CHINA AND THE MANCHUS

New Zealand Tablet, 14 March 1912, Page 15

CHINA AND THE MANCHUS

THE EARLY JESUIT MISSIONARIES It would be difficult for a student of history to tell you offhand who was the first representative of the Manchu dynasty which the Chinese are now setting aside, after submitting to its rule for three hundred years (writes ‘X ’ in America). On the other hand, a great many,people have heard of a certain famous Li-mat-tieu who was living in Peking just as those Manchus were making their appearance three hundred years ago. In China, especially, everyone knows him, and his name is a household word. He was not an emperor, nor a statesman, nor a soldier, but a great mathematician and a greater missionary. He is commonly known to the Western world as Father Matteo Ricci. The Chinese, how.ever, read his name backward, and by changing li into L, as they always do, and omitting the troublesome letters cci, they transformed Ricci Matteo into Li-mat-tieu; . Matteo Ricci was an Italian: from Macerata. He was born in 1552, became a Jesuit when he was nineteen, and made his mathematical studies under the famous Father Clavius, who was known as * The Christian Euclid/ the great scholar who was Galileo’s friend and who had so much to do with the Gregorian calendar. Evidently, Ricci’s scientific career was inspired by Clavius, but, unlike his master, he was to achieve greatness not in Europe, but in distant and curious China. In 1580 he was sent to Macao, a Portuguese settlement near Hong Kong, where he met Father Ruggieri, who had been wrestling with the difficulties of the Chinese languages for some time, and was now waiting for a chance To Enter China to Preach the Gospel. /,//. But no foreigner could ever pass the frontiers except the merchants with their wares, and even they never went farther .than Canton, which a glance at the map will show us it not at a very great distance from the borders. At last, however, the two zealous men succeeded in going in a caravan to Canton, but there was some sort of difficulty in that city, and we find them shortly after /settled at Chau-king, which lies to the west of Canton. r There they built a little house and chapel. Their acknowledged learning, their perfect mastery of Chinese, their wonderful library, their maps and their scientific instruments naturally attracted a great deal of attention, while the strange vestments and unusual ceremonies in the chapel appealed to something higher than the natural. There they labored with considerable success for a time, but Chau-king was not Peking, and Ricci especially was eager to face the Emperor himself to secure permission to preach everywhere in China. But year after year: rolled by, bringing him no nearer the goal, and it was not until 1600 that he found himself inside

the walls of Peking. To have done even that much was to have accomplished the impossible, and it had implied many a hardship and many a danger that would have . exhausted and appalled any less valiant man. However, he had not succeeded in his main object, for no mandarin, no matter how powerful or friendly, would have presumed to present him to the Emperor, who lived in his palace enveloped in such absolute and mysterious seclusion that few of his own people, and no one from the Western world, was ever permitted to look upon his sacred countenance. So Ricci withdrew, defeated indeed, but not discouraged. He made another attempt, but failed again; until finally, in 1601, the Emperor, who had heard of the persistent stranger, and of the mysterious bells he had with him, ‘ which rung of themselves ’ —as a matter of fact they were only ordinary clocks—summoned. Li-mat-tieu to the palace, ■ - ‘ "V/ Ricci was One of China’s Great Men from that out. He was installed in the palace itself, and to the amazement of every one, with tree access to the Emperor at all times he was commissioned to instruct four of the chief mathematicians ; of the realm in the abstruse science of winding the clocks; he gave learned lectures to the literati; he instituted classes of mathematics; he wrote music for the court and the common people, and at the same time began the ( organisation of the Church in China. He did not live to see the result of his labors, but thirty years after 'his death there were 175 churches in different parts of the empire. ~ The missionary work alone that he assumed would have been enough to exhaust the energy of any ordinary man, but Ricci was not an ordinary man;. As we turn the pages of Sommervogel’s Bibliotheca Scriptorum, S.J., we ask in amazement how it was possible for one so burdened to have been able in the midst of his other labors to give to the world such a library of learned works. There are more than thirty of them on all sorts of subjects. A Chinese Euclid, a Chinese De Amicitia, known as Kiao-yeou-luen; . a Memoria Techriica, treatises on Geometry, Astronomy, Weights ■; and Measures, Gnomonics, *Astrolabographies, Music, Moral Philosophy, Bellarmine’S;, Catechism in Chinese,, Chinese Ancient History, a Chinese Dictionary, eight arias for the organ, the theory of right-angled triangles, isoperimetric figures, etc. , - Hg lived in Peking amid all this splendor and success! from: 1601 to 1610. They were his last years, just as they were the last years of the imperial dynasty of Ming, from whose representatives he had received, suchkdistinguished consideration. Already the Tartars were crossing the frontiers, though it was not till thirty years later that the first Manchu mounted the imperial throne. Ricci’s glory, however, has remained undimmed through all the political changes that have supervened since then, and his name is still cherished in China. ' ' / > * •/ Twelve years after the demise of , this great, missionary, John Adam Schall von Bell of Cologne appeared in China, and there he toiled and suffered for almost half a century. He was made President of the Mathematical Tribunal and charged with the reform of the Chinese Calendar. Xum Chin, the Emperor, honored him with a friendship such as had never been vouchsafed to any foreigner, and readily granted him leave to preach wherever he liked in China. It was Schall who erected The First Church in Peking. During the twenty tumultuous years of war waged in self-defence by the Mings against the incoming Manchus Father Schall lived on the most intimate terms of friendship with the last representative of the expiring dynasty, and when the crash finally came, in 1644, it made no change in the status of this great representatice of science and religion. The first Manchu Emperor also was his friend, and so was the second. Indeed, it was this very friendship that was the occasion of Schall’s first sufferings in China. For when ChunTchi died, in 1661, the four regents appointed to govern during the minority of the prince named Father Schall as his tutor. . That, however, exasperated the bonzes.

