. 18. The missionary João Monteiro was also present at the meeting. 19. Zhu, Responses, 1a–3a, preface by Zhang Nengxin. This anecdote points to the fact that the 1643 edition with an introduction by Zhang Nengxin is the original, not, as suggested by Fang Hao, a reprint of the one from 1631; see Fang, Zhongguo tianzhujiao, 94. On the various editions of Zhu’s Responses, see Adrian Dudink, “The Rediscovery of a Seventeenth-Century Collection of Christian Texts: The Manuscript Tianxue jijie,” Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 15 (1993): 1–26, particularly 11. 20. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Das Hung-Ming Chi und die Aufnahme des Buddhismus in China, Münchener Ostasiatische Studien 12 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1976), 132. Donald Holzman, “The Conversational Tradition in Chinese Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West 6, no. 3 (October 1956): 224, suggests that, following a period of decline, the influence of Buddhism prompted a revival in the dialogue form as early as the late Tang. 21. Francis X. Clooney, “Roberto de Nobili’s Dialogue on Eternal Life and an Early Jesuit Evaluation of Religion in South India,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences,

192  2. A Globalizing Organization and Chinese Christian Life

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, 402–17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). See also the older account by Bernard Hung-Kay Luk, “A Serious Matter of Life and Death: Learned Conversations at Foochow in 1627,” in Ronan and Oh, East Meets West, 175–76. On Ricci’s work and life, see R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Zhu, Summary, 3b. Zhu, Summary, 16b. Traditional Chinese dates specified the title of an emperor’s reign (which was not the same as his name and not always identical with the duration of his entire reign) and a designation given to the particular year in a sixty-year cycle. The first Qing emperor, Shunzhi, ruled from 1644 to 1662; the jiashen year was the first year of his reign. The title of this text is a quotation from the Zhongyong [Doctrine of the mean] (Zhongyong 19, 6). On the frequent publication of examination essays during the first half of the seventeenth century, see Schmidt-Glintzer, Hung-Ming Chi, 132. See also Fang, Zhongguo tianzhujiao, 97. A Summary of World Salvation, which was almost certainly printed only once before 1660, was another exception; it is mentioned along with the Treatise in a letter by the Franciscan missionary José Navarro dated February 8, 1698. This letter can be found in Fortunato Margiotti, Relationes et epistolas fratrum minorum hispanorum in Sinis qui a. 1684–92 missionem ingressi sunt, vol. 8 of Sinica Franciscana (Rome: Collegii S. Antonii, 1975), 292–93. Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007), 276. An overview is provided in Nicolas Standaert, “Rites Controversy,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:680–87. Zhu, Responses, 30a–30b. Erik Zürcher, “Jesuit Accommodation and the Chinese Cultural Imperative,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello, 31–64 (Nettetal, Ger.: Steyler, 1994), see particularly 41n16. Domingo Navarrete, Tratados historicos, políticos, étnicos y religiosos de la Monarquía de China (Madrid, 1676), 19. See also John S. Cummins, ed., The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, 1618–1686 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 1:73. Juan Bautista de Morales, “Relatio et Libellus Supplex,” in Apologie des Dominicains missionaires de la Chine, ed. Alexandre Noël, 29–106 (Cologne, 1699), see particularly 74–75. The passage cited is Zhu, Responses, 30a–30b, of the ca. 1643 edition, although Morales mentions p. 28. Letter from Ferdinand Verbiest to Alessandro Filippucci, February 1685, Ajuda Library, Lisbon, JA 49-IV-63, no. 419, fol. 185v–188r.

2. A Globalizing Organization and Chinese Christian Life  193 35. Included in Margiotti, Sinica Relationes et epistolas, 702–3. The letter is dated December 22, 1701, and addressed to Charles Maigrot. See, also in reference to this passage, Zürcher, “Jesuit Accommodation,” 41. 36. Nicolas Standaert, “Chinese Christians: General Characteristics,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:387. 37. Erik Zürcher, “A Complement to Confucianism: Christianity and Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China,” in Norms and the State in China, ed. Chun-Chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, 71–92 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), see particularly 83. 38. Dunin-Szpot, “Sinarum Historia,” 2:8, 10. This passage relates to the year 1640. 39. In connection with a description of the character of the Jesuits, Zhu writes, clearly with exaggeration, in the Treatise, 5b, “I meet all [these] noblemen on a daily basis.” 40. The coadjutors were bound by the same vows as Jesuit fathers but for a variety of reasons were not ordained as priests. On these different leading roles in Chinese Christian communities, see Brockey, Journey to the East, 350–56. 41. Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, “L’émigration portugaise (XVe–XXe siècles): Une constant structurelle et les réponses au changements du monde,” Revista de História Económica e Social 1 (1978): 5–32. On the mestizos, who often played the role of mediators and interlocutors for the Europeans, see G. William Skinner, “Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia,” in Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese, ed. Anthony Reid and Kristine Alilunas Rodgers, 51–92 (St. Leonards, Austral.: Allen and Unwin, 1996). 42. Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 192. See also Tara Alberts, Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 43. Dehergne, “Les chrétientés de Chine,” 13. On the number of congregations, see Standaert, “Jesuits in China,” 176–77. 44. On the various forms of Christian associations, see Brockey, Journey to the East, 114–17. 45. Brockey, Journey to the East, 328–31. 46. Nicolas Standaert, “Social Organization of the Church,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:456–73. 47. On related topics, see Thomas Cohen, “Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Society of Jesus,” in Worcester, Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, 199–214, see especially 203–6; Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 207–8. 48. For more, see Brockey, Journey to the East, 331–38. On related topics, see Thomas Cohen, “Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Society of Jesus,” in Worcester, Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, 199–214, see especially 203–6; Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 207–8. 49. For more on this topic, see chapters 4 and 5 of the present volume.

194  2. A Globalizing Organization and Chinese Christian Life 50. Xiao Qinghe, “Tianhui” yu “wudang”: Mingmo qingchu tianzhujiaotu qunti yanjiu [“Heavenly association” and “local community”: A study on Christian groups during late Ming and early Qing] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2015). 51. On related issues, see Standaert, “Jesuits in China,” 176–77. See also Eugenio Menegon, “Jesuit Emblematica in China: The Use of European Allegorical Images in Flemish Engravings Described in the Kouduo richao (ca. 1640),” Monumenta Serica 55 (2007): 389–437. 52. Brockey, Journey to the East, 372–73. 53. Zhao Yuan, Mingqing zhiji shidafu yanjiu [A study of the literati during the Ming-Qing transition period] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1999), chapter 4. 54. For an overview of the academies, see Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 256–66. 55. On these types of associations, see Standaert, “Social Organization,” 456–73. Concerning Buddhist charitable organizations, see Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 105. See also He Zongmei, Mingmo qingchu wenren jieshe yanjiu [Research on scholars’ associations during the late Ming and early Qing period] (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2003). 56. Rainer Hoffmann and Hu Qiuhua, China: Seine Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zum Ende der Kaiserzeit (Freiburg: Rombach, 2007), 354. 57. On Confucian notions that moral cultivation, rather than coercion and control, should be the basis of a flourishing and stable state, see, for example, Lee Dian Rainey, Confucius and Confucianism: The Essentials (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 45–61. 58. For instance, some sacraments as well as the Holy Mass are described in Zhu, Summary, 48a–53a. 59. Brockey, Journey to the East, 411–15.

3. A TEACHING SHAPED BY CONSTRAINTS 1. For an annotated English translation, see Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, trans. Douglas Lancashire, Peter Hu Kuo-chen, and Edward Malatesta (San Francisco: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985). 2. For forms of Christian faith in the lower strata of Chinese society, see, for instance, Luo Qun, Chuanboxue shijiao zhong de airulüe yu “Kouduo richao” yanjiu [Research on Giulio Aleni and the Kouduo richao from a perspective of communication studies] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2012). See also Erik Zürcher, “Aleni in Fujian, 1630–1640: The Medium and the Message,” in “Scholar from the West”: Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582–1649) and the Dialogue Between

3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints  195

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Christianity and China, ed. Tiziana Lippiello and Roman Malek, 595–616 (Brescia, It.: Fondazione Civiltà Bresciana; Sankt Augustin, Ger.: Monumenta Serica Institute, 1997). Nicola Di Cosmo, “Did Guns Matter? Firearms and the Qing Formation,” in The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time, ed. Lynn A. Struve, 121–66 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), see particularly 141–55. In recent years, the study of global concepts has turned into an expanding academic field. See, for instance, Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global Conceptual History: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Roderich Ptak, Portugal in China: Kurzer Abriss der portugiesisch-chinesischen Beziehungen und der Geschichte Macaus im 16. und beginnenden 17. Jahrhundert (Bad Boll, Ger.: Klemmerberg Verlag, 1980), 46. Certainly, the city had characteristics of this kind: for instance, its diverse population and pluralistic Catholic community visibly represented the idea of a church that cut across different cultural and ethnic divides. In mid-seventeenth-century Macao, for example, the two thousand Portuguese residents were a minority among an overall population of forty thousand, a population that—in addition to Chinese—also had substantial communities from East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia—communities that could be politically influential. See Ptak, Portugal in China, 80–84. See also George Bryan Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in the South China Sea, 1630–1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). John E. Wills Jr., “Maritime Europe and the Ming,” in China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions, ed. John E. Wills Jr., 24–77 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), see especially 47–48. Wolfgang Reinhard, Die Unterwerfung der Welt: Globalgeschichte der europäischen Expansion, 1415–2015 (Munich: Beck, 2016), 135 Johannes Meier, “Religiöse Begegnungen und christliche Mission,” in WBG Weltgeschichte: Eine globale Geschichte von den Anfängen bis ins 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Walter Demel et al., 4:325–83 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010), see particularly 377. Nicolas Standaert, “Ecclesiastical Administration,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, 576–79 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Claudia von Collani, “Missionaries,” in Handbook of Christianity, 1:295–97. Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 154–57. John E. Wills Jr. and John Cranmer-Byng, “Trade and Diplomacy with Maritime Europe, 1644–c. 1800,” in Wills, China and Maritime Europe, 183–254. On the limited communication technologies of the time and their decentering effects on global Catholic structures, see Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 45–67.

196  3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints 15. For a good contextualizing summary of the early history of the Jesuits, see R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27–33. 16. Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). 17. For a long time, historical scholarship focused on the Jesuit experience in single regions; only recently has there been increasing interest in the Society of Jesus as a decidedly global organization. See John W. O’Malley, “The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today?,” in Saints or Devils Incarnate? Studies in Jesuit History, ed. John W. O’Malley, 1–36 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Missions in the Far East enjoyed a certain degree of popularity among the Jesuits: many applied and were put through a careful selection process before being dispatched to the East. See Ludwik Grzebien, “The Perception of the Asian Missions in Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century Poland During the Period of Re-Catholicisation,” Monumenta Serica 59, no. 1 (2011): 177–89, particularly 183–84. 18. For examples of comparative studies investigating different local theaters of the Jesuit mission, see Andrés I. Prieto, “The Perils of Accommodation: Jesuit Missionary Strategies in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 3 (2017): 395–414, and Ana Carolina Hosne, The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570–1610: Expectations and Appraisals of Expansionism (London: Routledge, 2013). 19. For more, see Steven J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, 212–40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), see especially 217–23. 20. For a biography of the visitor André Palmeiro (1569–1635), see Liam Matthew Brockey, The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014). 21. A study of this topic is provided in Alden, Making of an Enterprise. See also Qi Yinping, Yesuhuishi yu wanming haishang maoyi [The Jesuits and maritime trade in the late Ming dynasty] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2017). 22. Isabel Pina, “Chinese and Mestizo Jesuits from the China Mission (1589– 1689),” in Europe–China: Intercultural Encounters (16th–18th Centuries), ed. Luís Filipe Barreto, 117–37 (Lisbon: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, 2012), see especially 123–29. 23. Wolfgang Reinhard, A Short History of Colonialism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2011), 23–24. 24. Clossey, Salvation and Globalization.

3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints  197 25. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, 1400–2000 (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 116–18. 26. Walter Demel, “Weltpolitik,” in Demel et al., WBG Weltgeschichte, 158–59. 27. Quoted in Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 210. 28. Ines G. Zupanov, “Language and Culture of the Jesuit ‘Early Modernity’ in India during the Sixteenth Century,” Itinerario 32, no. 2 (2007): 87–110. 29. Rajesh K. Kochhar, “Secondary Tools of Empire: Jesuit Men of Science in India,” in Discoveries: Missionary Expansion and Asian Cultures, ed. Teotonio R. de Souza and Gregory Naik, 175–83 (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1994); Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 182–83. 30. Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 199–209. 31. C. Joe Arun, ed., Interculturation of Religion: Critical Perspectives on Robert de Nobili’s Mission in India (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 2007). 32. Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 33. Brockey, The Visitor, 308–9. Among Palmeiro’s key concerns was the question of the compatibility of values and the fact that the accommodation method’s overall success in converting members of the Chinese elite was modest. 34. Paul Rule, K’ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Crows Nest, Austal.: Allen and Unwin, 1986); D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989). 35. For an overview of the origins of scholastic theology and its ties to the Islamic world, see, for example, William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 213–25. 36. Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 37. On this topic, see, for example, Yong Chen, Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences (Leiden: Brill, 2012). On the debates during the early twentieth century, see, for example, Peter Zarrow, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012). 38. Willard J. Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, 708–88 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), see particularly 709. 39. Some scholars use the term “official religion”; see, for instance, Romeyn Taylor, “Official and Popular Religion and the Political Organization of Chinese Society in the Ming,” in Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, ed. Kwang-Ching Liu,

