In his second attempt, Matteo Ricci was able to gain access to the Forbidden City. Over the next century, the Jesuits came to surprising influence in China through their knowledge of European astronomy, though this journey was not without its perils.

Transcript

Good evening, and welcome to the Song of Urania, a podcast about the history of astronomy from antiquity to the present, with new episodes every full moon. My name is Joe Antognini.

Last month I started to tell the story of the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries to China and I left you on something of a cliffhanger. The principal missionary, and for many of the early years, really the only missionary, was Matteo Ricci. His overriding goal was to travel to the capital city of Beijing, ingratiate himself to the most powerful officials, and ideally the emperor himself, and gain the permission the Jesuits needed to evangelize in this country that had been closed to outsiders for centuries. And after 18 years in China, having once tried to visit Beijing and been kicked out within just 24 hours, in 1600 Ricci finally felt that he had accumulated enough credibility to try his luck at visiting the capital once again.

Now, up until this point I’ve basically implied that the whole operation of the Jesuit mission was just Ricci. And, to be fair, for many years, that really wasn’t too off from the mark. Michele Ruggieri had been with him at the beginning, but he had gone back to Italy and had ended up dying there. And from time to time new priests would arrive to join the mission, but many of them died either on the long journey or shortly after arriving. But by 1600, Ricci had managed to gather a small coterie of missionaries around him. There were eight Jesuits in China all together, two of whom were Chinese. Ricci made his journey to Beijing with these two, along with Diego de Pantoja, who was a Spaniard who had arrived in the country three years earlier. Ricci had also developed a good relationship with a court eunuch in Nanjing, and the eunuch agreed to assist Ricci in his journey.

Despite all this, this was still a risky endeavor. By law, as a foreigner, Ricci was not allowed to enter the capital city unless he was delivering tribute to the emperor on behalf of a vassal state. And indeed, when he got to the outskirts of Beijing he and his entire party were arrested. During his arrest his mathematical and astronomical books, in particular, were confiscated. As I mentioned in Episode 38, astronomical knowledge was treated in Chinese society as a state secret. So naturally these especially sensitive documents were seized. But already, Ricci’s work from the past few years at cultivating his reputation with court officials had started to pay off. News of his arrest reached the emperor himself, and the emperor had heard enough stories floating through his court about this curious figure that he ordered Ricci and his party to be released and granted them permission to visit Beijing. In exchange, when Ricci arrived at court, he offered the Emperor several oil paintings and a pendulum clock. Ricci’s gift of the clock was something of a stroke of genius on his part. On the surface it was a very appropriate gift that highlighted the new, technical knowledge he was bringing to China. As I described in Episode 41, the court astronomers in China had been using water clocks to make their observations for millennia and they were very interested in precision timekeeping. Here was a clock that functioned by an entirely different mechanism. This gift was a tangible indication of the value of the knowledge he was bringing, of which this was just the start. But Ricci had an ulterior motive for giving this gift in particular. The clock was displayed in a prominent place in court, but the mechanical clocks of the day were finicky and required regular adjustments and the weights would periodically have to be reset. This gave Ricci and his colleagues an excuse to frequently visit the court, where they might happen upon various officials and could strike up conversation with them.

Ricci found that court officials in Beijing were just as eager to meet with him as they had been back in Nanjing and he had a constant stream of visitors. One of his early claims to fame was in providing a proof that the Sun is larger than the Earth and that the Moon is smaller than the Earth. What evidence he presented isn’t recorded, but it seems to have made an impression at court. That said, Ricci did not only attract attention based on his knowledge of Western science. A healthy dose of exoticism seemed to help, too. In particular, Ricci’s Spanish companion, Diego de Pantoja, had blue eyes, and apparently that alone was reason for a number of curious officials to drop by. Pantoja wrote, “The Chinese find [my eyes] very mysterious, and normally say that my eyes spy where to find precious stones and the like…claiming even that they have characters written inside them.” Ricci even managed to obtain a residence outside of the usual quarters that were reserved for foreign delegations. And Ricci’s growing renown within Chinese high society at long last started to pay dividends for the Jesuit mission as a whole. Now, when the Jesuit superiors sent missionaries to other parts of the country, they could declare their association with Ricci. If they got in trouble with local officials, word would eventually come down from the Imperial court to leave the Jesuits alone.

With the fame of the Jesuits growing, these other missionaries started to have more success at converting government officials. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, one of the major impediments to an official’s conversion was that he would have to give up his concubines. And any official of stature would have a number of concubines in his household as a sign of his high status. So generally the missionaries had more success with very old retired officials, who no longer needed to engage in the rat race, or young men who had not yet taken the imperial examination and who had no concubines to give up. But even still, from time to time they would score an important official and convince him to convert to the faith. And what’s more, typically when this happened, he would bring his entire household along with him. So convincing an important official to be baptised could result in the conversion of some twenty or thirty souls. Sadly, though, the imperial policy of frequently rotating officials through the provinces posed an issue. Oftentimes, a couple of years after converting, an official would be ordered to move to some distant province, along with his entire household. And because the Jesuits only had a handful of missionaries placed in a couple of strategic places throughout this vast country, the official was likely to end up somewhere without a priest and was liable to drift away from the faith. And even still, the numbers were relatively small. By 1605, the Jesuits estimated that they had no more than a thousand converts, compared with more than two hundred thousand over in Japan. So it was still hard to convince their superiors to send more resources or missionaries to China. And, what’s more, around this time, persecutions of Christians in Japan were starting to ramp up. In 1597 26 Christians had been crucified, and this was just the start. To a fervent young Jesuit who was asked to decide between going to China or Japan, the choice was obvious — the allure of potential martyrdom was hard to resist. So, despite their slow but steady progress, the Chinese mission continued to be chronically understaffed.

