[
    {
        "id": 205106,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 62,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n57\n\nwith Chinese technique and art forms. This stone is so far the \"sole material monument\" of the Franciscan mission in medieval China. It has been suggested that there might exist another one. Christian tombstones from Ch'üan-chou were published some years ago, and it has been thought that the language on one of them is Latin. It must be Christian because the inscription begins with the sign of the Cross, but the attempt to read it as Latin and to regard it as the tomb inscription for Andrew of Perugia, the third suffragan bishop of Zayton — modern Ch'üan-chou — does not seem convincing. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the inscription is not in Syriac script.5\n\nThere is, however, another mission from the West that reached China and where even the dynastic history of the Yuan has recorded their arrival. It is that of the papal envoy Giovanni da Marignolli, Bishop of Bisignano. A medieval manuscript in Prague has recorded the Western part of the story. This embassy, if we may call it that, was occasioned by a letter from some Alan Christians in China dated 11th July 1336. Some of the senders can be identified with persons mentioned in Chinese sources of the period. The Pope, Benedict XII, answered with a letter dated 13th June 1338, and Giovanni da Marignolli left Avignon — the papal see in those years — in December 1338. He travelled first to Constantinople and proceeded from there to the Crimea and the court of Uzbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde. Another station was Almaliq in Central Asia. Finally the papal envoy reached Khanbaliq (Peking) and was presented to the Emperor, Shun-ti. Giovanni presented the emperor with gifts, among them a Western horse. After a few years in China the envoy went back to Europe via India and reached Avignon in 1353. The Chinese annals have recorded the exact date of the audience when Giovanni met Shun-ti, or, to call him by his Mongol name, Togon Temur; it was August 19, 1342. The Chinese dynastic history calls the country Fu-lang, another way of transcribing the name of the Franks, that is, the Europeans. However, Giovanni's name and that of the Pope, are not mentioned by the Yuan-shih. In any case, this embassy seemed so important to the compilers of the dynastic history that they recorded it, and this means something because the basic documents for Togon Temur's reign were already lost at the time of the compilation of the Yuan-shih so that the annals for his reign are notoriously incomplete. But even so it does not seem",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205107,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 63,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "58\n\nHERBERT FRANKE\n\nas if the court historiographers and recorders recognized the importance of the mission. The Western horse, at least, impressed Mongols and Chinese alike. It was, if not one of the Flemish battle horses, certainly much bigger and stronger than the native breed of horses familiar to the Mongols. The court painter Chou Lang was commissioned to paint a portrait of the horse. This painting was still extant in the eighteenth century when the Jesuit Father Gaubil saw it; the Catalog of the Imperial Collections compiled in 1815 lists it. There is no trace of that painting left, but in a time when so many and sometimes stunning discoveries are made in China and Chinese archives we should not give up all hope of tracing this pictorial evidence of Giovanni da Marignolli's embassy. Apart from painting, there are many passages in fourteenth-century Chinese literature where allusion is made to the gift of Western horses to the emperor. Many poets of that time wrote poems praising this kingly gift and extolling the horse which, as one poet says, stood out like a camel among the other horses in the Imperial stables. At least a full dozen writers can be found who considered this horse important enough to be the subject of a poem. Almost invariably, allusion is made to the famous \"Heavenly Horses\" brought to China under the Han Dynasty from the Western Regions by Chang Ch'ien. Then, as under Shun-ti, the gift of a Heavenly Horse was regarded as an auspicious omen for the Imperial house and the emperor in particular. All this is completely in accordance with Chinese tradition. If far-distant countries send tribute, this shows that the Mandate of Heaven truly extends to the end of the inhabited world. One wonders what Giovanni da Marignolli would have thought, being the representative of the Vicar of Christ on earth, if he had known that his embassy served as the subject for a display of Sinocentric sentiment and an exhibition of pro-dynastic loyalty. The lucky omen of the Heavenly Horses turned out to be of not much avail, however. A few decades later, the emperor had to flee to the Mongolian steppes when the Ming troops took Peking. It remains, nevertheless, quite surprising that so many Chinese poets (there is hardly a non-Chinese among them) went to the length of writing hymns of praise of the dynasty when nobody forced them to, and it seems that at least among the literati, there was not yet much anti-dynastic and anti-Mongol feeling. In any case, it is striking how much this incident is treated in literature in a traditional Chinese way.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    }
]