8 - Frustrated at the Door : Alessandro Valignano Evaluates the Jesuits’ China Mission (1588)

Summary

Abstract

Jesuits were famous for being the first Europeans to enter China in the modern period. But before Matteo Ricci charmed his way to Beijing, the challenge seemed impossible. This report on the status of the Jesuits’ China enterprise after its first six years considers the problems that the missionaries faced in Guangdong Province, their first stop inside the Ming Empire. Alessandro Valignano, inspector of the Asian missions, wrote it for his superiors in Rome with the intention of describing a path to success in the Ming empire. This report by Valignano on the China mission stands in contrast to later Jesuit writings about the Ming Empire, situating the Jesuits within a political and cultural framework where, as they thought at that moment, they had little hope for advancing their mission.

Keywords: Jesuits, Alessandro Valignano, missionaries, China, Mandarins, Ming dynasty

In the autumn of 1588, the prospects for spreading Christianity in China were bleak. Few missionaries had been able to advance into the Ming empire, and those who did were met with seemingly insurmountable difficulties. For the men of the Society of Jesus, this situation was especially frustrating. Jesuit efforts in Japan, inaugurated in 1549 by Francis Xavier (1506–1552), had started small but had grown dramatically. Their successes in India and elsewhere also testified to their missionary competence, but they had no such luck in China. Nearly a decade had passed since a Jesuit superior had assigned two men to the task of clearing the initial hurdles. But it had taken three years for them to obtain permission to remain inside the Ming empire beyond the end of the biannual trade fairs at Guangzhou, which they called Canton, and they had subsequently made little headway. Few outside of a handful of indigents had submitted to baptism, and the threat of expulsion from China hung over the missionaries. Such a situation did not bode well.

The letter that follows is a candid assessment of the Jesuits’ China mission written at that crucial moment. Its author, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), held the post of plenipotentiary visitor, or inspector, of the society's missions in Asia. His writ encompassed the Jesuits’ activities from East Africa all the way to Japan, and his powers were second only to those of his correspondent, Claudio Aquaviva (1543–1615), the superior general of the Society of Jesus.