At any rate, back in Beijing, two of the most important converts that Ricci obtained were Xu Guangqi and Li Zhizao, who were both very high ranking officials. Xu Guangqi eventually became the Grand Secretary, and both had a deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. They worked on Chinese translations of Euclid’s Elements and Aristotle’s On the Heavens. But more importantly, they were the key to the mission’s staying power, because the mission was about to face its most uncertain period.

One of the key roles they played came after Matteo Ricci died in 1610. With their help, the Jesuits obtained permission for Ricci to be buried in a cemetery just outside of Beijing, and the Emperor even issued a proclamation eulogizing him. This was a major coup, at least in the Jesuits’ view. With Ricci’s burial plot in Beijing, the Jesuits would have a perpetual justification for being there — they could point to the Confucian duty of honoring an ancestor’s tomb. João Rodrigues wrote that Ricci had “[done] more with his death than with his life.” Now, the Jesuits may have been overstating things a bit. It was not uncommon for the Emperor to grant permission for foreign ambassadors who had died in the capital to be buried nearby. After all, just from the logistics, in those days you couldn’t transport a cadaver all that far before it started to decompose pretty heavily anyway. But the Jesuits were happy to seize on whatever excuse they could to stay in the country, and more importantly, near the capital.

After Matteo Ricci’s death, the Jesuit mission in China was led by Nicolò Longobardo. Longobardo felt that Ricci had put the mission on a solid footing and reported that in his estimation the Jesuits had ensconced themselves in China for good. Ricci had managed to obtain a salary from the imperial government, and even after his death, the Jesuits continued to receive these payments. The imperial court valued their mathematical and astronomical knowledge. And, he believed that now that they had seen the inside of the Forbidden City for so many years, the Chinese emperor was unlikely to allow them to leave and take the secrets they had seen within his walls with them. In fact, as precedent, in western China, if Muslim merchants stayed in China for nine years, they were forbidden from ever leaving.

But, as unimpeachable as Longobardo’s reasoning was, it turned out to be wrong. Although they didn’t know it, at this point they were in the twilight years of the Ming Dynasty. The current emperor, called the Wanli emperor, had been emperor for quite some time, forty years at this point. His own ability and interest in ruling had been in decline for a while. Throughout his reign he had struggled to tame the various factions that warred amongst themselves in his court. And as the decades passed, he seems to have just grown fed up with the court politics and after he failed to push through a reform in 1606, he essentially withdrew from governance and gave his underlings free reign. In the broader society this was also an interesting time. There was a huge increase in manufacturing activity and trade in the private sector, but simultaneously there was a decline in institutional capacity, since without leadership from the emperor, the bureaucracy essentially turned inward on itself and engaged in infighting. This seems to have produced a general kind of anxiety, at least among the literate classes, that channeled itself into what we might broadly identify as a religious revival. This ended up taking several different forms in different places. Among a very small minority, this led them to this new religion of Christianity. But more commonly, it led to an increase in fervor among Buddhists and Taoists or, on the other side, it led to a return to a stricter Confucianism.

Now, initially, court officials were all too happy to have the Jesuits on their side against the Buddhists. The Jesuits wrote a number of tracts vigorously condemning various aspects of Buddhism and court officials were eager to attach their own names to these tracts by writing introductions to them. But a strategy of the enemy of my enemy is my friend is not completely stable. Over the years a faction of more hardcore Confucians came to distrust the Jesuits. The anti-Jesuit faction, which the Jesuits internally referred to as the “ministers of Satan,” was led by an official based out of Nanjing named Shen Que.

One of the sources of tension was of a more temporal than spiritual nature. Early on Ricci had attempted to move away from the Portuguese trading colony at Macau so that the Jesuit mission wouldn’t be tarnished with the poor reputation of the Portuguese merchants anytime they stirred up local ire. Nevertheless, even in Beijing and Nanjing the Jesuits couldn’t completely escape this association. At some level it was inescapable that many officials would paint all westerners with the same brush. But the Jesuits and any funds supporting them also had to travel through Macau to interact with their superiors who were in charge of the overall mission in Asia. To try to stave off these associations in the early 1610s, Longobardo managed to get the Chinese mission to become organizationally independent of the overall Asian mission in order to reduce the frequency that missionaries would have to pass through Macau.

But this distancing was not enough and there were many other, more spiritual or religious reasons for the orthodox Confucians to oppose the presence of the Jesuits. So in 1616 Shen Que published a series of memorials attacking the Jesuits. Shen Que alleged a whole litany of crimes that the Jesuits had committed: the words “Heaven” and “Great” were reserved for the emperor, yet the Jesuits appropriated those words for their own God; they were spies for the Portuguese; they illegally dressed as Confucian scholars despite being barbarians; they bribed the Chinese to convert to their religion; they were alchemists. But to Shen Que, the biggest crime that the Jesuits had committed in this long rap sheet was that their foreign astronomical theories were corrupting traditional Confucian teachings on the heavens. The other crimes that the Jesuits had committed were bad, of course, but could be solved easily enough by expelling them. But, once introduced, these new astronomical ideas would be much harder to expel. And if some pillars of traditional Chinese thought were to collapse, what was to prevent the other pillars from collapsing in the future?

Had this happened 15 years earlier, that might have been the end of it. Shen Que would have published his memorials, but at the time the emperor clearly was intrigued enough by the foreigners knowledge that he wanted to keep them around. But in 1616 there effectively was no emperor running things. Shen Que got his companion at the Beijing Ministry of Rites to sign off on the memorial and then ordered the arrest and expulsion of all the Jesuits from China. Shortly thereafter, six Jesuit priests in Beijing and Nanjing were arrested, locked into wooden cages, and transported back to Macau and ultimately back to Europe. Twenty-three Christians were also arrested. Once word got out of the arrests the remaining fourteen Jesuit priests throughout the country, including Longobardo, went underground. The Jesuit leadership ordered that no priest in the country leave China alive unless they were physically captured and expelled.