198  3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

126–57 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 1–24. On the unity of politics, morality, and rites in Confucianism, see, for example, Jacques Gernet, “La société chinoise à la fin des Ming,” Recherches de Science Religieuse 72, no. 1 (1984): 27–36, particularly 42–43. On this terminological dualism during the late Ming era, see Richard HonChun Shek, Religion and Society in Late Ming: Sectarianism and Popular Thought in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 380. Nicolas Standaert, “Confucian-Christian Dual Citizenship: A Political Conflict?,” Ching Feng 34, no. 2 (1991): 109–14. Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 115–93. Bol’s work provides an insightful overview of neoConfucian traditions. On the neo-Confucian interpretation of time and the Way, see Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 100. On Zhu Xi’s notion that the proper Way had been obscured for more than fifteen hundred years, see Wolfgang Bauer, China and the Search for Happiness: Recurring Themes in Four Thousand Years of Chinese Cultural History (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 289–90. Ian McMorran, “Wang Fu-Chih and the Neo-Confucian Tradition,” in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, 413–67 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), notes that a number of neo-Confucian scholars accused one another of being influenced by Buddhism. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Die Identität der buddhistischen Schulen und die Kompilation buddhistischer Universalgeschichten in China (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), 34. A particularly clear articulation of this idea came in the commentaries on the classics by Hu Anguo (1074–1138), which also played an important role in the official examination system. See Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 129–30. In classical Chinese, the word xin refers to both mind and emotions, as well as a person’s moral nature and intentions. In some cases, the term is translated as “consciousness.” For recent Chinese research on Wang Yangming, see Tian Wei, “Lun wang yangming yi ‘liangzhi’ weiben de daode zhexue” [On Wang Yangming’s ethical philosophy based on innate moral knowledge], Qinghua daxue xuebao 18, no. 1 (2003): 5–9. Quoted in Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 98. Kojima Tsuyoshi, “Mingmo qingchu ningshao diqu zhuzixue zhuangkuang he yiyi” [The state and meaning of the Cheng Zhu school in the seventeenth century in Ningbo, Zhejiang], Rujiao wenhua yanjiu 7 (2007): 89–104; Dai Guangzhong, “Mingqing zhedong xueshu yu ningbo shangbang fazhan” [The East

3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints  199

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

Zhejiang school of thought and the development of Ningbo’s merchant community in the Ming and Qing dynasties], Ningbo daxue xuebao 16, no. 4 (2003): 45–49. Quoted in Peterson, “Confucian Learning,” 749. On Li Zhi in general, see, for example, Kenji Shimada, Die neo-konfuzianische Philosophie: Die Schulrichtungen Chu Hsis und Wang Yangmings (Berlin: Reimer, 1987), 173–94. For an overview, see Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 161–85. On Jiao Hong, see Edward T. Ch’ien, “Chiao Hung and the Revolt against Ch’eng-Chu Orthodoxy: The Left Wing Wang Yang-ming School as a Source of the Han Learning in the Early Ch’ing,” in de Bary, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 271–301, see particularly 279; Araki Kengo, “Confucianism and Buddhism in the Late Ming,” in de Bary, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 39–66, see especially 47. On Yuan Zongdao, see Jennifer Eichman, A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship: Spiritual Ambitions, Intellectual Debates, and Epistolary Connections (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 329–35. Araki, “Confucianism,” 57; Kristin Yü Greenblatt, “Chu-hung and Lay Buddhism in the Late Ming,” in de Bary, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 93–140, see particularly 127–29. Buddhist scholars in fact repeatedly endeavored to link their faith to the Chinese official teaching and cultural ethos, and they had been doing so ever since their religion arrived in China. Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 27–29. Tu Wei-ming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472– 1509) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 84–85. Araki, “Confucianism,” 46. See also Tang Chun-i, “The Development of the Concept of Moral Mind from Wang Yang-ming to Wang Chi,” in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, 93–117 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), see particularly 116. Zhao Yuan, Zhidu, yanlun, xintai: Mingqing zhiji shidafu yanjiu xubian [System, discourse, and mentality: Continuing the study of the literati during the Ming-Qing transition period] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2006). Zhao Yuan, Mingqing zhiji shidafu yanjiu [A study of the literati during the Ming-Qing transition period] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1999), chapter 4. On the history of academies and a comparison with contemporary European societies, see Cho-yun Hsu, China: A New Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 393–401. Judith A. Berling, The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

200  3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints 63. Among the main conceptual dualisms in this context was xiaoxin (careful) and ziran (spontaneous). For more, see Peterson, “Confucian Learning,” 754. 64. John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Suppression (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002). 65. Willard J. Peterson, Bitter Gourd: Fang I-Chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 94–95. 66. On the Donglin Academy’s policy of returning to original Confucian teaching by eliminating later additions, see Charles O. Hucker, “The Tung-lin Movement of the Late Ming Period,” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank, 132–62 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). See also Erik Zürcher, “A Complement to Confucianism: Christianity and Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China,” in Norms and the State in China, ed. Chun-Chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, 71–92 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), see particularly 73; Nicolas Standaert, “Xu Guangqi’s Conversion as a Multifaceted Process,” in Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), ed. Catherine Jami, Peter M. Engelfriet, and Gregory Blue, 170–85 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 67. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “ ‘Western Gods Meet in the East’: Shapes and Contexts of the Muslim-Jesuit Dialogue in Early Modern China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2-3 (2012): 517–46. 68. Converts of the Ming-Qing transition period commonly emphasized the ideal of the return to a lost wisdom. A list of quotes from four converts regarding this general tendency of accommodation (including a citation from Zhu Zongyuan’s Responses) can be found in Gong Daoyun, “Ruxue he tianzhujiao zai mingqing de jiechu he huitong” [The contact and mutual search for understanding between Confucianism and Catholicism during the Ming and Qing dynasties], Shijie zongjiao yanjiu 1 (1996): 49–61, particularly 55. 69. On the fact that quite disparate schools in China all laid claim to the concept of “culture” (wen), see Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, “Vielfalt und Einheit: Zur integrationistischen Tendenz in der Kultur Chinas,” in “Kultur”: Begriff und Wort in China und Japan, ed. Wolfgang Bauer, 123–57 (Berlin: Reimer, 1984), see especially 125. 70. Wolfgang Bauer, China und die Hoffnung auf Glück: Paradiese, Utopien, Idealvorstellungen in der Geistesgeschichte Chinas, 2nd ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), 17. 71. Willard J. Peterson, “Learning from Heaven: The Introduction of Christianity and Other Western Ideas into Late Ming China,” in Mote and Twitchett, Cambridge History of China, 789–839, see particularly 789. During the late Ming era there was little awareness of the earlier Nestorian Christian communities on Chinese soil. 72. Critics of Chinese Buddhism nonetheless pointed to its foreign origins. 73. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints  201 74. Nicolas Standaert, Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China: His Life and Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 213. 75. This question and its answer can be found in Responses, 1a–1b. 76. The Chinese terms that Zhu uses, xu and wu, are often translated as “emptiness” and “nothingness,” yet both concepts actually describe being that is not manifest in concrete form. In any case, Zhu’s point is clear: among the three Chinese teachings only Confucianism has a higher purpose. 77. Zhu, Responses, 1a–1b. 78. An allusion to the Zhongyong [Doctrine of the mean], chapter 1. 79. Zhu, Responses, 6a–6b. 80. For more, see Daniel K. Gardner, The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007). 81. Zhu, Responses, 10b. 82. Jami, Engelfriet, and Blue, Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal. 83. Zhu, Responses, 7b. 84. Zhu, Responses, 6b. 85. Stephan Schumacher and Gert Woehner, eds., The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 39. 86. Zhu, Summary, 1a–1b. 87. There were originally Six Classics, but the Book of Music (Yuejing) was lost after the Han period. 88. In the Book of Songs, the term cangcang describes the green of grass and reeds. The term “blue heaven” (cangtian) is used in the Book of Songs to indicate “heavenly power.” 89. Zhu, Summary, 2a–3a. 90. Zhu, Summary, 3b–4b. 91. Zhu, Summary, 3a–3b. 92. Zhu, Summary, 21a–21b. 93. Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Searching For Alternatives to Western Modernity: Cross-Cultural Approaches in the Aftermath of World War I,” Journal of Modern European History 4, no. 2 (2006): 241–59. 94. Zhu, Summary, 21b. 95. For details, see Daniel K. Gardner, “Confucian Commentary and Chinese Intellectual History,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 2 (1998): 397–422, particularly 402. 96. On Wang Gen and his conception of the Way, see Wm. Theodore de Bary, Learning for One’s Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): 155–202. See also Monika Übelhör, Wang Gen (1483–1541) und seine Lehre: Eine kritische Position im späten Konfuzianismus (Berlin: Reimer, 1986), 48. 97. See Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 183. 98. Quoted in Brook, The Troubled Empire, 179.

202  3. A Teaching Shaped by Constraints 99. Examples are given in Araki, “Confucianism,” 47–50. 100. Araki, “Confucianism,” 53; Heinrich Busch, “The Tung-lin Shu-yüan and Its Political and Philosophical Significance,” Monumenta Serica 14 (1949–1950): 1–163, particularly 35. See also Edward T. Ch’ien, Chiao Hong and the Restructuring of Neo-Confucianism in the Late Ming (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 183–87. 101. Examples are Gu Xiancheng, Gao Panlong (1562–1626), and Liu Zongzhou (1578–1645). For details, see Peterson, “Confucian Learning,” 754. 102. Lin Qinzhang, Mingdai jingxue yanjiu lunji [Research essays on classical studies during the Ming era] (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2015), 2–24, 97–134, 175–76. 103. Lin, Mingdai jingxue yanjiu lunji, 352. 104. Busch, “Tung-lin Shu-yüan,” 35; McMorran, “Wang Fu-Chih,” 432, cites the same criticism by Wang Fuzhi (1619–1693). 105. Such lists were compiled by converts like Yan Mo (d. after 1718). See Nicolas Standaert, The Fascinating God: A Challenge to Modern Theology Presented by a Text on the Name of God Written by a 17th Century Chinese Student of Theology (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1995), 65. Another convert attempting a similar task was Zhang Xingyao (1633–1715); see D. E. Mungello, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), 97. 106. Here Zhu differs from Ricci, who quotes mainly from the Four Books. In Zhu’s Summary and Responses, however, the proportion of quotations from the Five Classics to those from the Four Books is more balanced. 107. On Ricci’s hypothesis of a continuous written tradition in Judea, see Thomas H. C. Lee, “Christianity and Chinese Intellectuals: From the Chinese Point of View,” in China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Thomas H. C. Lee, 1–27 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991), see particularly 9; John D. Young, East-West Synthesis: Matteo Ricci and Confucianism (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1980), 31. 108. The New Text and Old Text schools, which occupied an important role during the Qing dynasty, were based largely on this textual divide. On the book burning by the Qin emperor as a historical event and a topos in Chinese exegesis, see John B. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), 40–41. 109. Zhu, Treatise, 5b–6a. 110. Zhu, Responses, 6b–7a. 111. Zhu, Responses, 7a. 112. The desire to purge the classics of later additions had a long tradition in Confucianism. Even in antiquity, there were movements placing great emphasis on cleansing and purging in the case of the supposed compilation of a number of classics by Confucius himself.

4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways  203 113. On the fushe, see Chow, Rise of Confucian Ritualism, 42. 114. On this latter distinction, see Erik Zürcher, “Confucian and Christian Religiosity in Late Ming China,” Catholic Historical Review 83, no. 4 (1997): 614–53, particularly 622. 115. The citation is given in Adrian Dudink, “Christianity in Late Ming China: Five Studies” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 1995), 55.

4. OF FOREIGN LEARNINGS AND CONFUCIAN WAYS 1. Isabel Pina, “Chinese and Mestizo Jesuits from the China Mission (1589–1689),” in Europe–China: Intercultural Encounters (16th–18th Centuries), ed. Luís Filipe Barreto, 117–37 (Lisbon: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, 2012), see especially 125–26. 2. Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007), 293. 3. Brockey, Journey to the East, 306–11. 4. Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuits in China,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester, 169–85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), see particularly 169–72. See also Brockey, Journey to the East, 328–35. 5. Only Macanese children educated by the Jesuits, and later also some mestizos, were eligible to become coadjutor brothers. For more, see chapter 5 in the present volume, the section “The Limits of Integration.” 6. Pina, “Chinese and Mestizo Jesuits.” 7. Adrian Dudink and Nicolas Standaert, “Apostolate Through Books,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, 600–631 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). On related issues, see R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185. The Jesuits not only coauthored new works for the Chinese book market but also initiated translations of many nonreligious European works in fields ranging from philosophy to science. 8. Timothy Brook, “Europaeology? On the Difficulty of Assembling a Knowledge of Europe in China,” in Christianity and Cultures: Japan and China in Comparison, 1543–1644, ed. M. Antoni J. Üçerler, 261–85 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2010), see particularly 262–63. 9. For example, Ricci’s famous world map did not refer to the homelands of Islam, so his purpose was not to provide a global view of the spread of religions. See, for example, Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 212. See also Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, “Jesuit Representations of Europe to China in the Early Modern Period,” in Departure for Modern Europe: A Handbook of Early Modern

204  4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Philosophy (1400–1700), ed. Hubertus Busche, 792–803 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011). The work in question is Aleni’s Xixue fan [General account of studies in the West], published in 1622. See Willard J. Peterson, “Learning from Heaven: The Introduction of Christianity and Other Western Ideas into Late Ming China,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, 789–839 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). John W. Witek, “Epilogue: Christianity and Cultures; Japan and China in Comparison, 1543–1644; Reflections on a Significant Theme,” in Üçerler, Christianity and Cultures, 337–41, see particularly 341. See also Zhang Xianqing, Xiao lishi: Mingqimg zhi ji de zhongxi wenhua xiangyu [Microhistory: Cultural encounters between China and the West during the late Ming and early Qing period] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2015), part 2. For Islam as a teaching from the West, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “ ‘Western Gods Meet in the East’: Shapes and Contexts of the Muslim-Jesuit Dialogue in Early Modern China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2-3 (2012): 517–46, particularly 528–35. See also Xu Song, Xiyu shui daoji: Wai er zhong [On water systems in western regions: Two supplements] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005). For the historical background of this novel, the travels of the famous monk Xuanzang to India as the homeland of Buddhism, see Sally Hovey Wriggins, Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). In fact, however, Chinese scholars were always involved in the creation of these works. On the changing connotations of the concept of “Europe,” see Robert Richmond Ellis, They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 12–13. On the broader conceptual and semantic changes in Chinese beginning in the late nineteenth century that also implied the rise of the West as a reference space, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). See also Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Notions of Society in Early Twentieth-Century China, ca. 1900–25,” in A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860–1940, ed. Hagen SchulzForberg, 61–74 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). Kenneth Ch’en, “Matteo Ricci’s Contributions to, and Influence on, Geographical Knowledge in China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 59, no. 3 (1939): 325–59, particularly 343; Willard J. Peterson, “Why Did They Become Christians? Yang T’ing-yun, Li Chih-tsao, and Hsü Kuang-ch’i,” in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh, 129–51 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982), see especially 137. Already, particularly during the sixteenth century, books on foreign

