A Barbarian in Asia

A BARBARIAN IN CHINA

The Chinese people are born craftsmen.

Everything that can be discovered by tinkering the Chinaman has found.

The wheelbarrow, the printing press, engraving, gun-powder, the rocket, the kite, the taximeter, the water mill, anthropometry, acupuncture, the circulation of the blood, perhaps the compass and a quantity of other things.

Chinese handwriting seems like the language of contractors, a group of workshop signs.

The Chinaman is a craftsman and a clever craftsman. He has a piano player’s fingers.

Unless you are clever you cannot be Chinese; it is impossible.

Even to eat the way he does, with two little sticks, requires a certain cleverness. And this cleverness he has sought. The Chinaman could have invented the fork, which a hundred races have discovered, and used it. But this instrument, which requires no skill to manipulate, is distasteful to him.

In China the ‘unskilled workman’ does not exist.

What is simpler than to sell newspapers?

A European newsboy is a shouting, romantic fellow, who tears about, screaming at the top of his voice: ‘Times. Herald-Tribune,’ and gets under your feet.

A Chinese newsboy is an expert. He examines the streets where he is going on his rounds, observes where the people are to be found and, using his hand as a megaphone, lets out his voice, now toward a window, now toward a group there on the left, wherever it is necessary, calmly.

What is the use of letting your voice run away with you, tossing it where there is no one to catch it?

In China, you have nothing that is not clever.

Politeness here is not a simple refinement, left more or less to the judgment and good taste of each one.

The chronometer is not a simple refinement more or less left to the judgment of each one. It is a work that required years of application.

Even the Chinese bandit is a qualified bandit, he has a technique. He is not a bandit on account of a sense of social outrage. He never kills uselessly. He does not seek the death of people, but the ransom. He refrains from doing them the slightest bit more damage than is necessary — cutting off finger by finger and sending them to the family with demands for money and dark threats.

On the other hand, cunning in China is not associated with evil more than with anything else.

Virtue is the thing that is the most ‘cleverly contrived.’

Take, for example, a corporation often looked down on: that of the porters.

Porters, the world over, usually pile up on their heads and on their backs or their shoulders everything they can. They are not conspicuous for their intelligence. No, indeed.

Now the Chinaman has succeeded in making his job a work of precision. What the Chinaman likes more than anything is equilibrium. In a wardrobe, one drawer that balances with three, or two, or with seven. The Chinaman who has a piece of furniture to carry divides it in such a manner that the part of it hanging behind him balances with the part of it hanging in front of him. Even a piece of meat he carries dangling from a string. These things are slung from a big bamboo stem carried over his shoulder. Often you can see, at one end, an enormous saucepan, or a smoking kettle, and at the other boxes, plates, drawers. One can easily see what skill this requires. And the procession goes on throughout the Far East.

CHINESE TYPES

Modest and rather retiring, choked, one might say, phlegmy, the eyes of a detective, and on his feet felt slippers, and wearing them out at the toe, as is only natural; the hands in the sleeves, jesuitical — artlessness that is perfectly transparent, but would stop at nothing.

Face of gelatine, and suddenly the gelatine melts and out of it comes a ratlike darting glance.

With something drunken and soft about it; a sort of rind between the world and himself, and he detests water (excellent for the personality, in fact, is dirt).

Not yellow, the Chinaman, but chlorotic, pale, lunar.

In the theater, the men sing like castrati, accompanied by a violin that quite resembles them.

No enthusiasm; a language made up of monosyllables, the shortest possible, and even so there is too much of it.

Moderate, gently sad when in their cups, restful and smiling.

Even though the eyes and nose and ears and hands of a Chinaman are so tiny, they are not filled by his being. He leans far backward. Not at all by concentration. No, the Chinaman’s soul is concave.

Rapid little gestures, but not hard, not even precise. No emphasis, nothing showy. Mad about firecrackers, he shoots them off on every occasion, and their brief sound, sharp without consequence and without resonance, pleases him (like the noise of the clogs that the women have on their feet).

He likes very much, too, the abrupt croaking of the frog.

The moon pleases him, the Chinese woman resembles it amazingly. That discreet clarity, that precise contour, appeals to him like a brother. In fact, many of them are under the auspices of the moon. They do not care in the least for the sun, that big bumptious fellow; they are very fond of artificial light, the oil lamps which, like the moon, throw a good light on them alone, and cast no brutal rays.

Faces astonishingly impregnated with wisdom, beside which the Europeans look exaggerated in every respect, veritable wild-boar snouts.

No debased types, nor mentally backward; even the beggars, though these are indeed rare, appear to be quite lively and good company and intellectual — many of them like ‘fins Parisiens,’ with an impression of frail correctness such as is to be found at times among the offspring of old aristocratic families weakened by intermarriage.

The Chinese woman’s body is admirable, standing straight as a plant, never that bitch look European women are so apt to have, the old as well as the young with such agreeable faces, not extenuated, but alert and wide-awake, a body that always does its work; and their tenderness to each other and with their children is charming.

The Chinese has not exactly, as it is understood elsewhere, a religious mind. He is too modest for that.

‘To seek the principles of things that are hidden from human intelligence, to perform extraordinary acts that appear foreign to man’s nature, these are things that I would not like to do.’ (Extract from a Chinese philosopher, quoted by Confucius with a satisfaction easily imaginable.)

Oh, no, he would be ashamed. He would not want to exaggerate. Imagine it! And then he is practical. If he bothers about anyone, it is about devils, the bad ones only, and not unless they do some evil. Otherwise, what would be the use?

It is, however, through this very self-effacement that the Divine together with illusion has slipped into them.

Buddha with the smile that effaces all reality was bound to reign in China. But his Indian gravity has sometimes disappeared.

I visited, among other temples, the temple of the Five Hundred Buddhas, at Canton.

Five hundred. If only there were a single good one in the lot, a really and truly good one! Five hundred, among which was Marco Polo with a hat, probably supplied by the Italian vice-consul. Five hundred, but not one on the road, the very beginning of the road to Holiness.

