Achinese

“ 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. ”

“ His enthusiasm is now all for the Chinese; its perfection of material and form, its dazzling beauty of colour, the artistic fitness of its decoration, engage his admiration more and more. Alien to his imagination as it is in conception, it nevertheless fascinates him ever more surely as he grows more familiar with it. The European china of his early collecting days pleases him no longer. ”

“ One of the most curious and harmless customs of the Chinese is that of carefully burning every scrap of paper inscribed with the cherished characters which, as far as calligraphy goes, justly take precedence of those of any other language on the globe. Not content with mere reduction by fire, a conscientious Chinaman will collect the ashes thus produced, and sealing them up in some earthen vessel, will bury them deep in the earth or sink them to the bottom of a river. ”

“ From one point of view, the Chinese, already provided with their tonic language at the Confusion of Tongues, marched to the Yellow River, where we find them. From the other, there is no evidence whatever to connect the Chinese with any people other than those we find near them now, and which have from the earliest times been near them; no evidence that their language, their civilization, their manners, ever received anything from, or gave anything to, India, Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, or Greece, except so far as has been suggested above, or will be suggested below. ”

“ In other words, China has been even more thoroughly isolated linguistically than she has socially, and the evidence goes to prove that at some period enormously remote, after the original Chinese had effected an entrance into the mighty amphitheatre, between the central Asian mountains on the one hand and the waters of the Pacific on the other, they were surrounded by a subsequent race who impinged upon them at every point, and conquered them more than once, but who never succeeded in leaving a single trace upon their unique and primitive language. ”

“ The Chinese especially flock to the port, and great numbers are settled in the city and throughout the island, largely contributing by their persevering industry to its prosperity. Who does not know the look of a Chinese, with his piggish eyes, thatched-like hat, yellow-brown skin, black tail, and wide short trousers? The streets swarmed with them, ever busy, ever toiling to collect dollars, the most industrious people under the sun—yet the least lovable or attractive. ”

“ If the planet on which we dwell be considered as a head, and the several nations as the hair, the Chinese race is a venerable cow-lick, capable of being combed, clipped, and possibly shaved, but which is certain to grow again just as before, and the general direction of which is not likely to be changed. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even Chinamen, hard as we find it to believe, enjoy being Chinese. And the Chinaman stands alone to be unthinkable; natural enough, as the representative of the only other great civilisation. Take my people here at my doors; their life is a very good one ”

“ No very long acquaintance is required with any Asiatic race, however, to satisfy us that their instincts and ours are by no means the same—in fact, that they are at opposite poles. We shall lay no stress upon the redundancy of honorific terms in all Asiatic languages, some of which in this respect are indefinitely more elaborate than the Chinese. ”

“ No written language has ever been or is now understood by so many people as the Chinese. The Chinese were a civilized people centuries before the Japanese had, even according to their own uncertain legends, emerged into the light as an empire. If we accept the opinion which seems most reasonable, that the Japanese came over to the Japanese islands from the continent by way of Korea, and belong to the Mongol tribes of central Asia, then we must assume that the Japanese were closely related to a large section of the Chinese. ”

“ What about China? Here there are vague resemblances between the buildings of the two peoples; but at most they are those features in which one might trace a similarity between the productions of any two building races. As in Japan, ritual and customs are all distinct from those found among the Mayans. Those who would have us believe that Central American civilisation was of Chinese origin have been much influenced by that fable promulgated by the Chinese historian [Pg 262] Li Yen, who lived in the seventh century. ”

“ About fifteen young Chinamen are seated at the tables, all reading and studying aloud in true Chinese fashion. Just as you enter the teacher, touches the bell. Books are closed and all take seats on the benches in front of the organ. A Chinese evangelist is present, and while he makes an impassioned address, accompanied by most expressive gestures, you are free to study the faces upturned to listen. What a contrast to the faces you have just left in Chinatown, idly staring at the passer-by, or, vacant of all interest, staring at nothing! ”

“ The highest conventional refinement, of a certain kind, is apparent in all that belongs to the Chinese. The inviolability of custom has not made their life heavy, but shaped it to the utmost adroitness for their own purposes. We are now somewhat familiar with their literature, and we see pervading it a poetry subtle and aromatic, like the odors of their appropriate beverage. Like that, too, it is all domestic,—never wild. The social genius, fluttering on the wings of compliment, pervades every thing Chinese. ”

“ The small feet of the Chinese women, though admired by the Chinese and poetically referred to by them as "three-inch gold lilies," are in our eyes a very unpleasant deformity—but still, even with this deformity, the walk of the Chinese woman is more comely than the gait of the Japanese woman as she shambles ungracefully along with her little bent legs, scraping her wooden-soled slippers along the pavement with a noise that sets your teeth on edge. "Girls are like flowers," say the Chinese, "like the willow. ”