4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways  205

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

lands could be very successful on the Chinese book market. See Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 195–244. Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 113–16. On Ricci’s world map and its intellectual contexts in China, including earlier Chinese works dealing with the outside world, see Ge Zhaoguang, Here in “China” I Dwell: Reconstructing Historical Discourses of China for Our Time (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 66–76. Wei Jun, “Lishuo huangtang huoshi,” in Shengchao poxieji [The sacred dynasty’s collection of writings exposing heterodoxy], ed. Xu Changzhi and Xia Guiqi, 183–86 (Hong Kong: Jiandao shenxueyuan, 1996). Zhang Qiong, Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 172–73. For an older English translation of parts of this text, see Zhang Weihua, Ming shi folangji lüsong helan yidaliya si zhuan zhu shi [A commentary of the Four Chapters on the “Franks,” the (Spanish) Philippines, Holland, and Italy in the “History of the Ming Dynasty”] (Beijing: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1934), 161–62. Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 135. Charles Patrick Fitzgerald, The Chinese View of Their Place in the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 7. On Ricci’s accounts, see Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume 2: A Century of Wonder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 802. Douglas C. Lancashire, “Buddhist Reactions to Christianity in Late Ming China,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 6 (1968–1969): 82–103, particularly 91–92. For an argument for the importance of nineteenth-century diplomacy in influencing this tendency, see Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in the Modern World Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), chapters 2, 3. For lack of an adequate term in English, the following translations of passages in Zhu Zongyuan’s work use the term “barbarian.” Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Chinese Perception of World Order, Past and Present,” in The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations, ed. John King Fairbank, 276–88 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), see especially 277–78. On questions of ethnicity in Ming society, see Leo K. Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Arif Dirlik, “Born in Translation: ‘China’ in the Making of ‘Zhongguo,’ ” boundary 2, July 29, 2015, https:​­//www​­.boundary2​­.org​­/2015​­/07​­/born​­-in​­-transla​

206  4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

tion​­-china​­-in​­-the​­-making​­-of​­-zhongguo​­/; Ge Zhaoguang, Hewei zhongguo: Jiangyu, minzu, wenhua yu lishi [What is China? Frontiers, nationalities, culture, and history] (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2014). Peter K. Bol, “Geography and Culture: The Middle-Period Discourse on the Zhong guo, the Central Country,” in Space and Cultural Fields: Spatial Images, Practices and Social Production, ed. Ying-kuei Huang, 61–106 (Taipei: Center for Chinese Studies, 2009). Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Joseph W. Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” in Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young, 229–59 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Zhu, Summary, 62a. Zhu, Summary, 62a–64a; Zhu, Responses, 50a–54b. Zhu, Responses, 52a. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7: Military Technology; The Gunpowder Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 310. For a general depiction of Sino-Vietnamese relations during the Ming era, see Kathlene Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Zhu, Summary, 62a. Zhu, Responses, 51b. Zhu’s name for the region of the Yangtze delta (including his home province of Zhejiang). Yan and Zhao were states of the pre-Qin era. Like many of his contemporaries, Zhu used these names in this context to describe the northern China of his day. The Chinese script did not acquire the form that is still used today until the Qin dynasty. According to historical sources, the tadpole script was one of the scripts that existed before the book burning during the Qin. See Li Xueqin, Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations, trans. K. C. Chang (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 447. The character read as zhi (fortune) occurs in the Shijing, xiaoya, VI, 6 (James Legge, The Chinese Classics: With a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes [Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford; London: Trübner, 1871], 4:289), and daya, huangyi (Legge, The Chinese Classics, 4:452). In the Zhengjian commentary by the Han scholar Zheng Xuan (127–200), the character is defined as fu. The character read as jue appears numerous times in the Shijing [Book of songs] and is described as qi by Zheng Xuan. Zhu, Responses, 51b. Zhu uses the term suoan (literally, “rope snob”), which was apparently a traditional term of abuse in the south for peoples of the north, where the queue

4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways  207

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

was common. Northern Chinese were evidently still described this way in Zhu’s day. The terms “rope slave” (suolu) and “rope head” (suotou) were already in use in this sense during the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420–589). They also appear in the Songshu by Shen Yue (441–513). See these terms in Zhongwen da cidian, 40 vols. (Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo, 1962–1968). An is another old term of abuse for northern Chinese (see under sutou in Zhongwen da cidian). Daoyi (island barbarians) is used in the Shujing [Book of documents] to describe the peoples of the south (Shujing III, 1, VI). However, as early as the time of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, or possibly earlier, it was a pejorative term for southern Chinese (see under daoyi in Zhongwen da cidian). Zhao Yuan, Mingqing zhiji shidafu yanjiu [A study of the literati during the Ming-Qing transition period] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1999), chapter 2. Zhu, Responses, 50b. A recent translation of the Zuozhuan is Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg, trans., Zuo Tradition, “Zuozhuan”: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). See also Anne Cheng, “Ch’un ch’iu, Kung yang, Ku Liang and Tso Chuan,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe, 67–76 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), see particularly 68. Steven Davidson and Michael Loewe, “Ch’un ch’iu fan lu,” in Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, 77–87. For a brief overview, see Hans van Ess, “Hu Hong’s Philosophy,” in Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy, ed. John Makeham, 105–24 (New York: Springer, 2010), see especially 105–6. This approach was in line with a particular Confucian exegetical school, ­following the Gongyang tradition. Many of these rulers could trace their genealogy back to the Zhou dynasty; Richard Louis Walker, The Multi-State System of Ancient China, 2nd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), 20. More generally, see Li Feng, Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045–771 b.c. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Jacques Gernet, La Chine ancienne: Des origines à l’empire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 69–70. A good introduction to the period is Choyun Hsu, “The Spring and Autumn Period,” in The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 b.c., ed. Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy, 545–86 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On intellectual life during this period, see Yuri Pines, Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period (722–453 b.c.e.) (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002). Chunqiu [Spring and Autumn annals], Wengong 9, 12. The full sentence reads, “In winter, the baron of Chu sent Jiao with a diplomatic request to Lu.” The

208  4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

verb lai (come) indicates that he was sent on a mission to Lu, the state from whose perspective the annals are written. On the usage of the verb lai in the Chunqiu, see Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5:891. For an overview of the Chu culture and state, see, for example, Constance Cook and John Major, Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999). Walker, Multi-State System, 26–28, 114n16. Henri Maspéro made this point building on a rich tradition of textual critique in China; see Henri Maspéro, La Chine Antique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1955), 82–83. For an early study on this topic, see Otto Franke, Studien zur Geschichte des konfuzianischen Dogmas und der konfuzianischen Staatsreligion: Das Problem des Tsch’un-ts’iu und Tung Tschung-schu’s Tsch’un-ts’iu fan lu (Hamburg: Friedrichsen, 1920), 210n1. Chunqiu, Zhuanggong 23, 5. See Legge’s note on Chunqiu, Wengong 9, 12, in Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5:254. Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5:254, note on Wengong 9, 12. Examples of the usage of “baron” in the Chunqiu include VII, 4, 1; VII, 10, 7; and VII, 9, 12. Hu Anguo, Chunqiu hushi zhuan [Master Hu’s commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals], ed. Qian Weijiang (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 2010), 229. Adrian Dudink, “Christianity in Late Ming China: Five Studies” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 1995), 37–39. See also Adrian Dudink, “Nangong shudu (1620), Poxie ji (1640), and Western Reports on the Nanjing Persecution (1616 / 1617),” Monumenta Serica 48 (2000): 133–265. The title daifu constituted the second-highest category of official during the Zhou era; see Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), 465. The commentary contradicts itself here, because it had already noted with regard to a passage in the Chunqiu on the fourteenth year of the reign of Prince Xi (645 b.c.e.) that Chu had begun to have high officials. While the Zuozhuan does not address this problem, the Guliang commentary states that Chu had no daifu and that the envoy’s name was used only for reasons of ­etiquette; Fu Lecheng, Zhongguo tongshi [A general history of China], 2 vols. (Guiyang: Guizhou jiaoyu chubanshe, 2010), 1:70–71, discusses this in greater detail. Chunqiu VIII, 3, 12. Dong Zhongshu, Chunqiu fanlu [Rich dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1926), chapter 3, section 66. Noted in Chunqiu VIII, 4, 2. Information on the Confucian regulations governing mourning can be found in Franke, Studien zur Geschichte, 305n1, 306n2.

4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways  209 68. “Baron” and “son” are written in Chinese with the same character; context, however, makes it possible to distinguish the intended meaning. 69. Chunqiu fanlu, 7a–7b. 70. In this section, Zhu Zongyuan attempts to show how Confucius upgraded or downgraded the titles of historical individuals depending on his moral judgment of their actions. This chiasmus is imperfect, however—even in light of the harshest commentary, the term zi in the case of the Count of Zheng does not signify degradation to the level of an outer state, let alone a barbarian tribe. Zhu’s conclusion from the second quotation that Confucius made barbarians of the Chinese therefore seems less self-evident than the converse found in the first quotation. 71. Zhu, Responses, 50b. 72. Pierre Ryckmans, The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past, George Ernest Morrison Lecture in Ethnology, vol. 47 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1986), 8–9. 73. Sima Qian seems to have added another three emperors, primarily in the interest of numerical symbolism. A recent introduction to Sima Qian is David R. Knechtges, “Sima Qian,” in Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide, ed. David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, 2:959–65 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 74. On the portrayal of these emperors in historiography and myth, see Fu, Zhongguo tongshi, 1:10–13, and Tu Wei-ming, Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 77. As discussed in the preceding, most Confucian schools believed that these “saintly” kings had attained understanding of the world principle through self-cultivation and that their inner wisdom translated into a perfect, harmonious society. 75. Zhu, Summary, 62b–63a. 76. Mencius 4a, 1. 77. In the passage “Shun from Yu” (Yu Shun zhe) in volume 1 of the Shiji (Wudi benji) the commentary says, “Shun was an eastern barbarian.” The source cited is the lost Feng shiji from the pre-Qin era. See the entry for Feng shiji in Zhongwen da cidian. In the edition of the Shiji referred to here (Sima Qian, Shiji [Records of the grand historian], 10 vols. [Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959]), this passage is at 1:31. 78. Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 11. 79. The word qiang refers to the peoples of southwestern China. A note on the relevant passage in the Zhengyi commentary, stating, “Xia Yu was called Wen Ming,” which opens volume 2 of the Shiji (Xia benji), reads, “Yu’s first name was Wen Ming . . . and he was originally a southwestern barbarian.” This passage of the commentary is found in Sima Qian, Shiji, 1:49. 80. You Yu’s life is recorded in the Shiji (chapter 5) as well as in the Han feizi (III, 49). The Zhengyi commentary says of the envoy’s name in the passage

210  4. Of Foreign Learnings and Confucian Ways

81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

“The king of the rong sent You Yu to Qin” (Sima Qian, Shiji, 193), “The name of a rong.” The English translation conveys the ambiguity of this brief remark. You Yu could be understood to be Chinese with a foreign name, or as a rong. Evelyn S. Rawski, Early Modern China and Northeast Asia: Cross-Border Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 188–94. The earliest occurrence of this quotation is in the classic Book of Rites (Liji V, 2), where it refers more generally to the eastern barbarians: “In the east they are called Yi [eastern barbarians], they have disheveled hair and tattoo their bodies” (Sun Xidan, Liji jijie [The Book of Rites, with explanations] [Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989], 359). In a commentary on the Houhan shu by Fan Ye (d. 445), which erroneously refers to the Guliang commentary on the Chunqiu, the term “eastern barbarians” is replaced explicitly by “the inhabitants of Yue”: “The inhabitants of Yue have disheveled hair and tattoo their bodies.” See Fan Ye, Houhan shu [History of the Later Han], ed. Li Zhuanshu (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1996), 2:110a. See also Taishan Yu, “A History of the Relationships between the Western and Eastern Han, Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Western Regions,” Sino-Platonic Papers 131 (March 2004), http:​­//www​­.sino​­-platonic​­.org​­/complete​­/spp131_chinese_dynasties​ _western_region​­.pdf. In the Han shu [Book of Han], however, there is the statement that the “Yue . . . shave their heads and tattoo their bodies (64a; Ban Gu, Han shu, 8 vols. [Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962], 6:2777). Zhu, Summary, 62b–63a. On Yue, see, for example, Li, Eastern Zhou, 189. For vivid descriptions, see, for example, Jonathan D. Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (New York: Viking, 2007). On Ricci’s accounts of prostitution and carousing in China, see Johannes Bettray, Die Akkommodationsmethode des P. Matteo Ricci S. I. in China (Rome: Universitatis Gregorianae, 1955), 152–53. According to Zhongwen da cidian, 9:295. In contrast to Confucianism, Daoist traditions regarded the age of the five emperors as a break with a happy, unspoiled original state. See Wolfgang Bauer, China und die Hoffnung auf Glück: Paradiese, Utopien, Idealvorstellungen in der Geistesgeschichte Chinas, 2nd ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), 61–63, 108. Confucianism, in contrast, saw these simpler societies as a moral ideal that modern civilization should seek to recover. Zhu, Summary, 62b–63a. On the status of peoples according to the Zhou- and Han-era worldview, see Claudius C. Müller, “Die Herausbildung der Gegensätze: Chinesen und Barbaren in der frühen Zeit,” in China und die Fremden: 3000 Jahre Auseinandersetzung in Krieg u. Frieden, ed. Wolfgang Bauer, 43–76 (Munich: Beck, 1980). Zhu, Responses, 52a–52b. Zhuangzi 17, Qiushui [Autumn floods].