No more hieratic positions favorable to contemplation. Some hold two or three children in their arms, or play with them. Others, irritated, scratch a thigh, or raise one leg as though in a hurry to go away, waiting with impatience to take a little turn; almost all with the sly little faces of examining magistrates, of examiners, or of eighteenth-century abbés; several, obviously, are having a good laugh over the ingenuousness of it all; finally, and these are the most numerous, the careless and evasive Buddhas. ‘Oh, you know, we fellows… ’

You do not know whether to choke with laughter, with rage, with tears, or simply to think that stronger than the personality of a saint, of a demi-god, is the leveling and vital power of human pettiness.

In a temple, the Chinaman is perfectly at ease. He smokes, he talks, he laughs. At either side of the altar fortune-tellers read the future from ready-printed formulas. Little sticks roll in a box, one always protrudes, and you draw it out. It has a number on it. The leaflet about the future with the corresponding number is found, you read. .. and all you have to do after that is to believe in it.

Few Europeans like Chinese music. Yet Confucius, who was not one to exaggerate, far from it, was so much taken with the charm of a melody that he remained three days without being able to eat.

I would not go as far as that, but except for certain Bengalese melodies, I must say it is Chinese music that affects me the most. It moves me. What makes the European so uncomfortable is the orchestra, with its din underlining and interrupting the melody. That is something peculiarly Chinese. Like their fondness for firecrackers and explosives. One has to get used to it. Besides, curiously enough, in spite of this appalling noise, Chinese music is all peace, not sleepy, not slow, but pacific, exempt from the desire to make war, to compel, to command, exempt even from suffering, affectionate.

How good, agreeable and sociable this melody is! It has nothing blaring, idiotic, excited about it, it is quite human and good-natured, childlike and popular, joyful and ‘family reunion.’

(With regard to this, the Chinese say that European music is monotonous. ‘It is nothing but marches,’ they say. Indeed, how the White men do trot and how they blow the trumpet!)

And just as certain people have only to open a book by such-and-such an author and they burst into tears without knowing why, so when I hear a Chinese melody, I feel relieved from the errors and the evil tendencies that are in me and from a kind of excess with which I am afflicted daily.

But there is another charm, not greater, but perhaps more constant; it is the Chinese spoken language.

Compared with this language all others are pedantic, burdened with a thousand ridiculous things, laughable in their monotony — languages for soldiers. That is what they are.

Now the Chinese language was not made like the others, forced by a jostling and controlling syntax. The words in it were not constructed harshly, with authority, method, redundancy, in a conglomeration of resounding syllables, nor along etymological lines. No, just words of one syllable, and that syllable of uncertain resonance. The Chinese sentence resembles weak exclamations. A word rarely contains more than three letters. Often a drowning consonant (the n or the g) envelops it in the sound of a gong.

Finally, in order to be still closer to nature, this language is sung. There are four tones in the Mandarin language, eight in the dialects of Southern China. None of the monotony of the other languages. With Chinese, one goes up, one goes down, one goes up again, one is halfway there, and one dashes off.

It still remains, it plays with, is completely of, nature.

Chinese love is not European love.

The European woman is in a transport of love for you — then all of a sudden she forgets you on the edge of the bed, musing over the serious side of life, about herself, or about nothing, or maybe she has merely relapsed into ‘White anxiety.’

The Arab woman behaves like a wave. The stomach dance, do not forget that, is not a mere exhibition for the eyes; no, you are caught in the surge, you are carried away and you find yourself a bit later, blissful, without knowing exactly what has happened to you, nor how.

And she too begins dreaming. Arabia comes between you. All is over.

With the Chinese woman it is not at all like that. The Chinese woman is like the root of the banyan, which turns up again everywhere, even among the leaves. Thus she is, and when you have admitted her into your bed, you will not be rid of her for days.

The Chinese woman takes care of you. She considers you are under treatment. Not for a moment does she turn over on her side. Always twined around you, like ivy that does not know how to live alone.

And the most restless man finds her again, near and comfortable like the sheet.

The Chinese woman places herself at your disposal — without cringing, she is not that way, but tactfully and with intelligence.

And she is so affectionate.

A moment comes, following other moments, when almost everyone feels like resting.

You, perhaps; not she. This ant looks immediately for some work to do, and there she is, proceeding to tidy up your valise.

A real lesson in Chinese art. You look at her in amazement. Not a safety pin, not a toothpick does she leave unturned, rearranging them in that perfect order apparently acquired by centuries and centuries of practice and experience.

Every object she becomes familiar with by gestures, trying it, experimenting and judging, and before putting it in place she plays with it. Then, when you see all this in order, the contents of your valise seem now to be rather doll-like, doll-like yet hard, and somehow regulated once for all.

When the Chinese woman talks of love, she can talk indefinitely; she never tires of it; she can even talk about something else, as she often does, she has the language of love, love is made of monosyllables (as soon as a word is lengthened, it looks as if it were going away and taking everything with it; as soon as a sentence appears, the sentence separates you).

The Chinese language is made up of monosyllables, or the shortest, or the most inconsistent ones, and with four singing tones. The singing is discreet. A kind of breeze, or birds’ language. A language so moderate and affectionate that one could hear it all one’s life without getting bored, even when not understanding it.

Such is the Chinese woman. And yet, all that would be nothing did she not answer to the admirable definition of the word ‘mitschlafen,’ to sleep with. There are men who are so restless that they even throw their pillows on the ground without realizing it.

What does the Chinese woman do? I do not know; a sort of sense of harmony, subsisting in her sleep, enables her, by appropriate movements, to remain attached, always to sub-ordinate herself to what, all the same, would be so wonderful — to be harmoniously two.

In Europe everything ends tragically. There has never been any philosophy in Europe (at least since the Greeks… and even with them it is questionable).

The French with their social tragedy, the Greeks with their Oedipus, the Russians with their love of misfortune, the Italians with their pride in tragedy, the Spanish with their tragic obsession, Hamletism, etc., etc.

If Christ had not been crucified, he would not have had a hundred disciples in Europe.

His Passion is what excited people.

What would the Spaniards do if they did not see the wounds of Christ? And all European literature is about suffering, never about wisdom. One has to wait for the American Walt Whitman and the author of Walden to hear another note.

Therefore, that of the Chinese, which is almost devoid of heartbreak poetry, of complaint, has no charm whatsoever for the European, excepting a hundred or so librarians, who by dint of reading know nothing whatsoever about anything.

