Chinese history

“ To behold leagued together, not only the effeminate Chinese, but even their women,—wives and daughters fighting by the side of their husbands and fathers, inspired by one common hope and ardour—all animated by a great religious and political object, for the attainment of which they had suffered and fought many years,—is an event never before realized in the history of China. ”

“ It would be a curious discovery if some learned student of Chinese history should succeed in ascertaining and explaining the processes by which the Chinese government came to be what it is. If ever those processes should be discovered, we think it certain that it will then be clearly seen why there have been in China so few of those interior revolutions to which all other peoples have been subject. ”

“ Think how little {244} we know of ancient Chinese history, and realise how little China knows of the history of our civilisation. Home at the present day is to the Chinaman merely the capital of Germany's weakest ally. The reasoning of the universality of the Roman Church, always faulty, seems almost ridiculous in China. The Chinaman on one side is conversant with America, on the other side she is in touch with India, while on the north she has a frontier which stretches for thousands and thousands of miles between her and the great Orthodox Church of Russia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there is another fact already mentioned that throws still stronger light on the high civilization of China—it is that at every period, when this empire has been conquered by the Moguls and Tartars, the conquerors, overcome in their turn by the ascendancy of Chinese civilization, have, within a short time, invariably adopted the manners, laws, and even language of China, and thus its institutions have remained, on the whole, unaltered. ”

“ 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. How far they went in this direction we can only surmise. There are comparatively few obviously pictorial characters and ideograms to be found even in the script of two thousand years ago ”

“ The Chinese in strictly obeying the injunction to walk in the old ways, to conform to the customs of the ancients, have failed to mark out any new footpaths for themselves. Hence their lack of originality, their habit of imitation: hence the unchanging, unprogressive character of Chinese civilization. ”

“ As might be supposed, it never could have originated in an enlightened nation, and yet enlightened nations indorse its antiquity of folly. We trace it to China and as far back as the dimness of its history can carry us. It may surprise some to hear the term unenlightened applied to China, the land of classic works, and the richest and most important in all Asia. Philosophers have made the works called “Kings” the basis of their labors in morality and politics. History has always received the attention of the Chinese, and their annals form the most complete series extant in any language. ”

“ It was undoubtedly the practice of semi- Chinese states, such as Ts'u, Wu, Yueh, and Shuh (the last is the modern Sz Ch'wan province, and its history was only discovered long after Confucius' time) , to call themselves "Kings," "Emperors," and "Sons of Heaven," in their own country (just as the tributary King of Annam always did until the French assumed a protectorate over him; and just as the tributary Japanese did before they officially announced the fact to China in the seventh century A.D.) ”

“ Much of the interest connected with the investigation of the Chinese and its cognate tongues, arises from the immense multitudes which speak and write them; and from the influence which China has, through the writings of her sages, exerted over the minds and progress of her neighbors. There is nothing like it in European history ”

“ There is one element common to all these religions, and that is the worship of ancestors. Every Chinese, whether he be a Confucianist, a Taoist, or a Buddhist, reverences his ancestors, and prays and makes offerings to their spirits.
POLICY OF NON-INTERCOURSE.—The Chinese have always been a very self- satisfied and exclusive people. They have jealously excluded foreigners and outside influence from their country. The Great Wall with which they have hedged in their country on the north, is the symbol of their policy of isolation. ”

“ The Chinese have for a long time preserved the history of the first ages either in their books or in their traditions. The oldest of their books have perished. They have saved only a part of their ancient national works on the great wars and general uprisings, and the original traditions, changed in a thousand ways, made into fables, finally corrupted by idolatry, are today only chaos ”

“ Ethnological, anthropological, and sociological research has begun for China and her neighbours; thus we are in a position to write with some confidence about the making of China, and about her ethnical development, where formerly we could only grope in the dark. The claim that "the Chinese [Pg 2] race" produced the high Chinese civilization entirely by its own efforts, thanks to its special gifts, has become just as untenable as the other theory that immigrants from the West, some conceivably from Europe, carried civilization to the Far East. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Chinese build their towns in the strongest situations, near rapid rivers, and chiefly at the curves, in order that they may serve in part for enclosures; and if the towns are half a league in circuit, they build walls of a league in extent, so that in case of war they may hold a considerable number of defenders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ China is placed in the list, far below her pretensions, because we do not really know the age of the character in which Chinese books preserve the inscriptions of Yu. It appears derivable from the dissertations of M. Terrien, whose sagacious learning has attracted many scholars, that the earliest history recorded in Chinese annals is not geographically Chinese; but that it represents the legends and traditions which were carried into China by the ancestors of the race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our own antiquities sink into insignificance in comparison. As early as the reign of Edward the First, fire-arms were invented in China. The art of printing was discovered there in the reign of our Saxon king Athelstan. Paper was first made about A.D. 150; and gunpowder about the commencement of the Christian era. While the inhabitants of our now highly-favoured island were wandering about, painted savages, the Chinese were a settled people, living under the same form of constitutional government as they at present possess. ”

“ And we may here remark that the number of a people and the size of its territory have absolutely no bearing on the estimate which we ought to form of its character. Who would say that the Chinese are the most interesting and commendable nation on the surface of the globe? They are certainly the most ancient and most populous; their code of precise and formal morality is the most exact and clear that philosophers could ever dictate, and succeed in giving as law to a great people. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has a much more difficult task to achieve, and one which, on account of the size of the Empire, is likely to have a far greater importance for the world at large. The Chinese are strongly animated by the spirit of patriotism ”

“ Under such a load as this, it would seem unreasonable to hope for the continuance of a race of human beings, but we very soon discover that the Chinese have contrived to make their ceremonies, as they have made their education, an instinct rather than an acquirement. ”

“ Thus the empire of China, even when deprived of its fabulous and traditionary periods, is still very ancient; the Chinese must have branched off from the great human family immediately after the dispersion, and travelling to the farther east, settled down on the borders of the Yellow River, coeval with the establishment of the Babylonian and Egyptian monarchies. ”

“ Most of their writings have been commentaries on the Classics following along the beaten paths, or works of poetry full of references to the Shi-King or the classic poetry of the Chinese. The literature of China is characteristic of her civilisation. It is confined by an artificiality which has its origin in an inordinate respect for the past and an absolute distrust of the future. Every book looks backward to the period when China's thought was pure and great. ”

“ As touches the surrounding regions of ancient China, and the knowledge of it possessed by the orthodox nucleus, such traditions as there are all point to acquaintance with the south and east rather than with the north and west. Persons who are persistently bent on bringing the earliest Chinese from the Tower of Babel by way of the Tarim Valley, are eager to seize upon the faintest tradition, or what seems to them an apparent tradition, in support of these preconceived views ”

“ 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. ”