Vermeer's Hat (16 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
Commissioner Pan then turned to Las Cortes. He posed a series of carefully phrased questions designed to pry out the truth.
Trusting Las Cortes over his own officers, Pan soon determined that these people had indeed been maltreated, that the ship
was carrying a cargo of silver, that its owners had been prevented from recovering it, and that some of it had been salvaged
later. Pan expected as much, but knowing that the commander would not present any evidence that silver had been taken, he
could do nothing. He then turned to the decapitations, the evidence for which—the severed heads of Ganpti and the others—was
sitting in a row of baskets in the courtroom.
“Did you see anyone from Jinghai kill the people whose heads have been presented before this court?”
“In truth,” declared Las Cortes, “we saw them decapitate seven of our people, but cannot say whether they cut off their heads
while they were still living or after they had already died, whether from drowning or exposure or the injuries they suffered
during the shipwreck.”
Commissioner Pan was trying to get at the issue of whether any of the foreigners had died at Chinese hands, but Las Cortes
chose to prevaricate. He suspected that nothing would be achieved by filing accusations of murder—other than delaying their
departure. Pan seems to have understood Las Cortes’s testimony for what it was: an agreement to compromise in order to close
the case and allow everyone to go home. Having only the mute evidence of the heads, he dismissed the charge of murder with
the platitude, “The dead cannot be brought back to life by us.”
The problem of the missing silver had to be handled in the same way. Foreign ships were known to carry as much as ten thousand
ounces (taels) of silver, as Judge Yan notes in another case, yet not a single ounce was reported lost or gained by either
side. Pan had to dismiss the matter. “As for the silver the ship was carrying,” he declares in his final judgment, “let it
be deemed lost at sea, as nothing about its recovery can be determined.” Pan also declined to order compensation be paid for
the foreigners’ losses, adding the observation that “it does not seem likely that so small a number of Europeans could have
been in possession of any great quantity of silver.” The observation assumed that the silver used in trade was in the possession
of individuals, not of corporations. This was either an odd prevarication, an excuse for doing nothing, or a sign of Pan’s
lack of knowledge regarding foreign commerce.
Was Commissioner Pan duped? I think not. From Las Cortes’s account, he seemed to know exactly what was going on, and even
more clearly to understand the limits of his powers to prosecute when no evidence had been brought forward from a crime scene
three hundred and fifty kilometers away. He had to close the proceedings with the finding that the shipwrecked had arrived
in China by misadventure, not by intention, that they were not engaged in piracy, and that they should be allowed to return
to Macao. All charges were dismissed.
VERMEER’S CALM GEOGRAPHER IS A world away, physically and intellectually, from the arguments in Pan’s courtroom. He is not
a coastal villager threatened by pirates; nor need he fear the ocean, as his compatriots controlled it anyway; nor does he
have an interest in the profits VOC merchants are making by traveling overseas. What interests him is the information they
are bringing back: information he will collect, analyze, and synthesize into sea charts and maps, which the merchants can
then take back into the wider world that is now better understood. And if that useful knowledge fails, then new knowledge
will be collected and incorporated. The geographer’s task in the seventeenth century was to engage actively in this endless
loop of feedback and correction. This is exactly what Hondius had requested in the cartouche on the curve of the globe we
see over the geographer’s head. Would those embarking on the “very frequent expeditions” going “every day to all parts of
the world” please report their positions back to him, so that he can produce a new edition that will improve upon the one
that stands before them?
Through this sort of feedback mechanism (which involved a lot of heavy borrowing if not outright plagiarism from the work
of others), European cartographers were constantly revising their maps during the seventeenth century. New knowledge replaced
old, and then was replaced in turn by newer, and hopefully better, information. The process was not always perfect: many maps
of North America showed a transcontinental channel well after the time when there was any hope that one would be found. Still,
the cumulative effect was correction and elaboration, so that gradually the map of the world was filled in.
A few blank spaces tenaciously resisted this knowledge-gathering process—the African interior, the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
the northern end of North America, the two poles—and explorers duly rose to the challenge of filling them in, often simply
for the sake of doing it and not because anyone needed this knowledge. What merchants needed was precise information about
the routes on which their ships traveled so as to lower the chance of shipwreck and increase the speed at which ships could
go and return—and thereby increase the rate at which their capital turned over. This is not the story that Vermeer’s
Geographer
tells, however. Leeuwenhoek poses as a man of science, not a man of business. Yet without scholars like him who devoted their
energies to the accumulation of useful knowledge, the merchants would not have had their maps. The two impulses—knowledge
and acquisition—worked together.