“ THE first knowledge which we acquire of the Chinese is derived from our servants. Unconsciously to themselves, and not always to our satisfaction, they are our earliest teachers in the native character, and the lessons thus learned we often find it hard to forget. But in proportion as our experience of the Chinese becomes broad, we discover that the conclusions to which we had been insensibly impelled by our dealings with a very narrow circle of servants are strikingly confirmed by our wider knowledge, for there is a sense in which every Chinese may be said to be an epitome of the whole race. ”

“ The term Man-tzŭ, although applied by the Ssŭ-ch’uanese to the inhabitants of the region to the west of Lolodom and often to the Lolos themselves, is generically used to designate the non-Chinese races of Western China.
Our knowledge of these races is defective, for the simple reason that no foreigner has ever paid them a lengthened visit, which is essential to a thorough grasp of their ethnological characteristics. ”

“ There has been too much of a disposition to think of the Chinese as a mass, almost as we would regard immense herds of cattle or shoals of fish. Why not rather think of the Chinese as an individual, as a man of like passions with ourselves? ”

“ No one has ever been able to trace any affinity between the Chinese language and that of any other people, ancient or modern. It is absolutely unique. No other nation except the Japanese has ever borrowed from it, or mingled any of its elements with its own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tom-toms, red-clothed coolies carrying roasted pigs and other dainties, smaller coolies carrying cheap paper ornaments of a Mongolian theatrical type,—these are the invariable elements of both processions.
China, if you know it at all, is the easiest of the Oriental countries to write about; although it is very difficult to inform yourself about the Chinese, they are so bitterly exclusive. For any scrap of information you once obtain is necessarily exact. The versatile Japanese have a hundred modes of life; the conservative Chinese have one. ”

“ The Chinese are highly civilized. They work iron with tools. I have seen iron inlaid with gold and silver, as cunningly and skilfully wrought as they could be in any part of the world. In like manner they work in wood and all other materials. The Portuguese say that the Chinese are good people—that they possess somewhat of the light of the world, but they see it with only one eye. ”

“ And, as it is always found congenial to baseness of heart, the most dastardly cowardice completes the description of that of the Chinese.
Unimproved as their arts is their learning. Though their language consists of few words, it is almost impossible for a stranger to attain the art of speaking it. And what a European learns ere he is seven years old, to read, is the labour of the life of a Chinese. ”

“ Many months after the night of the tule fog, I happened into the Hawaiian capital and took down from a library shelf a big legal-looking book, bound in bright yellow leather the color of a Filipino house boy's shoes on his Saturday night in town. I found what I was looking for under the heading: “In the Matter of Chang See.”
The Chinese, we are told, are masters of indirection, of saying one thing and meaning another, of arriving at their goal by way of a devious, irrelevant maze. ”

“ Any one who travels widely in China can see for himself that, wherever unassimilated tribes live in complete or partial independence, and, á fortiori, where the assimilation has been carried out, all those tribes possess at least this point in common with the original Chinese or the assimilated speakers of Chinese—that their language is monosyllabic, uninflected, not agglutinative, and tonic ”

“ As regards Japanese, in the year 1868 Mr. Edward Harper Parker of China wrote a paper on the relationship of Chinese with ancient Japanese, the object of which was to show “before Chinese was imported into Japanese, (1) directly, and (2) indirectly, through Corea—say before A. D. 1—the Japanese spoke a language the great majority of words in which came from the same language-stock as Chinese.” [1] And from anything appearing to the contrary be seems to have pretty well established his point. ”

“ Shanghai, May 3.
Some one told us when we were on the boat that the Japanese cared everything for what people thought of them, and the Chinese cared nothing. Making comparisons is a favorite, if dangerous, indoor sport. The Chinese are noisy, not to say boisterous, easy-going and dirty—and quite human in general effect. They are much bigger than the Japanese, and frequently very handsome from any point of view. The most surprising thing is the number of those who look not merely intelligent but intellectual among the laborers, such as some of the hotel waiters and attendants. ”

“ For the Chinese like to hang their balconies with artistic screens, bedeck them with palms, illuminate them with the gay lanterns of their home. Sometimes a woman of complexion of rather accentuated brunette will hang over the rail with a Chinese—or at least a Chinesque—baby in the parti-colored clothing of its paternal ancestors. ”

“ The Chinese, when once acclimated and accustomed to the routine, were docile and industrious; they could not stand the same amount of exposure as an African, but they were intelligent and ingenious; within-doors, in the sugar factory, in the carpenter-shop, in the cooper-shop, in driving teams, they were superior to the negro. ”

“ A MAID OF WESTERN CHINA. The Chinese are the only people in the Orient, and, so far as we know, in the European and Asiatic continents, who resemble the Americans in their love for a good, substantial morning meal. This was much better adapted to our purpose than the Russian custom, which compelled us to do the greater part of our day’s work on merely bread and weak tea. ”