The Tartars in European Missionary Writings of the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 4 The Tartars in European Missionary Writings of the Seventeenth Century

Dong Shaoxin

In the past few decades,1 many studies have been devoted to the intensifying contacts between Europeans and various Asian groups in the seventeenth century. Among these different groups, the Tartars have received comparatively little attention. This chapter will outline how the increasingly correct under- standing of the terms “Tartar” and “Tartary,” and of the people denoted by these terms, can be attributed to texts related to the Catholic mission. In so doing, it will illuminate how the European stereotype of China became increasingly nuanced throughout the seventeenth century, due to direct contact with different groups. Yet, these new differentiations could, in fact, result in the profusion rather than the disappearing of stereotypes, such as the contrast that was constructed between “masculine” Tartars and “effeminate” Chinese. The European word “Tartar” and the Chinese word “Dada” 鞑靼 may have the same origin. But they acquired different meanings in different historical periods. “Dada” first appeared in a text from the Tang dynasty, Li Deyu’s Hui chang Yipinzhi Ji 李德裕 [Collected Works of Li Deyu] (《会昌一品制集》). Thereafter, the term returned in Chinese sources of the Song and Yuan dynas- ties. During the Ming, “Dada” referred in particular to Mongols beyond the Great Wall. The Ming Shi 明史 [The Official History of the Ming Dynasty] includes a Dada zhuan 鞑靼传 [History of the Tartars],2 which is, in fact, a brief history of the Dada (Mongolian) people. The different connotations of “Dada” in Chi- nese literature have been studied thoroughly by Chinese and Japanese schol- ars of the early twentieth century, such as Wang Guowei, Fang Zhuangyou, and Yanai Wataru.3 Through these studies, we can see that the Jurchen people

1 This article is one of the results of the project “Ming-Qing War in European Sources” (17AZS006) sponsored by the National Social Science Foundation of China. 2 Zhang Tingyu 张廷玉 et al., Ming Shi 明史 [The Official History of the Ming Dynasty] (Bei- jing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2000), juan 327, liezhuan 215, waiguo 8. 3 Wang Guowei, 王国维, “鞑靼考[A Study on Tartar],” 清华学报 Tsing Hua Journal 3, no. 1 (1927): 651–678; Fang Zhuangyou, 方壮猷, “鞑靼起源考 A Study on the Origin of the Tar- tars,” 国立北京大学国学季刊 [Quarterly of Chinese Studies of National Peking Universi ty] 3, no. 2 (1932), separate, 16 pages; Yanai Wataru, 箭内亘, 兀良哈及鞑靼考 [A Study on

The Tartars in European Missionary Writings 83

女真, a Tongusic people in northeast Asia, never called themselves “Dada”; additionally, in Chinese literature, “Dada” seldom refers to the Jurchen. The connotations of the term Tartar in European texts are more complicat- ed. Generally speaking, it was applied to the people living in the northern parts of Eurasia. In the thirteenth century, the name Tartar was used in Europe for the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, while Marco Polo’s term “Tartari” mainly refers to the Mongols. Later, the word was applied to the different Turkic- or Mongolic-speaking peoples who were encountered by the Russians.4 Before 1600, Europeans had not known about the Jurchen, so the term Tartary in Eu- ropean literature before the sixteenth century does not include them. Only by the seventeenth century, the word Tartar in European texts usually refers to the Manchus. Martino Martini’s (1614–1661) Bellum Tartaricum (1654) and Jean- Baptiste Du Halde’s (1674–1743) Description […] de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise (1735) are two important examples. With these well-known publications, the Jurchen people (and later the Manchus) were included in the conception of Tartary and the terms Tartar and Manchu were used inter- changeably. This shift can be attributed to the contributions of European Cath- olic missionaries in China in the seventeenth century.

1 Sixteenth-Century Sources

In the early sixteenth century, Europeans established a direct sea route with east Asia. But during this entire century, no Europeans—except the Portu- guese ambassador Tomé Pires—reached Northern China, and none of them had a chance to encounter the Mongols or the Jurchen beyond the Great Wall. Europeans arriving in south and east Asia in the sixteenth century mentioned the Tartars occasionally in letters, reports, and books. Their ideas were based on the traditional European statements about the Tartars and on hearsay in Asia. As Tomé Pires wrote in his Suma Oriental of 1515:

They say that there are people from Tartary [Tartaria] in the land of Chi- na and they call them Tartar [Tartall], and these people are very white with red beards. They ride on horseback; they are warlike. And they say

Uriankhai and Tartar], translated from Japanese into Chinese by Chen Jie 陈捷 and Chen Qingquan 陈清泉, (Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1932). 4 For more details on the European concept of the term “Tartar,” see Svetlana Gorshenina, L’Invention de l’Asie Centrale: Histoire du concept de la Tartarie à l’Eurasie (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2014).