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Beijing is famous for tombs. Among 5,000 year-old civilizations, that's to be expected. China's capital is chockablock with Ming and Qing tombs. Former Chairman Mao Tse Tung himself is enshrined on Tiananmen Square. Even in such company, this cemetery has long stood out.
For the past half century, high-ranking party officials have attended brush-up classes on bureaucracy at serene Beijing Communist Party School, where they are confronted by the grave memories every day. Missing them is practically impossible, since they are marked by twelve-foot-tall tombstones towering over the gates. Locked inside are a set of tombs China has successfully secreted from the world's view for decades but which still periodically torment its own leadership.
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[Above] Locked away in the courtyard of a Communist Party school in Beijing is the graveyard in which Jesuits were buried in the 17th and 18th centuries. The grave marker for Br. Pierre Frapperie, a native of Aix-en-Provence, France, notes that he died in 1703 at the age of 39, after serving only three years in the China mission. [Below] Fr. Chen Shengxiu's grave marker gives his European name in Latin as John Fr(ancis) Regis; he was a Chinese Jesuit who entered the Society in 1732. A strong preacher twice apprehended and beaten for his ministry, he died in 1776. Fr. Shengxiu was one of nine Chinese Jesuits among the 63 Jesuits and other clerics whose gravestones are legible. |
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Interred here, out of sight and often out of mind, are some of China's most illustrious foreign friends. Because they are foreign, and China so xenophobic, the very existence of the graves of dozens of Western pioneers in the Middle Kingdom has been a matter of controversy. For years they have been talked about but seldom seen.
Suddenly, that's changed. A call to the Communist Party School, unlikely custodian of the tombs, provides an invitation. A tour of the site suggests that these old friends of China--most of them missionaries--may yet perform one more service in bringing East and West closer by helping bridge the tempestuous chasm between China and the Church.
Not that there is much sense of tension at the actual site. Tree-shaded and peaceful, one plot holds three huge stelae and headstones marking the final resting place of a trio of China's earliest and most influential visitors: Jesuits Matteo Ricci, Ferdinand Verbiest, and Johann Adam Schall. In another plot are the markers of 60 other Jesuits from Italy, Portugal, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, some of the West's brightest brains and bravest travelers, and some Chinese Jesuits as well.
Old China hands have dreamed for decades of such an opportunity. Why now? That question has sparked the interest of China watchers around the globe, as well as those inside the Catholic Church, which has had no official ties to the People's Republic of China in half a century. Instead, the Vatican remains the last European outpost that maintains relations with Taiwan, much to China's chagrin.
Meanwhile, an estimated 4 million Catholics worship in China's state-approved churches while perhaps as many as twice that number of Catholics take the risk of worshipping in churches without this state approval.
Consequently, this previously off-limits cemetery has emerged as the center of a new style of graveside diplomacy, in which small concessions may point toward reconciliation.
As he shows me around the cemetery, the gravekeeper talks about plans to open a small museum dedicated to Matteo Ricci. Already, unprecedented celebrations were held to mark the 400th anniversary of the Italian Jesuit's arrival in Beijing last year.
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The frontispiece of Jesuit Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata (China in Pictures) shows Jesuit missionaries Johann Adam Schall (left) and Matteo Ricci holding up a map of China; above them are Sts. Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola. |
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In October, some maps credited to Ricci and other early missionaries were moved from Nanjing, where they were stored, to Beijing for a first-ever showing at the Italian embassy. At the same time, a group of scholars gathered in the Chinese capital for an unprecedented religious conference that later continued in Rome.
Even at the gravesite, there is a new atmosphere of openness. The scholar who shows around visitors touts a fine book about Ricci and the companions buried alongside, recently published by the Association for Matteo Ricci Studies. Another scholar insists Ricci, known as Li Matou, is practically a household name throughout the mainland. All of this seems remarkable, considering China has long obscured Ricci's role in its history.
The property had been in Catholic hands for over three centuries, the emperor's gift to Ricci for his contributions to China. But when the Communists took over, they displaced the Catholic seminary and established the Beijing Communist Party School.
Ricci wasn't the first Westerner to visit the mysterious Middle Kingdom, but he made the greatest mark. As early as the sixteenth century he published the first maps of China available in the West. But Ricci is even more renowned for what he brought China in addition to Catholicism--Western methods of mathematics and astronomy.
These scientific skills, along with a dedication to learning the Chinese language and culture, won Ricci, in 1600, a place in the court of Ming Emperor Wan Li (1573-1621). No other foreigner had ever received such an invitation.
Ricci charmed the emperor with a gift of two clocks. Legend says he was kept close by in case these prized instruments, or other Western marvels, needed repair. Whatever the case, he was given the land to establish Beijing's first seminary. When he died in 1610, he was buried here at a site reportedly selected by the emperor himself, an honor of unimaginable magnitude.