The Chinese sees nothing tragic at all in death. A Chinese philosopher declares very simply: ‘An old man who does not know how to die I call a good-for-nothing.’ There you have it.

In fact, one-third of China is a cemetery. But what a cemetery!

The Chinese country, when I saw it for the first time, went right to my heart. Tombs, whole mountains (or rather the side of one, the eastern slope of another) covered with tombs, but not hard, straight tombs, no — semicircles of stones… that are inviting. Unmistakably, they are inviting. Indeed, they do not frighten anyone. Every Chinaman has his coffin while he is alive. He is quite at ease with death.

When a man dies in a distant province, a room is made ready, while waiting to find a way to transport him back to his country — a room where the members of the family, the son, the daughter, etc., come from time to time, to meet, to meditate a little, to eat, talk and play majong.

The paintings, the theater, and Chinese handwriting, more than anything else, show this extreme reserve, this inner concavity, this lack of aura of which I spoke. Chinese paintings are mainly landscapes. The movement of things is indicated, not their thickness and their weight, but their linearness, if one may say so. The Chinaman possesses the faculty of reducing the being to what signifies the being (somewhat like the mathematical or algebraic faculty). If a combat is to take place, he does not go into combat, he does not even pretend to do so. He signifies it. That is all that interests him; the combat itself would seem coarse to him. And this signification is established by something so slight that a simple European cannot hope to decipher the piece. All the more so as there are hundreds of them. In addition to that, a quantity of elements are taken apart and then put together again in fragments, as one would do in algebra.

If the subject is a flight, everything will be represented except the flight — the sweat, the glances to right and left, but not the flight. If they show you old age, you will have it all there, except the look of old age, and the gait of old age; but you will have, for example, the beard and the lame knee.

In the creating of Chinese characters, this lack of a gift for mass effects, and for the spontaneous, and this taste for taking a detail to signify the whole is more striking still, and it is why Chinese, which might have been a universal language, has never, except in the case of Korea and of Japan, crossed the Chinese frontier — and moreover is supposed to be the most difficult of the languages.

The trouble is that there are not five characters in the twenty thousand that one can guess at first glance. Not a hundred simple characters even in the primitive writing. The Chinaman wants general effects.

Let us take something that should be quite easy to represent: a chair. It is formed by the following characters (they themselves unrecognizable):

1) tree; 2) tall; 3) to sigh with pleasure, in admiration: the whole makes chair, and is recomposed, no doubt, as follows: man (sitting on his heels or standing up). Sighing with pleasure near an object made of the wood of a tree. And if one only saw the different elements! But if one does not know them in advance, one will not discover them.

The idea of representing the chair itself with its seat and its legs does not occur to him.

But the chair that suited him he has found; not obvious but discreet, pleasantly suggested by elements of the landscape, deduced by the mind rather than designated, and yet uncertain and as though ‘played at’.

This character, which is one of the easiest of the composed characters, shows plainly enough how repugnant it is to a Chinaman to see an object as it is, and on the other hand, the delight he takes in general effects, in the landscape with figures. Even if the Chinaman represents an object as it is, in no time he reshapes and simplifies it. Example: The elephant, during the centuries, has taken eight forms.¹

In the first place, it had a trunk. A few centuries later, it has it still. But the animal has been made to stand up like a man. Some time later, it loses its eye and its head, after that its body, keeping only its feet, its spinal column and its shoulders. Then it recovers its head, loses the rest, except the feet, then writhes in the form of a serpent. To finish up, it is anything you like; it has two horns and a nipple that comes out of one foot.

Chinese poetry is so very delicate that it never meets an idea (in the European sense of the word).

A Chinese poem cannot be translated. Neither in painting, nor in poetry, nor in the drama, has the Chinese that warm, thick voluptuousness of the Europeans. In a poem, he indicates, and the points indicated are not even the most important ones, their evidence is not hallucinating, they are avoided, they are not even suggested, as it is often said, but rather the landscape and its atmosphere are deduced from them.

When Li Po says to us such apparently easy things as this, and it is one third of the poem:

Blue is the water and clear the moon of autumn

.

We pluck white lilies in the South lake

.

They seem to sigh with love

filling with melancholy the heart of the man in the boat

.

It must be said, in the first place, that the painter’s eye is so prevalent in China that with no other indication the reader sees this in a satisfying manner, enjoys it, and quite naturally can draw a picture of it for you with a brush. Of this faculty, an ancient example:

Toward the sixteenth century, I do not know under what emperor, the Chinese police had made by stealth, by their inspectors, the portrait of every foreigner coming into China. Ten years after having seen only the portrait, a member of the police recognized you. Better still, if a crime was committed and the assassin had disappeared, there was always someone in the neighborhood who could do from memory the portrait of the assassin, which, reproduced in several copies, was sent off at breakneck speed over the great highways of the Empire. Hemmed in on all sides by his portraits, the assassin was obliged to give himself up to the judge.

In spite of this gift for seeing, a Chinaman would have little interest in a French or English translation of the poem.

After all, what do these four lines of Li Po contain in French? A scene.

But in Chinese, they contain thirty or so; it is a bazaar, it is a cinema, it is a great picture. Each word is a landscape, a group of signs, the elements of which, even in the briefest poem, combine with endless allusions. A Chinese poem is always too long, such is its superabundance, but it really excites one, it is bristling with comparisons.

In the ‘blue’ (“Spirit of Chinese Poetry,” by V. W. W. S. Purcell), there is the sign of chopping wood and that of water, not to mention silk. In bright, there is the moon, and at the same time the sun. In autumn, you have fire, and corn, and so on.

The fact is that three lines suffice to give such an affluence of parallels and of fine points that one’s delight is intense.

This delight is obtained by equilibrium and harmony, a state pleasing beyond all else to the Chinaman, for whom it is a kind of paradise.²

This sentiment, even more opposed to the exalted Hindu peace than to the restlessness and action of the European, is to be found nowhere but among the yellow races.

What the Chinaman knows best is the art of escaping.

A profoundly ‘Pilate’ people. In the street you ask a Chinaman for information, and immediately he runs off. ‘It’s wiser’, he thinks, ‘not to mix in other people’s business. One begins by giving information, and ends in blows.’

People who run away at the slightest provocation and whose little eyes scoot over to the corners when you look them in the face.

