Boston’s Most Overlooked Library: Inside the Ricci Institute’s East–West Cultural Treasures

This might be the most overlooked research library in America, but what's inside will surprise you. 400 years of East and West history. rare books from China, Europe, Japan and Korea, world maps, carved art, all under one roof. Hello my friends, I'm Cathy. Welcome to Library Hunter, and today we're in Boston. I'm at the Ritchie Institute at Boston College. The Ritchie Institute at Boston College is a research center dedicated to East and West culture exchange. It houses a rare book library with manuscripts, maps, art, and archival materials that trace centuries of interaction between China, Japan, Korea, and Europe. If you've never stepped into a research library before, you're not alone. They're not built for everyday browsing. They're made for specialized study, housing the kinds of rare materials you will never find in a public library, stitch-bound classics, carved credenzas, posetsu boards, and the replica of the legendary 1602 world map. In this video, we are going to see them all. I also made a second video where I sit down with the librarians themselves, the people who protect these materials and keep the past alive. If you can read all the books in your library, the library is really too small. You must have like more than you can read so that you can explore new things. So I'm hoping that this institute can remain that kind of resource. So when they asked me if I would like to take a chance at cataloging this, because cataloging Chinese books was a new thing, if you have gloves on, you can't feel to turn the page. And you do more damage to the page by trying to turn it. So don't forget to watch the part 2 video as well, because together they tell the full story of why those old and rare books still matter and how we make sure they survive for the generations to come. So let's start from part one. As usual, we will begin the tour by walking through the stacks and meanwhile let's listen to a two-minute audio clip from recently retired librarian Mark while he explains how the Ricci Institute got its name. We're called the Ricci Institute after Matteo Ricci, right? Yeah. I guess you know who he is. 16th century Jesuit missionary. He's considered the founder of the China mission. Although he wasn't the first to go to China, but he was the most successful and the most illustrious. And there were many others after him who were just as competent and talented. And it's really quite remarkable the kind of work that they did the reason that the Jesuits and Ricci were important is that for about 200 years from about 1550 to about 1800 say a little longer the Jesuits were the primary intermediaries between East and West so between China and including the Sinosphere, Japan, Korea as well and Europe because America hadn't been invented yet it was the Jesuits who interpreted what went back and forth so information about China to Europeans was often based on Jesuit reports so things about the politics and government who their rulers were what their food was like what their history was about what things that they make most of that was stuff written about Jesuits the same thing was true on the Chinese side. The Jesuits wrote many books in Chinese. In fact, some like Alfonso Vagnoni wrote something like 42 books in Chinese on education, on deportation, all kinds of things like that in Chinese. But many times they were based on European sources. So Chinese and East Asia in general got their first information about Europeans from the Jesuits Ricci's 1602 map which i can show you in a minute uh he did it just almost as a favor to the to friends at court uh it's the first time on a chinese map that the west coast of europe and africa North and South America or the Poles were ever shown on a Chinese map. This is a portrait of Matteo Ricci that was done the same year he died and it was done by a Chinese Jesuit named Yowen Hui or took the name Manuel of Emmanuel Yow and he was trained in oil painting and he made that painting of Ricci this is a copy he made that painting of Ricci and the original was sent to to Rome and it's in the Jesuit residence now. This is an exact replica actually made on special by special sacral process so it retains the 3D feel and image you can go right up to it and you can see it's exactly like the original one. Exhibition from the Tushan Wang workshop it's a workshop at Shu Jia Hui and this is by the same group of carvers who sent it to the Calif to San Francisco for the 1915 exhibition. This is a famous scene with Zhu Ge Liang accepting the surrender. Remember the story? The castle here, the general Zhu makes them think it's occupied and ready to fight, but there's actually nobody in it. This is the scene. You can see all the spears and shields and so on, which are not manned, but the enemy general is so discouraged by this that he surrenders immediately to General Zhu. And this is an original 1716 document. It's dated here, see? The fifty-fifth year of Kangxi. And it's written in Latin and Chinese and Manchu. And it is a document that was sent to the ports of entry for any Westerners entering to follow the decrees of Rishi until his emissary Provana and his associates returned from the embassy to Rome. So this is kind of a legend. This was signed by the Jesuits who were in Beijing at the time. Actually, they're not all Jesuits. Vipa and They were non-Jesuits, but they were Catholic missionaries anyway. He was a convert. He was a Catholic convert. But he was really, Xu was an important Ming official. He held a very high rank. So he was a kind of a friend and