Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States Read Online Free Page B

India. Over the centuries, the tribute network the Middle Kingdom established with its various vassal states became the official channel by which the finest products of foreign lands, from gems to foodstuffs, directly reached the emperor for his pleasure andenjoyment. Between 1405 and 1433, the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty sent Admiral Zhen He’s fleet of three hundred ships on expeditions extending from Southeast Asia to Africa to assert Chinese power and expand the tribute system. In 1601, another Ming emperor hired the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci to serve as his court mathematician and cartographer. Ricci introduced western geometry and trigonometry and drafted accurate maps of the world showing latitude and longitude and the main continents. He could speak, read, and write Chinese, saw no contradiction between Catholic and Confucian beliefs, and converted many scholars and officials to Christianity. Even today, the Chinese admire Ricci for his deep knowledge of and respect for their culture.

     
    Figure 1.3. Large flags proclaim the western presence in the “factory” compound on the outskirts of Guangzhou. Until 1842, this was the only part of China where Europeans and Americans were allowed to live and trade.
     
    By the time Ricci died, in 1610, Europeans were a constant presence at the edges of the Chinese empire. This incursion had begun in 1517 with the arrival of Portuguese traders, who soon acquired the rights to anchor at and then settle in Macau. They were followed by the Dutch and then, in the seventeenth century, the Spanish, French, English, and other European powers. The imperial government saw their presence as decidedly a mixed blessing. The European trade became highly profitable to the emperors, who took most of the profits directly into their coffers, restricting contacts with the European traders to the port of Guangzhou in order to protect their imperial monopoly, and for fear of foreign contagion. Imperial China was a highly organized yet delicately balanced machine—who knew what kind of cultural, economic, or political instability these strangers would bring? Official knowledge about Europe and its various peoples was designedly inadequate, because it was considered dangerous to learn more. Aside from the storerooms of the Forbidden City, the only place where Chinese could have seen European maps was Guangzhou. In the mid–eighteenth century, imperial courtiers drafted a massive, ten-volume encyclopedia, the
Illustrations of the Tribute-Bearing People of the Qing
(1761), that gave the official view of the outside world—one heavily influenced by the view of ancient texts like the
Shanhaijing
. All foreign peoples are defined by their level of allegiance, imaginary or not, toward civilization, that is, the Middle Kingdom. The authors do not bother to correctly locate England, France, Italy, Holland, Russia, or even the Atlantic Ocean. The inhabitants of the European countries are described as having “dazzling white” skin, “lofty” noses, and red hair. They favor tight clothes; their disposition is warlike; they esteem women more than men; and all they care about is trade. (In traditional China, since at least the days of Confucius,merchants were relegated to the lowest rung of social status.) To imperial officials, the behavior of the Europeans resembled more that of dogs or sheep than that of civilized human beings. When the
Empress of China
—a European style of ship, with a crew who spoke the same language as the English—arrived in Guangzhou, local businessmen like Chouqua may have been curious about these people’s native land and glad to have new trading partners. To imperial officials, however, they were just more red-haired, white-skinned foreigners from the far-off zone of “cultureless savagery.”
    At the end of the American War of Independence, Americans knew slightly more about China than the Chinese did about the United States. For about a half century,