And so, for the next seven years the Jesuit mission went dormant. In 1620, the absentee emperor at long last died, but this did not improve the political situation. His son ascended to the throne, and had the makings of a capable leader. But fate was not on his side. Within a month he fell ill and died and the Imperial throne passed, in turn, to his 15 year old son. His son was maybe something of a Ron Swanson. He apparently had a strong interest in woodworking, but less of an interest in governing. So the state of anarchy in the imperial palace continued.

Well, partly in response to the continued weakness of the central government, the Jurchen people who lived up to the northeast in Manchuria, began making trouble around this time. I had mentioned the Jurchens in the last episode when as far back as the 13th century the Han Chinese had been fighting them for control of Manchuria, and the Han ended up making a Faustian bargain of allying themselves with the Mongols to defeat the Jurchens. Well, after the region was overwhelmed by the Mongols, Manchuria more or less had stayed under Chinese Imperial control. But in the early 1600s, a Jurchen chief named Nurhaci managed to unite the scattered Jurchen tribes. He had earlier in his life been content to be a vassal of the Chinese Emperor and even prevented other Jurchen tribes from invading China. But once he came to be the ruler of all of the Jurchens, he seems to have take a more global view of their situation, and in 1618 he issued a document called the Seven Grievances in which he accused the Ming Dynasty of seven particular crimes against himself and the Jurchen people. And in response to these crimes, he began attacking to the south into Han-dominated China. Now, lest I mislead you, at this point in time there was no hard boundary between the places that the Jurchens lived and the places that the Han Chinese lived. After all, nominally the had all been part of same empire. There were many Han people living in Manchuria, and in fact many of them ended up defecting to the Jurchens. One of the causes of the fall of the Ming Dynasty was that over time, military leaders began to be rotated through different parts of the empire less frequently, and were now staying in one spot for as long as fifteen years. So over time the Han members of the military in Manchuria and their leaders began to identify more with the Jurchens than with the officials all the way off in Beijing.

Well, the assault of the Jurchens was slow but steady. To skip over many of the details, over the course of about 25 years the Jurchens made more and more progress and the Ming Dynasty became progressively weaker. As more Han officials defected from the falling Ming Dynasty to the Jurchens, they began to call for the establishment of a new dynasty. Nurhaci had died in battle a few years earlier and had been succeeded by his son Hong Taiji. Like any good aspiring Chinese emperor, Hong Taiji was reluctant to establish a new dynasty for himself, but was eventually persuaded to declare the Qing dynasty in 1636. In order to sidestep the embarrassing origins of his people as a vassal of the Chinese state for centuries, he renamed the Jurchen people the Manchus. And the name for the dynasty, Qing, was a modification of the original name of the kingdom the Jin Kingdom.

Well, the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty was a prolonged and messy process. It really began in 1618, but the Ming court in Beijing didn’t fall until 1644, and even after that a rump state persisted in the south of the country until 1688. But this whole time, the Jesuits were watching this process with interest from their safe houses. In 1623, Shen Que, the official who launched the expulsion of the Jesuits, retired. With his retirement, the principal force behind the persecution of the Jesuits dissipated and the restrictions on the Jesuits eased somewhat. During this time, the two highest ranking converts that Ricci had made, Xu Guangqi and Li Zhizao, had been working tirelessly to rehabilitate their Jesuit friends. A unique opportunity to highlight what they had to offer came in 1629 when there was a solar eclipse at Beijing.

Now, decades earlier, Ricci and the other missionaries in China had been begging Rome to send them more missionaries, and in particular, to send them missionaries who excelled at astronomy. Eventually Rome had heard their plea and sent them a group of very capable astronomers. Among them was a Jesuit named Johann Schreck, though he was more commonly known by a Latin pen name that he adopted of Terrentius, or Terrenz for short. Terrenz had made such a name for himself as an astronomer that when he decided to join the Jesuits, Galileo himself lamented the decision as “a great loss.” Another Jesuit in this group was Johann Adam Schall von Bell, of whom we will hear much more in a bit. This cohort had bad luck in timing, though. They arrived in China essentially right when the persecution was starting in 1618. After a few years they managed to sneak from Macau onto the mainland, but they had to lay low. But they had arrived not just with the clothes on their back, they brought the latest and greatest of European science at the time, and this being the early 1600s, science was improving rapidly. Among their artifacts was the first telescope in China. But beyond the physical artifacts, they had been aware of the developments in astronomical theory, in particular, the laws of planetary motion of a German astronomer named Johannes Kepler. As they became acculturated to Chinese astronomy and began to learn what the Chinese astronomers were more interested in and less interested in, they realized that it would be exceedingly valuable to be able to predict eclipses, and that Kepler’s discoveries should allow for highly accurate eclipse predictions.

Now, you’re probably already aware of Kepler’s laws, they say things like, the planets move in ellipses and the square of the period equals the cube of the semi-major axis. This is all very well and good, but how do you go from these very general statements to actually predicting a solar eclipse? The math is not entirely trivial. For these sorts of practical applications, astronomers would use planetary tables. The author of a set of planetary tables would take some model of planetary motion, be it the Ptolemaic model or Kepler’s model, and go through all the involved math to actually derive the positions of the planets at different points in time. Once this was done, it was relatively straightforward for a reader to look up the positions on a date of interest and possible apply a small correction to get the time. Well ever since he had published his laws of planetary motion in 1609, astronomers all across Europe had been begging Kepler to use them to compile a new set of astronomical tables. But Kepler, it seems, was never very enthusiastic about doing this. It involved a lot of tedious math and, well, he just didn’t want to do it. But Terrenz and the other Jesuit missionaries, along with other astronomers all over Europe, wrote him letters over and over again pleading with him to please compile the tables so they could take advantage of his discovery. Kepler responded to a letter from a Venetian astronomer by saying, “I beseech thee, my friends, do not sentence me entirely to the treadmill of mathematical computations, and leave me time for philosophical speculations which are my only delight.”