protector and a proponent of each of his teachings. So they did a lot of work. In fact, his daughter, Candide, donated the land to Xu Hui. Xu Hui? oh yeah i've been to that yeah it's a really fancy district now yeah in those days it was just the kind of like these are all things that were made in china mostly this is a map of high mass college in mass and latin and all the woodwork and materials in the book, the whole book, and this is a 19th century copy of a 16th, 17th century book by and in it, it explains a lot of the meaning of it, but it also explains the meaning of this cow, what it means, why it has four sides and why it has certain illustrations and decorations. You mean the shape or the patterns? The pattern and the contents of the embroidery is different on each one. I think they were used for Dallas ceremonies, but they're often used for casual events. Because we burn incense and we have flowers and candles and so on. And these are part of Arthur Wood's collection. These are 18th century copper-plate engravings of Chen Long's military campaigns. Made of what's called the Xi'an stele. It's the earliest known official presence of Christianity, the Church of the East, in China. And it was the earliest Silk Road Christians arrived in the northwest of China in the Tang Dynasty. And in the year 635 was the first missions of the, they call them Nestorians sometimes, or Syriac Christians. by the Tang, by the Mid-Tang Dynasty, you can see it's dated here, by the time Jianzhong 2-Nian, so 685 it was yeah, it was the church was allowed, was officially permitted, supported by the state and this stele actually represents the background of the church it's Christian background and the Jingjiao is what they call this of pure religion there wasn't really a word now for christian the catholic church would say Tianzhujiao or Jizhujiao, yeah, what's interesting about this is that this had been lost for centuries until like the 1600s around 1660 when it was dug up in Xi'an and they made rubbings of it and word got out that it was this at first it was thought to be a form of buddhism because it's often mistaken for buddhist sutra like a text because if you read some of the creation story it could be a buddhist story but you can see it has a syriac script of the syriac monks who were witnesses and in fact syriac is still the language of the east church of the east in the headquarters the world headquarters was in baghdad but these churches still exist there's one in san francisco So Father John could come out and he could read these names because that's still the name of the ecclesial language. By the way, this rubbing doesn't do it justice. The original one has giant dragons and clouds, and it's on a huge tortoise, a turtle shell. So the original one is ginormous. It's huge. This is just the rubbing of the carved part, so this doesn't do it justice. There are pictures in some of our texts of the original one. It still survives in China, in the Forest of Stele, as they say. So Catherine Ilionis was the daughter of a merchant from Genoa, from Italy, named Domenico Ilionis. Domenico is mentioned in Marco Polo's books. He was a merchant with a series of trading houses along the Silk Road all the way to China. In the port city of Yangzhou, his daughter, granddaughter, Katharina, died in the year 1342. So during the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol Dynasty, and was buried there. And the tomb was, again, the stone was lost for years until 1951, when some soldiers were taking the stones down to rebuild it, to re-flag a floor, a wall. and one of the soldiers saw this funny carving so he put it in his wheelbarrow and took it to the Yangzhou City Museum and the curator there recognized it as a form of Latin so he made this rubbing he actually made two rubbing and sent it to Father Francis Rouleau who was a Jesuit who was still in China in Shanghai in 1951 he left in 1952 Father Rouleau brought this with him When he came and when he did a study on it, he realized that this is the earliest known Roman Catholic iconography shown in China. This is the martyrdom of Catherine of Alexandria in the 3rd century. So the wheel with the blades on it, the soldier who you might notice is dressed as an aventurier guard, cutting the head with the sword. The friar with the baby, which represents the soul. the angels lifting the tombstone to let the soul out to go to heaven and so this was a very unusual mix of metaphors kind of a hybrid uh it turns out that this area of Yangzhou uh was a cemetery for foreign merchants in the same area there were tombstones were uncovered in Hindi Malayalam arabic uh also about five years later her brother antonio's tombstone was discovered in the same area now at some point this became the property of a personal collector though because see this little carved part here ying wei had the pleasure of viewing this uh so this one time had been looked at by a collector and he actually carved the name on the stone oh who this collector is exactly we only have this pen name we don't really know who who was because the stone was apparently just with a lot of the other tombstones in the area. So the port city of Yangzhou was a huge... In fact, that's where Marco Polo, when he returned to Italy, he left from the port city of Yangzhou. He and his uncle were accompanying a Mongol princess to the Middle East to marry the Khan of the Levant, the Argo. He was one of the Khans of the Middle East. And from there, Marco returned to Italy, where he was captured in a naval battle with Genoa. And Marco Polo actually didn't write the book himself. He told his story to a