King of China

“ Even the Emperor Muh in China was not so named until he died. If a man can be given a complimentary title three years after death (that was the Chinese rule at first) , why not give it him 300 years after his death? The king or chief hitherto known, whether accurately or not, whether honestly or not, as X, had most certainly existed; that is, the tenth great-grandfather of the reigning prince ”

“ The people of China are, in general, neither brave nor skilful, nor have they any natural inclination for warlike affairs; if they maintain themselves it is by the multitude of the people, the strength of the walls and towns, and the provision of ammunition. At the boundary of the kingdom of China, where it borders on the Tartars, there is a wall of wondrous strength, of a month's journey in extent, where the king keeps a great military force in the bulwarks. ”

“ Princes who live near, are bound to go thither every year; those who live at the extremities of the earth, go every second or third year, according to the distance they have to travel.” “What is your purpose in going every year to Peking?” “We ourselves go as the retinue of our king; the king alone enjoys the happiness of prostrating himself in the presence of the Old Buddha (the p. 225Emperor) .” He entered then into long details about the ceremony of the first day of the year, and the relations between the Chinese Emperor and the tributary kings. ”

“ GOVERNMENT AND CIVILIZATION.—The government of China is "a patriarchal despotism." As father of his people, the king has absolute authority. The power of life and death is in his hand. Yet the right of revolution was taught by Confucius and Mencius, and the Chinese have not been slow to exercise it. The powers of the emperor are limited by ceremonial regulations, and by a body of precedents which are held sacred. He administers rule with the help of a privy council. ”

“ The kingdom of China exceeds them all in extent, and the king of that country is as powerful as all the sovereigns in Europe together. His empire is above 700 leagues in extent, possessing abundance of metals, and far exceeds Europe in manufactures, some of which seem to exceed human art, and the silks, provisions, and luxuries with which it abounds are beyond computation. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is held by native scholars that Chinese history supplies a fairly accurate record of the Kings and Emperors who have reigned for the past four thousand years, and that their annals, dealing with an earlier period are largely mythical. The primitive sovereigns of the race are represented as the sources of the wisdom and probity, which are supposed to characterise the Government of the present day. They were certainly not without influence in moulding the political and social institutions which have kept the Chinese together for so many centuries in independence and isolation. ”

“ That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence. And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it so long together has been guided. Again and again conquerors have forced their way in upon it from the north—rude, uncivilised tribes invading a highly civilised land. Again and again the chiefs of the invaders have established themselves on the throne of China. They and their sons for many generations have governed the land. ”

“ We cannot hope that any effort of ours or of the emperor will suffice to change at once the character and habits of a people, or even of the population of a city. But the last war has shown that with us it rests to bring at any time the pretensions of the Chinese rulers down to a nearer level with their military power ”

“ Of the statesmen who have appeared since the opening of Peking in 1860, it would probably be fair to consider the two emperors as negligible quantities. The potent personage in the empire during that period is no doubt the Empress-dowager, who has, in so far as any one can be said to have done so, ruled China for forty years. Apart from ethical considerations, which have less to do with matters of government than could be wished, the empress's characteristics are clearness of purpose, strength of will, a ready accommodation of means to ends, and frank acceptance of the inevitable. ”

“ The history of the empire has always been the fortunes of the dynasty, which has depended, in the first place, on the passive content of the subjects, and, in the second, on the success or failure of its external and internal wars. This condition of things may be disappointing to those who pride themselves on tracing the origin of a constitution and the growth of civil rights, and also would have a history of China a history of the Chinese people ”

“ In Marco Polo's time the middle door of the great portal was never opened save to admit the emperor, and that was still true a few months ago, but last winter a day came when the bars rolled back, and there entered no emperor, no ruler, but the representative of the People's Assembly, and then a placard was posted announcing that hereafter the door was open to every one, for all China belonged to the people. For a matter-of-fact man the Chinese has a very dramatic way of doing things. ”

“ Whatever and whoever may have altered, the Chinese certainly have not. Commissioner Lin, Viceroy Yeh, Prince Tuan, the empress-dowager, and all wielding authority, whether in name or not, have been true to the Chinese ideal. They have all alike been blind to the consequences of their acts, which have throughout been characterised by the strategy of fools—momentary success followed by overwhelming reverses, resulting at each succeeding encounter in a further invasion of the frontiers of their political independence. ”

“ Now, this absolute Divine duty of loyalty to the Emperor of every man, woman, and child in the whole Chinese Empire gives, as you can understand, in the minds of the Chinese population, an absolute, supreme, transcendent, almighty power to the Emperor; and this belief in the absolute, supreme, transcendent, almighty power of the Emperor it is which gives to the Chinese people, to the mass of the population in China, the same sense of security which the belief in God in religion gives to the mass of mankind in other countries. ”

“ Her plight is sore to-day. But China has held together longer than any other empire in history. We Chinese never forget, and we do not meekly forgive. Again and again we have seemed to accept innovations, have tried them, have found them unacceptable, and then we have discarded them once and forever. We are in peril now; but the end is not yet. Already the word passes over China, as a breath of summer over the head-heavy poppy fields, ‘Back to Confucius’! And I—I descended from that great sage—I, too, who love China as I did not love your mother—I, too, have betrayed China—and you! ”

