Plodding through China
Philip Glazebrook
THE CITY OF LIGHT by Jacob d'Ancona, translated and edited by David Selbourne Little, Brown and Co., £22,50, pp. 231 The desire for gain conquers the greatest fear.' So writes the author of this book, a Jewish merchant of Ancona who led a trading argosy to China in 1270, and that apothegm encapsulates his outlook. The details of what goods he traded, and how credit was arranged, and the extent to which a Jewish trading family on this dynastic and cosmopolitan scale — we see Jacob's son make a useful commercial mar- riage to one of Basra's 3,000 Jews — could outsmart the anti-Jewish decrees of the time; all this and much else is of interest. The Jewish community of Jacob's day formed an international trading group owning no local loyalties but ready to accept, for profit's sake, whatever badge of demarcation local laws decreed. The book's editor is watchful and informative, setting the scene fully but unobtrusively, and his translation is so smooth that the matter seems to come straight from Jacob's pen, and to create his character for us we read his accounts of buying cheap and sell- ing dear, all of it drenched in appeals to God and quotes from the Torah.
Unfortunately it is the character of a bore. There is enough incident during the journey, by way of Damascus and Basra and the Indian coast, to engage our inter- est and keep the narrative alive. But once Jacob reaches the Chinese city of Zaitun in Sinim where the Sung dynasty is fading before the onset of the Tartars, any narra- tive interest kindled in the first 70-odd pages of the book is suffocated in the static and improbable happenings of the next 200. It is interesting to compare Jacob's style with that of Marco Polo, his near con- temporary, and to reflect that Marco Polo unedited by Rustichello might have been as laborious as Jacob: Polo had had all the experiences, but Rustichello was the pro- fessional romancer who turned them into a bestseller. Jacob, the moment he lands in China, begins to plod. Is the whole thing an allegory, I began to wonder, a precursor of those political allegories cast in the form of journeys to unknown lands which, in the 18th century, allowed witty satires of cur- rent government to amuse the smart set?
Jacob, it seems, certainly reworked his manuscript when he got home. How much did he invent? There is a long Dantesque search through the seedy and sordid Zaitun underworld for a lost companion, 'the helmsman Turiglioni', during which our hero suffers many temptations; Zaitun, `city of light' whose rush-hour din shuts out even God's thunder, is curiously near in name to Shaitan the Turkic Prince of Dark- ness; the imminence of Tartar conquest threatens civic extinction, whilst the citi- zens debate and quarrel among themselves; all this is the stuff of allegory. These citi- zens' debates follow the mode of Thucy- dides — indeed there is a spokesman for the pragmatic cynicism of Cleon — in set- ting out doses of political theory under the name of each debater. There is the aged Tory, 'noble Pitaco', there is 'the Adver- sary', a Thatcherite merchant; these are all people-as-points-of-view, but above all there is Jacob, the foreign businessman who steps into the heart of Zaitun's politi- cal life — imagine it happening in the China of Macartney's day, or of our own and talks everyone else into the ground (served as well by his interpreter, 'the faith- ful Lifenli', as by any intercommunication set-up BT could supply): 'Wherefore I, Jacob di Salomone, resolved to take com- mand, and spoke as follows, for which God be praised'; morals, politics, ethics, duty, charity, the just price — sententious and heavy-handed, he's ready to trot out plati- tudes on any abstract subject by the hour together: 'Thus I continued, even though dawn drew near.'
It makes dull reading. If Jacob's manuscript had fallen into the hands of a Rustichello in the 13th century instead of waiting 700 years to be discovered by a scholar such as Mr Selbourne, the tedious debates in China would have been cut, and the human interest worked upon. The char- acter of 'the girl Buccazuppo', taken on the trip as a washerwoman and soon in all sorts of trouble, would have been a gift for the Rustichello rewrite. Instead we have metic- ulous editorship which feeds us all we need to know (by means of informative panels set into the text as well as in conventional notes) and even nudges us towards the reactions we ought to have to Mr Sel- boume's miraculous find. For me, poor Jacob defined himself in two sentences, each uttered with a sigh. might have been a prince in Sinim,' he muses; but then another thought overtakes the day-dream: 'He who engages overmuch in trade cannot become wise.' Jacob was a trader to his backbone, who nursed a fantasy of holding the Chinese parliament spellbound with his oratory.
This review was written before any doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript had been expressed.
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