* Ihe y rose in rebellion against it and succeeded in having . Schall arrested, loaded with chains and sent to, prison to await the execution of the terrible sentence of being cut- into pieces. He was am old man by that time, for, he had passed his seventieth year, but the generosity he had displayed in the days of his power and prosperity was remembered, as was the veneration in which he had so long been held for his learning and virtue. The result was that a popular demand was made for his release. Schall would have willingly died at that time, but the Lord wished otherwise, and he was restored to his rejoicing brethren. Eight years afterwards he went to heaven. He, too, has Enriched Chinese Literature • with a vast number of learned works, several of them in two volumes, one, on European Astronomy, in four, another in seven, and another, on Lunar and Solar —Eclipses, running up to,nine volumes. - The last of this remarkable scientific Chinese triumvirate was Ferdinand Yerbiest, who was born in Belgium, near Courtrai, three years before the Manchus began to reign in China. He had asked for the missions, although he was distinguished enough to have been selected for the Public Act in theology at the College of Seville in 1655, and might have made a great name in Europe. But he was not seeking glory. When he arrived in China he betook himself to preaching, but Father Schall summoned him to Peking as a collaborator in the Astronomical Observatory. He obeyed, of course, and when Schall was sent to prison Yerbiest was with him. Probably they were both liberated at the same time. During their incarceration, everything, as was to be expected, went topsy turvey in the astronomical world at Peking, and in 1669 Yerbiest. Was summoned to the capital to preside over the TriJruna! of Mathematics. In 1681 we find him in the somewhat unpeaceful occupation of casting cannon for the army and the more pleasing one of fashioning the maivellously beautiful and precious astronomical instruments in bronze which in the last Boxer uprising were bundled off to Berlin for safekeeping, though the jespectful Chinese and the weather had done them no harm during the two hundred years and more that they _ were perched on the parapets of Peking. Like his predecessors, . •, Yerbiest was a Prolific Writer. ' ' < One of his books wSs a Tartar Grammar, written, no doubt, -to accustom the subject Chinese to the language of the conqueror. But all the Jesuits in China have been, from the beginning, very active with the pen, and it is calculated that in spite of their missionary work they have produced no less than 131 works on religion, 103 on mathematics and 55 on physical and moral sciences. Yerbiest died in 1688, after a short illness, and his obsequies were celebrated in Peking with most extraordinary pomp and ceremony. Thus with both Ming and Manchu these missionary mathematicians always enjoyed the greatest favor both of the court and the common people. It is to be hoped that this union of science and religion which has always been a tradition among the Jesuits as an effective apostolic instrumentality, may avail at the present time. There is a famous Jesuit observatory at Zi-ka-wei. Perhaps it may serve as a means of conciliation and. good will with the new rulers of China, no matter what political formthe coming Government may assume. ——MMI

/ During the fierce storm oh Sunday afternoon, Febr ruary 25, the Convent of Mount St. Patrick, Padding--ton, by the Sisters of Charity, suffered considerable damage from the effect of lightning striking the tower 7 of the and one of the four globular concrete .. embellishments, weighing over hundredweight, placed on the corner of the tower toppled down. The dislodged material (says the Freeman's ■Journal) was known as a finial, and connecting with it the bed of ‘ brickwork was a piece of iron. When this was struck the finial fell from a height of over 50ft, crashed on to.the roof of a large class-room, and then rolled over, landing in front of a doorway leading into the yard * It as remarkable that none of the Sisters were hurt!