The Emotional Role of Chinese Porcelain in Early Modern Jesuit Missions

Chapter 11 “Such fragile jewels”: The Emotional Role of Chinese Porcelain in Early Modern Jesuit Missions

Susan Broomhall

This chapter explores how, in the writings of the Jesuit father François-Xavier d’Entrecolles (1664–1741), porcelain was constructed as having a vital, emotional role in the missionary endeavor of the Jesuits in China and Europe. D’Entrecolles proselytized in China from 1698 until his death in 1741. In 1712 and 1722, he sent two detailed letters to fellow members of the Society that he claimed would reveal the secret of porcelain manufacture to a highly inter- ested European readership.1 These letters combined key information shared by Chinese Christian converts in the industry with knowledge he had garnered from ancient texts and his own eyewitness observations in the manufacturies of Jingdezhen. His detailed reports, which were reproduced across Europe, coupled with the contemporaneous discoveries of Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682–1719) in Saxony, were to break the Asian monopoly on hard-paste porcelain production in the eighteenth century. Up until then, the trade in porcelain had been dominated by the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company; hereafter voc); its display was a crucial representational tool of first Protestant, then more broadly aristocratic, elites in Europe.2 D’Entrecolles was not the first European, or even Jesuit, to discuss the manufacture of porcelain. Well before him, the Portuguese Dominican Gas- par da Cruz (c.1520–70) had written enthusiastically about porcelain and its

1 The two letters, “Lettre du Père d’Entrecolles, Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jesus: Au Père Orry de la mesme Compagnie, Procureur des Missions de la Chine & des Indes, September 1, 1712” and “Lettre du Père d’Entrecolles, Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, au P…. de la même Compagnie, January 25, 1722,” can be found in Stephen Bushell, Description of Chi- nese Pottery and Porcelain: Being a Translation of the T’ao shuo (New York: ams Press, 1973 [1910]), 181–209 and 210–22, respectively. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own. This research was conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (project number CE110001011). 2 On the interrelated religious and gendered dimensions of Asian porcelain in the Europe elite market, see Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent, “Gendered Strategies of Porcelain as Power in the Early Modern House of Orange-Nassau,” in Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Daybell and Svante Norrhem (London: Routledge, 2016), 49–67.

262 Broomhall manufacture in his Treatise on Things Chinese (1569).3 Others, such as Juan González de Mendoza (1545–1618), who compiled earlier Spanish accounts, the Portuguese Jesuit Álvaro de Semedo (1585/86–1658), who had lived in China, and the German travel writer Johann Albrecht de Mandelslo (1616–44), offered further published accounts in 1586, 1638, and 1639 respectively, in addi- tion to other manuscript descriptions.4 In 1703, the Jesuits had also sent back to Europe nineteen cases of porcelain on the Compagnie française des Indes orientales (French East India Company) vessel, Amphitrite.5 This was the same vessel that had some years earlier brought d’Entrecolles himself to China.6 The Jesuits were associated with a particular kind of proselytizing porcelain produced in China—the black-and-white porcelain adorned with religious images known as “Jesuitware”—although it is debatable how much its production was ever under their control or, indeed, used for preaching among select communities to inculcate Jesuit beliefs in visual and material form.7 As Clare le Corbeiller has noted, a great deal of religious porcelain also appears to have been manufactured for and distributed throughout Protestant locales in Europe.8 These porcelain pieces were made by Chinese craftspeople to be exported to the European market. This chapter, however, suggests an alterna- tive narrative of porcelain as a deeply emotional tool for preaching, mediated by text. For what d’Entrecolles’s reports claimed was something far greater

3 See Gaspar da Cruz, “A Treatise of China and the Adjoining Regions (1569),” in South China in the Sixteenth Century: Being the Narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar da Cruz, Fr. Martín da Rada, trans. and ed. Charles R. Boxer (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 44–239. 4 Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood, Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5; Chemistry and Chemi- cal Technology; Part 12; Ceramic Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 743–45. Closer in period to d’Entrecolles was fellow Jesuit Louis Daniel le Comte (1655–1728), who wrote home from Beijing in 1696 and 1697 about porcelain, describing varied kinds, their respective economic value, and the industry’s organization. See Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey, “The Search for Souls in China: Le Comte’s Nouveaux mémoires,” in Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700, ed. Glenn Ames and Ronald Love (Westport: Greenwood, 2003), 231–47; and Anne Gerritsen, “Global Design in Jingdezhen: Local Production and Global Connections,” in Global Design History, ed. Giorgio Riello, Glenn Adamson, and Sarah Teasley (London: Routledge, 2011), 25–33, here 25–27. 5 Clare le Corbeiller, China Trade Porcelain: Patterns of Exchange: Additions to the Helena Woolworth McCann Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974), 69. On the wider context of France’s cultural relationship with Asian trade in this era, see Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien régime (London: Berg, 2008). 6 Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 17. 7 John Feller, “Jesuit Ware: The Society of Jesus and Chinese Export Porcelain,” Scranton Journal 4, no. 2 (1983), 16–19. 8 Le Corbeiller, China Trade Porcelain, 69.