Well, Kepler formulated his three laws of planetary motion in 1609, but it wasn’t until 1623 that he finally completed his planetary tables, named the Rudolphine Tables. But even then, thanks to legal disputes and a number of other snafus which we’ll probably talk about in some future episode, it took another four years to get the tables over the finish line and published. Finally, in 1627, Kepler published the book, and sent a copy to Terrenz over in China.

This still gave the Jesuits over a year to prepare for the eclipse of 1629. Now the imperial astronomers, of course, had anticipated this eclipse as well and predicted both its time and duration. And, in fact, both the Chinese and Islamic schools made their own independent predictions. But the imperial astronomers in both schools were off by an hour as to the start of the eclipse, and they predicted that the eclipse would last for two hours, when in fact it only lasted for about two minutes. The Jesuits, however, were essentially correct in both their predictions. This impressed the emperor at the time enough that he invited the Jesuits to collaborate in the promulgation of a new calendar.

This emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, had ascended the throne just two years earlier, so it was appropriate that he promulgate a new calendar to commemorate this transition. The Chongzhen emperor was the younger brother of the previous emperor, the Tianqi Emperor, who was the one who had been more interested in woodworking than governing. Unlike his older brother, the Chongzhen Emperor was a relatively capable leader, at least as judged by the standards of the late Ming dynasty. But as fate would have it, he would be the last emperor of his dynasty. The accumulation of decades of mismanagement, along with his own particular shortcomings as a leader, and the pressure of the encroachment of the Manchus, was too much for him to overcome. After Beijing fell to the Manchus in 1644 he committed suicide and the Ming Dynasty essentially collapsed.

Despite the nearing turmoil, in these last few years of the Ming Dynasty the Jesuits had continued to work on the calendar reform. They had no official position within the bureaucracy, but Xu Guangqi, one of their converts, was head of the astronomical bureau. And after he died in 1633, he was replaced with an official named Li Tianjing, who was also Christian.

Well, the Jesuits had no particular attachment to the Ming rulers, and once it became clear that the Ming dynasty were on its way out, they lost no time in transferring their attention to the new Qing Dynasty. Almost immediately after the establishment of the Qing Dynasty the Jesuits were able to make a name for themselves. The Manchus took Beijing in April of 1644 and on the first day of September of that year there happened to be another solar eclipse in the capital. Once again, the Jesuits, the Chinese, and the Islamic astronomers predicted when the eclipse would occur and how long it would occur for. The astronomers from the two official schools were off by over an hour and the Jesuits were right on the dot. The Jesuits were quick to point out to the Qing emperor that the official astronomers had not erred in their calculations in any way. It was not as though they were incompetent and had made mistakes. It was simply that the astronomical models and techniques that the Jesuits had were superior to the Chinese models and techniques. The new Qing rulers were impressed with the accuracy of the Jesuits’ predictions, and also, being Manchu outsiders, they had little attachment to the way things had traditionally been done in the Astronomical Bureau. So, the Emperor appointed the Jesuit Adam Schall von Bell to be the head of the Astronomical Bureau, and from this point forward, for the next 160 years, the Astronomical Bureau was, with only a three-year hiatus, headed by a Jesuit.

Well, as head of the Astronomical Bureau, Schall immediately made himself useful. The establishment of a new dynasty cried out for the promulgation of a new calendar. And fortunately, Schall had just the thing. The Jesuits had spent the whole of the 1630s working on a calendar reform, and just when they had wrapped it up and were going to present it to the Chongzhen emperor, the emperor became somewhat distracted by the impending invasion of the Manchus and then killed himself. So after the new Qing Emperor set himself up, they already had a new calendar sitting around ready to go. It had to be tweaked a little bit, there were various references to the Ming Dynasty and these naturally had to be replaced with the Qing Dynasty, but within a year the Qing emperor was able to promulgate a new calendar to mark the establishment of his new dynasty.

As head of the Astronomical Bureau, Schall was not interested in being a mere figurehead. He wanted to make real reforms. During the late Ming Dynasty the Bureau had maintained five separate calendars. Schall reduced the number of calendars to two: one calendar for official purposes which contained all the various bells and whistles like planetary ephemerides; and a second calendar for the general public which was simplified and also included more astrological information — which were the propitious days for this or that.

He also attempted more ambitious organizational changes. Since the time of Kublai Khan in the 13th century, the Astronomical Bureau had existed as the union of two separate schools: the Chinese school and the Islamic school. Schall tried to create a third school, a Western school, which would use European techniques to predict eclipses and ephemerides. The idea of having yet another school of foreigners within the vaunted Astronomical Bureau competing with the Chinese school got too much pushback, however, and Schall’s effort foundered. So, instead of establishing an independent school that used Western techniques he decided to do away with the notion of having separate schools within the Astronomical Bureau altogether. He eliminated the Islamic school and turned his attention to updating the techniques used within the Chinese school to match those of the West. To this end he published thirty books in Chinese on various astronomical topics including trigonometry, the theory of eclipses, the telescope, and the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler.

