Achinese people

“ The Chinese are a colonizing race, and in Manchuria, Mongolia and Turkestan they have brought several districts under cultivation. In the regions where they settle they become the dominant race—thus southern Manchuria now differs little from a province of China proper. In Indo-China, the Malay Emigration. Peninsula and throughout the Far East Chinese are numerous as farmers, labourers and traders; in some places, such as Singapore, Chinese are among the principal merchants. This colonizing spirit is probably due more to the enterprise of the people than to the density of the population. ”

“ THE CHINESE FEAST OF THE DEAD.
Weird and Ghastly Scene in a Chinese Temple at Midnight.—The Story of Concatenation Bill.—The True History of the Great Indian Fight on the Gila.
What a strange, peculiar people are these Chinese! Dwelling among us, they are not of us; but are born and grow up, and toil and die here in the midst of the boasted civilization of the nineteenth century, just as they have been being born and growing up, and toiling and dying, for ages on ages, in the "Central Flowery Empire" on the other shore of the blue Pacific. ”

“ LOVE OF NATURE IN CHINA
It is a mistake to regard the Chinese as essentially a prosaic race, caring only for material things and nothing at all for what we should call things of the spirit. If they have less power of artistic creation than the Japanese—and even that may be doubted—they are quite as sensitive as the people of any other race to the magic of beauty in either nature or art; and especially do they—like our own Ruskin—take a vivid delight in the loveliness of mountain scenery. ”

“ Such evidence as there is points to their immigration from elsewhere; the Chinese themselves have a tradition of a Western origin. The first picture we have of their actual history shows us, not a people behaving as if long settled in a land which was their home and that of their forefathers, but an alien race fighting with wild beasts, clearing dense forests, and driving back the aboriginal inhabitants. ”

“ But what they adopt from us they so assimilate with their vividly characteristic national modes of thought and life, that that superficial mammal, the travelling European, never suspects that many of the conveniences of everyday Chinese life are adaptations of Aryan customs or of European tools.
The Chinese are to-day the most unique, the most ancient, and the most misunderstood people on the earth. I say the most ancient because they are the least changed from what they were long centuries ago. The least changed—they are not changed at all! The China of to-day is the China Marco Polo knew. ”

“ In later days, that is, since the beginning of our era, undoubtedly much that has been looked upon as the outcrop of Chinese culture is due to the Indo-Aryans. My own conclusion is that in all important elements the ancient Chinese civilization was a home product, a spontaneous growth of an intellectually gifted people, but one whose capacity of development was limited, and that 200 later generations were satisfied to borrow and appropriate from the nations with whom commerce brought them into contact. ”

“ Nicholas listened to the cries of the unhappy castaway, appeared to his wondering eyes, and with a stroke of a wand, like some benevolent fairy, changed the threatening crocodile into a rock, and the Chinese was saved. But do not imagine that the legend ends here; the Chinese are not an ungrateful people—China is the land of porcelain, of tea, and of gratitude. The Chinese who had thus escaped from the cruel fate that awaited him, felt desirous of consecrating the memory of the miracle ”

“ Even the funny-looking, be-cued little Chinese children wear a look of solemn inquisitiveness, as they toddle along the streets of San Francisco by the side of their queer-looking mothers. In his own land, overpopulated and misgoverned, the Chinaman has a hard fight for existence. In these United States his advent is regarded somewhat in the same spirit as that of the seventeen year locusts, or the cotton-worm. The history of a people may be read in their physiognomy. The monotony of Chinese life during these thousands of years is reflected in the dull, monotonous faces of Chinamen. ”

“ For the Chinese are each day becoming more wary, and more on their guard. They are even laying in munitions of war, fortifying themselves, and training men—all which they have learned, and are still learning, from the Portuguese and our people. ”

“ The Chinese being every day brought into contact with drunken sailors and unscrupulous traders from the west, new lessons are constantly learned from them in the school of duplicity and immorality. The Chinese of this class are no fitting type of the race. It is an accepted fact that the great seaports of the world, where international trade holds sway, are the worst centers of vice, and no estimate of a people formed from these cities can be just.
The Chinese as a race are of a phlegmatic and impassive temperament, and physically less active and energetic than European and American nations. ”

“ Their industry is the result of the quick sense of gratification which they derive from the indulgence of the more grovelling passions and animal appetites, and where these can be indulged without labour, the Chinese [66] will be found to indicate their full share of Asiatic indolence.
It must be confessed however that the Chinese are, in a political point of view at least, by far the most useful class of people to be found in the Indian Seas or Archipelago. Their robust frames, their industrious habits, and their moderate conduct, place them beyond competition. ”

“ There are, of course, great differences—China has more people—she has a more developed internal trade, her citizens have more intelligence and certain inventive and business qualities, and there are other very material features too obvious to mention, which distinguish the Chinese from the American aborigines, but in the sense in which I am speaking, the comparison is correct. ”

“ Obscurity shrouds the origin of the Chinese race. The Chinese people cannot be proved to have originally come from anywhere beyond the limits of the Chinese empire. At the remotest period to which investigations can satisfactorily go back, without quitting the domain of history for that of legend, we find them already in existence as an organized, and as a more or less civilized nation. Previous to that time, their condition had doubtless been that of nomadic tribes, but whether as immigrants or as true sons of the soil there is scarcely sufficient evidence to show. ”

“ CHINESE SHOPS—THE GOD OF RICHES—CHINESE SHOP-KEEPERS—CHINESE WATCHMEN. The Chinese have an antipathy to everything like symmetry in the decoration of an apartment. Anyone, on seeing the inside of their rooms, would say that diversity is their only motto; in everything, however, relating to costume and the exteriors of their habitations, the Chinese restrict themselves to fixed rules, which impart the most monotonous character to their apparel and architecture. People following the same profession, and having the same social habits, are dressed uniformly, and housed uniformly. ”

