In the 1950s I was a young schoolboy. Nobody spoke much about China, and when our geography teacher asked us what we knew about that faraway country all I was able to say was that since a revolutionary called Mao Tsetung had come to power, the country had been closed off behind the Great Wall, and that its borders were sealed by the so-called "bamboo curtain". As I drew a map of the old Heavenly Empire, my imagination was fired by the stories of Marco Polo, who seven centuries earlier had journeyed along the legendary Silk Road, since the third century BC the line of contact between the peoples of the Mediterranean and those of the eastern Asia. Since that time, entirely different peoples, separated by immense distances, had sought to establish contact and cultural exchange. I was hooked, and my need to know grew stronger and stronger.
An old encyclopaedia of my parents' provided the first information about the great country of the Chinese and laid the foundations of my future passion. I discovered that at the same time as the Roman Empire a powerful Chinese Empire had existed with dynasties that would later become familiar to me through my deeper studies: the Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan, the Song, and above all the glorious Ming dynasty, comparable in its splendour and grandeur to our Renaissance.
It was a great empire where many things had been invented before they were known in Europe: writing, paper, ink, the compass, gunpowder, silk, porcelain, and movable type printing.
As a young boy, I imagined adventurous journeys along the Silk Road, and entertained myself by drawing evermore detailed maps. In this way I became familiar with names such as Yumen, or the Jade Gate, the pass through which the caravans entered China from the west; Chang'an, today's Xian, the eastern end of the Silk Road; Khanbaliq, Kublai Khan's fabulous capital described by Marco Polo in The Million, which later the third Ming emperor, Yongle, was to rename Beijing, known for many years in the West as Peking.
My slow, but progressively deeper, understanding of China, the former Middle Kingdom, with its thousands of years of history, its magnificent civilisation and its profoundly original culture, led me over the years to make 158 separate journeys to China (as of spring 2009), to a systematic study of the complexities of Chinese civilisation, to write books and to organise the four major exhibitions entitled The Silk Road and Chinese Civilisation at the Casa dei Carraresi museum in Treviso, where on 24 October 2009 the third exhibition, dedicated to the Ming dynasty, will be inaugurated with the title of "The Secrets of the Forbidden City and Matteo Ricci at the Ming Court". The exhibition, currently in preparation, will draw attention to the extraordinary achievements of China between the 14th and the 17th centuries. It will focus, too, on the great sea journeys of discovery, not only of the European navigators Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, but also of the Chinese admiral Zheng He, whose enormous fleets reached the African coasts; and on the meeting between Western and Chinese science brought about by the Jesuits, who sent to the Heavenly Empire men of great culture such as Matteo Ricci from Macerata. The displays will include the splendours of Chinese porcelain, lacquer, jade, silk, bronzes and jewellery, and the treasures of the Forbidden City, the magnificent palace in Beijing. The glorious Ming period is seen in justified parallel with the Italian Renaissance, two worlds which, paradoxically, were closer to each other in the past than they are in the present.
Adriano Màdaro