person he was in jail with, he was in prison with. And this jail, Rustichello was his name. He was an Italian writer of romance novels, fancy novels. And he took the story and wrote the book that we know as Marco Polo's. In Italian, they called it Il Milione, The Millions, because everybody thought he was exaggerating. you know, but Marco talks about Yangzhou, about the bridges and the city, how beautiful it was, and all these things. These are some of the materials we had for the exhibit. Some of our workshop participants are interested in linguistics, so we have books on Shanghai dialect, Hakka dialect, you know, Kuja dialect, things like that. These are linguistic books. We have rare materials from a dictionary project that was started many years ago by the judges of a Chinese dictionary. So they were working on this project here. Are these original copies? They are. Wow. This is just one box of them. There are thousands of them. I feel the paper is still very nice. Yes. They were done on typewriters. So this is very thin, so you could make copies of them easily with carbon paper. Here's one, let me show you how it looked. This was done in the 1940s and early 50s. As you can see, how they would have to write the character in by hand, with different pronunciations. See? Nice. So this is just one part of the dictionary. One fascicle, yes. Literally just like one section of a very large dictionary. It was actually originally to be done in five languages. Ultimately, it was finally produced in French only in quite a different form. It was a long project. This works on the Franciscans of the early 16th century in Asia. This is a Catholic spiritual journey map showing the road to heaven and the road to hell. It's a very unusual and rare map, so a lot of people have been interested in studying this. You can see most of the works here are Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. For example, we have a Taizokyo, which is the Taizangjing, the Japanese Taisho edition of the Buddhist canon. We have a Qianlong edition of the same thing right here. Then we have collected works on Buddhism, Taoism, Tushu Jichang, and some other traditional Chinese sources. which is a collection of edifying stories from chinese classical history as a means of edification for scholars and proper government and things like that and it's mixed with things like the Tokugawa's letters prohibiting Christianity and uh in japan uh this is a yeah it's a maria canon as they call it uh it's just like this one here which appears to be buddhist It's actually supposed to be Mary, Mary and Jesus. This was actually made in China, even though it was sent to Japan. And Father Anthony found it in Japan. These boards are kosatsu boards. I don't know if you saw the movie Silence by Martin Scorsese or perhaps the movie Shogun. They're based on real characters anyway, real people. Gracia Hosokawa plays, the girl who plays Mariko, that's based on a real person. These kousatsu boards basically are government decrees that prohibit Christianity. This is one of the early ones from, I think, around 1643. And this one actually is offering rewards in silver for turning in Christians. And these others are for... This is the latest one we have, and this was intermediate. So the prohibition against Christianity in Japan lasted from around 1603 up until 1675, when they reconstitute Tushin's materials on Dasan, this Korean scholar, a Greek Korean scholar and sage who wrote lots of books. One of the advantages of reading Chinese is that the old Korean texts are all written in classical Chinese, so it's possible to read them. And these are similar works that are in Korean itself, court cases and jiaoan cases and things like that. These are regional records that we use for biographical and bibliographical purposes. Even though the Hangul characters were developed in the 1440s, the scholars continued to write or to use Chinese over the next few centuries, gradually replacing more and more of the Chinese characters with the Hangul. Wow. Did they speak Chinese? That's a good question. probably not but they could read it wow that's hard to imagine it was the same way in Japan for a long time too a lot of the records in Japan even though structurally the languages are completely different we have some printing blocks from Japan and they're written in Chinese but they have what's called kanbun the little reading marks that are put there on the board so that a Japanese audience could read the Chinese because it would tell them what was the subject, verb, and object, so they could figure it out. Yeah, word daizoukyo, some of the larger art books and so on, you can recognize some of them, like complete Tang literature and poetry books on the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, and many other materials like this. Since it's Halloween. A lot of ghost stories in here. Yeah. So these are all Korean works. In fact, King Sejong's work that he had his scholars compose that developed Hangul is in this text right here. It's reproduced. This is a reproduction of the original, and it looks like this. Wow. the introduction and it's explaining the different forms how Korean Hangul were developed. Of course this is an early draft. It was the 1400s. Over the centuries there were modifications and some forms fell out of use as the language changed. This is where it all started. You can see, see this is how we used to have them back at USF. So we'd have the row with the books, the titles on there, and of course they'd have the catalog tags so you could find them. But for example, you would just have them stacked this way with the