5. European Origins on Trial  211 92. On the latter, see Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 310. 93. On attacks against Buddhism because of its foreign origins, see the classic account of Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1959), 1:264. 94. There are additional similarities between early Buddhist groups and seventeenth-century Chinese Christians. For instance, both worked in mixed teams to translate important works into Chinese. For this aspect of early Buddhism, see Kai Vogelsang, Geschichte Chinas (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012), 217. 95. For a translation and contextualization of this text, see John P. Keenan, How Master Mou Removes Our Doubts: A Reader-Response Study and Translation of the “Mou-tzu Li-huo lun” (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). 96. Hongmingji, III, 17.3–21.3. See (on the mentioning of You Yu) Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, 1:266–68. 97. Lihuolun 1 (Hongmingji I, 3, 3, 21). On idealized depictions of India during the early phase of Buddhism in China, see Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, “Ausdehnung der Welt und innerer Zerfall (3. bis 8.Jahrhundert),” in Bauer, China und die Fremden, 77–113; see especially 105–10. 98. Bol, “Geography and Culture.” 99. Rawski, Early Modern China, 188–94; Q. Edward Wang, “History, Space, and Ethnicity: The Chinese Worldview,” Journal of World History 10, no. 2 (1999): 285–305. 100. Achim Mittag, “Scribe in the Wilderness: The Manchu Conquest and the Loyal-Hearted Historiographer’s (xinshi) Mission,” Oriens Extremus 44 (2003 / 2004): 27–42. 101. Even in other parts of East Asia, there were debates on similar themes. See Rawski, Early Modern China, 188–224. 102. Henry Em, The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 28–29. 103. On Zhu’s position vis-à-vis the Manchus, see, in the present volume, chapter 1, the section “Finding One’s Way During Stormy Times.”

5. EUROPEAN ORIGINS ON TRIAL 1. Gabriele Foccardi, The Chinese Travelers of the Ming Period (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986), 150. 2. R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 187–216. On the idealized accounts of single nations, see, for example, Shenwen Li, “Les jésuites et l’image de la France en Chine aux 17e et 18e siècles,” in Entre Mer de Chine et Europe: Migrations des savoirs,

212  5. European Origins on Trial

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

transfert des connaissances, transmission des sagesses du 17e au 21e siècle, ed. Paul Servais, 41–57 (Louvain-la-Neuve, Bel.: Bruyant-Academia, 2011). On the changing connotations of the concept of “Europe,” see Robert Richmond Ellis, They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 12–13. Timothy Brook, “Europaeology? On the Difficulty of Assembling a Knowledge of Europe in China,” in Christianity and Cultures: Japan and China in Comparison, 1543–1644, ed. M. Antoni J. Üçerler, 261–85 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2010), see particularly 269–72. Erik Zürcher, “The Jesuit Mission in Fujian in Late Ming Times: Levels of Response,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. E. B. Vermeer, 417–57 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), see especially 426. R. Bin Wong, “The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia,” American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 447–469, particularly 449–58. Feng Xianliang, “Mingqing jiangnan de fumin jieceng jiqi shehui ying­ xiang” [The wealthy social strata and their social influence in the Jiangnan region during the Ming-Qing period], Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu 1 (2003): 44–56. Zheng Yangwen, China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Wang Gungwu, “Sojourning: The Chinese Experience in Southeast Asia,” in Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese, ed. Anthony Reid and Kristine Alilunas Rodgers, 1–14 (St. Leonards, Austal.: Allen and Unwin, 1996). Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800 (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 137–43. John E. Wills Jr., “Maritime Europe and the Ming,” in China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions, ed. John E. Wills Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 24. On the history of Chinese maritime interactions, see Angela Schottenhammer, “The Sea as Barrier and Contact Zone: Maritime Space and Sea Routes in Traditional Chinese Books and Maps,” in The Perception of Maritime Space in Traditional Chinese Sources, ed. Angela Schottenhammer and Roderich Ptak, 3–13 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). For a general history of overseas Chinese, see Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). Wills, China and Maritime Europe; Roderich Ptak, China and the Asian Seas: Trade, Travel and Visions of the Other (1400–1750) (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998). Nigel Cameron, Barbarians and Mandarins: Thirteen Centuries of Western Travelers in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 138, 142, 144. See also John

5. European Origins on Trial  213

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

E. Wills Jr., Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1622–1681 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 7–8. Zhang Xie, Dongxiyang kao [Investigation of the eastern and western seas] (1617; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981). Translation of the pertinent passages can be found in Foccardi, Chinese Travelers, 136–40. On the massacres of the Chinese, see John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 144–46, and Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 96, 177. Pasquale M. d’Elia, ed., Fonti Ricciane: Documenti originali concernenti Matteo Ricci e la storia delle prime relazione tra l’Europe e la Cina (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1949): 2:372–73. Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Regarding Chinese slaves in Goa, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History, 2nd ed. (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 240. On high taxes imposed by the Dutch and a massacre of the Chinese population in 1652, see Johannes Huber, “Chinese Settlers against the Dutch East India Company: The Rebellion Led by Kuo Huai-i on Taiwan in 1652,” in Vermeer, Development and Decline, 265–96, see particularly 265–73. Suggesting that this colonial violence prompted Dutch ethnographers to emphasize their own individuality and the uncivilized behavior of others: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Forcing the Doors of Heathendom: Ethnography, Violence, and the Dutch East India Company,” in Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, ed. Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley, 131–54 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). George H. Dunne, Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), 184–85. Cameron, Barbarians and Mandarins, 219; Kingsley Bolton, Chinese Englishes: A  Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 126–29. Walter Demel, Als Fremde in China: Das Reich der Mitte im Spiegel frühneuzeitlicher europäischer Reiseberichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992), 86. Wong, “Search for European Differences,” 458–59. Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, 96. Nonetheless, many commercial enterprises were run by the Jesuits in East Asia at little or no profit, with the chief objective of establishing good relations with the local upper classes. On the Jesuits’ financial activities in the seventeenth century, see Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 552.

214  5. European Origins on Trial 23. Erik Zürcher, “The First Anti-Christian Movement in China (Nanjing, 1616– 1621),” in Acta Orientalia Neerlandica: Proceedings of the Congress of the Dutch Oriental Society Held in Leiden on the Occasion of Its 50th Anniversary, 8th–9th May 1970, ed. Pieter W. Pestman, 188–95 (Leiden: Brill Archive, 1971), see especially 190; Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 47. See also Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 111. 24. Cameron, Barbarians and Mandarins, 143–46. 25. Wills, “Maritime Europe,” 52, 67–75. 26. Dunne, Generation of Giants, 117–19. On the events of 1606 in general, see C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan: 1549–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 269. See also Zhang Xinglang, ed., Zhongxi jiaotong shiliao huibian [A collection of materials on Sino-Western exchanges] (Beijing: Zhong­ hua shuju, 2003), 145. 27. Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105–40. See also Douglas C. Lancashire, “Anti-Christian Polemics in Seventeenth Century China,” Church History 38 (1969): 218–241, particularly 240–41. 28. Edward Thomas Kelly, “The Anti-Christian Persecution of 1616–1617 in Nanking” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1971), 36. It was indeed part of Ricci’s mission strategy to distribute gifts, but he was probably adapting to Chinese traditions. See John D. Young, East-West Synthesis: Matteo Ricci and Confucianism (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1980), 19–20. 29. The text was included in the Shengchao poxieji [The sacred dynasty’s collection of writings exposing heterodoxy]. This collection was first published in 1639—the specific passage can be found in Poxieji III, 30b and 31b. A reprint is in Xu Changzhi and Xia Guiqi, eds., Shengchao poxieji [The sacred dynasty’s collection of writings exposing heterodoxy] (Hong Kong: Jiandao shenxueyuan, 1996). The English translation cited can be found in Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, 131. 30. Zhang Qiong, Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 314–17. See also Adrian Dudink, “Nangong shudu (1620), Poxie ji (1640), and Western Reports on the Nanjing Persecution (1616?/?1617),” Monumenta Serica 48 (2000): 133–265. 31. Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der europäischen Expansion, Band 1: Die Alte Welt bis 1818 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983), 84; Boxer, Christian Century in Japan, 257. 32. Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 31; Judith A. Berling, The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 224.

5. European Origins on Trial  215 33. This topic is taken up in chapter 1 of the present volume, in the section “Finding One’s Way during Stormy Times.” 34. Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, trans. Douglas Lancashire, Peter Hu Kuo-chen, and Edward Malatesta (San Francisco: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), paragraphs 520–60. See also Brook, “Europaeology?,” 269–72. 35. Erik Zürcher, “A Complement to Confucianism: Christianity and Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China,” in Norms and the State in China, ed. Chun-Chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, 71–92 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), see particularly 77; Erik Zürcher, “Giulio Aleni et ses relations avec le milieu des lettrés chinois au XVIIe siècle,” in Venezia e l’Oriente, ed. Lionello Lanciotti, 107–35 (Florence: Olschki, 1987), see especially 122. On Aleni’s idealization of the West, see Bernard Hung-Kay Luk, “A Serious Matter of Life and Death: Learned Conversations at Foochow in 1627,” in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582– 1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh, 173–206 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982), see in particular 193; John L. Mish, “Creating an Image of Europe for China: Aleni’s Hsi-Fang Ta Wen,” Monumenta Serica 23 (1964): 1–87, particularly 43, 48, 54. 36. Erik Zürcher, “Renaissance Rhetoric in Late Ming China: Alfonso Vagnoni’s Introduction to His Science of Comparison,” in Western Humanistic Culture Presented to China by Jesuit Missionaries (XVII–XVIII Centuries): Proceedings of the Conference Held in Rome, October 25–27, 1993, ed. Federico Masini, 331–60 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1996), see especially 332–34. 37. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, 109–12. On Xu Guangqi’s portrayal of Europe in particular, see Monika Übelhör, “Hsü Kuang-ch’i (1562–1633) und seine Einstellung zum Christentum: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der späten Ming-Zeit (Teil 1),” Oriens Extremus 15, no. 2 (1968): 191–257; Monika Übelhör, “Hsü Kuang-ch’i (1562–1633) und seine Einstellung zum Christentum: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der späten Ming-Zeit (Teil 2),” Oriens Extremus 16, no. 1 (1969): 41–74, particularly 66; Min-sun Chen, “Hsü Kuang-Ch’i and His Image of the West,” in Pullapilly and Van Kley, Asia and the West, 26–44, see especially 38. On Yang Tingyun in this context, see Yu-yin Cheng, “Changing Cosmology, Changing Perspectives on History and Politics: Christianity and Yang Tingyun’s (1562–1627) Reflections on China,” Journal of World History 24, no. 3 (2013): 499–537. 38. Zhu, Responses, 50b–51b. 39. Book of Rites (Liji, Liyun, chapter 1). 40. For more, see chapter 3 of the present volume. 41. Each of the seven sections of 50b–51b ends with the sentence pattern “The . . . in our China are not as good.” 42. Zhu, Responses, 51b. Erik Zürcher, “Confucian and Christian Religiosity in Late Ming China,” Catholic Historical Review 83, no. 4 (1997): 647, describes Zhu’s

216  5. European Origins on Trial

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

portrayal of the West’s superiority over China as “maybe unique” within Christian literature in seventeenth-century China. Steven J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, 212–40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Markus Friedrich, “Organisations- und Kommunikationsstrukturen der Gesellschaft Jesu: Ein Überblick,” in Etappen der Globalisierung in christentumsgeschichtlicher Perspektive: Phases of Globalization in the History of Christianity, ed. Klaus Koschorke, 83–104 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012); Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 193–215. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science,” 217–18. Rivka Feldhay, “The Cultural Field of Jesuit Science,” in O’Malley, Bailey, Harris, and Kennedy, The Jesuits, 107–30. Dominic Sachsenmaier, “The Cultural Transmission from China to Europe,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, 879–905 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Sven Trakulhun, Asiatische Revolutionen: Europa und der Aufstieg und Fall asiatischer Imperien (1600–1830) (Frankfurt: Campus, 2017), 9–123. Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 127–34. Zhu, Summary, 63a–63b; Zhu, Treatise, 5b–6a. Yang Tingyun also defended the Jesuits against attacks of this kind. See Nicolas Standaert, Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China: His Life and Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 158–61. Zhu, Responses, 53a. On rumors that the Jesuits created gold by alchemy to bribe the Chinese, see Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, 122–24; Paul Rule, K’ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Crows Nest, Austral.: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 21. Ricci also mentions the belief that he himself was a master of this art; see Pietro Tacchi Venturi, ed., Opere storiche del P. Matteo Ricci, S. I. (Macerata, It.: Premiato stab. tip. F. Giorgetti, 1913), 2:209. Like its European counterpart, Daoist alchemy (huangbai zhi shu) also attempted to produce silver and gold. Zhu, Responses, 54b. Zhu, Responses, 55a. Zürcher, “Jesuit Mission in Fujian,” 447, remarks that the Jesuits never pointed out the differences between Nestorianiam and Catholicism. On the stele of Xian in general, see, for instance, Ralph R. Covell, Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ: A History of the Gospel in Chinese (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1986), 20. Adrian Dudink, “Christianity in Late Ming China: Five Studies” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 1995), 286.

5. European Origins on Trial  217 56. Indeed, many Jesuits began their Chinese texts by pointing out how far they had traveled. See Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 104. 57. Many Christian texts of the time, including Aleni’s Sanshan lunxueji and Zhifang waiji, stress the fact that the Jesuits exposed themselves to long, perilous journeys purely for the sake of spreading their religion. See Bernard Hung-Kay Luk, “Thus the Twain Did Meet? The Two Worlds of Giulio Aleni” (PhD. diss., Indiana University, 1977), 24–25. 58. Zhu, Responses, 53a–53b. 59. Zhu, Responses, 54a. 60. For example, Mencius 6a, X, 1: “If [I] cannot have both at once, I shall renounce life and take righteousness.” Similar quotations can be found in Lunyu IV, V, 3, and Lunyu XV, 8. 61. For a philosophical interpretation of these thoughts, see Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1978). 62. For an overview of Confucian schools during the late Ming period, see Willard J. Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, 708–88 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Harry Miller, State versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572– 1644 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 63. Willard J. Peterson, “Learning from Heaven: The Introduction of Christianity and Other Western Ideas into Late Ming China,” in Twitchett and Mote, Cambridge History of China, 789–839, see particularly 789; D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 8–9. 64. A complete inventory of the Nanjing Jesuit residence drawn up in connection with the 1616–1617 trial points to this and further evidence of the missionaries’ imitation of the lifestyle of Chinese scholars. See Adrian Dudink, “The Inventory of the Jesuit House at Nanjing Made Up during the Persecution of 1616–1617,” in Masini, Western Humanistic Culture, 119–57. 65. Generally on the usage of the term ru, see the older, yet still relevant, account by Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Volume 1: The Period of the Philosophers (From the Beginnings to circa 100 b.c.), trans. Dirk Bodde (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 48. 66. For more on the Confucian, or neo-Confucian, notion of passing down the Way, see chapter 3 in the present volume, the section “Contested Landscapes: Confucian Teachings in Late Ming China.” 67. Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 68. For a discussion of this topic with a reference to the Chinese term shi (learned individual), see Peterson, “Learning from Heaven,” 789–839.

