Barbarians in Shanghai: the conquering power of Euclid and Opium.

FOR SEVERAL HOURS, virtually every day, over a period of six months in late 1606 and early 1607, father Matteo Ricci, the pioneer Jesuit missionary to China, sought to convey the precise meaning of Euclid's Elements to Xu Guangqi, a convert to Christianity, known as Paul Xu. Laboriously, he read and explained the contents of one of the seminal books of Western civilisation so that Xu could translate it. The axiomatic style of The Elements was difficult to convey in Chinese, which had no copulative verb, linking complement to subject, in the affirmative. Furthermore, China had no mathematical tradition of definition.

After many years of study and struggle with the Chinese examination system, Xu had passed the jinshi examination two years before. He was appointed to the elite Hanlin academy, from whose ranks the most important positions in Chinese administration were filled.

Xu was a member of a wealthy gentry family from Shanghai, a background without any tradition of scholarly attainment, but which had an estate just outside Shanghai at Xujiahui, which would become a Jesuit sanctuary. Eventually Xu would hold the rank of Grand Secretary in Beijing--in effect prime minister to the emperor--probably the highest post that any native of Shanghai has held in China. It is definitely the highest post in China ever held by a Christian.

Shanghai was a natural harbour safely tucked away twelve miles south of the mouth of the Huangpu River, the last tributary before the fifty-mile-wide Yangzi pours into the East China Sea. The Yangzi basin is a vast deltaic plain, created over the millennia by the eternal pulse of the muddy Yangzi, sweeping down over 3000 miles of China and depositing hundreds of millions of tonnes of rich alluvial soil each year. "Earth", an ancient proverb said, "destroys water", just as, in the symbiotic circular antagonism of the Five Elements of Nature, "water destroys fire"; "fire destroys metal"; "metal destroys wood"; and "wood destroys earth". Shanghai sat on several hundred feet of thick alluvial loam--earth that had displaced water--on the edge of a dense network of waterways created by hydraulic engineering.

It was, probably, his personal background in a family concerned with practical affairs in a region preoccupied with and dependent on the control of water that had attracted Xu to what the West had to offer. Early in his career he had produced a detailed proposal about the control of water which displayed a knowledge of Chinese mathematics and its practical application in the surveying of land and the drawing of maps.

Ricci had received a rigorous training in mathematics and astronomy at the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit university in Rome where he was taught by Christopherus Clavius, one of the great Renaissance mathematicians. He brought a detailed knowledge of Euclid's text on his mission to China.

Xu would later explain his fascination for Euclid: "Western mathematics is more valuable as it supplies explanations which show why the methods are correct." This was in contrast with the Chinese mathematical tradition, which had always concentrated on how to solve a problem, rather than upon the proof to explain why the solution worked. Rigorous proof had never been a goal of Chinese mathematics. However, such proof was of pivotal significance to the practical application of mathematical knowledge. Scorned by the scholarly class, which emphasised learning the humanities, Chinese mathematics had, to a significant degree, became the reserve of magicians, who propounded geomancy and chose lucky days.