Chinese geographers were in a different situation. There was no feedback mechanism in operation and little impetus to alter
what was already laid down. Even if knowledge of regions beyond their borders could have been acquired from coastal mariners,
Chinese scholars tended not to take a great interest in it. An exception was the geographer Zhang Xie, who made a point of
talking to mariners who had sailed into the waters of Southeast Asia when compiling his
Investigations of the Eastern and Western Oceans
. As he states in his introductory notes, “all the places recorded in this book are places merchant ships have gone.” Zhang
was scathing toward authors who write history by simply repeating ancient facts and dismissing recent developments. Such people
perpetuate ignorance rather than produce knowledge. His goal was instead to record information on recent developments, including
the Red Foreigners, because of the effect they were currently having on maritime commerce.
The book had no appreciable impact among those who actually traveled, however; but nor, to be fair, would any of Zhang’s readers
have thought it should. The material in the book, as the invited contributor of a preface writes, “was selected to provide
material for historians of another day,” not for mariners and merchants in Zhang’s day, the very folk from whom Zhang gathered
his materials. His book was not for this readership, but for other curious scholars such as himself who had no expectation
of ever going abroad and simply wanted to know more about the lands beyond their shores. Zhang Xie knew that Chinese should
now expect ships like the
Guía
to show up at China’s edges, but it was not an idea that more traditionally minded readers would have known how to deal with.
Matteo Ricci, Paolo Xu’s Jesuit collaborator and the senior missionary in China until his death in 1610, eagerly shared European
knowledge of the natural world, as he assumed this would impress the Chinese and help him prove the truth of Christianity.
What clearer form had he to present new geographical knowledge than maps? European world maps by this time came in several
forms, and Ricci copied and revised examples of them, adding place names and explanations in Chinese in the hope of engaging
the intellectual attention of the scholars he met. Chinese viewers in the late Ming liked maps. Commercial wall maps were
not as popular as they were in Holland, but they existed and were hung. Seeing these European maps, Chinese viewers were unsure
of what to do with the information they provided, for the simple reason that most lacked an experiential basis from which
to interact with Ricci’s images.
Paolo Xu delighted in Ricci’s maps, as he was persuaded by the theory of a round earth and believed that maps could communicate
this idea more forcefully than a written explanation. Ricci’s European world maps were taken up by other scholars as well,
for they made it into the two great encyclopedias of the era, the
Compendium of Pictures and Writings
and the
Assembled Pictures of the Three Realms
(the three realms being heaven, earth, and humanity). The compiler of the first was delighted to note that these new maps
meant “you don’t have to leave your house and yet you can have complete knowledge of the world.” Yet the step from inside
the house to outside the house did not happen. The publication of these maps in popular encyclopedias could have started a
feedback loop, inspiring Chinese readers to go out, maps in hand, to test this knowledge. But it didn’t. These maps were not
subsequently refined and developed for other publications, as they were in Europe, nor did they dislodge the traditional cosmology.
The problem was simply that almost no Chinese mariners had the opportunity to test and develop this knowledge. No Chinese
merchant was circumnavigating the earth and finding it round. The only people bringing this information from the wider world
were foreigners, who were not always to be trusted. Nor, accordingly, was there anyone like Vermeer’s geographer who wanted,
or was able, to incorporate endless data from the outside world, constantly revising the body of useful knowledge that someone
actually needed.
For Europeans, the outside world was entering their lives in the forms of ideas and objects, some of which we see in the room
Vermeer has painted. For most Chinese, the outside world remained outside. It may have infiltrated the mind of Paolo Xu; even
Commissioner Pan sensed there was something to learn from the people whom the outside world had thrown into his custody. But
if the Jinghai commander and Lu Zhaolong had their say, and they did, outside was where this world should stay.
A
MONG THE COLLECTORS of local exotica in nineteenth-century Delft, Lambert van Meerten was the most obsessed. The heir of a
family that made its fortune in the liquor trade, Lambert devoted his life and fortune to amassing a vast collection of art
objects, statues, ceramics, curios, and whatever architectural detritus he could pick up from buildings undergoing renovation.
He acquired more objects than he could possibly afford to house, but had the good luck to have in Jan Schouten a wealthier
and more sensible friend. Schouten came to his rescue and agreed to help pay for a massive three-story house, which now sits
farther up the Oude Delft canal on the side on which the Delft Chamber of the VOC sits, where Van Meerten could store all
his treasures. When Van Meerten died, Schouten converted the house into a museum, which it remains today.
When I visited the museum, I happened upon a large blue-and-white plate in a cabinet in a back room on the upstairs floor.
