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Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary who had studied in Rome, arrived Macau in 1583. He would spend the next 27 years in China, until his death in 1610. Ricci wrote his first book in Chinese in 1595—a book of maxims culled from classical and ecclesiastical texts—and the following year he published a small book on the art of memory for a prince of the Ming dynasty, the governor of Jiangxi province. In this work, Ricci laid out the classical system of artificial memory, said to originate with the Greek poet Simonides (“Xi-mo-ni-de” to his audience), a series of cognitive techniques designed to artificially extend what was seen as the natural human memory. Ricci presented a theory of mnemotechnics that had proven itself a dominant intellectual force for centuries in Europe. As Mary Carruthers argues in The Book of Memory, “Medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern cultures in the West is documentary. This distinction certainly involves technologies—mnemotechnique and printing—but it is not confined to them.” These techniques—technologies even—of memory were almost always variations on a similar theme involving the mental construction of an imaginary memory palace—a grand structure made up of a series of rooms each distinguished by unique architectural features like arches of columns. Into each of these rooms of this memory palace you would mentally place a collection of objects which would stand for what you intend to remember through some metonymic process. As you imagine yourself walking through this space—perhaps Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 A.M. approximates something of this process—each object would immediately and sequentially bring to mind the things committed to memory. Matteo Ricci wrote in his treatise on the art of memory:

Once your places are all fixed in order, then you can walk through the door and make your start. Turn to the right and proceed from there. As with the practice of calligraphy, in which you move from the beginning to the end, as with the fish who swim along in ordered schools, so is everything arranged in your brain, and all the images are ready for whatever you seek to remember.

Though Ricci’s devotion to the art of memory is apparent, Ricci was perhaps even more renowned for his work on mathematics and cartography. Ricci published a Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements, and in his introduction he discusses the uses that mathematical study gives rise to, reserving the ultimate position for geography: “mountains, seas, kingdoms, continents, islands, and districts all laid down in miniature,” each “answering to the points of the compass” (the compass itself was a Chinese invention). One of the first large projects Ricci undertook upon his arrival in China was the construction of a full map of the world with place names translated into Chinese phonetic equivalents. This map apparently brought him great fame, and he later expanded it for publication with detailed historical and informational notes about the locations. A map must have a center somewhere: most European world maps put this center near Europe, but Ricci put the China smack in the center. A gigantic edition of the map was installed on six panels each six feet wide in one of the inner rooms of the palace of the emperor Wanli: as Wanli wandered his palace, he could be reminded of not only the cities and territories within his realm, but also of distant lands about which he had only heard stories.

The Great Khan owns an atlas whose drawings depict the terrestrial globe all at once and continent by continent, the boarders of the most distant realms, the ships’ routes, the coastlines, the maps of the most illustrious metropolises and of the most opulent ports. He leafs through the maps before Marco Polo’s eyes to put his knowledge to the test.