Excerpts. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spencer.

  In 1596 Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember: the most ambitious construction would consist of several hundred buildings of all shapes and sizes, "the more there are the better it will be," said Ricci, thought he added that one did not have to build on a gradiose scale right away. One coul create modest palaces, or one could build less dramatic structures such as a temple compound, a cluster of government offices, a public hostel, or a merchants's meeting lodge. If one wished to begin on a still smaller scale, then one could erect a simple reception hall, a pavilion, or a studio. And if one wanted an intimate space one could use just the corner of a pavilion, or an altar in a temple, or even such a homely object as a wardrobe or a divan.

  In summarizing this memory system, he explained that these palaces, pavilions, divans wer mental structures to be kept in one's head, not solid objects to be literaally constructed out of "real" materials. Ricci suggested that there were three main options for such memory locations. First, they coud be drawn from reality, that is, from buildings that one had been in or from objects that one had seen with one's own eyes and recalled in one's memory. Second, they could be totally fictive, products of the imagination conjured up in any shape or size. Or third, they could be half real and half fictive, as in the case of a building one knew well and through the back wall of which one broke an imaginary door as a shortcut to new spaces, or in the middle of which one created a mental staircase that would lead one up to higher floors that had not existed before.

  The real purpose of all these mental constructs was to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge. To everything that we wish to remember, wrote Ricci, we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it by an act of memory. Since this entire memory system can work only if the images stay in the assigned positions and if we can instantly remember where we stored them, obviously it would seem easiest to rely on real locations which we know so well that we cannot ever forget them. But that would be a mistake, thought Ricci. For it is by expanding the number of locations and the corresponding number of images that can be stored in them that we increase and strengthen our memory. Therefore the Chinese should struggle w/ the difficult task of creating fictive places, or mixing the fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by constant practice and review so that at last the fictive spaces become "as if real, and can never be erased."

  How many such images could one or did one seek to retain in the memory palaces of one's mind? Ricci wrote quite casually in 1595 of running through a list of four to five hundred random Chinese ideograms and then repeating the list in reverse order, while Chinese friends described him as being able to recite volumes of the Chinese classics after scanning them only once. But such feats were not particularly startling: Francesco Panigarola, an older contemporary who may have taught Ricci memory arts either in Rome or in Macerate - the manuscript draft of Panigarola's little tract on memory method still reposes in the Macerate library - was described by acquaintances in Florence as being able to roam across a hundred thousand memory images, each in its own fixed place. As Ricci, echoing the past books on memory, told Governer Lu Wangai, it was the order and sequence of the places ready for images inside each building that were crucial to the mnemotic art:

  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 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.  If you are going to use a great many [images], then let the buildings be hundreds or thousands of units in extent, if you only want a few, then take a single reception hall and just divide it up by its corners.

  Quite a strong level of memory, even among the poor and uneducated, was still taken for granted in a culture that remainted largely oral. Montaigne, for instance, on his Italian joruney of 1581, described a group of peasants in the fields near Florence, their girl friends at their sides, reciting lengthy passages of Ariosto as they strummed on their lutes. Yet at the same time, possession of too strong a memory could swiftly lead one's neighbords to suspect one of having magical powers, as happened w/ Arnaud du Tilh in souther France during the mid-sixteenth century.

  How he managed to draw the strands of these studies together in Nanchang in 1595, putting his new-found confidence in his knowledge of Chinese alongside his own rigorous memory training, and cleverly playing on the desire for book memorization on the part of his Chinese acquaintances, Ricci described a detailed letter to his superior in Macao, Edoardo de Sande, which bubbles w/ the joy of achievement.