“ When the early Chinese entered China, they found non-Chinese peoples in different parts of that vast area which they ultimately welded into an empire. They were an inland people and did not invent boats; they did not originate the agricultural mode of life but adopted it, using the seeds and implements they had acquired; nor did they invent the potter’s wheel with which they were familiar from the earliest times in China, having evidently become possessed of it, along with the complex culture associated with it, before they migrated into the province of Shensi. ”

“ Then the natives kindle fires under the trees to cook their meals; and, as you ride or walk along the roads, the scene is a curious one, as the figures of these dark-skinned people are brought into strong relief by the light.
A TRAVELLING BLACKSMITH.
"You see so many Chinese in Penang that you can easily believe you are in Shanghai or Hong-Kong. They are everywhere, and in all kinds of business, from the most important to the most humble; they are wholesale merchants of every name and kind, and they practise all the industries known to civilization. ”

“ While studying this race of small men, one is almost tempted to urge every man behind in this world’s favors, to do as the Japanese. It is indeed an incentive to wake up and go ahead.
THE CHINESE The Chinese are as near the pure Turanian stock as it is possible for a race with their environments to be.
The samples that come to the United States for employment are coolies, mongrels of the race, just as we have natural born mongrels from intermixtures with degeneracy. ”

“ The ethnologists who adopt this view assume that the Chinese must be excluded from the above body of immigrants, the Chinese who were doubtlessly a far more advanced people even in those ages than the other neighbouring races, and were destined to become the most influential benefactors of Japanese civilisation. ”

“ Even rickshaws are not allowed to enter, there being no room for them. Progress can only be made on a donkey, and then with much shouting and discomfort. What a busy people the Chinese are! Some day they may people the earth. They seem to be even more intelligent than the Japanese, more honest and more industrious; and have an almost lovable disposition. And what giants they are compared to their neighbours!—the men from the north being especially so. ”

“ This peculiarity is of great importance, inasmuch as the emigration from China is ever assuming more extended dimensions, and already embraces several portions of the world. We find Chinese scattered throughout Eastern Asia, in Australia, in California, in Peru, in Brazil, in the West Indies, and, what is very astonishing they thrive and prosper at most places they visit, despite the not very humane treatment they receive, and the wretched, desolate state in which they leave their homes. ”

“ A heated fancy — I cannot use any other expression — is drawing the picture before our eyes of thirty, forty, fifty, or one hundred million Chinamen suddenly flowing from their native homes across the Pacific ocean, sweeping over this country, and fairly submerging, as under a deluge of barbarism, our whole civilization and all that is dear to us. It is a horrible picture. Now, sir, let us look the facts in the face. Chinese immigration to the Pacific coast commenced, as I understand, in the year 1848. ”

“ It was the custom of the Achinese to lurk by these pathways day and night, waiting with infinite patience for the rare chance of killing a single foe. At any moment their shriek might burst forth and their scimitars might flash. ”

“ We know, too, enough of Asiatics in general, and of the Chinese in particular, to feel secure that much of what we know, and much of what we possess, would be to them of inestimable benefit. True, for many centuries they have lived without assistance from the Western world, and there must have been considerable value in the laws and customs by which such an enormous mass of human beings could have been held together for so long a period. ”

“ What may be called the old, but by no means the obsolete school, regards the Chinese populations as the direct descendants of the aborigines who during the Stone Ages entered the Hoang-ho valley probably from the Tibetan plateau, there developed their peculiar culture independently of foreign influences, and thence spread gradually southwards to the whole of China proper, extirpating, absorbing, or driving to the encircling western and southern uplands the ruder aborigines of the Yang-tse-Kiang and Si-Kiang basins. ”

“ In process of time, and with the co-operation of the mandarins, who are really interested in the removal of a wretched, sometimes starving and always discontented, social element, the difficulties attaching to the removal of females may in time be surmounted, and the Chinese may perpetuate, what they have never yet done, a Chinese community in the lands where they settle. No doubt the mestizo mixture of races—the descendants of Chinese fathers and Indian mothers—is now extensively spread, and is a great improvement upon the pure Malay or Indian breed. ”

“ The marvellous exodus of Chinese from their country is one of the most remarkable ethnological circumstances of modern history, and is producing and will produce extraordinary and lasting results. I do not believe any of the other Oriental races able to withstand the secret and widely spreading influences of Chinese competition and superiority. Dealt with justly and fairly, the Chinese are the most manageable of men, but they will be dangerous where despotism drives them to despair. ”

“ The probability is, so far as sane experience takes us, that the Chinese had been exactly where we first find them for many thousand years, or even for myriads of years, before their own traditions begin. With the exception of the discovery of America, which brought a flood of strangers into a strange land, and speedily exterminated the aborigines, there do not appear to be any authenticated instances in history of extensive and robust populations being entirely displaced like flocks of sheep by others. ”

“ The Chinese, at least, established a social world of their own, widely different from that of the whites, in some respects perhaps superior to it. But the fatal weakness of the yellow civilization was that it was not ennobling like the Egyptian, not scientific like the Babylonian, not adventurous and progressive as we shall find the Aryan. ”

“ Yet the Chinese have long had a civilization identical in many of its constituents with our own: civil government, rimed poetry, painting, trousers, wheat and barley, our common domestic animals, bronze and iron, for instance. Since most of these culture elements are wanting in Africa and Oceania, as well as in native America, there is no inherent reason why they should be expectable in China. ”