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Western Failure to Face Reality

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 "house for foreigners"- 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 "tower of mathematicians" 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 "what the eye perversely saw, the hand couldn't draw" about depictions of China and some of its people. The inaccuracy of "boss-eyed" 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.