Now, needless to say, Schall’s ambitious reforms earned him a few enemies. But fortunately for him, he had an excellent relationship with the new Qing Dynasty emperor, the Shunzhi Emperor. I said a few moments ago that the Emperor had appointed Schall to be the head of the Astronomical Bureau. This was true, but really only technically so since at the time the emperor was only six years old, so the appointment was really done by a regent acting in the young emperor’s name. Hong Taiji, the great Manchu ruler had died in 1643 and so didn’t quite get to see his forces capture Beijing. And so, when the Qing Dynasty was established, the throne fell to his five year old son. As the boy grew up he became quite fond of Schall, and even referred to him as “honorable father”. When Schall was originally appointed to be head of the Astronomical Bureau he was given the rank of Mandarin of the Fifth Class. This was relatively low on the hierarchy for his actual position, but was nevertheless a tremendous achievement for a foreigner. For decades the Jesuits had been wearing the clothing of a Confucian mandarin, or something similar to it, and were hoping that no one would take too much offense at it. But at long last, one of their ranks had finally earned the right to wear this outfit. During the Qing Dynasty the bureaucracy had nine ranks, and a Mandarin of the Fifth Class corresponded to positions like Assistant instructor at the Imperial university or a sub-prefect. But in 1658, the Shunzhi Emperor was so enthused by Schall’s work that he promoted him to Mandarin of the First Class which was a truly exalted position, being limited only to the Grand Secretary and attendants to the emperor himself. So, despite the opposition that his reforms engendered, his opponents couldn’t really do much given how much the emperor liked him.

But Schall also faced opposition from the other direction in Rome, and here the emperor’s favor did him little good. One of the main points of contention had to do with the more astrological aspects of the calendar. As I’ll discuss more in some future episode, the Catholic Church has had a long and complicated relationship with astrology. The Bible, of course, condemns astrology, though historically the Church had made a distinction between astrological practices which purported to inerrantly divine the future, which were forbidden, and practices which simply found the most opportune times for various things. The saying was that the stars incline, but they do not compel. By the middle of the 17th century, astrology was also just beginning to be distinguished from astronomy in Western science and to be regarded by some as mere superstition. Some of Schall’s Jesuit colleagues in China sent letters to Rome denouncing him for publishing the astrological elements of the official Chinese calendars. In his defense, Schall argued that he had only worked on the astronomical aspects of the calendar. The astrological work he had delegated to Chinese astronomers.

Another serious problem that others in Rome had with Schall was in his official role as the head of the Astronomical Bureau. This criticism had two parts. The first was more general. A number of officials in Rome, including some Jesuits, were uncomfortable with a Jesuit serving as a high government official within a government. The focus of a Jesuit’s work, after all, was to be the education of the youth and the conversion of souls. Yet here was Schall, who had supposedly taken a vow of poverty, living in a sumptuous residence and wearing the finest Chinese silk. Schall’s defense was that his position within the Chinese bureaucracy was not an end in itself, but was instrumental in getting permission for the Jesuits to do their missionary work across China. Moreover, by means of his astronomical work he was continuing to gain the respect of the Chinese elite for Western thought, and this would naturally extend to theological matters as well. And, what’s more, this strategy was clearly working. He had gained the favor of the Shunzhi Emperor and the emperor had granted the Jesuits permission to build dozens of churches.

A more specific kind of criticism of Schall’s position had to do with some of the Confucian rites he was obligated to participate in by virtue of his position as royal astronomer. To his critics in Rome his participation in these rituals was clear evidence of paganism, idolatry, heresy, apostasy, or some combination of all of them. Schall argued that these rites were not fundamentally religious in character. They were civic rites and so it was not incompatible with Christianity for a Jesuit to engage in them. For example, back in Europe, for centuries, during the coronation of a Holy Roman Emperor, it was expected that the pope, or at least an archbishop, would ritually lay the crown on the emperor’s head. No one disputed that it was licit for the pope to do this because the ritual was a fundamentally civic in nature. A tribunal in Rome was convened ended up decided to give the Jesuits wide latitude in how they were to accommodate Chinese cultural practices in their evangelization. They issued the following instructions to the Jesuits:

Do not act with zeal, do not put forward any arguments to convince these peoples to change their rites, their customs or their usages, except if they are evidently contrary to the [Catholic faith] and morality. What would be more absurd than to bring France, Spain, Italy or any other European country to the Chinese? Do not bring to them our countries, but instead bring to them the Faith, a Faith that does not reject or hurt the rites, nor the usages of any people, provided that these are not distasteful, but that instead keeps and protects them.

Nevertheless, these arguments didn’t sway everyone, and the permissibility of the Jesuits to engage in Confucian rites was a major point of contention for decades to come in what came to be known in Rome as the Chinese Rites Controversy.

Well, Schall caught flak for his participation in the Confucian rites on both sides. On the Chinese side, the members in the Ministry of Rites seem to have intuited that he was just going through the motions and that his heart wasn’t really in it. But, from that side, so long as Schall had the favor of the emperor they could do little but cope and seethe, as the kids today might say.

But this happy state of affairs did not last long for Schall. In 1661 there was a smallpox outbreak in Beijing. The government took smallpox outbreaks very seriously, and anytime it was detected in the city, patients would be forced to evacuate, and the imperial family would move into a self imposed quarantine as a precaution. During the Shunzhi Emperor’s reign he had had to go into quarantine on nine separate occasions. Nevertheless, in this ninth outbreak, the disease managed to reach the emperor’s family even in quarantine and he died of it at the age of 22, as did the empress.

The throne then passed to his six year old son, who became known as the Kangxi Emperor. As with his father, at the start of his reign decisions were made by a council of regents. And now, without the unwavering backing of the emperor, Schall’s enemies made their attack. Just as the Jesuits found themselves in peril when the Wanli Emperor had withdrawn from public life in the late 16-teens, the early 1660s were another perilous period for the missionaries.

The attacks were led by a pair of men: Wu Mingxuan, who was a disgruntled Muslim astronomer who had been fired when Schall had eliminated the Islamic School. The other was Yang Guangxian, who, if we are being generous, could be labeled an astrologer but who at least pretended to be an astronomer. The abilities of the two complemented each other. Wu Mingxuan was a capable enough astronomer who could lend credibility to their arguments, whereas Yang Guangxian was something of a polemicist whose writings could be guaranteed to attract attention.