A Chinese general who does it in his trousers, who begs the colonel to take his place in the battle, surprises no one. No one asks to see his trousers. Everybody thinks this quite natural.³

One day I saw five officers who were swearing to exterminate I don’t remember whom. They looked like rabbits (and yet the Chinese were and are once more becoming the best soldiers in the world).

An old, old childish people that does not want to know what is at the bottom of anything, that has no principles, but ‘cases’; no law, but ‘cases’; no morale, but ‘cases.’

The lie, so-called, does not exist in China.

The lie is the creation of excessively upright minds, militarily upright, just as immodesty is an invention of people far removed from nature.

The Chinaman adapts himself, barters, calculates, exchanges.

He goes with the crowd. The Chinese peasant believes that he has three hundred souls.⁴

Everything that is tortuous in nature is to him a gentle caress.

He considers the root more ‘nature’ than the trunk.

If he finds a big stone, with holes in it, or cracked, he takes it in as his child, or rather as his father, and places it on a pedestal in his garden.

When you perceive at twenty yards in front of you a monument or a house, do not imagine that you will be nearer to it in a few seconds. Nothing is straight, infinite turnings lead to it and perhaps you will lose your way, and never reach what was right in front of your nose.

This is to throw the ‘demons’ off the track, as they can only walk in a straight line, but above all because everything that is straight makes the Chinaman ill-at-ease and gives him the painful impression of error.

Morale of a drugged anemic people.

(Is it by chance that the women all have the look of vicious boarding-school girls with their hair cut across the forehead?)

Philosophy for little children. ‘Say a nice “thank you.” Bow, take off your hat, don’t pass in front of the others. Don’t scream. Don’t take up the middle of the street. Think of your future, of your parents. Don’t pinch your comrades, etc.’

‘If you go out with one who is your superior, apply rule 72 in the manual; with a professor, rule 18, for going home, rule No. 44; then apply ritual C and, if a Mandarin is making a visit with bonnet B4, salute him with ceremonial 422, repeating words 4007.’

Thus he will not lose face. From the lowest coolie up to the highest mandarin, the thing is not to lose face, their wooden face, but they do care about it and, in fact, having no principles, it is the face that counts.

Wisdom of little tots, but one that has amazing and unexpected advantages over other civilizations, due, no doubt, to the Chinaman’s sense of the efficacious (he is the inventor of jiu-jitsu).

Courtesy, gentleness, are, eight hundred years before Confucius, indicated as essential qualities in the ‘historic books.’

To obey wisdom, a reasonable politico-shopkeeping wisdom, discussed and practical, has always been a matter of concern to the Chinese.

The Chinese have always demanded wisdom on the part of their emperors. Their philosophers spoke to them as those who have the upper hand speak. The emperor was in fear of having to blush… before them.

The bandit evades the laws of the empire, but not that law.

A thoughtless bandit would never succeed in enrolling a single man.

On the contrary, the wise bandit gets a great deal of support.

In China, nothing is absolute. No principle, no a priori. And nothing shocks the victim. The bandit is considered as an element of natural force.

This element is one of those with which small transactions are made. One does not suppress it, one arranges with it. One deals with it.

It is practically impossible, in China, to go outside of a city; twenty minutes away from it, they catch you. However, in the heart of China perhaps you will not get caught. But nowhere does security exist. There are pirates two hours from Macao, two hours from Hong Kong, who seize boats.

Now the Chinese, the Chinese businessman, is the first to fall a victim to them.

Never mind. For the Chinaman to see clearly, things must first be complicated. So that he may see clearly at home, he must have at least ten children and a concubine. So that he may see clearly in the streets, they must be labyrinths. So that the city may be gay, he must have a country fair.

So that he may go to the theater, it must have, in the same building, eight to ten theaters for dramas, comedies, films, plus a gallery for prostitutes, accompanied by their mothers, a few games of skill and of chance, and, in one corner, a lion and a panther.

A Chinese shopping street is stuffed with signs and advertisements. They hang from every side. You do not know what to look at.

How empty is the European city⁵ beside this; empty, clean, yes! and earthy.

So that he may feel fit, the Chinaman must have on his body the dirt of ninety days.

The Chinaman is neither honest nor dishonest.

If it is the time to be honest, he will take up honesty as one would take up a language.

When, in doing business with Englishmen, you have been conducting your correspondence in English, all your letters will be in English, and not all less five or six a month; thus, the Chinaman who takes up honesty of the rigid type is perfectly honest. He does not swerve from the rigid type; he is more faithful than the European.

But honest though he may be, dishonesty does not shock him. In fact, there is no dishonesty in nature. Is a caterpillar that eats the leaf of a cherry tree dishonest? And yet the Chinaman, before the arrival of the European, was famous throughout Asia for his remarkable honesty in business matters.

Europeans (Germanic, Gauls, Anglo-Saxons) out-Chinese the Chinese. It is often said that the Chinese invented everything… ahem!

Curiously enough, it is precisely the Europeans who have re-invented and ‘re-searched’ what the Chinese have invented and researched.

When the Chinese boast of having discovered diabolo, polo, football, archery, jiu-jitsu, paper, etc. — well, what is one to do about it? That does not prove that the Chinese is superior. It is does not prove that the European is superior either. It proves the superiority of the Hindu who, intensely cultivated, did not invent diabolo, football, etc.

Were I a civilization, I would not boast of having invented diabolo. No indeed; instead of that I would be ashamed of it, and I would hide from myself. I would make better resolutions for the future.

The Chinese and the Whites suffer from the same malady.

During the day they potter, then they have to play games.

Without their theater, the Chinese in the cities would find life insupportable. They need a thousand games.

Playing games, he is alive. At Macao, in the gambling dens, they become slightly animated; but fearing ridicule, they soon go out to take a pipe of opium and, having regained their wooden countenance, they return to the room.

Every instant, in the street, one hears pennies falling, and shouts of ‘heads or tail,’ and immediately a group of anxious faces, watching and praying.

In spite of all these games, a malady awaits the Chinaman: he finds himself unable to laugh any more. What with dissembling, making plans, composing his face, he no longer knows how to laugh. Terrible malady. There was a devoted child who, for filial love, stumbled and fell over some buckets of water to divert his parents afflicted with ‘the malady.’ Now when one knows how the Chinaman: 1) has a horror of water; 2) fears ridicule, one realizes the seriousness of the malady that must be cured, and the tremendous duties of filial love in China.

