A Town of Palaces

China, the late sixteenth century. An Italian priest of the Jesuit order, Matteo Ricci, has lived in the country for years. He has learned to speak, read and write Chinese, and dresses as a scholar. He is there to talk about his religion, but he has found that the best door into Chinese society is a surprising one: his memory.

In China, ambitious young men prepared for years for the imperial examinations, which tested their knowledge of an enormous body of classical texts. Memory was a serious matter. When Ricci reportedly showed scholars that he could learn a long list of Chinese characters, read once, and say it back in order, and then backwards, they wanted to know how.

In 1596 he wrote a short book in Chinese to explain the art. In it he taught the memory palace. He told his readers to choose a building, to fix places in it, and to put a picture in each place. He explained that the scholar should fix places in order and walk through them. He did not present it as his own invention; it came from the West.

The scholars who read it faced the same problem as every student with a lot to learn. A single building is not enough. One house with fifty places holds fifty things, and the examination was thousands of lines long. What they needed was more buildings, and a way to move between them.

Which is exactly where this lesson begins. A network of palaces is like a town. You do not memorise one house; you memorise streets, and the streets connect houses, and each house is about one subject. A bank of buildings for history, another for languages, another for your job.

The part of the network that matters most is not the houses but the connections. A good connection is a short, vivid step between the last place of one palace and the first of the next. With those, a hundred buildings can be walked in one long journey, and you can enter and leave wherever you want.