The plate, forty-three centimeters in diameter, depicts a busy Chinese garden scene stocked with immortals, scholars, servants,
and mythological creatures (see plate 5). The Portuguese were the first Europeans to try their hand at making dishes that
looked Chinese, but Delft potters were the first to manage reasonable imitations. On this one, a faux-Chinese style of illustration
has been accomplished with dramatic flair, but there is no chance of mistaking it for a real Chinese plate. Numerous little
details betray its Dutch origins. The chips around the edge show the clay to be European, and the glaze lacks the hardness
and evenness of Jingdezhen ware. The fatal giveaway is the three-character inscription on the tablet being carried by a Confucian
official in the middle of the plate. A valiant attempt to make Chinese characters, it is entire nonsense. So the plate is
a fake, though that sentence judges it too harshly. The decoration was never intended to fool a buyer. The Chineseness was
simply there to please the eye and amuse the imagination. It is a happy, innocent fake.
The figures on the Van Meerten plate are busily doing the sorts of things Europeans expected Chinese to do in pictures, like
floating in clouds, crossing bridges, and catching cranes. Among the quirks and inconsistencies you would never see on a “real”
Chinese dish is a bald immortal riding a mythological tiger-dog and sucking fiercely on a long-stemmed pipe. No smoke issues
from his mouth or pipe, but the swirling clouds of heaven through which he flies stand in for the fumes. No porcelain painter
in China ever put a smoker on a dish, so far as I have seen. Not until much later in the eighteenth century would a Chinese
artist even be willing to include someone smoking in his repertoire, and then only for sketches or woodcuts (we will see an
early example later in this chapter). New practices take time to be culturally absorbed, and smoking was never absorbed well
enough to be allowed into the realm of fine art before the twentieth century. Chinese painting is conservative on such cultural
matters.
This is not the only piece of Dutch porcelain to depict a smoker. Delft tile painters had been putting smokers on their wares
for some decades. Nor were porcelain painters the only artists to paint smoking. Delft painters had been doing this on canvas
for just as long, using smoking to signal sociability and conviviality. The Delft “merry company” painter Jan Steen delighted
in crowding his satirical scenes with smokers of all ages. The more genteel Pieter de Hooch and Hendrik van der Burch put
pipes in the hands of male figures to give them something to do with their hands while they were engaged in conversation.
Johannes Vermeer never painted anyone smoking, so no Vermeer painting gives us a ready door that we can open onto the global
spread of tobacco. But this plate—which may be the earliest depiction of a Chinese smoker by a European artist—does.
Where did the painter get the idea that Chinese smoked? He was not copying a Chinese original, as no Chinese painter would
have put a smoking scene on porcelain. If he was inventing his own image, it had to have been because he had heard that Chinese
smoked. Some bit of global information had come his way. Europeans were used to smoking by this time, having become schooled
in the pleasures of tobacco through the latter part of the sixteenth century. That Chinese, or all Asians for that matter,
were joining them through the seventeenth, and doing so on their own without business or cultural elites telling them to do
it—indeed, almost without anyone noticing it was happening—is one effect of global mobility in the seventeenth century that
no one could have predicted. Tobacco smoking was not fated to go global, but it did. The smoking immortal on the Delft plate
opens for us another door, and through it we will find our way back into the world as it was becoming in the seventeenth century.
BEIJING WAS THE CITY to which all educated young men in China went to make their reputation and fortune. Cold in winter, clogged
with Mongolian dust in the spring, parched in the summer, pleasant only in the fall, it was nonetheless the emperor’s home
and the center of power. Its examination halls drew the ambitious few up through the exam system and into state service. The
ladder of advancement was not to be scampered up quickly. Every candidate had to start on the same bottom rung down in his
home county; a tiny few got to the ultimate degree of “presented scholar,” and even fewer found themselves serving at court.
To be from a presented scholar’s family helped in preparing for the ordeal of scaling the ladder, but family made no difference
once you went into your exam cubicle and wrote papers for three days, unless of course your family knew an examiner to bribe,
but that was a capital offense and difficult to arrange. If you passed, being from a family of degree holders meant you had
the social skills and political connections to get a decent appointment in the capital rather than being sent out to the provinces
as a county magistrate and having to work your way back to the center. The ascent up the examination ladder to Beijing was
forbiddingly steep. So too, the re-ascent from a posting as a county magistrate to an appointment in the capital was nearly
as tough, and most magistrates never made it.
Yang Shicong came from a good family, but he did not pass the presented scholar exams until 1631, when he was already in his
thirties. Family connections allowed him to make up for lost time. Yang was posted right into the Hanlin Academy, a policy
think tank and secretarial agency in Beijing for Emperor Chongzhen, and he rose to the post of vice-minister of rites. He
got the coveted post of instructor to the heir apparent when the prince came of age in 1637, which segued into the position
of adviser to the prince in the 1640s. The emperor committed suicide when rebels captured Beijing in April 1644, a few short
weeks before the Manchus invaded and took over. The heir apparent, who came under Jesuit influence, sent a desperate appeal
to the pope to send an army to drive the Manchus out of China, but what could the pope do about an invasion half a world away?
