Several years ago I contacted 13 academics asking them what they thought the poet W.B. Yeats meant by the phrase “gong-tormented sea” in his poem Byzantium. Of the 12 answers I received, the most illuminating was from Michael Keevak, a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. He pointed me to a work about the books in Yeats’ private library that paid special attention to the poet’s annotations. One of these books was about Istanbul, the modern name for Byzantium, and gongs were indeed mentioned there.
Keevak has already published four books, and the new Embassies to China is his fifth. He began with Sexual Shakespeare (2001), then in 2004 produced The Pretended Asian, about a European who claimed to come from Taiwan. Next came The History of a Stele (2008), followed by Becoming Yellow (2011). Embassies to China is, however, undoubtedly the most wide-ranging and probing of the five.
The various friars bearing letters from popes or the king of France are described first. Then came the Portuguese, marking their landfalls with padroes, or inscribed pillars. Their success in gaining Macao wasn’t, however, followed up very extensively, even though the Dutch, who Keevak describes next, routinely blamed them for muddying their waters (only to be expected, of course, from what the Protestant Dutch viewed as perfidious Catholics). Be that as it may, the Dutch, who arrived in 1655, were rebuffed by an imperial edict ordering them to leave immediately and return every eight years to offer tribute.
This Dutch suspicion of the Portuguese as Catholics was reinforced by the long-standing presence in the imperial court of Jesuits — astronomers, engineers, mathematicians and doctors. Prominent among these in Keevak’s narrative is the German-born astronomer Adam Schall (1592-1666), known in Chinese as Tang Ruowang (湯若望), who maintained a huge influence extending even into the reign of the youthful Kangxi Emperor (reigned 1661-1722).
A question of perception
Given that little of Keevak’s material is new, what marks it out as of interest? The answer, I think, lies in his emphasis on perceptions. Chinese and Westerners, he tells us, viewed the world of what today we would call diplomacy very differently. The Westerners, however they cloaked their missions in religious or other terms, essentially wanted trade, and the huge profits that could come from trade with China dazzled them over many centuries. The Chinese, by contrast, saw themselves as at the center of the world, and largely self-sufficient, and were only prepared to entertain foreign emissaries as bearers of tribute. It’s true that the merchants of, for instance, Canton in the south saw matters rather differently, but even they had to couch their mercantile interests in the tribute-bearing language of the north, and of the court.
The one exception in imperial eyes was Russia, which at one point was allowed yearly caravans, the establishment of a Russian orthodox church in Beijing, and even a kind of consulate. Why was this? The reason appears to be that the Chinese were concerned about the turbulent territories beyond their northern border, and thought the Russians could help in maintaining stability there. No nation further west could offer that. One archival source even called the Russian tsar Peter the Great the Chinese emperor’s “neighbor and friend of equal rank,” an appellation previously unheard-of in imperial correspondence. The 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk was not only penned in Latin but signed in a city outside Chinese territory, and sworn to by the imperial representative in the name of the Christian God.
It is nevertheless difficult to determine from Keevak’s style and general approach who exactly he is aiming his narrative at. Is he informing professional historians of things he has newly discovered? Probably not because most of the material in this book has long been known. Is he hoping to enlighten students on a range of topics previously researched but here freshly presented? Possibly. Or is he aiming to tell an old tale in a new way for the benefit of the general public? Again, possibly — but the cover price of US$79 for the Kindle edition is likely to put off many such purchasers.
Materials from National Taiwan University
As with its predecessors, the vast majority of the illustrations in this book come from items in the National Taiwan University’s library. But rather than be seen as a shortcoming, this can be viewed as Keevak’s pioneering exploration of the riches in Western languages of that library, and his revealing them to the world at large.
The story of these “embassies,” or attempts to establish reciprocal trade, date from the centuries before the systematic humiliation of China by the Western powers began in the 19th century. It has often been noted that the country’s recent attainment of regional dominance is merely a resumption of that long-traditional state of affairs, and this new book, while not mentioning this, does nothing to challenge that view. It does, however, quote Matteo Ricci’s famous pronouncement that in the 4,000 years of their history the Chinese hadn’t once “conquered neighboring kingdoms,” instead exerting “cultural and economic influence” over them (this last is Keevak’s phrase). With the exception of the conquest of Tibet in the 1950s — and Tibet was viewed in China as having long been a part of its territory — something similar could still be said today.
Embassies to China is elegantly written and comprehensive on what it chooses to cover. It stops short of treating the very well-known English embassy to Beijing led by Lord Macartney in 1793.
My real reason for asking those academics about “gong-tormented sea” was that I had a theory about it of my own. I’d read somewhere that in ancient China ships kept musicians on board to scare off, with drums and gongs, the spirits thought to be causing typhoons. Sometimes these demons instead got more agitated by all the noise and the storms got worse — hence, perhaps, “gong-tormented.” My only problem was that, although Yeats was certainly interested in China, this poem was about somewhere else, and, if this was a Chinese reference, it was the poem’s only one.
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