Chinese Sympathies

Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe

Daniel Leonhard Purdy

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501759741, 9781501759734
• eBook ISBN: 9781501759758
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Literature

Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe.

Analyzing key German literary texts—theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cycles—Chinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe's concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful similarities across culturally diverse literatures based on shared human experiences.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

1

MARCO POLO’S FABULOUS IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS

From the very earliest, travel writers have felt the need to secure their credibility with readers. For adventurers it has always been important that their stories were believed. The farther the journey and the stranger the location, the more authors struggled to establish the plausibility of their narrative. If distance and unfamiliarity were inversely related to the likelihood that a travelogue would be believed, they were also directly connected to the audience’s eagerness to enjoy the tale. All narratives are caught in the paradox that the more an author insists on the truth of his tale, the more readers question its veracity. At every stage, the accuracy of one traveler’s account is measured against previous texts. The possibility of a text’s fictionality creeps through all early travel literature. From the first, thoughtful readers struggled with how to treat the possibility that an emotionally engaging travel narrative did not correspond to the lived reality of foreign places. To sooth these contradictions, travel literature was required to balance the urge to narrate a compelling epic with accurate and insightful description of the strange peoples and places encountered along the way.¹

As much as European writing about China suffered under the suspicion that the stories told about the Middle Kingdom were invented, readers never wanted the stories to end. Any examination of relations between China and Europe must also include the history of credibility and how it was established. The history of information, goods, and people flowing between cultures also includes a nuanced record of how plausibility was asserted or denied. Did this person really travel to China? Are his stories to be believed? How was this silk spun? Where was this tea cup manufactured? The notion of authenticity became important only in the mid-eighteenth century. Before that, institutional authority and rhetorical strategies were more likely to determine whether a traveler’s tale was considered believable. In the face of the uncertainty almost any travel narrative creates, comparing one travel text with another became the stay-at-home scholar’s best method for detecting exaggerations.

Very early on, in the first Italian compilations of travel writing, this comparative approach tried to test the truthfulness of a description and plausibility of a narrative by reading one text against another. Thus, an empirical problem was addressed philologically. In writings about China, fables were intertwined with history from the earliest. As fiction came to be distinct from ethnographic and geographic description and the genres separated, truthfulness was nevertheless evenly distributed among all of them. Later readers recognized that fictional writing often conveyed more insight into a society’s hidden structures than a traveler’s hastily composed observations. By the end of the eighteenth century, fables and romances from Asia were recognized as privileged sources of information. The challenge for Europeans was to find means of negotiating through a foreign story’s strangeness to recognize basic similarities. Marco Polo’s Travels was the first attempt at such a mediation.

Well into the nineteenth century, Marco Polo’s work served as the baseline for determining what stories and descriptions were within the realm of the possible.² Giovanni Botero, for example, in his 1589 comparative study of world governments defends his own description of China: “These things I here deliver ought to be not thought by any man to be incredible. For (thanks that Marco Polo in his relations affirmeth far greater things) these things I speak are in these days approved to be most true by the intelligences we do receive continually both by secular and religious persons, as also by all the nations of the Portuguese.”³ Still, a critical reader might wonder if Botero’s reliance on parekbase, an author’s direct address to the reader, undermined precisely what he sought to accomplish—acceptance. The first-person narration invited the reader to judge the author’s character as if the text were a person. Although many of the first books about sea journeys were cobbled together from the recollections of ships’ crews by scribes who had never left home, these texts adopted a single authorial voice. When Arnold Montanus compiled an illustrated volume about Dutch embassies to the Japanese shogun, he arranged at least four separate seamen’s journals into a single line of observation, with the presumption that readers were more likely to accept the truthfulness of one voice rather than a string of recollections.⁴

Although Marco Polo’s Travels has often been challenged as filled with exaggerations, it remains the first book to read for Europeans curious about the China.⁵ Its lingering authority may stem from the narrative’s muted tone, a surprising quality given the remarkable events it recounts. Polo’s book conveys the practicality of a merchant’s handbook. While he justifies his traveling to China with the possibility that the Mongols might be converted to Christianity and brought into an alliance against Islam, there is little indication within the many chapters that he and his companions put much effort into this plan. Polo characterizes the religious practices in the many cities along his route as so many forms of idolatry and maintains a consistent antipathy for Islam, but he does not try to incorporate them all into a single Christian tale of salvation. In the end, Polo shows a practical appreciation for the Mongol policy of allowing subjugated nations their religion so long as they obey and pay taxes. The khan himself appears at least curious about Christianity, yet over the course of its episodic movement, the travelogue eventually settles on the material wealth and military prowess of Kublai Khan as its center of interest.⁶ While Polo includes a handful of stories about magic and sorcerers, they do not come close to the wild fantasies of John Mandeville’s Travels, Europe’s other popular medieval romance about the East. Time and again the splendor and extravagance of Kublai Khan’s court are shown to be the true marvel in Polo’s narrative.