Chinamen should always be thought of as animals. The Hindus, as other animals, the Japanese ditto, and the Russians and the Germans, and so on. And in each race these three varities: the adult man, the child, and the woman. Three worlds. A man is a creature who understands nothing about a child, and nothing about a woman.

And neither they nor ourselves are right. We are obviously wrong, all of us.

Also, the question of whether Confucius is a great man need not be raised. The question is to know whether he was a great Chinaman, and thoroughly understood the Chinese, which seems to be true, and directed them for the best, which is not so certain.

Ditto Buddha for India, etc., etc.

In these different human species, their philosophy generally approaches the type or the race, but occasionally it is remote from it.

That is why it is difficult to know how far Confucius and Lao-Tsu have Chinesed the Chinese, or have un-Chinesed them, or how far Mencius, placing the Empire’s ban on war and the military, has fostered Chinese cowardice or affected the combativeness of the Chinese. It must be remembered that the Chinaman who runs amok is a demon that nothing can stop, and compared to whom a Malay is quite gentle, and that acts of courage were at least as abundant in China as elsewhere, and that their indifference to death and privation is incomparable.

The Chinese are not mere dreamers. They have not had transcendental systems or strokes of genius, but they made discoveries of incalculable practical value.

Confucius: the Edison of morality.

Kindliness, calm (do not meddle with what does not concern you. Behave according to your condition; if you are powerful, like a powerful person, if you are head over ears in debt, like a man head over ears in debt, etc.), correctness in attire, politeness…

No one has concerned himself with the relations between human beings with as much solicitude and foresight as the Chinese.

Sun Yat Sen said very justly: ‘Where politics are concerned, China has nothing to learn from Europe.’ In fact, she might give lessons to Europe and even India in the art — having done everything, put everything into practice, including the systematic absence of government.

Without municipality, without lawyers (if one of them turns up, he is put in prison… lawyers attract trials), without armies (armies attract wars), she has been able to live very well for quite a time, all the time that the Chinese were sufficiently wise.

When you are no longer wise, then, alas, you must have strong administrations. But nothing prevents or could prevent wars, revolution and destruction (see Europe, nineteenth century).

The Chinaman does not insist on his duty toward humanity in general, but toward his father and his mother; it is where one lives that things must go smoothly and that requires a touch and a virtue such as a European saint would be scarcely capable of showing.

The romantic Chinaman is as yet unborn. He always wants to look reasonable.

Tsin che Hoang Ti is one of the most famous and fantastic tyrants in the world, who had a whole mountain painted red (color of the condemned) because his people had got caught in a storm on it.

Tsin che Hoang Ti, who had a bath of boiling water prepared in the Throne-room when one of his officers demanded an audience which displeased him, was the same emperor who had engraved stone tablets all over the place reading: ‘All is well. Weights and measures are standardized. Men are good husbands, parents are respected!

‘Wherever the wind blows, everybody is glad,’ etc.

On the other hand, in a theatrical piece, no matter what its subject every five minutes there is a scene where they take council. One would think oneself at a trial. And the actors come in saying: ‘I am so and so, I come from…, I am going to…,’ in order that there may be no confusion. To explain carefully, that is reasonable.

The Chinese detest us as cursed meddlers, who cannot keep our hands off anything. Ammunition, tinned food, missionaries, we have to throw our activities at their heads.

And so, what hatred, and, in the Extreme Orient, what jealousy too! And how can one appear innocent? But from having seen this hatred constantly turned on me, I was affected perhaps by it myself, in my attitude to them.

The Chinaman has the love of imitation carried to such a degree, submits himself so naturally to the model, that one is ill at ease.⁶

This mania is so rooted in them that the Chinese philosophers have based almost their whole morality upon it, which is a morality of example.

The book of verses says:

‘The Prince, whose conduct is always full of equity and of wisdom, will see men from the four parts of the world imitate his uprightness. He accomplishes his duty as a father, as a son, as an elder brother, and as a younger brother and then people imitate him.’

There you are, you have done the trick! It is irresistible. Now everything is going to go like clockwork.

The Chinaman must have been amazed to see the European not imitating him. That is: he had a chance to be amazed. But a Chinaman would die rather than be amazed.

The current idea among Chinese art critics is that paintings must take the place of nature, that pictures should convey such a strong impression of it that the city-dweller need no longer take the trouble to go to the country, which, in fact, is what happens.

The sampans, on the river at Canton, are desperately bare, but there are always one or two pictures hung up inside.

In the worst Chinese hovels one sees pictures with wide horizons, with superb mountains.

An ancient Chinese philosopher, to encourage virtue, makes the following rather silly pronouncement, ‘that if the government of a small state is good, everyone (everyone who is Chinese, of course) will flock to it,’ and its power and prosperity will be augmented.

He knew his Chinese people, wise old Chinaman that he was.

The thing can still be verified today. Malaya has a stable and reliable government. The Chinese flock to it. There are two millions of them there. Singapore is a Chinese city. Malaya, a friend was saying to me, is a Chinese colony administered by the English.

Javanese trade is in the hands of the Chinese. In the tiniest villages, they have their shop.

In Borneo, or even in Bali, where the inhabitants keep to themselves and do not need anyone, some Chinese have managed to install themselves and to do business.

They tell us that Confucius and his disciples one day met a woman (I give you the story roughly)… They learn that her father has been swept away by a flood, her husband killed by a tiger, her brother bitten by a snake, and one of her sons involved in a misfortune of much the same type.

Then Confucius, disconcerted, says: ‘And you remain in a country such as this?’ (It was a small state in China that she could easily have left to go to another one.)

The woman then gives this charmingly Chinese reply: ‘The government here is not too bad!’

That is to say, in good English, that business was going well, that taxes were moderate.

Things like that root you to the spot. Confucius himself was wide-eyed when he heard it.

Do the Chinese ever see things on a large scale?

They are particularly good workers on little tasks.

They have been able to appear profound in politics on account of their pleasant principle of ‘Let it alone, everything will come out all right,’ which they keep for great matters.

But one notices that they go on exactly the opposite principle where smaller matters are concerned, leaving no stone unturned in order to succeed in arranging their own affairs, small or large, more often small.

