| At the end of the 16th century, Matteo Ricci pioneered the way for western missionaries to preach in China during the late Ming Dynasty. In the famous manuscript of Matteo Ricci, he elaborately describe a colorful and unpolished “marble Rockery”, rather than the monumental Chinese Tai-hu Rockery, in the garden of Xu Hongji, the most prominent Duke of Wei in Nanjing, and particularly describe in detail of those "caves designed like a maze" ,which integrates the owner's daily life joy, social meeting, beating heat and other functions in a very small space. So-called “even though it occupies an area which is not too extensive, someone wanting to go through it all needed two or three hours, coming out then through another door”. This reflects that the artificial rockery in Duke Wei's West Garden, with their high technicality and professional spirit, are within a small space, create the feature of "urban mountain forest". Matteo Ricci's records had a profound influence on the Oriental documentary accounts of envoys and missionaries who came to China in later generations. Later writer, like Gabriel de Magalhaes,Alvaro Semedo, Joseph Amiot, and up to the Dutch East India Company envoy Johan Nieuhof, when describing Chinese cities and gardens, to varying degrees , retold Matteo Ricci's description of the artificial Rockery cave in Nanjing. This paper focuses on the textual research of Matteo Ricci (1599) and Nieuhof (1657), exploring the way and extent to which Western travel literature describes and understands Chinese rockery during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the impact of this on the records of Chinese gardens in later Western literature. |