titles on the bottom. Now, some of them we would make the boxes for, the titles and box them. But for most of these, we didn't have a chance to do that. By the way, here's a Dream of the Red Chamber. Everybody likes that story. This is a nice old Late Qing edition. I think there's some illustrations here. This is a record of Qianlong's southern tours where he would visit, do various visits to the south, take notes on the conditions there, draw pictures of gardens and things he admired. So there's a lot of illustrations in here. This is one of the oldest books that we have. This is a Guanzi, and Guanzi is a work of legalism. This is a 1579 edition, so this would have been circulating in China when Ricci got there in 1583. You can see the paper is really excellent quality in the late Ming Dynasty. This one, someone made notes. One of the previous owners vermillion notes it's kind of the way it's commentary on this quote on this clause here yeah the Guanzi is a work of legalism you're familiar with that one of the like confucianism you know faja like uh like uh like Qin Shi Huang followed legalists one of the old schools of chinese philosophy his big chest is uh the credenza was carved by the young men at the orphanage workshop in Shanghai at the Xu Zha Hui. And it was made for the 1915 Panama Pacific exhibition in San Francisco to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. And the Republic of China, the Nanjing government, asked the fathers in Shanghai if they could send Chinese artworks to represent the China Pavilion, because it was like a World's Fair of the Pacific Rim. So Korea and Canada, everybody in Chile, everybody along the Pacific Rim sent stuff to their art. And this was one of the items that they sent. The instructor of the shop was a German, a Bavarian, a brother of Aloysius Beck. But his favorites, so this is like a Germanic credenza, But his favorite story was the San Guo Yan Yi. So these are all San Guo characters. San Guo characters. Oh. Guan Gong and all. Oh, yeah. I didn't realize. This thing was built, except for the hinges and a couple of repairs, was built in traditional Chinese fashion, meaning there are no nails or screws. Everything is held together with pins or blocks of mortise and tenon. So all those pieces come apart. so when we shipped this from San Francisco we built a special case and this all came apart so when we put it together it just fit in this corner just a little bit to spare so it was just also we have a donation there was a donation of rare terracotta funerary objects from the late Ming Dynasty so we put them in here by the way we 3D imaged all this stuff So if you look on our website, you can find most of these things in 3D where you can zoom and blow them up. Oh, that's nice. You have end pieces from the Ming tools and a Buddhist post-op. And you can see the beautiful work, the carvings. We have pieces from a few screenings that we don't have anymore. This was an end piece with a crane. During the move, what was the most challenging part to move everything? Well, we had a moving company help us, but I started in January of 2022 boxing stuff along with a dozen or so other workers. And we loaded, I think, around 2,600 boxes of books, and we had to keep them in some kind of order, and they had to be unboxed here. But then things like this, we had to build special cases for. so this this part we built a piece where there were like canvas straps so we could hang suspended so it wouldn't get banged around too much and of course the headpiece crown pieces they call it and all the little images all come off so they all had to be wrapped and packaged and then that's a very big project it was a big project it took uh almost a month to do all the boxing and It took another several weeks to truck, I think there were four or five moving vans, and they had to come cross-country in the winter, and then they all came here to unload. So, yeah, it was a very busy time. The trucks had to be climate-controlled, just like the building. So, yes, because it's wintertime, that was a problem because, you know, it rains, it snows, it's a difficult thing to maintain. But in any event, it came out very well. I would like to show you just one other thing in here it's difficult to use is that it's on fan folded paper meaning it's it's not separate pages it's all the paper are they glued together I think they are but they are so well glued that it's very hard to tell where the seams are but you can see there's the Chinese text here they included an English translation as well kind of of unusual yeah but you can see just just randomly open to any page is two volumes so you can see the first story that's a good way to learn it is most of the work we do here it's not so much literary criticism but history so the stacks area that Sister Sophia showed you mostly deal with history history of medicine, cartography, science, politics and government, traditional Chinese texts, things like that. Exploring the Ricci Institute felt like opening door after door into centuries of cultural exchange, and this is only half the experience. In the next video, I interview the librarians Mark and Martin, who protect all of this. It's a deep dive into why old manuscripts and books still matter today, and the meticulous efforts involved in their preservation. They also share the behind-the-scenes story during the relocation process from San Francisco to Boston, how they managed to move thousands of fragile collections across the country. So if you want to finish the full story, don't miss part 2. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next library. Bye!