Wu Mingxuan had actually publicly attacked the Jesuits on his own before he had met Yang Guangxian, but without Yang Guangxian’s political sensitivities his attacks had backfired spectacularly. In 1659, while the Shunzhi emperor was still living and Schall was at the height of favorability he had denounced the Jesuits and accused them of making inaccurate astronomical predictions. Having no real evidence of this, the charges he had levied were dismissed and he, in turn, was charged, in essence, with making frivolous accusations and was thrown in prison.

Upon his release he met Yang Guangxian who was coming to prominence with a series of sharply worded pamphlets. One of these, On Collecting Errors, attacked the Western calendar that the Jesuits had brought. Another, On Exposing Heterodoxy, attacked the religion of Christianity. Yang Guangxian attacked other aspects of the Jesuits’ astronomy. He was particularly critical of their claim that the Earth was spherical. He argued that if this were so, the water of the oceans would drip away from the Earth and gather at its bottom. He wrote,

If indeed there are countries existing on the curved edge and the bottom of the globe, then these places are surely immersed in water. Westerners [living on the other side of the world] then must surely belong to the likes of turtles and fishes…. Since the Earth resides on the water, it is evident that all ten thousand countries are located above the horizon…for the horizon is nothing but the level surface of the water of the Four Seas.

Well, in 1664, a few years after the death of the Shunzhi emperor, the pair collaborated on a more strategic attack on the Jesuits. The Shunzhi emperor had a child who had died as an infant in 1657. Following Confucian custom, Schall in his capacity as royal astronomer had advised the emperor as to the most auspicious time to bury the child. Yang Guangxian and Wu Mingxuan accused Schall of having deliberately chosen an inauspicious time for the burial of the child. The consequence of this would, of course, be severe retribution from heaven. And, indeed, within just a few years both the emperor and the empress had died. What more evidence was needed?

Without the protection of the emperor, Schall’s enemies, particularly at the Ministry of Rites came out in full force, and Schall, along with his collaborators were put on trial. The charges had three components: the first was conspiracy against the state, and this was the charge that was directly related to Schall’s catastrophic recommendation for the timing of the burial; the second charge was preaching a religion which was harmful to society; and the third was his furtherance of Western astronomy and the suppression of traditional Chinese astronomy. The trial of Schall and the Jesuits lasted seven months, during which time the accused were all imprisoned. Schall was 74 years old at the time, and no doubt in part due to the stress of the trial, during this time he suffered a major stroke. So in the latter part of the trial his defense had to be presented by his principal assistant, Ferdinand Verbiest.

In the end, whatever defense they presented was not sufficient and the Jesuits, along with their collaborators, were all found guilty. The punishment was death by dismemberment. Undoubtedly they spent a long night in preparation for an even more important judgment they would face before their creator. But the very next day, a major earthquake struck the vicinity of Beijing and damaged the palace. As I mentioned in episode 42, earthquakes, like comets or unpredicted eclipses, were seen as signs of heavenly displeasure. And an earthquake that damaged the emperor’s palace itself was a severe rebuke from heaven. The earthquake was immediately interpreted by the judges as a sign that a great injustice had occurred. To appease the heavens, the sentences of the Jesuits were all commuted to house arrest. Unfortunately, their Chinese collaborators were not so lucky. Despite the earthquake, five of them were nevertheless beheaded for their role in working with the foreigners.

So, in 1665, the brief interlude began in which the Jesuits did not run the Astronomical Bureau. In recognition of his contributions in exposing the perfidy of the Jesuits, Yang Guangxian was appointed to Schall’s former position as head of the Astronomical Bureau. For his part, Yang Guangxian did not actually seem to have any desire to hold this role. He didn’t know anywhere close to enough astronomy to perform the role competently. But the regents insisted that he was duty bound to do so. To help him with the technical aspects of the job, Yang appointed his collaborator, Wu Mingxuan to be his right hand man. Then Yang focused on the parts of the job he had some talent for. He ordered all the western books to be burned, took possession of the Jesuit church, and smashed all the statues. Then once this had been accomplished he hung a picture of himself up over the altar. Within a year or two, thanks to Wu Mingxuan, he then published a new calendar as he was required to do.

Well, three years later, in 1668, the Kangxi Emperor was now fourteen years old, and he was starting to take an interest in matters of state. After the trial Schall’s health had declined further, and within a year he had died in house arrest. Leadership of the Jesuit mission in China was then taken up by Verbiest. Now, taking the reins of power from the regents was a somewhat delicate affair for the young Kangxi emperor. Right from the start, the regency period had been beset by palace intrigue. After the death of the Shunzhi Emperor, his will had rather unusually appointed four men to be regents, but his mother had tampered with the will, so it was unclear whether this choice was really that of the emperor’s or not. Either way, power struggles ensued. One of the regents died fairly early on and another was apparently uninterested in exercising any power himself and simply aligned himself with a third regent named Oboi. Oboi then spent years duking it out with the fourth regent, named Suksaha. Eventually Oboi managed to get Suksaha put to death, at which point he effectively became the sole ruler of China. Given Oboi’s powerful position, the young Kangxi emperor had to tread carefully to assert his own authority without instigating a coup. The calendar was an excellent, relatively low stakes way to begin to do this. Oboi had, at least implicitly, aligned himself with Yang Guangxian and against the Jesuits. Deposing Yang Guangxian and reinstating the Jesuits was a concrete way for the emperor to begin to flex his power. At his request, Verbiest had already informed the emperor of the various mistakes in the calendar that Yang Guangxian had produced.