Yang is not an exceptional figure in the history of the dynasty. One of many competent officials who rose to the vice-ministerial
level and no higher, he makes no appearance in the standard histories of the period. But he has come to the attention of a
few historians because of a collection of short anecdotes he compiled about life in the capital in the closing decade of the
Ming. He finished the manuscript of
Collected Writings from Jade Hall
in 1643. It was not a great year to publish a book. A massive epidemic had just swept through north China the previous year,
and a year later rebels would overrun the capital and topple the dynasty. This is why the book is now extremely rare. Yang
did not know that the Ming would fall, but he knew the realm was troubled. His book, he tells us in his preface, was to remind
people of what life in the capital was like when times were still good.
In an essay that appears in the first part of
Collected Writings from Jade Hall
, Yang observes that Beijing people in the past decade had experienced two minor changes. They were changes you could see
“on every street corner,” as he puts it, and they were signs that all was not well. The first was that peddlers were selling
wild sand grouse. Sand grouse did not belong in the Beijing area. Their natural habitat was farther north along the southern
edge of the Gobi Desert. According to local lore, these birds flew this far south only when military maneuvers on the northern
border disturbed their habitat. Yang was told that sand grouse had started appearing in Beijing in 1632. Enterprising bird
catchers were now catching them and selling them to cook for dinner. The arrival of sand grouse in Beijing could have been
a sign of a change in the weather, for 1632 was a wet year and the rains might have had something to do with driving them
south. But their presence was regarded locally as evidence of trouble on the northern border, where the Manchus were massing
for an invasion. The sand grouse were the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. No one could actually say this, since even
to mention the possibility of invasion was enough to be accused of treason as a fifth columnist. But everyone understood that
that was what the availability of sand grouse really meant.
The second street-corner sign that the world was topsy-turvy was the appearance of tobacconists. In the year Yang was born,
1597, no one in his home province of Shandong, south of Beijing, had tasted tobacco. Few were the Chinese anywhere who had.
There were smokers on the southeast coast, and the leaf had found its way to Beijing, where it appears in a list of county
office purchases from 1596 (at a price twice what cinnamon or sulphur cost on the Beijing market, and seven times higher than
jasmine tea). By the time Yang arrived in Beijing to take his exams in 1631, the taking of “smoke liquor,” as some called
it, was well established in the capital. Yang dates tobacco’s arrival in Beijing to the reign of Emperor Tianqi, who was enthroned
in 1621 and died six years later. Beijing farmers, he writes, have been cultivating tobacco for “the last twenty years.”
Yang felt that he had to account for the strange plant being in Beijing. He starts his explanation by noting that smoking
was unknown in ancient China, there being no references to it in the classics. It must have come from abroad. As the main
smokers in the capital region were soldiers who had been moved north to defend the border against the Manchus, Yang suspected
a southern origin. The soldiers’ demand had induced local farmers to convert their fields to tobacco patches, and they were
earning ten times what they could get by growing grain. With all that tobacco about, Beijing residents started picking up
the habit. The shift eventually caught the attention of Emperor Chongzhen. He was unhappy that farmers were abandoning grain
in favor of tobacco, fearing what this might do to food supplies in the capital region, so in 1639 he decreed that anyone
caught selling tobacco in the capital would be decapitated. The official explanation was that tobacco was a waste of time,
health, and money, but local people—and here Yang tells us something that official history would not record—thought the ban
was an overreaction to a pun.
The standard expression at the time for smoking was
chi yan
, “eating smoke.” (Today it is
chou yan
, “sucking smoke.”) The trouble was, the phrase
chi yan
was homophonous with the phrase “eating the capital.”
Yan
was smoke, but Yan, written with a different character, was the ancient name of the Beijing region. Eating Beijing was just
what Manchu warriors and peasant rebels at that very moment were threatening to do. Merely to speak of smoking could thus
be regarded as rumormongering by fifth columnists intent on destroying the dynasty. Had Yang known the Manchus were keen smokers
before northern Chinese ever took up the habit, it would only have bolstered the case against smoking.
The first known case to test the new prohibition came to the Beijing courts the year after the ban was imposed, in 1640. A
student from the southeastern coastal province of Fujian came that year to Beijing to take the national examinations with
a servant in tow. The servant, presumably to help his master make ends meet while he was away from home, sold some of the
tobacco they had brought north with them on the street, and was soon arrested. The sentence was automatically set at decapitation.
The sentence went up for review to Emperor Chongzhen, and he confirmed the judgment, making the poor man the first victim
of the harsh new law. The penalty was hugely unpopular with the people of Beijing. It took the military governor general of
the region two years to get the ban lifted in early 1642. When Yang returned to the capital that year after a brief absence,
tobacco was selling in greater volume than ever, and what had been an exotic custom was considered strange no longer.