Others, like Schall, a German, and Verbiest, from Belgium, followed Ricci to the East, bringing telescopes and books of trigonometry. The instruments and science texts were treasured by the Chinese. Even to this day, many of the antique instruments are displayed atop an old watchtower that once guarded the capital's original city walls. Today it overlooks traffic jams on the highway paved over those very walls.
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Western astronomy played a great part in making the Jesuit visitors acceptable to the Chinese court; some of their scientific instruments, shown here in an old illustration, are still in place in Beijing today. |
Astronomy was much revered in ancient China. Foreign religion, however, wasn't, and the missionaries had a precarious tenure in the Middle Kingdom. To be fair, it was that way long before the Communists, who certainly didn't invent the practice of religious persecution.
But the Party, in keeping with its customary ambivalence towards all things Western (the Watchtower's Observatory Museum displays the instruments without any label identifying them as European in origin), has attempted to erase all mention of the foreign missionaries from history. That makes the cemetery an uncomfortable monument in many ways--hence, the locked gate and un-welcome mat.
Another reminder is inscribed on a cemetery wall. In bas-relief, hidden from view, is perhaps the world's largest apology, demanded by the Western forces, for injuries inflicted by the Boxer Rebellion, which ended just over a century ago.
Few in the West are likely to remember this terror, when countless missionaries were slaughtered and churches across China put to the torch. But China is still buffeted by conflicting emotions regarding its past. Hence, the giant apology was written, but hidden to all.
For centuries, it's been thus in China, a roller coaster of indecision. These graves were desecrated during the Boxer period, when the seminary was razed. All that remains is an old clock tower and a small stone chapel; the Communist party replaced the cross with a Communist star and shattered all the stained glass. But though cemented over, the arched windows and other features are instantly identifiable.
That the chapel still stands is remarkable. Likewise the tombstones, perhaps the only remaining graves of foreigners in all China, according to sinologists. In Shanghai and Harbin, which had larger foreign enclaves, Western cemeteries were long ago razed, the bones scattered.
That might have happened here, too. But students stood up to the Cultural Revolution thugs, the gravekeeper says proudly, ferrying away the tombstones to bury, thereby saving them. The cemetery, he says, was restored in 1978.
Still, don't expect a rush of religious tourism anytime soon. But the way forward is clear. Recently, Beijing reopened East Church after an almost $2 million restoration. Although just a century old, the former St. Joseph's Church is seen as the preeminent Catholic relic of Beijing. The same site is where Italian missionaries Ludovicus Buglio and Gabriel de Magalhaens constructed the original St. Joseph's in 1655.
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An old map of Beijing marks communities and works of French and Portuguese Jesuits and, to the west outside the city walls, the Jesuit cemetery. |
Burned by the Boxers, looted by Cultural Revolution thugs, and locked shut by various Communist party directives, the church limped along with a nominal congregation of hundreds. Following its lavish renovation, it has become a landmark on the capital's main shopping boulevard and a favorite photography backdrop for Chinese newlyweds.
Critics counter that it is merely a facade to fool visitors into thinking the mainland offers religious freedom, as promised in the Chinese constitution. Indeed, Beijing remains at odds with the Vatican on many issues, from basic religious freedom to the appointment of state-sponsored ministers and bishops, who aren't recognized by the pope. Beijing's battles with the Church are only part of the age-old jingoism that has always marked its dealings with outsiders, or barbarians, as they are still known.
Foreigners living in the capital are well aware of the precarious balance, which blazes into prominent view every time there is a Belgrade bombing or spy-plane controversy. Then, officials promote "spontaneous" street demonstrations that regularly feature racist slurs against foreigners. Even common slang terms them "foreign devils."
Such emotions often boil over in ways that verge on the satirical. Take the late 1999 controversy over the sale of several bronze fountain heads from the original Summer Palace. Mainland publications attacked plans to sell these national treasures by a leading auction house in Hong Kong. Despite the vitriol, the auctions went on.
In the end, Chinese press praised the "patriots" who purchased these pieces, which had been looted by foreign armies that razed the old Summer Palace after a campaign to relieve the besieged foreign legations in Beijing. The heads were promptly shipped back to Beijing, where thousands saw the much-hyped nationalistic icons at the Poly Art Museum.
Ron Gluckman, from San Francisco, is a U.S. journalist based in Beijing who writes about Asia. His articles have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Travel & Leisure, The Wall Street Journal, and the Sydney Morning Herald, among many others. |  |
Not mentioned at the exhibit or by the Chinese press was that the same artifacts were sold in the first place by a Chinese collector and in China's own Hong Kong. And the heads, just like the unlabeled astronomical instruments at the nearby watchtower, were actually the creation of China's old friends, the Jesuits.
That is why the open gates at this ancient cemetery are seen as a small step forward for Church and this state. If future movement follows, it would be a fine memorial for Ricci and the other courageous Jesuits who devoted their lives to China.