Rather than simply kick out Yang Guangxian and reappoint the Jesuits, which might be seen as arbitrary, the emperor decided to hold a public contest to determine who was worthy to hold the position of royal astronomer. Verbiest and Yang Guangxian were to predict the length of the shadow of a gnomon at a predetermined day and a predetermined time. Verbiest’s prediction was quite accurate, whereas Yang Guangxian refused to even make a prediction at all. And to prove that this wasn’t a fluke, Verbiest repeated the prediction on several different days and at several different times. The Emperor was satisfied with the superiority of Western astronomy over traditional Chinese astronomy and Yang was first fired and then sentenced to death by dismemberment, just as the Jesuits had been. But in his mercy, and perhaps due to Yang’s old age, the emperor reduced Yang’s sentence to exile in his hometown. Though Yang died of old age during the journey.

So in 1669 Verbiest became the head of the Astronomical Bureau, and from then on the post was occupied continuously by a Jesuit until 1805, which is all the more remarkable because the Jesuits ceased to exist as a religious order in (the year) 1773. But more about that in a moment.

Well, like his predecessor Schall, Verbiest took his role very seriously. Almost immediately upon taking office he proposed to the emperor that the calendar that Yang had developed be corrected. In particular, Yang had inserted an extra month into the calendar, presumably because he was using an inaccurate lunar period. Verbiest wanted the extra month removed. Now, correcting the calendar may seem like a trivial thing today, but this was an exceedingly bold move. The emperor had already approved and promulgated a calendar. Millions of people all over the country were using it. To issue a correction would be nothing short of asking the emperor to admit very publicly that he had erred in a task that was fundamental to his legitimacy. Verbiest’s underlings pleaded with him not to ask the emperor to make this correction lest they all suffer his wrath. Verbiest’s response was simply, “it is not within my power to make the heavens agree with your calendar. The extra month must be taken out.”

As it happened, the trepidation of his reports was unwarranted. The Kangxi emperor was extremely receptive to the proof that Verbiest had that the current calendar was inaccurate and he issued a correction without much fuss. Just as the Shunzhi emperor became quite fond of Schall, the Kangxi emperor became good friends with Verbiest. Verbiest personally tutored the emperor on a number of subjects like mathematics, philosophy, and music and the emperor had Verbiest accompany him on his trips throughout the country. Like Schall, Verbiest was elevated to the exalted rank of a Mandarin of the First Class.

Verbiest also wrote a number of books on astronomy in Chinese. Verbiest’s most tangible legacy, however, remains to this day. He constructed a new set of astronomical instruments in bronze for the imperial observatory in Beijing. These instruments included two armillary spheres, one ecliptic and the other equatorial, a quadrant, a sextant, a horizontal circle that could be used to measure azimuth, and a large celestial globe. These instruments are all still present at the observatory to this day. Verbiest also described the construction and working of these instruments in a book called “On the Theory, Use and Fabrication of Astronomical Instruments and Mechanisms.”

Now, all along, the strategy that the Jesuits had been pursuing, for over a century now, was to take advantage of the fact that the Chinese state valued astronomical knowledge and European astronomy was superior to Chinese astronomy at the time. They could then leverage this knowledge to win themselves friends in high places, and through these connections persuade the country’s rulers to grant the Jesuits permission to evangelize in the country. It had certainly taken a long time, but the strategy was undoubtedly effective. Now, the Jesuits had become not simply respected by two successive emperors, but even friends with them. And unlike the Shunzhi emperor who had the bad fortune to die in his early twenties, the Kangxi emperor reigned for over fifty years. Over the decades, the Jesuits had managed to get permission to preach the faith in various cities, but finally in 1692, the Kangxi emperor granted blanket permission for the Jesuits to evangelize anywhere in China. The emperor declared,

The Europeans are very quiet; they do not excite any disturbances in the provinces, they do no harm to anyone, they commit no crimes, and their doctrine has nothing in common with that of the false sects in the empire, nor has it any tendency to excite sedition … We decide therefore that all temples dedicated to the Lord of heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practiced according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth offer them any opposition.

So that was it. They had at last done it. But unfortunately, as Verbiest’s position reached its apogee in the imperial court in China, it began to weaken back in Rome. The theological controversy over the accommodations that the Jesuits had made to Chinese cultural practices started to flare up again. At this stage the critics had three main objections to the behavior of the Jesuits and their Catholic converts in China. The first was the translation of the word God. The Jesuits had permitted the God to be translated as, among other things, “tian,” which is usually rendered in English as “Heaven.” But in the Catholic faith God is not identical with heaven — God is the creator of both heaven and Earth. The other criticisms had to do with whether it was permissible for Chinese Catholics to participate in the various Confucian rites, particularly the rites they performed at the change of seasons and the ancestor rites.

This time around the opponents of the Jesuits in Rome prevailed and in 1704 and again in 1715 Pope Clement XI forbade Chinese Catholics from participating in or even attending any of the seasonal or ancestral Confucian rites as he had concluded that they were a fundamentally pagan practice. The Kangxi emperor became incensed when he learned of this, that some religious leader halfway across the globe was issuing proclamations and meddling in the affairs of the subjects of his empire. He revoked the permission of the Christians to evangelize, and declared,

Reading this proclamation, I have concluded that the Westerners are petty indeed. It is impossible to reason with them because they do not understand larger issues as we understand them in China. There is not a single Westerner versed in Chinese works, and their remarks are often incredible and ridiculous. To judge from this proclamation, their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never seen a document which contains so much nonsense. From now on, Westerners should not be allowed to preach in China, to avoid further trouble.

So, with that, a century of efforts on the part of the Jesuits to gain access to China came to a close. Nevertheless, the Jesuits did not lose hope. They were permitted to stay on in their role running the Astronomical Bureau. They hoped that they could continue to make themselves useful to the emperor and that the broader diplomatic relations between the emperor and the Vatican might one day improve.