218  5. European Origins on Trial 69. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “ ‘Western Gods Meet in the East’: Shapes and Contexts of the Muslim-Jesuit Dialogue in Early Modern China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2-3 (2012): 517–46, particularly 532. 70. There is evidence that missionaries did indeed make an impression on renowned individual Chinese thinkers, and that they did so by presenting themselves as respectable scholars. One example of this is the admiration that the philosopher Li Zhi (d. 1602), who was not a convert, expressed for Matteo Ricci. He regarded Ricci as a morally and intellectually distinguished scholar. See Li Zhi, Xu Fenshu [Sequel to Fenshu] (1918; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 35. However, Li also remarks that he doesn’t know exactly why the missionaries have come. See Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, 18–19. 71. Zhu, Treatise, 5b. 72. Analects 12,19. For an annotated translation, see Simon Leys, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Norton, 1997), 59. 73. Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Neo-Confucian Cultivation and the SeventeenthCentury ‘Enlightenment,’?” in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, 141–216 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), see especially 182. Ricci uses the term wu in the sense of “reason”— see the introduction to Ricci, True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 155. 74. Zhu, Treatise, 3b–4a. 75. Zhu, Responses, 52a. 76. The term shengren was more widely used in late Ming society than shengxian. In the Confucian tradition, the term xian has nothing to do with the Daoist immortals (although it is also used in this context) but refers to people who act in accordance with their moral values (see under xian and shengren in Zhongwen da cidian, 40 vols. [Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo, 1962–1968]). 77. Zürcher, “Confucian and Christian Religiosity,” 618, emphasizes the significance of Buddhist influences. 78. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 66–69, 100. 79. Rodney Leon Taylor, The Cultivation of Sagehood as a Religious Goal in Neo-Confucianism: A Study of Selected Writings of Kao P’an-lung (1562–1626) (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978), 21. 80. On Wang Yangming, see Tu Wei-ming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472–1509) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). On the Taizhou school, see Edward T. Ch’ien, “Chiao Hung and the Revolt against Ch’eng-Chu Orthodoxy: The Left Wing Wang Yang-ming School as a Source of the Han Learning in the Early Ch’ing,” in de Bary, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 271–301, see particularly 297. 81. Pauline C. Lee, Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). 82. Zhu, Summary, 5a–5b.

5. European Origins on Trial  219 83. Aleni was even occasionally referred to as the Confucius from the West (xilai kongzi). See Tiziana Lippiello and Roman Malek, eds., “Scholar from the West”: Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582–1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China (Brescia, It.: Fondazione Civiltà Bresciana; Sankt Augustin, Ger.: Monumenta Serica Institute, 1997); Markus Friedrich, Die Jesuiten: Aufstieg, Niedergang, Neubeginn (Frankfurt: Piper, 2016), 499. 84. Ricci, True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 447–49. 85. D. E. Mungello, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), 112, 165, suspects that Zhang Xingyao did not describe individual Jesuit missionaries since he had only little personal contact with them. Zhang was active two generations after Zhu Zongyuan’s death, a time when the Jesuit presence in China outside Beijing had grown thin. 86. Han Lin and Zhang Geng, Shengjiao xinzheng [Evidence of the Christian faith] (Jiangzhou, 1647). 87. In the early Qing period, Muslim astronomers were being replaced with Jesuits; see Kiyosi Yabuuti, “Islamic Astronomy in China during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties,” trans. Benno van Dalen, Historia Scientiarum 7, no. 1 (1997): 11–43. See also Nicola Di Cosmo, “Did Guns Matter? Firearms and the Qing Formation,” in The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time, ed. Lynn A. Struve, 121–66 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), see particularly 145. On the minor role of foreign ties in many aspects of Chinese Islam, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 88. Isabel Pina, “Chinese and Mestizo Jesuits from the China Mission (1589–1689),” in Europe–China: Intercultural Encounters (16th–18th Centuries), ed. Luís Filipe Barreto, 117–37 (Lisbon: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, 2012). See also chapter 2 of the present volume for more. 89. Another Chinese Christian, the Jesuit Zheng Weixin (1633–1673), was ordained as a priest in Europe in 1664 and returned to China in 1668. Regarding Zheng and Luo Wenzao, see Nicolas Standaert, “Chinese Christians Going Abroad,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:449–55. 90. Nicolas Standaert, “Missionaries,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:286–354. 91. Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 192–97. 92. Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, 129–30. 93. Wolfgang Reinhard, Die Unterwerfung der Welt: Globalgeschichte der europäischen Expansion, 1415-2015 (Munich: Beck, 2016), 135. 94. Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, 236. 95. Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011). 96. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, eds., Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (New York: Berghahn Books,

220  5. European Origins on Trial

97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

2011). On China, see Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). Ruth Hill, “Between Black and White: A Critical Race Theory Approach to Caste Poetry in the Spanish New World,” Comparative Literature 59, no. 4 (2007): 269–93. Thomas Cohen, “Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Society of Jesus,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester, 199–214 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), see especially 199–203. Cohen, “Racial and Ethnic Minorities,” 203–6. Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 207–8. Wolfgang Reinhard, A Short History of Colonialism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2011), 29. There are many other examples for similar statements—for instance, Jesuit reports of “savages” in New France; see Dominique Delandres, “Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits’ Missionary World,” in O’Malley, Bailey, Harris, and Kennedy, The Jesuits, 258–73, see particularly 264. Andrew C. Ross, “Alessandro Valignano: The Jesuits and Culture in the East,” in O’Malley, Bailey, Harris, and Kennedy, The Jesuits, 336–51, see especially 347–49. Nicolas Standaert and John Witek, “Chinese Clergy,” in Standaert, Handbook of Christianity, 1:462–70.

EPILOGUE 1. For a comparative account, see On-cho Ng, “The Epochal Concept of ‘Early Modernity’ and the Intellectual History of Late Imperial China,” Journal of World History 14, no. 1 (2003): 37–61. 2. John R. McNeill and William McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), 183. 3. In an influential essay, Erik Zürcher analyzes the Chinese cultural imperative in the Jesuit China mission: “Jesuit Accommodation and the Chinese Cultural Imperative,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello, 31–64 (Nettetal, Ger.: Steyler, 1994). On the usage of this concept, see Nicolas Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 136. 4. On the connections between the Catholic missions and the early modern state, see R. Po-chia Hsia, “Mission Frontiers: A Reflection on Catholic Missions in the Early Modern World,” in The Frontiers of Mission: Perspectives on Early Modern Missionary Catholicism, ed. Alison Forrestal and Seán Alexander

Epilogue  221

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

Smith, 180–93 (Leiden: Brill, 2016). On related topics, see Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 262–66. On the seventeenth-century usages of the concept of religio (which were not identical with today’s connotations of “religion”), see Nadine Amsler, “ ‘Sie meinen, die drei Sekten seien eins’: Matteo Riccis Aneignung des sanjiaoKonzepts und ihre Bedeutung für europäische Beschreibungen chinesischer Religion im 17. Jahrhundert,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 105 (2011): 77–93. Seventeenth-century Chinese had no equivalents of this dichotomy—after all, Chinese terms for “religion” and “philosophy” like zongjiao and zhexue became influential only in the late nineteenth century. Certainly, in today’s scholarship definitions of “religion” and “religiosity” have become decidedly wider and more multifaceted. See Benson Saler, Understanding Religion: Selected Essays (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013). For China, see Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On the term “civilization” and its various connotations in the singular and plural, see, for example, Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Regarding the wider transformations of the Chinese language around the turn of the twentieth century, when it—among other changes—incorporated new terms for “civilization,” see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 181–82. Timothy Brook, “Europaeology? On the Difficulty of Assembling a Knowledge of Europe in China,” in Christianity and Cultures: Japan and China in Comparison, 1543–1644, ed. M. Antoni J. Üçerler, 261–85 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2010), 261–85. A comprehensive account of the early modern European book sphere is provided in Timothy Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648–1815 (New York: Viking, 2007), 475–79. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Charles Wheeler, “Buddhism in the Re-ordering of an Early Modern World. Chinese Missions to Cochinchina in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Global History 2, no. 3 (2007): 303–24.

222 Epilogue 13. Joseph F. Fletcher, “Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500–1800,” Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (1985): 37–57. 14. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 15. Islam, Christianity, and Theravada Buddhism belong to this category. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History, 2nd ed. (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 31. 16. In some cases, new religious forms emerged as responses to cultural tensions and constraints. For example, during the early 1500s Sikhism developed in the Punjab at least partly as a way of bridging differences between Islam, the religion of the Mughals, and local Hinduism. For more, see Khushwant Singh, The Illustrated History of the Sikhs (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 17. R. Michael Feener, “South-East Asian Localisations of Islam and Participation within a Global Umma, c. 1500–1800,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 3: The Eastern Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid, 470–503 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 182–89, 198–201. 18. Anthony H. Johns, “Friends in Grace: Ibrahim al-Kurani and Abd al-Ra’uf al Singkeli,” in Spectrum: Essays Presented to Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. S. Udin, 469–85 (Jakarta: Dian Rakyat, 1978). 19. Different religious traditions had of course long encountered one another and, in many cases, even existed side by side in places ranging from Sicily to Kaifeng. Yet by and large religious organizations had been founded on monocultural foundations and had clustered around single world regions. See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, “Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities—A Comparative View,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 1–18. 20. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62. 21. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,” Representations 91 (2005): 26–57; Dominic Sachsenmaier, “The Cultural Transmission from China to Europe,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, 879–905 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). See also the still relevant article by Edwin J. Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” American Historical Review 76, no. 2 (1971): 358–85. 22. The rules of economic and other transactions as well as cultures of political exchange were increasingly converging around standard patterns. See Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, 292–93. 23. For more, see McNeill and McNeill, The Human Web, 162, 182–83. 24. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, 1400–2000 (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 84–85.

Epilogue  223 25. Frank Broeze, Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989). 26. Parker, Global Interactions, 70–81. 27. The trading (and other) connections of single diasporic communities have become the subject of a growing research literature. See, for example, Ho, The Graves of Tarim; Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). 28. Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Zvi BenDor Benite, “ ‘Like the Hebrews in Spain’: The Jesuit Encounter with Muslims in China and the Problem of Cultural Change,” Al-Qantara 36, no. 2 (2015): 503–29, focuses on Matteo Ricci’s perception of Islam in China, arguing that the missionary’s views of that religion were constrained by images of Islam in contemporary Europe. 29. Michael N. Pearson, “Creating a Littoral Community: Muslim Reformers in the Early Modern Indian Ocean World,” in Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, ed. Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley, 155–65 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), see particularly 158. 30. On the relatively few encounters between Jesuits and Muslims in China, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “ ‘Western Gods Meet in the East’: Shapes and Contexts of the Muslim-Jesuit Dialogue in Early Modern China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2-3 (2012): 517–46. 31. Wheeler, “Buddhism in the Re-ordering,” 303–24; Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 32. For instance, the Ottoman Empire tolerated religious diversity even though over time it stepped up the pressure for an Islamicization of its population through instruments such as tax policies that differentiated between different groups of believers. For a global yet locally sensitive history of Islam, see Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 33. Reinhard, Short History of Colonialism, 43; D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 16. 34. Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 187–216.

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SECONDARY LITERATURE Alberts, Tara. Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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INDEX

academies (shuyuan), 61, 84, 147. See also Donglin Academy accommodation method (Confucian-­ Christian synthesis): and Buddhism, 66, 67; and Chinese elites, 12, 13, 59, 66, 67, 119–­20, 197n33; and Chinese knowledge of Europe, 131, 138; and Confucian notions of golden age, 137–­38, 144, 146, 200n68; contradictions in, 155–­56; and foreign origins of Christianity, 100, 104–­5; global context of, 73–­75, 163; limits on, 65–­99, 146–­52, 158; in local communities, 59, 63–­6 4; opposition to, 74–­75, 86, 99; origins of, 19–­20; and rituals, 63, 68–­69; scholarship on, 11–­17; and science, 13, 46, 59; terms used in, 66; and Zhu Zongyuan, 86–­93, 152, 155 Acehnese sultanate (Sumatra), 8 Africa, 5, 149, 150, 161, 195n6 afterlife, 51, 88–­91 Akbar, Emperor, 74, 164

alchemy, 140, 216n52 Aleni, Giulio, 16, 106, 133, 136, 189n98, 219n83; as Confucian scholar, 142; works by, 102, 103, 131, 145, 217n57 Analects (Lunyu), 143, 217n60 ancestor worship, 9, 52–­5 4, 60, 69, 75. See also Chinese Rites Controversy Anthologies of Self-­Correction (Tizheng bian; Gravina), 48 Arabic relations with East Asia, 108, 165 Asia: Catholic Church in, 57, 58, 69–­70; concept of “middle” in, 128; foreigners in, 2, 130, 131–­32, 135, 164; global knowledge in, 163; Jesuits in, 9, 17, 58, 72, 73–­74; native clergy in, 149–­50, 151; religions in, 5, 155, 160–­61, 165, 166; trade in, 7–­9, 25. See also Eurasia; South Asia; Southeast Asia; particular countries and cities astronomy, 66, 134, 159, 176n34, 219n87