They make plans, mark boundaries, arrange things in such a way as to have something to fall back on, set traps, and have always acted thus, because they have always liked to contrive.

Every creature is born with an idea, a principle that does not need to be proved, is generally far from being transcendental, and around which he assembles his notions… It is generally believed that the central, intimate idea of Confucius was one’s obligations to the family, to the prince and to wisdom. What do we know about it?

An idea, too essential, too intimate for him, for the Chinese to perceive, was used as a base by him constantly. It was perhaps that man was made for bargaining.⁷

In the eighteenth century, a great Chinese author was racking his brains. He wanted an absolutely fantastic tale, breaking the laws of the world. What did he find? This: His hero, a sort of Gulliver, arrives in a country where the merchants were trying to sell things at ridiculously low prices, and where the customers were insisting on paying exorbitant prices. After that, the author believed he had shaken the foundations of the universe and of all the planets.⁸ Nothing so strange, thinks this Chinaman, exists anywhere in the world.

Among the characteristics common to all the peoples of the yellow races is their addiction to intoxicants.

One is apt to believe that it is opium that has done the harm, and that it might have been as well not to have the poppy in China to supply the opium, and consequently…

Opium has nothing to do with it.

Fifteen centuries ago the Chinese did not smoke. He was only a drunkard. He drank wine and rice alcohol.

Opium does not suffice with the Chinaman. He smokes tobacco. The women smoke. In the shops, in the street, and they throw away a cigarette only to take another one. Without a cigarette, obviously, they could not choose a stuff.

Japan is full of drunkards. They zigzag everywhere in the street.

The Burmese, at the age of four, smoke already, little girls as well as little boys, and not cigarettes, but big, dirty, strong cigars, ‘cheroots.’

The Indo-Chinese take opium.

The Koreans take opium and morphine.

The Chinese and the Japanese are fond of toys, of the artificial, of well-being, of lanterns, of artificial lighting, of dwarf or cardboard trees. They are nocturnal. Their cities are alive at night.

He has the peace that goes with drugs. Enjoys being without any motion, except when it’s hysterical, and likes to hear shrill sounds.

The Chinaman is not very sensual, yet at the same time he is very much so. But finely.

He has, so to speak, no ancient erotic literature. He is not disturbed by a woman, nor is a woman by a man. He is not even disturbed at the moment when everyone is disturbed. That is of no consequence. That leaves no trace. No, that does not stir his blood. Everything takes place in a springtime, fresh and still near to winter. If he has really a desire, it will be for a little girl still retaining the line of childhood, delicate and thin. He is not dirty. Obscene Chinese postcards are extremely witty. His music always has a transparent quality. He does not understand the heavy voluptuousness of the European, that warm thick tone of European voices, musical instruments and tales does not exist for him, he has none of the sickening sentimentality of the English or American, French or Viennese, that feeling of the long kiss, of stickiness, and of the submerging of self.

A Chinese prostitute is less obviously sensual than a European mother of a family. She immediately shows affection. She seeks to attach herself.

Chinese painting is cleanliness, absence of impressionism, of excitement. There is no air between the objects, nothing but pure ether. The objects are traced; they seem to be memories. It is they, and yet they are absent, like delicate phantoms that desire has not raised. The Chinaman likes distant horizons above everything… things that cannot be touched.

The European wants to be able to touch. The air in his pictures is thick. His nudes are almost lewd, even when the subject is taken from the Bible. Passion, desire, hands maul them.

The Chinaman has a genius for the sign. Beside Chinese writing, Egyptian writing is bestial, it is particularly stupid. The most ancient Chinese writing, that to be found on seals, was already free from voluptuousness in its presentation and tracing, almost so in its symbols; the writing that succeeded it lost its circles, curves and all envelopments. Freed from imitation, it became quite cerebral, thin and ‘un-enveloping’ (to envelop: voluptuousness).

And only the Chinese theater is a theater for the mind.

Only the Chinese know what a theatrical production is. The Europeans have, for a long time, produced nothing at all. The Europeans show you everything. Everything is there, on the stage. Every object, nothing is missing, not even the view from the window.

The Chinese, on the contrary, who is a simple creature, and marvelously clever, brings out whatever is needed to indicate a landscape, or trees, or a ladder, according to what is required. As the scene changes every three minutes, there would be no end to the installing of furniture, of objects, etc. His theater is extremely rapid, like a cinema.

He can show a great many more objects and outdoor scenes than we can.

The music indicates the type of action or of sentiment, and even a European is finally able to follow.

Each actor comes on the scene with a costume and a face painted in such a way that it tells you at once who he is. Impossible to cheat. He can say anything he likes. We know what we know.

His character is painted on his face. Red if he is brave, white with a black stripe if he is a traitor, and we know exactly to what degree; if he has only a bit of white on his nose, he is a figure of fun, etc.

If he needs great space, he simply looks off into the distance; and who would look off into the distance if there were no horizon? When a woman has to sew a dress, she at once begins to sew. Only the pure air shifts between her fingers, nevertheless everyone feels the sensation of sewing, of the needle (for who would sew pure air?) going in, and coming out with difficulty on the other side; and one’s impression is even stronger than in reality; one feels the cold and everything. Why? Because the actor pictures the thing to himself. A sort of magnetism makes its appearance with him, coming from his desire to feel what is absent.

When you see him pour, with the greatest care, from a non-existent jug, non-existent water onto a non-existent cloth and rub his face with it, and wring out the non-existent cloth just as it should be done, the existence of this water, unapparent and yet evident, becomes somehow hallucinating, and if the actor lets the jug fall (non-existent) and you are in the front row, you feel you have been splashed like he has.

There are plays where the action is terrific, where non-existent walls are scaled, with the aid of non-existent ladders, in order to steal non-existent money chests.

There are often, in comic plays, twenty minutes or more of almost uninterrupted miming.

The miming language of lovers is something exquisite; it is better than words, more tangible, more imperious, more spontaneous, and central; it is fresher than love, less exaggerated than dancing, less domestic; and what is really remarkable, one can represent everything without its being shocking.

I saw, for example, a prince who was traveling incognito ask a servant-girl at the inn, by gestures, if he could sleep with her.

She replied, in the same manner, by a lot of impossibilities.