Throughout the 18th century they continued their astronomical work. The Jesuits maintained connections with the burgeoning scientific community in Europe and worked to translate the latest advances in science like Newtonian mechanics and the theory of logarithms into Chinese. By this point the Jesuits had become something of a fixture in Chinese imperial politics, so throughout the 18th century there was none of the high drama that there had been in the previous century.

The beginning of the end of the Jesuit leadership of the Astronomical Bureau came in 1773 with the suppression of the Jesuit order. I’ve mentioned the enemies of the Jesuits a couple of times now in connection with the Chinese Rites Controversy, so it would be worth saying a few words about what their beef was with the Jesuits.

Now, right from the start, the Jesuit order rubbed certain people in the Church the wrong way. Typically, when you have a religious order in the Catholic Church, the order is named after its founder. You have the Dominicans, named after St. Dominic, the Benedictines, named after St. Benedict, the Franciscans, named after St. Francis. Yet the Jesuits didn’t call themselves the Ignatians after St. Ignatius, their founder. No, they named themselves after the Lord Jesus himself — just who did they think they were?

Furthermore, throughout the Church’s history there had always been conflicts between the pope and monarchs who each tried to assert their authority over the other. Monarchs would try to appoint bishops and popes would get involved in the foreign affairs or even internal affairs of nations. The fact that the Jesuits had sworn their allegiance to the pope had made them distrusted by secular authorities. This might have been fine if the Jesuits were hermits, but they oftentimes strategically inserted themselves into positions of political power to achieve their religious goals. This, of course, was their whole strategy in getting involved in astronomy in China, but they had worked their way into power all over the globe. The pattern that they had often followed was that they had set out on missions to far flung lands all over the world right when these colonies were being established. Unlike the early colonizers, the Jesuits had a tendency to stick around a long time, and having been well educated they were in many places the most competent people to manage these very remote colonies. Over time, many of these colonies became huge sources of wealth. And thanks to their position running things, the Jesuit order managed to become quite wealthy. They apparently professed a vow of poverty when they joined the order, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at them.

In the late 1760s and early 1770s, these colonies across the world were becoming extremely productive and European countries were becoming more interested in taking a more active role in managing them. Over the course of about a decade a series of countries expelled the Jesuits from their lands, both the colonies and also the homeland. First Portugal in 1759, then France in 1764, and then Spain in 1767. In fact, where I sit as I record this podcast in California, it is due to this expulsion that all the missions here are Franciscan missions. The Jesuits had begun working their way up the California coast in the early 1760s and established a few missions in Baja California. But after their expulsion in 1767 the missions were taken over by the Franciscans, and all the missions in Alta California were Franciscan.

After this the Jesuits began to have trouble in other parts of Europe. Belgium, Prussia, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came next. By 1773 there was a huge army of Jesuits sitting around in Rome having been exiled from the lands they had been ordered to go to. I mentioned in the last episode that the Jesuits have sometimes been described as the Pope’s shock troops. But now he really couldn’t deploy them anywhere. So given that the Jesuits could no longer realistically carry out the goals of their order, education and missionary work, Pope Clement XIV decided to bring the order to an end.

So, officially, the Jesuits stopped running the Astronomical Bureau in China in 1773 since there were no Jesuits anywhere anymore. The head of the mission in China at the time, Augustin von Hallerstein, was apparently so dismayed at the news of the suppression of the order that he had a stroke and died shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, the other former Jesuits stayed in the country and took over the role of running the Astronomical Bureau until the last of them died in 1805. At that point, with no one from Europe to replace them, the leadership of the Astronomical Bureau once again transferred back to the hands of a Chinese subject. Though now, after 160 years of Jesuit management, subsequent royal astronomers had long been trained by the Jesuits in Western astronomical techniques. The Jesuit order was restored in 1815, but this point the Jesuit leadership had other priorities and didn’t send any other astronomers back to China. Incidentally, Pope Pius VII restored the Jesuit order because after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, a number of European monarchs now saw the advantage of aligning themselves more closely with the pope. But in more Protestant countries the prohibitions continued. The Jesuits were banned from England until 1846, from Germany between 1872 and 1917, from Norway until 1956, and from Switzerland until 1973.

Well, one last coda to this story came in 1939. The Jesuits continued working in China in the hopes that the Chinese Emperor and Rome might come to a better mutual understanding about the nature of the Confucian Rites and to what degree Chinese cultural practices could be accommodated by the Catholic faith. That never happened. When the last Chinese emperor was deposed in 1912, Pope Clement XI’s prohibition was still in force and had been later reiterated by Pope Benedict XIV who had additionally required the Jesuits to swear an oath that they would stop pestering him to revisit the issue.

But in 1939, shortly after Pope Pius XII became pope, he obtained a statement from the Chinese government of the time that the Confucian rituals that were at the heart of the controversy were simply civic rituals and did not have a religious character. Pius XII declared,

It is abundantly clear that in the regions of the Orient some ceremonies, although they may have been involved with pagan rites in ancient times, have—with the changes in customs and thinking over the course of centuries—retained merely the civil significance of piety towards the ancestors or of love of the fatherland or of courtesy towards one’s neighbors.

This once again opened the doors for Christian evangelization of China, at least in principle. But, once again, the timing was poor. World War II broke out, and then after the end of World War the Communist Revolution started, and after the Communist Party took control of the country religion of any kind was prohibited.

Well, with that we will have to leave China and begin to explore astronomy elsewhere. Next month we will turn to the astronomy of Oceania, starting with the astronomy of the aboriginal Australians. I hope you’ll join me then. Until the next full moon, good night and clear skies.

Additional references

• Brockey, Journey to the East
• Hannam, The Clash Between the Jesuits and Traditional Chinese Square-Earth Cosmology
• Udias, Searching the Heavens and the Earth