Western Failure to Face Reality

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http://english.qianlong.com/7838/2003/07/18/207 (AT) 1502577 (DOT) htm

 

After the mid-14th century, when the Chinese people regained their

country on the advent of of the Ming Dynasty, the boundless Celestial

Empire shut itself behind the Great Wall. It was only through the

good offices of the Jesuits that the western world was able to

continue contacts with China, whose precise borders were only

approximate to outsiders. Maps drawn by Catholic missionaries in the

17th century, however, enabled Europeans to reconsider China for

profitable trading.

 

Peking, China's mythic but affluent capital, was the city everyone

dreamt about, though visits by foreigners were strictly forbidden by

a succession of emperors. Any foreigner was considered to be a

dangerous spy to be kept away from the country or, if he did arrive

in Peking, to be confined in the so-called ?¡ãhouse for foreigners?¡À-

a prison of sorts guarded by soldiers where missionaries and

ambassadors alike were locked up and deprived of their writing

instruments lest they should draw a plan of the city.

 

What were the features of Peking in the early 17th century? From

those pre-camera days, all we can rely on are a few amateurish

drawings improvised by artists in the west from the memories of men

who had visited the Chinese city. These eye witnesses could do little

more than recall certa buildings and their features, notably the

Forbidden City of which Marco Polo had given a lively description

more than three centuries earlier. Kublai Khan??s Peking bore no

resemblance to the reality of the city that existed during the Ming

Dynasty.

 

While researching Peking's and China's iconography I found a lot of

material in prominent western libraries. A map of Peking from the

early 17th century, drawn from a description by Italian missionary

Matteo Ricci (known to the Chinese as Li Madou) and published in a

travel book printed in Venice in the same century, is surprisingly

accurate. Along with the city gates and the Imperial Palace, the map

shows only religious buildings, mainly the Catholic churches, the

temples of Heaven and Agriculture, and the astronomy observatory ?the

latter described as the ?¡ãtower of mathematicians?¡À There are no

references to large urban lakes such as Shichahai, Beihai and Zhong

Nanhai

 

What purports to be a map of the Forbidden City, titled The Great

Imperial Throne, is amazingly fanciful, the result of a wholly

western mindset in that the city is in the likeness of a Renaissance

fortress city. The only aspect to some extent faithfully rendered is

the sequence of walled quadrangles, concentric squares, though they

were very different to the courts of the Forbidden City.

 

Another engraving, The Great Imperial Audience Hall, is no doubt a

representation of the quadrangle and of the Hall of Supreme Harmony,

though it could in fact be Wu Men, the entrance to the Forbidden

City. The engraving was made from a drawing by Johan Nienhof, who

arrived in Peking in 1656 as part of the retinue of the Dutch

ambassador.

 

Simply, then, there was much of the ?¡ãwhat the eye perversely saw,

the hand couldn??t draw?¡À about depictions of China and some of its

people. The inaccuracy of ?¡ãboss-eyed?¡À Europeans simply meant that

they found it difficult to absorb a reality that was different to

cities in their home country. The late 17th century saw an attempt to

picture the Emperor of China, a Mandarin and a Buddhist Lama, as a

kind of mixture of western and eastern elements. The subjects

depicted have European facial features, while their clothing is the

outcome of descriptions that the anonymous designer probably obtained

from missionaries?? or ambassadors reports.

 

Just as distorted is that what purports to be a Chinese throne is a

wooden armchair with a studded leather cover, a commonplace of 17th-

century Italy or Spain. No less odd are the other ways in which the

Chinese are represented. Two early-18th century prints are still

pervaded by western tastes and influences. In fact, the 18th century

was to pass before the western world could come up with more

plausible images and reports about China, Peking in particular -a

subject I will cover in my next Yesteryear Beijing.

 

Editor Cilla