  "One day, when I was invited to a party by some holders of the first-level literary degree, something happened that gave me a great reputation among them and among all the other literari in the city. The thing was that I had constructed a Memory Place System for many of the Chinese ideographs, and being in good relations w/ these literati and desiring to gain among them some credit, and give some evidence of what I knew of Chinese letters, understanding how much this mattered to the service and glory of Our Lord and to that which we were intending, I told them that they should write down a large number of Chinese letters in any manner they chose on a sheet of paper, without there being any order among them, because after reading them only once, I would be able to say them all by heart in the same way and order in which they had been written. They did so, writing many letters without any order, all of which I, after reading them once, was able to repeat by memory in the manner in which they were written: such that they were all astonished, it seeming to them a great matter. And I, in order to increase their wonder, began to recite them all by memory backward in the same manner, beginning with the very last until reaching the first. By which they all became utterly astounded and as if beside themselves. And at once they began to beg me to consent to teach them this divine rule by which such a memory was made. And immediately my fame began to spread so swiftly among the literati that I couldn't even keep a counting of all the degree holders and other imporant people who came to ask me if I would be willing to teach this science and took me as their master, and paid me courtesies as they would to a master, and also offered me money as they would their masters."

  The memorization of such classical works was of course crucial to ambitious Chinese youths entering the examination ladder for bureaucratic office; as Ricci shrewdly observed: "Great is the rejoicing that is made in the city by the magistrates and by the parents of all those who obtain a passing grade, for as they are heathens they think that this is both their glory and their paradise." Ricci had already met one senior official (the milirary mandarin Scielou, who nearly led him to a watery grave) whose son had had a physical and mental collapse after failing the state examinations, and as he came to write down his thoughts in his book on mnemonic method, he played on this desire, assering that "if a student were trying to recall what he had read of the Classics, then such-and-such a chapter, such-and-such a page, such-and-such a line would be as vivid as if before his eyes."

  In presenting the case for his own mnemonic system Ricci obviously tried to impress the Chinese with the fact that the system had been used successfully by roaylty in the distant past: he wrote of "the king of Bando," who learned the languages of the twenty-two countries he ruled (in reference to Mithradates of Pontus); of "the king of Balaxi," who knew the names of all the soldiers in his army of hundreds of thousands of men (in reference to Cyrus of Persia); and of "the king of Liweiya," who sent an envoy to Rome, the envoy remembering the names of the thousands of officials he met there (referring to Pyrrhus's envoy Cineas).

  One wonders if, in leisurely conversation with some of his scholarly Chinese friends, Ricci roamed beyond these three examples, which he probably drew from the brief section of Pliny's Natural History that dealt w/ memory, where all three Western examples that he used are listed. The Latin humanist and Stoic writers he had been raised on, such as Cicero, Quitilian, and Seneca, all provided fine examples that the Chinese might have warmed to more readily, for they had attributes that the Chinese themselves valued. For example, Seneca, remembering two thousand names in sequence or two hundred random lines of verse, would have struck a Chinse chord, as would Theodectes w/ his ability to recall any number of poems after a single reading, and Charmadas, who could remember the entire contents of the books in the libraries he visited. Such figures from the Western past could have claimed a kind of equality w/ Chinese scholars of the past famous for parallel feats: doubtless any of Ricci's educated Chinese friends could have told him of Ni Heng of the Eastern Han, who remembered all the stone tomb inscriptions after he returned from a long journey; or Xing Shao, who remembered the whole Han dynastic history after five days and could always recall all the poems written at a party; or Lu Jiangdao of the Tang, who after one reading could recite books both forward and backward; and the formidable Zhang Andao who, having grown up in seclusion, had always thought that everyone remembered books after reading them once through, until he was politely corrected.

  The parallels that one can find, all of which would have been in the conscious minds either of Ricci or of his Chinese friends, are indeed remarkable. If Julis Caesar could, in Pliny's words, "dictate or listen simultaneously, dictating to his secretaries four letters at once on his important affairs - or, if otherwise unoccupied, seven letters at once," could not Liu Xuan in the Sui dynasty listen to, and retain, five items of information being delivered to him at the same time? If Lucius Scipio could name the citizens of Rome and Themistocles list all the citizens of Athens, had not Su Song, serving in the Nanjing area, been able to retain all the area population registers in his own head? As well as which he had developed a kind of chronlogical "placement" system of his own, based on the traditional dynastic Histories. The matched examples could be found also in varied commercial or recreational sphrers. Hortensius recalled every price of every item sold at auction, while Chen Jian recalled each detail of his accounting books and the produce of his looms; Scaevola, riding back to his home in the country, could replay in his head every move of the pieces in the board game he had lost, while Wang Can could do the same w/ a game of Chinese checkers where he had been only a spectator.

  (An idea: to remember a board game.)