254 Index Baiheilun. See Treatise of White and Black barbarians (yi, qiang, rong), notions of, 106–­7, 205n24, 207n42, 210n82; vs. concept of “middle,” 116, 118, 120–­25, 127–­28, 186n66; vs. idealized Europe, 138; Manchus as, 107, 122, 128; and morality, 118, 121–­25, 126, 129; sage-­k ings as, 120–­21; Zhu Zongyuan on, 106, 120–­25 Barros, João de, 182n12 Bible, 101, 162; and Confucian classics, 12, 96–­97, 163; and Zhu Zongyuan, 2, 3, 49, 51 Bodhidharma (Damo), 90 Bolivia, 24 book markets: Chinese, 5, 7, 10, 19, 45, 46, 105, 176n34, 203n7; European, 139, 159; global Catholic, 10, 19, 45–­47; and religious syncretism, 78–­79; and Zhu’s works, 44–­45 Book of Changes (Yijing), 112 Book of Documents (Shujing), 96, 112, 207n42 Book of Rites (Liji), 137, 210n82 Book of Songs (Shijing), 96, 206n39 Brancati, Francesco, 41–­42 Brazil, 30 Brittany, 10 Buddhism: Chan (Zen), 39, 90, 165; and Chinese Christians, 15, 60, 62, 211n94; and concept of “middle,” 126–­27; and Confucian-­Christian synthesis, 66, 67; and Confucianism, 6, 40, 45, 51, 78, 82–­83, 87, 91, 93, 95, 99, 143, 199n55, 201n76; dialogues in, 50, 191n19; enlightenment in, 39, 144; expansion of, 161, 165; foreign

connections of, 6, 103–­4, 106, 147, 165, 200n72; as neo-­Confucianism, 80, 82–­84, 98–­99, 198n45; and religious syncretism, 84, 85, 86, 143, 163; revival of, 38, 82; and revolts, 85, 135; in Southeast Asia, 147, 161, 165; and sutras, 94, 95, 96; and “the West,” 103–­4; Theravada, 167, 222n15 Buglio, Luigi, 33, 40, 188n88 bureaucracy, Chinese: and Confucian ideals, 142–­43; and Confucian schools, 77, 80, 156; and Confucian-­ Christian synthesis, 66; and elites, 37, 61, 80, 81, 143; and Jesuits, 58, 164; Ming, 27, 31–­32, 81; in Ming-­Qing transition, 31–­32; Qing, 36; and religious syncretism, 79, 84; and Zhu Zongyuan, 27, 34, 36–­37, 89 Caballero, Antonio de Santa Maria, 53 Cao Binren, 32 Catholic Church: in Asia, 57, 58, 69–­70; centralized organization of, 57, 147, 154, 158, 167; and Chinese Rites Controversy, 52–­54, 119; and Chinese state, 11, 18, 78, 86, 156–­58; conflicts within, 42, 69, 70–­71, 156, 159–­60; ethnic hierarchy in, 148–­49, 150; in Europe, 58, 60; global book markets of, 10, 19, 45–­47; global expansion of, 160–­68; global networks of, 57, 60, 63–­64, 71–­72, 152, 154, 166–­67; inquisition in, 70, 78, 149; and Jesuits, 68–­71; and local associations, 61–­63; native clergy in, 58–­59, 74, 101–­2, 146–­52, 157, 203n5, 219n89; and

Index  255 Portuguese padroado, 9, 70, 150, 175n20. See also papacy Catholicism: and Chinese elites, 6–­7, 52, 55; Chinese-­Jesuit, 65–­66, 75; and colonialism, 9, 57, 130; and European culture, 1–­2, 137, 155; heresies in, 90; in local Chinese communities, 32, 54–­64; localization of, 2, 10, 47, 60, 62–­63, 64, 67, 71, 73–­75, 78, 101, 147, 157, 163; morality in, 135–­36; and Qing dynasty, 36. See also accommodation method; Christianity; converts, Chinese; Jesuits; liturgy, Catholic Central Asia, 5, 121. See also Eurasia Chan (Zen) Buddhism, 39, 90, 165 Cheng Yi, 79, 80. See also neo- ­Confucianism Chinese language, 12, 45, 108–­9, 151, 160, 221n7 Chinese Rites Controversy, 9, 42, 52–­54, 75, 119, 163 Chinese state: and Catholic Church, 11, 18, 78, 86, 156–­58; and Christianity, 20, 66, 156–­57; and Confucian ideals, 142–­43; and Confucianism, 76, 77–­79, 94, 145, 156; and foreign countries, 105–­6; and Jesuits, 68, 69, 73, 86, 147, 158; and Macao, 67–­68; in Ming-­Qing transition, 4, 68, 165–­66; and neo-­Confucianism, 80–­82; rituals of, 52, 78, 156, 157. See also Ming dynasty; Qing dynasty Chongzhen emperor (Ming), 28 Christianity (tianxue; Learning of Heaven), 11–­17; and Buddhism, 15, 60, 62, 66, 67, 211n94; and

bureaucracy, 36–­37; and Chinese elites, 6–­7, 15, 52, 55, 62, 114, 119–­20; and Chinese state, 20, 66, 156–­57; and Chinese syncretism, 5, 16, 85–­86; Chinese-­Jesuit, 65–­66, 75; and colonialism, 9, 57, 130; and concepts of “middle” vs. “outer,” 125, 126, 129; and Confucian classics, 12, 13, 93–­99, 163; and Confucianism, 3, 10, 13, 48, 62, 63, 77, 78, 93, 144, 160; contradictions within, 19–­20, 167; and Daoism, 15, 60, 66, 125; distrust of, 133, 135; in Eurasia, 57, 154, 167; and Europe, 7, 20, 21, 100–­105, 132, 134, 136, 138; and European culture, 1–­2, 137, 155; foreign origins of, 2, 20, 99, 100–­105, 107–­10, 129, 130, 155; heresies in, 90; in Japan, 57, 58; in local Chinese communities, 32, 54–­64; localization of, 2, 10, 47, 60, 62–­63, 64, 67, 71, 73–­75, 78, 101, 147, 157, 163; and Ming loyalism, 35–­36; in Ming-­Qing transition, 6, 32, 47, 166; morality in, 135–­36; and notions of universalism, 100–­105, 118; opposition to, 106, 167; persecutions of, 20, 68, 116, 134; and sagehood, 145–­46; and social status, 15, 46, 55, 62, 66, 119; in Tang China, 140–­41; and trade, 21, 72, 161–­62, 222n15; as Western learning, 142. See also accommodation method; communities, Chinese Christian; Jesuits Chronicle of Foreign Lands (Zhifang waiji; Aleni), 102, 217n57 Chu, state of, 113, 115, 116, 117–­18, 123, 208n63

256 Index Chufen xiyi yi. See Critique of the Western Barbarians Chunqiu. See Spring and Autumn Annals Chunqiu fanlu. See Rich Dew of the “Spring and Autumn Annals” “civilization,” concept of, 3–­4, 106–­7, 127–­28, 158–­59, 221n7. See also “middle” classics, Confucian: authority of, 98; and Christianity, 12, 13, 91, 92, 93–­99, 163; commentaries on, 95–­96, 111–­12, 116, 119, 198n47; historical chronology in, 163; morality in, 89, 112–­13, 115, 116; and neo-­Confucianism, 88, 94, 95–­96, 97; transmission of, 96–­97; Zhu’s allusions to, 88, 91, 92, 96–­99, 110–­20, 160, 202n106. See also particular titles coadjutor brothers (assistants to priests), 56, 59–­60, 63, 102, 148, 192n40, 203n5 colonialism: and Catholicism, 9, 57, 130; Chinese knowledge of, 130–­39; Dutch, 132–­33, 183n23, 213n16; and ethnic hierarchies, 148–­50, 157; and Jesuits, 69, 73, 135; and mestizos, 57, 148, 203n5; Portuguese, 7, 8, 9, 67–­70, 132, 134, 150, 165; Spanish, 2, 7, 8, 21, 175n20; violence of, 132–­33, 213n16. See also Goa; Macao; Philippines communities, Chinese Christian: and global Catholicism, 11, 32, 54–­64; and Jesuits, 61, 62–­63, 102; and local associations, 56–­57, 61–­64; organizers (huizhang) in, 56, 62; religious syncretism in, 60–­61, 162, 163; rural, 15, 61; scholarship on,

14–­15; and Zhu Zongyuan, 19, 54–­59, 154, 168. See also Ningbo communities, trading, 1, 3, 25, 162, 164–­65 Confucian-­Christian synthesis. See accommodation method Confucianism: authority of, 99; and Buddhism, 6, 45, 78, 82–­83, 93, 95, 99, 143, 199n55; and Chinese past, 105, 118, 124, 202n112; and Chinese state, 76, 77–­79, 94, 145, 156; and Christianity, 3, 10, 13, 48, 62, 63, 77, 78, 93, 144, 160; and civil service examinations, 38, 77, 80, 81, 94, 110, 111, 143; and concepts of “middle” vs. “outer,” 110–­20, 128, 129; and Daoism, 78, 95, 96, 210n87; early, 95–­96, 114, 119; in global context, 92–­93; heterodoxy (xie) in, 78, 90; ideal person in, 142–­43; and Jesuits, 68, 140–­46, 152; morality in, 77, 89, 94, 112–­13, 115, 116, 120–­21, 194n57, 209n70; notions of golden age in, 137–­38, 144, 146, 200n68; schools of, 38, 76–­86, 136, 156, 158; and social status, 37, 38; Song, 79–­80, 81; terminology of, 76–­77, 218n76; and Zhu Zongyuan, 3, 10, 19, 20, 40, 44, 45, 49, 51, 52, 86–­93, 155, 200n76. See also accommodation method; classics, Confucian; neo- ­Confucianism Confucius, 79, 93, 94, 120, 208n70; and concepts of “middle” vs. “outer,” 123, 126; and Spring and Autumn Annals, 112–­18; Zhu Zongyuan on, 87–­88, 89 conversos, 149

Index  257 converts, Chinese: and Confucian-­ Christian synthesis, 12, 16, 155, 200n68; elite, 6–­7, 36, 38, 42, 47, 52, 55, 156; and Europe, 21, 137, 159; families of, 41; and Jesuits, 9, 16, 42, 146, 157, 167; limited knowledge of, 153; lower-­class, 7, 15, 16, 59, 101, 178n44; Ming loyalism of, 35–­36; and Nestorianism, 141; numbers of, 6, 16, 47, 52, 55, 58, 60; religious syncretism of, 6, 38, 60–­61; and Rites Controversy, 42, 52, 53; roles of, 56, 59–­60, 148–­49, 151, 167; scholarship on, 11–­17, 33; suspicion of, 135, 156–­57; and trade networks, 162, 166; works by, 44, 46, 47, 52, 146, 154, 157, 211n94. See also communities, Chinese Christian Cow Street Mosque (Niujie Libaisi), 5, 174n9 Critique of the Western Barbarians (Chufen xiyi yi; Wen Xiangfeng), 99 Da kewen. See Responses to a Guest’s Questions Daoism: in Chinese syncretism, 38, 39, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87; and Christianity, 15, 60, 66, 125; and Confucianism, 78, 80, 82, 95, 96, 210n87; on immortality, 90–­91; on past vs. present, 124; terms in, 218n76; and Zhu Zongyuan, 40, 49, 51, 87, 90–­91, 201n76 daoxue (Learning of the Way), 77 Daxue. See Great Learning de Figueiredo, Rodrigo, 41, 101 De Imitatione Christi (Thomas à Kempis), 47 de Nobili, Roberto, 74, 75

Denmark, 30 Descartes, René, 159 Detailed Explanation of the Ten Commandments of the Holy Learning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shengjiao shijie zhiquan), 47 Dias, Manuel the Younger (Yang Manuo), 41, 47, 56, 101, 187n71, 191n12 Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), 87 Dominicans, 2, 42, 43, 53, 56, 75 Dong Zhongshu, 112, 117 Donglin Academy, 84, 95, 98, 142, 144, 199n61 Dongxiyang kao. See Investigation of the Eastern and Western Seas dream metaphor, 39 Dunin-­Szpot, Thomas I., 40, 55 Dutch. See Netherlands economy, Chinese: centers of, 23, 25, 45, 165; and currency, 24, 30; and elites, 37–­38, 81; foreign products in, 5, 23, 108, 153; and Jesuits, 72, 133, 134, 165, 213n22; in Ming-­Qing transition, 23, 166; silver in, 24, 30, 153. See also trade, transregional economy, global, 4–­5, 164, 222n22 elites, Chinese: and accommodation method, 12, 13, 59, 66, 67, 119–­20, 197n33; and bureaucracy, 37, 61, 80, 81, 143; and Christianity, 6–­7, 15, 52, 55, 62, 114, 119; and Confucianism, 19, 76, 77, 79, 80, 111; as converts, 6–­7, 36, 38, 42, 47, 52, 55, 156; and economy, 37–­38, 81; and Europe, 130, 131, 134–­35, 138–­39; and foreign connections, 6, 23, 102, 164; global knowledge of, 5–­6, 21, 105–­6,

258 Index elites, Chinese (continued) 107, 139, 153; and Islam, 85; and Jesuits, 13, 16, 46, 52, 55, 59, 74, 102, 114, 119–­20, 213n22, 217n64, 218n70; local, 7, 10, 32, 41, 55, 61; Ming loyalism of, 29, 30–­31, 35–­36; in Ming-­Qing transition, 31, 32, 37; moral, 124–­25; regional identities of, 109–­10; and religious syncretism, 6, 38, 79, 86, 163; and the West, 104, 157; Zhu Zongyuan’s critique of, 123–­24 England, 25 English East India Company, 7 enlightenment, personal: in Buddhism, 39, 144; and Jesuits, 143–­44; in neo-­Confucianism, 39, 82, 97, 144; and Zhu Zongyuan, 39–­40, 91 ethnic hierarchies, 21, 147–­52; color terminology in, 151; vs. racism, 149–­50 Eurasia, 25–­26, 57, 154, 167; early modernity in, 25, 183n24 Eurocentrism, 177n36 Europe: and Biblical chronology, 163; Catholicism in, 1–­2, 58, 60, 137, 155; and Chinese concepts of “middle” vs. “outer,” 127, 128, 129; and Chinese converts, 21, 137, 159; and Chinese elites, 130, 131, 134–­35, 138–­39; Chinese knowledge of, 104–­5, 130–­31, 138–­39, 140, 159; and Christianity, 7, 20, 21, 100–­105, 132, 134, 136, 138; conflicts within, 136, 159–­60; diversity in, 9–­10, 158–­59, 166, 179n53; eastern, 176n27; and global crisis, 30; historical contexts of, 1–­2, 7–­8, 16, 73,

100–­105, 137, 155, 158–­59, 179n53; idealized image of, 135–­40, 144, 152, 155, 159; and Jesuits, 100–­101, 131, 133, 159; maps of, 102–­3; morality in, 124, 136, 137, 138; terms for, 103, 130–­31; Zhu Zongyuan on, 20–­21, 54, 135–­38. See also colonialism Europeans: Chinese attitudes toward, 130–­52; distrust of, 130–­35, 140, 141, 155; and transregional trade, 24–­25; and violence in China region, 131–­35, 138, 140. See also missionaries, European Evidence of the Christian Faith (Han Lin and Zhang Geng), 146 examinations, civil service: and commentaries, 112, 198n47; and Confucianism, 38, 77, 94, 110, 111, 143; essays for, 50, 52; in Han period, 123; and Manchus, 29, 36; under Ming, 34, 35; and neo-­ Confucianism, 80, 81; under Qing, 29, 31, 35, 36, 128; and social status, 7, 15, 55; and Zhu Zongyuan, 3, 7, 34–­35, 154 Explications of the Golden Book on Contempt of the World (Qingshi jinshu zhijie), 47 Fang Hao, 13, 17, 32–­33, 191n19 Feng Shihu, 48–­49 Filippucci, Alessandro, 54 foreigners: as advisers, 102, 164; in Asia, 2, 130, 131–­32, 135, 164; and Buddhism, 147, 165; Confucian conceptions of, 110–­20; images of, 105–­10; Jesuits as, 101–­2, 107;