“ Like many other great reformers, though but indifferently treated in his lifetime, he became after death the object of universal admiration, and to this day the Chinese pay homage to the memory of the “Great Master,” the “Chief Doctor,” the “Wise King of Literature,” the “Saint,” the “Instructor of Emperors and Kings.” His descendants [Pg 122] have been loaded with honours and privileges, and now constitute the only hereditary nobility in the Chinese empire. Like the princes of the blood, they are exempt from taxation. ”

“ So it was even in the time of the great monarch who, 200 years before Christ, consolidated the Chinese Empire, and built the still-enduring Great Wall, in hopes of thereby defeating Tartar incursions. To overcome the opposition of the Literati, he ordered all their books to be destroyed. But the fact remains that the vigorous heads among the people, who, in other lands, have had to carve their forward path, by agitation and revolution, through the barriers of social rank, caste, and the privileges of wealth, have had for ages in China an open avenue to advancement. ”

“ It is well known that the Chinese designate their empire as the “Middle Kingdom.” Another native name for China is “Chung-ho-a,” which I find translated as “the Flower of the Middle.” The empire is likewise designated as “the Four Seas”=ssu-hai and “the Four Mountains,” and it was actually divided by the emperor Yaou or Yāo (B.C. 2357) into four provinces converging at the capital, the central enclosure of which was considered as the centre of heaven and earth. ”

“ And now begins one of those romantic episodes which from time to time lend an unusual interest to the dry bones of Chinese history. In the confusion which followed upon the entry of troops into his palace, the young and defeated emperor vanished, and was never seen again; although in after years pretenders started up on more than one occasion, and obtained the support of many in their efforts to recover the throne. It is supposed that the fugitive made his way to the distant province of Yunnan in the garb of a Buddhist priest, left to him, so the story runs, by his grandfather. ”

“ Moreover, new-Chinese, Chinese- veneered, and half-Chinese states, recognizing their own responsibilities, now interposed themselves as "buffers" or barriers between the Emperor and the unadulterated barbarians; these hybrid states themselves were quite as formidable to the imperial power as the displaced barbarians had formerly been. Hence, as we have seen, the pitiful flight from his metropolis of one Emperor after the other; the rise of great and wealthy persons outside the former limited sacred circle ”

“ It is with the same disregard of truth that it has been said, that the Chinese shut themselves up in their houses when the Emperor goes out, and that those he happens to meet on his road turn their backs with their face to the ground, to escape the penalty of death. ”

“ There is a small Chinese book, studied by every schoolboy and entitled The Hundred Surnames, the word "hundred" being commonly used in a generally comprehensive sense. It actually contains about four hundred of the names which occur most frequently.
About two hundred and twenty years before Christ, the feudal system came to an end. One aggressive state gradually swallowed up all the others; and under the rule of its sovereign, China became once more an empire, and such it has ever since remained. ”

“ In China they have a mixture of monarchy and aristocracy. The monarch is unlimited in his power, but he is so hedged about by the aristocracy that he really has very little independence. Like some of the native princes who rule under Dutch regents, the Chinese ruler is the servant rather than the master of his officials. Living in the forbidden city and meeting personally but few of his people, he is quite dependent upon the mandarins. The aristocracy of China is not an aristocracy of birth or of wealth, but a civil service aristocracy. ”

“ Indeed, I wonder they sent at all, for they consider themselves as the only civilized nation in the world, and call China the "Celestial Empire," while they imagine that the Emperor is an intimate relation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars! ”

“ The whole Chinese administrative system is based on the doctrine of filial piety, in its most extended signification of duty to natural parents and also to political parents, as the Emperor's magistrates are to this day familiarly called. China is thus one vast republic of innumerable private families, or petty imperia, within one public family, or general imperium; the organisation consists of a number of self-producing and ever-multiplying independent cells, each maintaining a complete administrative existence apart from the central power. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In foreign affairs these ninety years were marked by the steadily growing influence of the Western powers, aimed at turning China into a colony. Culturally this period was that of the gradual infiltration of Western civilization into the Far East; it was recognized in China that it was necessary to learn from the West. In home affairs we see the collapse of the dynasty and the destruction of the unity of the empire; of four great civil wars, one almost brought the dynasty to its end. North and South China, the coastal area and the interior, developed in different ways. ”

“ There was a gleam of a pair of dark, lustrous eyes; a shadow cast by the heavy coils of black, wavy hair; something blue and filmy as Oriental gauze enveloped her fine figure; a side door opened, and the vision was gone.
Striking points of similarity exist between the old monarchy and the young Republic. China is divided into provinces as our country is divided into States. Education is within reach of all. From the humblest beginning merit can rise and divide the honors with the imperial blood. An inexorable fiat envelops China as with a network of bristling steel. ”

“ Such absurdity could not possibly be entertained by Chinese reason. So it is a first article of China’s political creed that the emperor, as well as Heaven, is lord and master of all the gods, and delegates this dignity to his mandarins, each in his jurisdiction. With them then rests the decision which of the gods are entitled to receive the people’s worship, and which are not. It is the imperial government which deifies disembodied souls of men, and also divests them of their divine rank. ”