Sleeping proposals always seem difficult to separate from a certain sensuality. Well, it is curious, but there was none. Not a sign of it, and it lasted for at least a quarter of an hour. It became an obsession with this little young man. The whole house was amused. But never did that obsession become embarrassing. She was not in flesh, but had got as far as being outlined like certain faces seen in a dream, free from any vulgarity.

Chinese style, particularly the very ancient style of the Mings, of the Six dynasties, of the Tangs, is extraordinary. No lyrical development, no unilinear progression.

Suddenly you are stopped, you can go no further. Old Chinese stories always seem disconnected. They have stumps. They are chopped off. Compared to them one of our stories looks as if it were full of tricks; and in fact the richest grammar, the most mobile phrase, is nothing but sleight-of-hand with the elements of thought.

The thought, the phrase of the Chinese is right before you. And it stands solidly, like a chest, and if the phrases flow and are linked, it is the translator who has made them flow.

A grandeur like that from a pot of stew emanates from it.

Lao-Tsu, Chuang-Tsu in their philosophy, Kao-Ti (the peasant who became emperor) in his proclamations to the Chinese, Wu-Ti in his letter to the captain of the Huns, have this extraordinary style. A style that economizes words.

Nothing approaches the style of Lao-Tsu. Lao-Tsu throws you a big pebble. Then he goes away. After that he throws you another pebble, then goes away again; all his pebbles, though very hard, are fruit, but naturally the old bear is not going to peel them for you.

Lao-Tsu is a man who knows. He touches bottom. He speaks the language of evidence. He says nothing that is not clear, certain. Nevertheless, he is not understood. ‘The Tao that is expressed in words is not the true Tao. How small! How great! How unfathomable!… — What does the water of rivers do to reign over the torrents of the high mountains and the streams?

‘—It knows how to keep to a lower level.

‘Work by inaction.

‘With inaction everything is possible…

‘Annihilate one’s being and one’s action, and the universe comes to you.’

His Taoist disciples cultivated all this for magic, rather than for moral purposes.

A man thus effaced is no longer struck by substances, nor by phenomena.

A hunter, to frighten the game, set the forest on fire. Suddenly he saw a man who was coming out of a rock. This man then went through the fire deliberately.

The hunter ran after him.

— Heigh, tell me. How do you manage to pass through the rock?

— The rock? What do you mean by that?

— And you have been seen to pass through the fire as well.

— The fire? What do you mean by the fire?

This Taoist, perfect, completely effaced, no longer noticed any difference in anything.

At other times he lived among lions, and the lions did not realize that he was a man. They noticed nothing strange about him.

Such is the pliability that the understanding of Tao gives one. Such is the supreme effacement of which so many Chinese have dreamed.

The Chinaman is not particularly dashing. A Chinese city is conspicuous for its formidable gates. What one needs first of all is to be protected. Rather than too many proud monuments in the interior, imposing gates, strongly built, for the purpose of frightening people away, but for us, so obviously a bluff.

The Chinese empire is distinguishable among all others for its Wall of China. What one needs first of all is to be protected.

Chinese edifices are distinguishable for their roofs. What one needs first of all is to be protected.

The Chinaman never lets himself go, but is always on his guard; he always has the air of belonging to a secret society.

Everywhere there are great screens, then there are again smaller ones, and naturally triple labyrinths. What is needed first of all is proper protection.

Though warlike when it was absolutely necessary, China was always a peace-loving nation. ‘With good steel, one does not make nails. Of a young man of worth, do not make a soldier.’ Such is public opinion. All Chinese education lays so much stress on pacifism that the Chinese had become cowards (for a time), and most unblushingly.⁹

The Chinaman, who can carve splendid and sedate camels, as well as horses, with a great deal of humor, has not been able to render the lion. His lions make grimaces, but they are not lions. They are more like eunuchs.

Natural ardor, hot blood and natural aggressiveness, the Chinaman is unable to grasp.

China is so essentially peaceful that it is full of bandits. If the Chinese people were not so peace-loving, they would take arms at all costs and restore order. However, they would rather not.

The peasant, the small tradesman, finds himself ruined, plundered, or even ten times plundered. Yet after the tenth time he still has a little patience left in reserve.

The Chinaman lives comfortably in the midst of this insecurity in the interior of China, where you risk your property and your life, and which is so insupportable and distressing to the European. As a player of games, he knows how to behave as a toy.

It is in Pekin that I understood the willow, not the weeping willow, but the straight willow, the Chinese tree par excellence.

The willow has something evasive about it. Its foliage is impalpable, its movement resembles a meeting of breezes. There is more of it than one sees, more than it shows of itself. It is the least ostentatious of trees. And though always shivering (not the brief and anxious shiver of the birches and of the poplars), it does not look as if it were contained in itself, nor attached, but always sailing and swimming so as to maintain its place in the wind, like fish in the river’s current.

It is little by little that the willow educates you, giving you its lesson each morning. And a repose made of vibration seizes you, so that when it ends, you can no longer open the window without feeling a desire to weep.

In things that seem at first to be almost neutral, but which are immediately revealed to him (to us after a while) with a heartrending mystic sweetness, the Chinaman has placed his infinite — a just and enjoyable infinite.

Jade, polished stones that seem moist but not shiny, clouded and not transparent, ivory, the moon, a single flower in its flower pot, little branches with their multiple twigs, their tiny leaves; thin, vibrating, far-off landscapes caught in a rising mist, stones pierced and as though tortured, a woman’s song heard faintly in the distance, plants under water, the lotus, the short, flutelike whistle of the toad in the silence, flavorless dishes, a slightly decayed egg, gummy macaroni, a shark’s fin, a light rain falling, a son who accomplishes the acts of filial piety and follows the rites in too exact a manner — so strained, this exactitude, it makes you faint — imitation in all its forms, plants made of stone, creamy flowers with corollas, petals and sepals of an irritating perfection; to have theatrical performances at court, played by political prisoners, obliging them to do it; delicious, half absent-minded cruelties — here is what the Chinese has always liked.

The Chinaman, among all the peoples of the yellow race, has something about him that is powerful, and particularly that is heavy — he himself somewhat barrel-shaped with his cylindrical forms, when he begins to get on in years.

