Chinese culture

“ There is a native system of writing, which seems to derive from Chinese stimulus, if not sources. It is obvious that this culture has fused together very old elements that are characteristic of southeastern Asia, with elements that have flowed in from remote sources or during the most recent centuries. It is also clear that certain ingredients of Chinese culture have been freely absorbed and others rejected by this mountain people. ”

“ The Chinese are beginning to imbibe Western culture—especially Western science and philosophy—with avidity, and the more they do so the more ready will they be to abandon some of their traditional ideas with regard to demonology, fêng-shui, the burning of paper furniture and money, the worship of the "gods" of Taoism, and many other superstitious beliefs and practices; indeed this lopping off of the rotten branches of the religious life of China began several years ago, and is not likely to cease until there are no more rotten branches left on the tree. ”

“ Their literature, superstitions, system of education, ancestral worship, culture, and modes of thinking are Chinese. Society is organized on Confucian models, and the rights of parents over children, and of elder over younger brothers, are as fully recognized as in China. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Chinese students who aspire to honors spend years in verbally memorizing the classics —Confucius and Mencius—and receive degrees and public advancement upon ability to transcribe from memory without the error of a point, or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder that China is today more like an herbarium than anything else. ”

“ In all probability, the outbreak in Susiana of, possibly, some political disturbance, in about the 24th or 23rd century B. C., drove the Chinese from the land of their adoption, and that they wandered eastward until they finally settled in China and the countries south of it. ... It would appear also that the Chinese came into China possessed of the resources of Western Asian culture. They brought with them a knowledge of writing and astronomy, as well as of the arts which primarily minister to the wants and comfort of mankind. ”

“ But, aside from this, almost every department of mental productiveness is represented in China by hosts of works, ancient and modern: in history, in biography, in geography and ethnology, in jurisprudence, in the grammar and lexicography especially of their own tongue, in natural history and science, in art and industry, in the various branches of belles-lettres, as poetry, romance, the drama, the Chinese have produced in abundance what, tried even by our own standard, is worthy of high respect and admiration. ”

“ They have an aversion to a proportionate division of space; they never attempt to counterbalance their artistic ideas, and to arrange them according to a law. They abhor spiritual, imaginary, and all higher intellectual culture to such a degree, that they concentrate all their powers on mere technicalities. Therefore they have remained stationary, whilst others, who began their self-conscious national existence thousands of years later, have left them far behind. The Chinese sacrifice59 everything to preconceived ideas of custom—in morals, science, and art. ”

“ Compare these characteristics with the universal black hair and black eyes of men and women throughout China, exclusive of a rare occasional albino; with the long, flowing, loose robes of officials and of the well-to-do; with their slow and stately walk and their rigid formality of position, either sitting or standing. To the Chinese, their own language seems to be the language of the gods; they know they have possessed it for several thousand years, and they know nothing at all of the barbarian. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Literature and Learning in China.—The Chinese are a reading people, and the number of their published works is very considerable. In the departments of morals, history, biography, the drama, poetry, and romance, there is no lack of writings, such as they are. The Chinese materia medica comprises forty octavo volumes; of statistical works the number is very large. Their novels are said to be excellent pictures of the national manners. China is full of books. New authors are continually spring up; the press is active, and the traffic in books is a lucrative and most honorable branch of trade. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Contemplative, gentle, and metaphysical in their habit of thought, the Chinese have reflected profoundly and worked out many riddles of the universe in ways peculiarly their own. Realization of the value and need to us of a more definite knowledge of the mental processes of our Oriental brothers, increases wonderfully as one begins to comprehend the richness, depth, and beauty of their thought, ripened as it is by the hidden processes of evolution throughout the ages. ”

“ As to the origin of the written language of China, invention is altogether out of the question. It seems probable that in prehistoric ages, the Chinese, like other peoples, began to make rude pictures of the sun, moon, and stars, of man himself, of trees, of fire, of rain, and they appear to have followed these up by ideograms of various kinds. ”

“ Virtually every adaptation in China must be thought through from the beginning by the Chinese; and even in thinking there are varying styles. Are the Chinese to think after the fashion of the West—scientifically and logically—or are they to think in their accustomed traditional and empirical manner? ”

“ The answer, however, is not difficult for those who possess the merest insight into the workings of the Chinese mind; for just as every inhabitant of the eighteen provinces believes China to be the centre of civilisation and power, so does he infer that his language and customs are the only ones worthy of attention from native and barbarian alike. The very antagonism of the few foreign manners and habits he is obliged by his position to cultivate, tend rather to confirm him in his own sense of superiority than otherwise. ”

“ Hence the artists of the fourteenth-century renaissance, and their followers in almost every era, chose Chinese motives for their pictures, and instead of drawing inspiration direct from the exquisite scenery of their own country and the noble acts of their own countrymen and countrywomen, were content to copy Chinese ideals of landscape, and to devote themselves to illustrating Chinese traditions. ”

“ Among the Anglo-Saxon race it is a lost art, or rather it is an art that was never discovered. But the Chinese listens patiently, attentively, even cordially, while you are exposing to him his own shortcomings, assents cheerfully, and adds, "I am in fault, I am in fault." ”

“ Life in China is not passed as it is represented upon that famous plate with its pagoda, and its bridge, which is so familiar to us all from our earliest years. It is a very grave event in the history of the human race that one-third of the human beings now crawling upon the surface of the planet should at length be brought really into contact with the vigorous and scientific thought of Europe. The Chinese are pre eminently an industrious, a persevering, and an ingenious race. ”

“ Now without committing myself to exaggeration or misdirection as to the practical value of these treasures, I dare assert that the old pride, arrogance, and exclusiveness of the Chinese are readily intelligible to any one who has faithfully examined the literature of China and hung over the burning words of her great writers. I do not flatter myself that all the extracts given will be of equal interest to all readers. I have not catered for any particular taste, but have striven to supply a small handbook of Chinese literature, as complete as circumstances would permit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One thing that I am always very much impressed with, in regard to the Chinese, is the feeling of there being something ancient about them, no matter how young they may be themselves; not only because many of them wear clothes which appear to have been handed down from their remotest ancestors, but they have ancient ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are the gods of war, literature, wealth, and medicine; and there are the goddesses of married women and of seamen. These are a few of the nobler specimens of the idols which are worshiped. The fertile imagination of the Chinese fills every lake and river with spirits, every street and house with ghosts, and every wood and mountain with deities. They believe the next world to be a shadow of this; that the dead have everything in the world below which they had on earth—only these premises exist as shadows instead of substance.
Buddhism entered China about the time of Christ. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we desire to understand what their peculiar views were, what were the dominant ideas which directed their conduct, and which led them to erect the monuments which are marvels to us, even at the present day, we must go to China.
Let us look for a moment into China at the present day. At first sight, the Chinese strike us as being not only geographically our antipodes, but as being our opposites in every particular—mental, moral, social; in language as in ideas.
The Chinese language is without an alphabet and without a grammar. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We are told by many observers that theory and practice in China are often widely divergent, but in one matter at least they absolutely coincide. The Chinese hold that the greatest treasure their country can possess consists not in gold and silver, mines and railways, factories and shipping, but in an ever-increasing army of healthy boys and girls—the future fathers and mothers of the race. ”