Index  259 religions of, 5–­6, 153–­54; terms for, 106–­7; trade with, 5, 23, 108, 153 Four Mirrors of the Learning of Heaven (Tianxue sijing; Monteiro), 48 France, 9 Franciscans, 53, 70, 156 Frank, Andre Gunder, 4 Froes, João, 33 “frog in the well” metaphor, 125, 127 Fujian, 42, 133, 134

Han dynasty, 79, 95–­96, 119, 123 Han Lin, 146, 174n13 Hangzhou, 22, 36, 46 Henriques, Henrique, 74 Hinduism, 163, 221n16 Hu Anguo, 112, 115–­16, 198n47 hua (flourishing; Chinese; civilized), 107, 124–­25 Huang Zhen, 106 Huang Zongxi, 81

Gao Panlong, 144 gazetteers, local (difangzhi), 32 Germans, 70 Gernet, Jacques, 179n53 global networks: of Catholic Church, 57, 60, 63–­64, 71–­72, 152, 154, 166–­67; crisis in, 30; economic, 4–­5, 164, 222n22; of Jesuits, 71, 72, 139–­40, 163, 166, 167, 196n17; and knowledge, 5–­6, 21, 105–­7, 139, 153, 163; and local communities, 11, 32, 54–­64; and local perspectives, 17, 153, 179n54; and religious expansion, 21, 160–­68. See also trade, transregional Goa, 57, 70, 149, 165 Gongyang commentary (Gongyangzhuan), 112, 116, 207n48 Gouvea, Antonio de, 33, 40, 188n88 Gravina, Girolamo de, 48 Great Learning (Daxue), 88 Greek thought, 12, 75–­76 Gregory XV, Pope, 70 Gu Xiancheng, 84 Guangzhou, 165 Guliang commentary (Guliangzhuan), 112, 117, 208n63, 210n82

Ibn Battutah, 161 Ibn Rushd (Averroës), 76 Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 76 Ignatius of Loyola, 150 imperial court, 55, 56, 77, 81, 84, 102, 164. See also Chinese state imperialism, Western, 131, 149, 157, 182n7. See also colonialism India, 8, 127, 161, 195n6; and Buddhism, 6; caste system in, 74, 75; elites in, 139; global knowledge in, 163, 164; Jesuits in, 71, 72, 74 Instructions (Valignano), 74 Introduction to the Learning of Heaven (Tianxue lüeyi; Monteiro), 48 Investigation of the Eastern and Western Seas (Dongxiyang kao; Zhang Xie), 132 Islam, 203n9, 221n15; in China, 5, 24, 85, 86, 147, 166, 222n28; and Chinese concepts of “the West,” 103, 104, 143; and Christianity, 76; and Confucianism, 85, 94, 143; and Jesuits, 164, 165; and religious syncretism, 85, 86, 161, 162–­63, 165, 223n32; Sunni, 167; and trade, 8, 24, 162 Italians, 70

260 Index Jansenists, 160 Japan: Christians in, 57, 58; elites in, 74, 139; and global crisis, 30; global knowledge in, 163; intercultural contacts in, 72, 165; in Jesuit ethnic hierarchies, 151; Jesuits in, 70, 72, 74; native priests in, 150–­51; pirates from, 133 Jesuits: in Asia, 9, 17, 58, 72, 73–­74; and Catholic Church, 68–­76, 139, 152; centralized organization of, 147, 151–­52; Chinese assistants to, 56, 59–­60, 63, 102, 148, 193n39, 203n5; and Chinese bureaucracy, 58, 164; Chinese lives of, 15–­16; Chinese perceptions of, 60, 100–­101, 101–­2, 107; and Chinese state, 68, 69, 73, 86, 147, 158; and Christian communities, 61, 62–­63, 102; and colonialism, 69, 73, 135; conflicts among, 156; and Confucianism, 49, 67, 77, 116, 119–­20, 140–­46, 152; converts of, 6, 9, 16, 42, 146, 157, 167; and Dominicans, 42; economic activities of, 72, 133, 134, 165, 213n22; and elites, 13, 16, 46, 52, 55, 59, 74, 102, 114, 119–­20, 213n22, 217n64, 218n70; and Europe, 100–­101, 131, 133, 159; global networks of, 71, 72, 139–­40, 163, 166, 167, 196n17; localization strategies of, 73–­75; maps of, 2, 105–­6; morality of, 136, 140, 141–­42, 144–­45; and Nestorianism, 141; in Ningbo, 40–­42; and non-­European clergy, 146–­52, 157; opposition to, 70–­71, 155, 160; and “purity of blood,” 150; and Rites Controversy, 9, 53, 54, 75; as sages, 140–­46, 152; as

scholars, 119–­20, 142–­43, 218n70; scholarship on, 11–­17; and science, 2, 46, 59, 66, 104, 159, 164, 176n34, 203n7, 219n87; works by, 13, 26, 46, 50, 176n34, 203n7; Zhu Zongyuan on, 20–­21, 33, 49, 51, 140–­46, 152; Zhu’s contacts with, 2, 7, 10, 55, 56, 192n38 Jesus of Nazareth, 101 Jews, 97, 149 Jiangnan region, 25, 45 Jiao Hong, 83, 95 Jiaoshe zhi li suoyi shi shangdi ye. See Rites for the Veneration of Heaven and of the Gods of Earth and Harvest Serve to Venerate the “Lord on High” Jin, state of, 113, 114, 116, 121 Journey to the West (Xiyouji), 104 Judaism, 97, 149 Judea (rudeya), 2, 96 Jurchen, 28 Kang Youwei, 92 Kerala, 57 Korea, 128 languages: of Catholicism, 46, 47, 52; Chinese regional variations in, 108–­9; equality of, 127; and foreigners, 106–­7; and Jesuits, 71, 73; non-­European, 46, 71, 73; Portuguese, 25, 183n23; Tamil, 74; vocabularies of universalism in, 163; and Zhu’s works, 48, 53, 54, 160. See also Chinese language Latin, 14, 71, 151 Learned Discussions at Sanshan (Sanshan lunxueji; Aleni), 145, 217n57 Li Zhi, 82, 95, 145, 218n70

Index  261 Li Zhizao, 15, 46 Li Zicheng, 28, 29 Liang Qichao, 92 Liji. See Book of Rites Lin Qilao, 27 Lin Zhaoen, 84, 135 literacy, 15, 25, 45, 155, 190n6 literature: European, 50; Greek, 12, 75–­76; theological, 119–­20 literature, pro-­Christian, 12–­13; on Europe, 136, 138–­39; in Japan, 74; on sagehood, 145–­46; in translation, 7, 13, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 63, 119, 139, 151; and Zhu Zongyuan, 2, 19, 32–­33, 36–­37, 44–­45, 65. See also book markets; particular titles liturgy, Catholic, 16, 46, 59; and Confucian-­Christian synthesis, 49, 63, 74, 158; Jesuit control of, 63, 101, 102, 157; performative, 60, 102; and Zhu Zongyuan, 2, 20, 49, 51, 63, 147. See also Chinese Rites Controversy Liu Xiang, 27 Longobardo, Niccolò, 101 López, Gregorio, 54 Lord of Heaven (tianzhu), 125, 145; and Confucian classics, 97–­98, 99; Ricci on, 50, 65, 119, 136; as universal god, 100; Zhu Zongyuan on, 52, 88, 89–­92 Louxin Temple (Ningbo), 38 lower segments of society: converts in, 7, 15, 16, 59, 101, 178n44; and Jesuit exoticism, 100–­101; knowledge of Europe in, 130, 131 Lunyu. See Analects Luo Wenzao, 148 Luther, Martin, 155

Macao, 57–­58, 133, 148, 149, 195n6, 203n5; and Confucian-­Christian synthesis, 67–­68; and Jesuits, 134, 139, 152 Malacca, 132, 149, 165 Manchus, 28–­29, 36, 48, 175n15; as “barbarians,” 107, 122, 125, 128. See also Qing dynasty maps: on colonialism, 136; criticism of, 105–­6; European, 102–­3; and global knowledge, 105–­6, 131, 139, 153; Jesuit, 2, 5; by Ricci, 203n9 Martini, Martino, 41, 48, 56, 191n14 Maspéro, Henri, 207n55 Master Mou’s Treatise Settling Doubts (Mouzi lihuolun), 126–­27 McNeill, John R., 155 McNeill, William, 155 Mencius, 89, 121, 128, 217n60 merchants, 23, 37, 72, 130–­33, 161. See also trade, transregional Mexico, 149 “middle” (zhong), 107, 110–­29; vs. “barbarian,” 116, 118, 120–­25, 127–­28, 186n66 migration, 23, 24, 131–­32 Ming dynasty: bureaucracy of, 27, 31–­32, 81; and Christian communities, 56–­57, 59, 61–­64; and Confucian-­Christian synthesis, 66, 67; Confucianism in, 76–­86, 88, 94, 98; decline and fall of, 6, 7, 19, 26–­28, 135, 139, 156; examinations under, 34, 35; loyalism to, 29, 30–­31, 35–­36; and notions of barbarians, 106–­7, 128, 138; religious diversity in, 5, 166; and trade, 4, 8, 27, 81, 132. See also Chinese state

262 Index Ming-­Qing transition, 26–­36; Chinese state in, 4, 68, 165–­66; Christianity in, 6, 32, 47, 166; economy in, 23, 166; and elites, 31, 32, 37; and global crisis, 30; migration in, 131; Ming loyalists in, 29, 30–­31, 35–­36; natural disasters in, 27, 31; notions of barbarians in, 106–­7; Zhu Zongyuan in, 29–­36, 50, 160 missionaries, European, 6–­7, 9–­17; attacks on, 133–­34; and Chinese knowledge of Europe, 131, 139; and Chinese state, 157; conflicts between, 9, 167; as Confucian scholars, 12–­13, 218n70; and Confucian- ­Christian synthesis, 11–­12, 16, 94; distrust of, 133–­34, 135; and ideas of ethnic hierarchies, 151, 157; as individuals, 146; intercultural contacts of, 154, 165, 166; and local Christian associations, 62–­63; and native clergy, 148–­52, 157; in Ningbo, 41–­42, 101; and papacy, 70–­71; and Qing rule, 36; and rumors of planned invasion, 140, 141; in rural China, 101–­2; on sagehood, 145–­46; Spanish, 70; and trade, 161–­62; and Zhu Zongyuan, 7, 19, 41, 49, 56, 128, 168. See also Jesuits Mongols, 28. See also Yuan dynasty Monteiro, João (Meng Ruwang), 40, 41, 47–­48, 55, 56, 188–89n93, 191n13 Morales, Juan Bautista de, 43, 53 morality: in Christianity, 135–­36, 155; and concepts of “middle” vs. “barbarian,” 118, 121–­25, 126, 129;

in Confucianism, 77, 89, 94, 112–­13, 115, 116, 120–­21, 155, 194n57, 208n70; and images of Europe, 124, 136–­38, 159; and images of Jesuits, 140, 141–­42, 144–­45; and past vs. present, 123–­24 Mouzi lihuolun. See Master Mou’s Treatise Settling Doubts Mu, Prince of Qin, 121 Mughal Empire, 8, 30, 58, 164; and Jesuits, 73, 74; religious syncretism in, 161, 222n16 Mungello, David, 14, 174n13 Nagasaki (Japan), 72, 165 Nanjing, anti-­Christian persecutions in, 68, 116, 134 native Americans, 73, 149 Navarrete, Domingo, 53 Navarro, José, 192n27 neo-­Confucianism, 79–­84; and Buddhism, 80, 82–­84, 98–­99, 198n45; and Chinese past, 105; and Confucian classics, 88, 94, 95–­96, 97; and education, 81–­82, 83; enlightenment in, 39, 82, 97, 144; in global context, 92–­93; and political reform, 89; self-­cultivation in, 80, 82, 83, 94–­95, 155; as state orthodoxy, 80–­82; and Zhu Zongyuan, 49, 87 Nestorianism ( jingjiao), 140–­41, 154, 216n54 Netherlands, 25, 27, 72, 132–­33, 183n23, 213n16 New France, 10 New vs. Old Text schools, 202n108 Ningbo (Zhejiang), 37–­43, 123, 181n4, 182n13; Buddhism in, 38; Christian

Index  263 community in, 2, 41; Confucianism in, 39, 81; economy in, 22–­23; European missionaries in, 40–­42, 43, 101; knowledge of Europe in, 131, 140; and Ming-­Qing transition, 23, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35; publishing in, 46; social change in, 25, 37–­38; as transregional trade center, 17, 19, 22–­26; Zhu’s status in, 54–­55, 56, 89, 154 Ningbo fuzhi (Ningbo gazetteer), 32 Northern Wei period, 126 Notes of the Learning of Heaven on the Distinction between Ways of Showing Respect (Tianxue bianjing lu; Monteiro), 47–­48 Ottoman Empire, 8, 223n32 padroado, Portuguese, 9, 70, 150, 175n20 Palmeiro, André, 75, 197n33 papacy: vs. Chinese state, 86; and Jesuits, 70, 139, 152; and native clergy, 59, 150; and Portugal, 9, 70, 150, 175n20 Pescadores, 133 Philippines: native clergy in, 149; Spanish control of, 2, 8, 21, 131, 132, 134, 175n20 pirates, Japanese, 133 Plato, 125 Poland, 9 Pomilun. See Treatise on the Destruction of Superstition Portugal: and Catholicism, 70, 130; colonialism of, 7, 8, 9, 67–­70, 132, 134, 165; declining power of, 69–­70; and global crisis, 30; and

global knowledge, 131, 163; and Jesuits, 70, 72; and mestizos, 57, 148, 203n5; and Ningbo, 24; and padroado, 9, 70, 150, 175n20 Portuguese language, 25, 183n23 printing technology, 45–­46 Propaganda Fide, Sacra Congregatio de (Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), 70 Protestants, 67, 166, 167 “pure blood” (limpieza de sangre), 149 Qi, state of, 113 Qian Fagong, 49 Qin, state of, 113, 123 Qin dynasty, 107, 109; burning of books in, 96, 202n108, 206n38 Qing dynasty: and Chinese state, 4, 7; civil service examinations in, 29, 31, 35, 36, 77, 128; and Confucian-­Christian synthesis, 12, 66; founding of, 19, 28–­29; religious diversity in, 166; resistance to, 29, 30–­31, 35–­36; and Zhu Zongyuan, 35–­36, 128. See also Ming-­Qing transition Qingshi jinshu zhijie. See Explications of the Golden Book on Contempt of the World racism, 149–­51 Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji; Sima Qian), 120–­21, 128, 209nn77–­80 Reformation, 136, 156, 159 Relatio et Libellus Supplex (Morales), 43 religio, concept of, 221n5; vs. philosophia, 158