Beside the great Chien Meng gate at Pekin, the Arc de Triomphe seems light and removable. A Chinese bathtub in the South is often a great earthen pot (from which water is dipped by little jugfuls that one throws on one’s body), that is all, a great pot, oh, how heavy! and it seems as if it would be easier to move a grand piano about. The Chinaman gives the impression of something squatting. His sculptured lions are like toads that grimace. His bronze cranes, his geese weigh on the ground like men, human birds that have ceased to count on anything but the solid earth. His furniture is stocky. His lanterns large and big-bellied, and every house has two or three of these barrels suspended in the air that slowly oscillate.

In miserable, absolutely bare interiors sometimes there is a great red ewer, like a patriarch enthroned.

The Chinese characters on Japanese posters are thin, drawn with fine strokes. On the Chinese posters, the characters are pot-bellied, real tumblers, like a hippopotamus’ bottom, and stand crushed down one on top of another, with a burlesque, heavy self-assurance, like the gravest and the most disturbing notes of the double-bass.

No city has gates as massive as those of Pekin.

You must really get it into your head that the Chinaman is a most sensitive creature. He has kept the heart of a youngster. For four thousand years he has kept the heart of a youngster.

Is it a good child? Not especially. But he is impressionable, is the Chinaman, a trembling leaf makes his heart rock, a fish sailing slowly by makes him almost swoon. He who has not heard Mei-Lan-Fang does not know what gentleness is, heartrending gentleness, decomposing, the liking for tears, the painful refinement of grace.

And even a textbook on painting, such as that of Wang-Wei, or the one by Ly-Yu, entitled The Garden of the Mustard-seed, is done so devoutly and so movingly that it makes the tears come into one’s eyes.

A trifle hurts the Chinaman’s feelings.

A youngster is terribly afraid of humiliations.

Who has not felt himself to be Poil de Carotte? The fear of humiliations is so Chinese that it dominates their civilization. They are polite for that reason. To avoid humiliating the other. They humiliate themselves to avoid being humiliated.

Politeness, that is a way to prevent humiliation. They smile.

They are not so much afraid of losing face as of making others lose it. This sensitiveness, really unhealthy from the European viewpoint, gives a particular aspect to their whole civilization. They have the sense and the apprehension of ‘people are saying.’ They always feel they are being observed. .. ‘When thou goest through an orchard, take care, if there are apples, to put thy hand to thy trousers, and if there are melons, to touch thy boots.’ They are not conscious of themselves, but of their appearance, as though they themselves were on the outside and observing themselves from there. From the earliest days this order existed in the Chinese army: ‘And now look fierce!’

Even the emperors, when there were emperors, were afraid of being humiliated. Speaking of Barbarians, of Koreans, they said to their messenger: Arrange so that they do not laugh at us. — To be the laughing-stock. The Chinese are offended more easily than anyone and their literature contains, as one might expect on the part of men who are polite and easily hurt, the most cruel and infernal insolence.

Is the change in me due to China? I always had a weakness for the tiger. When I saw one, it stirred up something in me, and at once I was one with it.

But yesterday I was at the Great World. I saw a tiger that was near the entrance (a fine tiger), and I perceived that it was a stranger to me. I perceived that the tiger has the head of an idiot, passionate and monomaniacal. But the roads that each creature follows are so little known that the tiger might all the same arrive at wisdom. One sees, in fact, that he has the air of being perfectly at ease.

Today, perhaps for the thousandth time in my life, I watched children playing (white people’s). The first pleasure the child has in the exercise of his intelligence is not derived from his judgment nor from his memory.

No, it is from ideography.

They put a board on the ground, and that board becomes a ship, they agree that it is a ship; they lay a smaller one beside it, which becomes a gangway, or bridge.

And then (what is still more curious, several of them agree), an irregular and fortuitous line of light and shade becomes the shore, and maneuvering according to their signs, embarking, disembarking, standing out to sea, while none but the enlightened would guess what it was all about: that this is a ship, here the bridge, that the bridge is raised… and all the complications (and these are innumerable) in which they are involved as they go along.

But the suggestion is there, evident to those who have accepted it, and it is the suggestion, and not the thing, that delights them.

The ease with which it is manipulated appeals to their intelligence, for the actual things are much more awkward to handle. In the present case, it was a complete demonstration. Those children were playing on the deck of a ship.

It is curious that this pleasure in suggestions was for centuries the great pleasure of the Chinese and the very kernel of their mental and general development.

¹‘The Evolution of Chinese Writing,’ Owen. p. 8, fig. 1.

²The Chinese has always wanted UNIVERSAL AGREEMENT where heaven and earth MAY BE IN A STATE OF PERFECT SERENITY and where all beings REACH THEIR COMPLETE DEVELOPMENT.

A man who was plotting to stir up the people said: ‘The Emperor is no longer IN HARMONY WITH HEAVEN.’ At these words, the peasants, horror-stricken, and the nobility and everybody, rushed to take arms… and the Emperor lost his throne.

³In war, he follows readily the precept: ‘Hesitating whether to advance one inch, I prefer to retreat one step.’

⁴‘The Chinese Idea of the Second Self,’ by E. T. C. Werner.

⁵It is believed that the Chinese swarm because they have a great many children. Not at all; they have a great many children because they like to swarm… and to occupy space. They like the general effect, not the individual; the panorama, not the single object.

⁶He copies without a single mistake and with no previous experience a Paris gown. The Museum in Pekin contains thousands of plants made of stone, in various colours, pots of flowers, imitations that one can hardly detect. The Chinaman prefers them to natural flowers. He also copies shells and stones. He copies lava in bronze. He places in his garden ARTIFICIAL CINDERS MADE OF CONCRETE.

⁷The Chinaman can negotiate anything: an insult, an army, a city, a sentiment and even his death. He trades his conversion for a watch, and his death for a coffin (for a good wooden coffin, coolies have been known to have themselves executed in the place of condemned persons richer than they). To the first Portuguese Catholics, eager to convert the heathen, the Chinese offered to trade twelve hundred baptisms for a cannon. A good mortar was worth three thousand of them.

⁸I notice with Giles that Herbert Spencer had thought of this, exactly this. Yet a philosopher. But the philosopher of a nation of shopkeepers is more profoundly shopkeeper than philosopher, just as a hunting dog is not so much hunting dog as he is dog.

⁹When put to the test, they again became invincible soldiers.