Marco Polo initiates a European tradition of understanding China and its culture that focuses on the emperor and his administrative elite. What appears in Polo’s story as a successful feudal relationship becomes the myth that justifies European approaches to China. Even though the physical boundaries, religions, languages, and populations of China were unfamiliar to Europeans, the basic presumption from the start was that China has a single emperor, who rules completely and unopposed over this territory. Thus if knowledge of China was to have any security, it inevitably had to be routed through imperial channels. Whatever ambiguities prevailed within China, Europeans oriented their diplomacy, commerce, and discourses around the figure of the emperor.⁷ In setting up this paradigm, medieval and early modern travelers were hardly inventing a new understanding of China; rather, they were following Confucian protocols and ideology. Nevertheless, a tone of implicit inter-imperial competition between China and a variety of European monarchies generated a succession of strategic and symbolic comparisons that would last until the end of World War One.⁸ Sanjay Subrahmanyam refers to the synchronic “transfer of imperial models and notions, in the sense of movement across a group of competing empires.”⁹ As a merchant, Polo could barely disguise how pleased he was to have entered into the service of such a supremely wealthy and powerful master. He was particularly proud of his ability to inform and entertain the khan with his observations about the people he encountered along his journeys. Polo could show Europeans that he attended the emperor of China and that his connection was direct and personal, and in the process he set a very high standard of what it meant for a traveler to successfully reach China. Like a good merchant working both ends of the supply chain, Polo could offer up his experiences moving across Asia at both ends of the journey. Kublai Khan was no different than any European reader. He was also curious to know more about foreign lands, and Marco Polo could offer him stories just as well. The emperor was both the center of the story and the perfect audience. Most importantly, the emperor stood as the ancient, stable ontological and political center of China, suggesting a coherence and continuity that Europeans thought they had lost with the demise of the Romans. The impression left upon Western readers about the unquestioned centrality of the emperor’s authority was considerable. Throughout this book, I will show that European identification with China was routed through the figure of the emperor and his Confucian administration. This imperial identification was most visible in European courts as they formulated complex rituals of conspicuous consumption, drawn from accounts of the entertainments, festivities, and hunting expeditions undertaken in the Mongol courts, but it extended much farther into the most complex corners German intellectual philosophy and poetry.¹⁰

So obvious was Polo’s delight in the millions of gold coins collected for the khan’s court that early Italian readers teasingly referred to the Travels as Il Milione.¹¹ Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the translator and compiler of first-hand travel writing, explained the tendency for readers to wonder about Polo’s numbers: “And because in the continual repetitions of the story which he gave more and more often when speaking of the magnificence of the Great Khan, he stated that his revenues were from ten to fifteen millions in gold, and in the same way in speaking of many other riches of those countries he spoke always in terms of millions, they gave him as a nickname, Messer Marco Millioni.”¹² Polo’s nickname points to the suspicions that arise when a description’s scale reaches unfamiliar heights—just how vast was the wealth, territory, and population of Kublai Khan’s empire? In his lectures on China and world history, Hegel underscored how Polo’s text presented Europeans with a scale that they considered fabulous at first, only to later learn from other travelers that it was accurate: “In the thirteenth century, a Venetian, Marco Polo, was the first to explore China. Still, his conclusions were considered to be fables. Later everything he stated about its expanse and size was fully confirmed.”¹³

Augmenting the European reader’s concern about the accuracy of Polo’s measurements was the all-too-familiar tendency for storytellers to exaggerate. After all, Polo’s manuscript was recounted orally during his imprisonment in a Genoese prison, written down by his fellow inmate—a classic setting for storytellers to pass the time by embellishing their past. In the vague border between fiction and truth, readers might expect a traveler to exaggerate, but they would hope he did not lie completely about ever having made the journey. Not only did one have to travel for years to reach China from Italy, but the entire trip involved scalar quantities far greater than anything in Europe: farther distances, more people, denser cities, overwhelming armies, fabulous levels of concentrated wealth were just some of the topics in which the scale of Asian social units exceeded the levels familiar to Europeans. Given the differences, it was easy for readers to conclude that Polo had simply gone from description to fantasy. The doubts about Polo reveal the scalar limits of early modern European imaginations. Up until the nineteenth century, the average European traveling by foot could cover no more than twenty-five miles in a day; a rider in a hurry might reach thirty to forty miles so long as the horse held out. The ran...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Marco Polo’s Fabulous Imperial Connections
• 2. Jesuit Channels between Europe and Asia
• 3. A Genealogy of Cosmopolitan Reading
• 4. News of the Ming Dynasty’s Collapse
• 5. Vondel’s Tragic Chinese Emperor
• 6. Wieland’s Secret History of Cosmopolitanism
• 7. Adam Smith and the Chinese Earthquake
• 8. Goethe Reads the Jesuits
• 9. Chinese-German Pairings
• 10. World Literature and Goethe’s Chinese Poetry
• Bibliography
• Index