264 Index religions: in Asia, 5, 155, 160–­61, 165, 166; diversity of, 5, 166, 167, 223n32; and elites, 37–­38; foreign in China, 5–­6, 153–­54; global expansion of, 153–­54, 160–­68; organization of, 57, 147, 154, 158, 167, 222n19; popular, 15, 85, 135; and power, 18, 21, 155; and revolts, 85, 134, 135; terms for, 221nn5–­6; and trade networks, 8, 21, 72, 161–­62, 222n15; Zhu’s knowledge of, 38–­39. See also particular faiths religious syncretism: and Buddhism, 84, 85, 86, 143, 163; in Chinese Christian communities, 60–­61, 162, 163; and Chinese elites, 6, 38, 79, 86, 163; and Christianity, 5, 16, 85–­86; and Confucianism, 77–­79, 85, 95–­96, 98–­99; and Daoism, 38, 39, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87; and Islam, 85, 86, 161, 162–­63, 165, 223n32; in Mughal Empire, 161, 222n16; and Zhu Zongyuan, 45, 87, 93 Responses to a Guest’s Questions (Da kewen; Zhu Zongyuan), 48–­50, 87–­90; on concepts of “middle” vs. “outer,” 110–­20, 125; and Confucian classics, 97, 202n106; criticism of, 54; dating of, 33, 186n60; and foreign origins of Christianity, 107–­8; form of, 49, 50–­51; idealizations in, 137, 144, 146; on mortality, 89–­90; preface to, 36, 48; reprints of, 52, 54; and Rites Controversy, 52–­54; and Zhu’s learning, 38, 43 “Restoration Society” (fushe), 98 revolts: in China, 26–­28, 85, 135; global, 30; in Macao, 134; in Manila, 132

Ricci, Matteo, 16, 59, 74, 214n28, 218n70, 223n28; and Confucian-­ Christian synthesis, 11; and Confucianism, 76, 142, 202n106; criticism of, 106, 216n52; on Europe, 132, 136; on sagehood, 145–­46; works by, 50, 65, 119, 136, 203n9; and Zhu, 96 “Ricci’s Fallacy and Its Deceptiveness” (Wei Jun), 106 Rich Dew of the “Spring and Autumn Annals” (Chunqiu fanlu; Dong Zhongshu), 112, 116, 117 Rites for the Veneration of Heaven and of the Gods of Earth and Harvest Serve to Venerate the “Lord on High” ( Jiaoshe zhi li suoyi shi shangdi ye; Zhu Zongyuan), 51–­52 Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), 115 rituals: ancient, 113, 114; and Confucian-­Christian synthesis, 63, 68–­69; state, 52, 78, 156, 157; Zhu’s works on, 51–­52. See also Chinese Rites Controversy; liturgy, Catholic Safavids, 8 sages (shengxian; shengren), 92, 93, 97–­98, 209n74, 218n76; Jesuits as, 140–­46, 152; and notions of barbarians, 120–­21, 127 Sanshan lunxueji. See Learned Discussions at Sanshan Schall von Bell, Johann Adam, 66 scholars (Ru): Jesuits as, 119–­20, 142–­43, 218n70; School of (rujia), 38, 68, 77; Western (xiru), 142 Scholasticism, 75, 197n35 science: of astronomy, 66, 134, 159, 176n34, 219n87; and Confucian-­

Index  265 Christian synthesis, 13, 46, 59; European, 2, 3, 44, 102, 151, 159, 164; in idealized Europe, 137, 138; and Jesuits, 46, 59, 104, 164, 176n34, 203n7, 219n87; military, 28, 30, 66, 164; and racism, 149; and rumored invasion, 134; works on, 44, 46, 47, 157 Scotland, 30 self-­cultivation, 77, 129; in neo-­ Confucianism, 80, 82, 83, 94–­95, 155; vs. political reform, 88–­89; and sages, 120, 144–­45, 209n74 Shen Que, 106 Shiites, 164 Shiji. See Records of the Grand Historian Shijing. See Book of Songs Shujing. See Book of Documents Shun (sage-­k ing), 120, 121 Sikhism, 222n16 silver, 24, 30, 153 Sima Qian, 120–­21 Sinarum Historia (Dunin-­Szpot), 40 slaves, Chinese, 132 social status: and Chinese clergy, 151; and Christianity, 15, 46, 55, 62, 66, 119; and civil service examinations, 7, 15, 55; and commercialization, 25; and Confucian-­Christian synthesis, 66; and Confucianism, 37, 38; and knowledge of Europe, 130; of Zhu Zongyuan, 5, 7, 10, 34, 35, 37, 54–­55, 56, 89, 154. See also elites, Chinese; lower segments of society Song dynasty, 79–­80, 81, 119 South Asia, 5, 63, 71, 132, 150, 155. See also Goa; India

Southeast Asia, 139, 195n6; Buddhism in, 147, 161, 165; Chinese migration to, 131–­32 Southern Song dynasty, 127 Spain, 24, 70, 130; in Philippines, 2, 8, 21, 131, 132, 134, 135, 175n20; proposed invasion by, 135 Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), 110–­20; terminology of, 114–­15 Spring and Autumn period, 113 Standaert, Nicolas, 14 Suárez, Francisco, 48 Sufis, 162–­63, 164 Summary of World Salvation (Zhengshi lüeshuo; Zhu Zongyuan), 50–­51, 90, 120, 145, 192n27, 202n106; criticism of, 54; on foreign origins of Christianity, 107, 108; on Three Teachings, 38, 39 Suzhou, 46 Taiwan, 132–­33 Taizhou school, 95, 145 Tang dynasty, 119, 140–­41 technology, 4, 134, 137, 138; and commercialization, 25, 163–­64; military, 28, 30, 66, 164; of printing, 45–­46. See also science theater, 83 Theravada Buddhism, 167, 222n15 Thirty Years’ War, 30, 136, 159 Thomas à Kempis, 47 Three Pillars (Yang Tingyun, Li Zhizao, Xu Guangxi), 174n13, 181n61 Three Teachings, 38, 39, 82, 83, 87. See also Buddhism; Confucianism; Daoism Three Teachings Are All One Society, 84

266 Index tian (heaven), 87, 91 tiandao (Way of Heaven), 112 Tianqi emperor (Ming), 26 tianxue. See Christianity Tianxue bianjing lu. See Notes of the Learning of Heaven on the Distinction between Ways of Showing Respect Tianxue lüeyi. See Introduction to the Learning of Heaven Tianxue sijing. See Four Mirrors of the Learning of Heaven tianzhu. See Lord of Heaven Tianzhu shengjiao huoyi lun. See Treatise on the Removal of Doubts about Christianity Tianzhu shengjiao shijie zhiquan. See Detailed Explanation of the Ten Commandments of the Holy Learning of the Lord of Heaven Tianzhu shiyi. See True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, The Tizheng bian. See Anthologies of Self-­Correction Tomás, Lucas, 54 Tong Guoqi, 36–­37 Torrente, Stanislao, 191n16 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 135 trade, transregional, 3–­9; centers of, 1, 3, 17, 19, 22–­26, 162, 164–­65; Central Asian, 5; and Chinese elites, 37–­38, 81; and Chinese knowledge of Europe, 130, 131–­32; Chinese restrictions on, 5, 22, 23, 24, 132; and Christianity, 21, 72, 161–­62, 222n15; and Europe, 4, 7–­9, 24–­25, 134; foreign products in, 5, 23, 108, 153; and global crisis, 30; and intercultural contacts, 24, 72, 132, 154, 161, 164–­65, 166; and local

communities, 1, 3, 25, 162, 164–­65; military competition in, 8–­9; in Ming-­Qing transition, 27, 166; networks of, 4–­5, 8–­9, 21, 22–­26, 162, 164, 166, 222n22; and religion, 8, 21, 24, 72, 161–­62, 222n15 Treatise of White and Black (Baiheilun), 127 Treatise on the Destruction of Superstition (Pomilun; Zhu Zongyuan), 33, 48, 143, 144 Treatise on the Removal of Doubts about Christianity (Tianzhu shengjiao huoyi lun; Zhu Zongyuan), 39, 48, 96–­97; reprints of, 52, 54 Trigault, Nicolas, 148 True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, The (Tianzhu shiyi; Matteo Ricci), 50, 65, 119, 136 universalism, 18, 20, 162–­64; Christian, 100–­105, 104, 118 Urban VIII, Pope, 70 Vagnoni, Alfonso, 134, 136 Valignano, Alessandro, 72, 74, 150–­51 Verbiest, Ferdinand, 54 Vietnam, 108, 163 von Bell, Johann Adam Schall, 16 Wang Gen, 135 Wang Ji, 83 Wang Yangming, 81–­84, 94–­97, 145, 155, 200n63 Warring States period, 79 Weddell, John, 133 Wei Jun, 105–­6 Wei Zhongxian, 26, 84 Wen, King, 121

Index  267 Wen Xiangfeng, 99 West, the: later dominance of, 4–­5, 9–­10, 104–­5, 157; terms for, 103, 106, 142; Zhu Zongyuan on, 137–­38, 215–16n42. See also Europe Western learning (xixue), 103–­4, 142, 176n34. See also science White Lotus sect, 28, 135 Wills, John E., 132 Wu, Emperor (Liang dynasty), 90 Wu, state of, 121, 122, 123 Wu Sangui, 28 Xavier, Francis, 71 xinglixue (Learning Involving Human Nature and Principle), 77 xinxue (Philosophy of Heart and Mind), 81 xiudao (cultivation of the Way), 87 Xiyouji. See Journey to the West Xu, state of, 117 Xu Guangqi, 7, 15, 46, 56, 88, 137 Yan Mo, 202n105 Yang Tingyun, 7, 15, 216n50 Yao (sage-­k ing), 120, 121 Yijing. See Book of Changes Yongle emperor, 108 You Yu (ancient minister), 120–­21, 127 Yu (sage-­k ing), 120, 121 Yuan dynasty, 127, 143, 154 Yuan Zongdao, 82–­83 Yue, state of, 122, 123 Zhang Geng, 146 Zhang Nengxin, 34, 35–­36, 48–­49, 190n13, 191n19 Zhang Xie, 132 Zhang Xingyao, 202n105, 219n85

Zhejiang, 1, 25, 31, 32, 42, 45, 58, 133. See also Ningbo Zheng, state of, 117 Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), 32 Zheng Weixin, 219n89 Zheng Xuan, 206n39 Zhengshi lüeshuo. See Summary of World Salvation Zhengyi commentary, 121 Zhifang waiji. See Chronicle of Foreign Lands zhongguo (Middle Kingdom, Middle states), 107, 113–­14, 118, 123 Zhongyong. See Doctrine of the Mean Zhou dynasty, 113, 114 Zhouli. See Rites of Zhou Zhu Biyuan, 188–89n93 Zhu Hong, 83 Zhu Xi, 38, 79–­81, 84, 94, 200n63. See also neo- ­Confucianism Zhu Ying, 34 Zhu Zongwen, 189n93 Zhu Zongyuan: and accommodation method, 86–­93, 152, 155; on afterlife, 51, 88–­91; baptism of, 39, 40, 189n96; on barbarians, 120–­25; and Bible, 2, 3, 49, 51; biography of, 17–­18, 19; birth year of, 32–­34; and Buddhism, 38, 40, 51, 87, 90, 91, 93, 201n76; and bureaucracy, 27, 34, 36–­37, 89; and Catholic Church, 42–­43, 147, 157–­58; and Catholic liturgy, 2, 20, 49, 51, 63, 147; and Christian communities, 19, 54, 154, 168; and civil service examinations, 3, 7, 34–­35, 154; on concepts of “middle” vs. “outer,” 110–­20, 126–­29; and Confucian classics, 88, 91, 92, 96–­99, 110–­20,

268 Index Zhu Zongyuan (continued) 160, 202n106; and Confucianism, 3, 10, 19, 20, 40, 44, 45, 49, 51, 52, 87, 89, 155, 201n76; conversion of, 18, 40; criticism of, 54; and Daoism, 40, 49, 51, 87, 90–­91, 201n76; death of, 43; distinctive features of, 4, 18, 21, 65, 67; education of, 34–­35; and enlightenment, 39–­40, 91; on Europe, 20–­21, 54, 135–­38; and European missionaries, 2, 7, 10, 19, 41, 49, 55, 56, 128, 168, 193n39; family of, 40–­41, 55–­56, 188–89n93; on foreign origins of Christianity, 107–­10; global historical contexts of, 1–­11, 160–­68; influence of, 54–­55; on Jesuits, 20–­21, 33, 49, 51, 140–­46, 152; learning of, 2–­3, 38–­39, 159–­60; on Lord of Heaven,

52, 88, 89–­92; in Ming-­Qing transition, 29–­36, 50, 160; on morality, 124–­25; and Ningbo, 37–­43; on notions of barbarians, 106; roles of, 19, 154–­55; on sages, 92, 93, 140–­46; as second-­ generation Christian, 174n13; self-­perception of, 167–­68; social status of, 5, 7, 10, 34, 35, 37, 54–­55, 56, 89, 154; sources on, 17, 32–­33; and Spring and Autumn Annals, 116–­18; works by, 2–­3, 18, 19, 33, 39, 44–­54, 96–­97, 143, 144, 154, 167–­68, 187n71. See also Responses to a Guest’s Questions; Summary of World Salvation Zhuangzi, 125 Zuozhuan, 112, 116, 208n63 Zürcher, Erik, 14