Our Oriental Heritage

She stands by the gate and watches the wayfarers pass,

Remembering him who snatched his sword and went to save the border-land,

Him who suffered bitterly in the cold beyond the Great Wall,

Him who fell in the battle, and will never come back.

In the tiger-striped gold case for her keeping

There remains a pair of white-feathered arrows

Amid the cobwebs and dust gathered of long years—

O empty dreams of love, too sad to look upon!

She takes them out and burns them to ashes.

By building a dam one may stop the flow of the Yellow River,

But who can assuage the grief of her heart when it snows, and the north wind blows?⁴⁹

We picture him now wandering from city to city, from state to state, much as Tsui Tsung-chi described him: “A knapsack on your back filled with books, you go a thousand miles and more, a pilgrim. Under your sleeves there is a dagger, and in your pocket a collection of poems.”⁵⁰ In these long wanderings his old friendship with nature gave him solace and an unnamable peace; and through his lines we see his land of flowers, and feel that urban civilization already lay heavy on the Chinese soul:

Why do I live among the green mountains?

I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;

It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.

The peach trees are in flower, and the water flows on.⁵¹

Or again:

I saw the moonlight before my couch,

And wondered if it were not the frost on the ground.

I raised my head and looked out on the mountain-moon;

I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home.⁵²

Now, as his hair grew white, his heart was flooded with longing for the scenes of his youth. How many times, in the artificial life of the capital, he had pined for the natural simplicity of parentage and home!

In the land of Wu the mulberry leaves are green,

And thrice the silkworms have gone to sleep.

In East Luh, where my family stays,

I wonder who is sowing those fields of ours.

I cannot be back in time for the spring doings,

Yet I can help nothing, traveling on the river.

The south wind, blowing, wafts my homesick spirit

And carries it up to the front of our familiar tavern.

There I see a peach-tree on the east side of the house,

With thick leaves and branches waving in the blue mist.

It is the tree I planted before my parting three years ago.

The peach-tree has grown now as tall as the tavern-roof,

While I have wandered about without returning.

Ping-yang, my pretty daughter, I see you stand

By the peach-tree, and pluck a flowering branch.

You pluck the flowers, but I am not there-

How your tears flow like a stream of water!

My little son, Po-chin, grown up to your sister’s shoulders,

You come out with her under the peach-tree;

But who is there to pat you on the back?

When I think of these things my senses fail,

And a sharp pain cuts my heart every day.

Now I tear off a piece of white silk to write this letter,

And send it to you with my love a long way up the river.⁵³

His last years were bitter, for he had never stooped to make money, and in the chaos of war and revolution he found no king to keep him from starvation. Gladly he accepted the offer of Li-ling, Prince of Yung, to join his staff; but Li-ling revolted against the successor of Ming Huang, and when the revolt was suppressed, Li Po found himself in jail, condemned to death as a traitor to the state. Then Kuo Tsi-i, the general who had put down the rebellion of An Lu-shan, begged that Li Po’s life might be ransomed by the forfeit of his own rank and title. The Emperor commuted the sentence to perpetual banishment. Soon thereafter a general amnesty was declared, and the poet turned his faltering steps homeward. Three years later he sickened and died; and legend, discontent with an ordinary end for so rare a soul, told how he was drowned in a river while attempting, in hilarious intoxication, to embrace the water’s reflection of the moon.

All in all, the thirty volumes of delicate and kindly verse which he left behind him warrant his reputation as the greatest poet of China. “He is the lofty peak of Tai,” exclaims a Chinese critic, “towering above the thousand mountains and hills; he is the sun in whose presence a million stars of heaven lose their scintillating brilliance.”⁵⁴ Ming Huang and Lady Yang are dead, but Li Po still sings.

My ship is built of spice-wood and has a rudder of mulan;*

Musicians sit at the two ends with jeweled bamboo flutes and pipes of gold.

What a pleasure it is, with a cask of sweet wine

And singing girls beside me,

To drift on the water hither and thither with the waves!

I am happier than the fairy of the air,

Who rode on his yellow crane,

And free as the merman who followed the sea-gulls aimlessly.

Now with the strokes of my inspired pen I shake the Five Mountains.

My poem is done. I laugh, and my delight is vaster than the sea.

O deathless poetry! The songs of Ch’u P’ing† are ever glorious as the sun and moon,

While the palaces and towers of the Chou kings have vanished from the hills.⁵⁵

V. SOME QUALITIES OF CHINESE POETRY

“Free verse”—“Imagism”—“Every poem a picture and every picture a poem”—Sentimentality—Perfection of form

It is impossible to judge Chinese poetry from Li alone; to feel it (which is better than judging) one must surrender himself unhurriedly to many Chinese poets, and to the unique methods of their poetry. Certain subtle qualities of it are hidden from us in translation: we do not see the picturesque written characters, each a monosyllable, and yet expressing a complex idea; we do not see the lines, running from top to bottom and from right to left; we do not catch the meter and the rhyme, which adhere with proud rigidity to ancient precedents and laws; we do not hear the tones—the flats and sharps—that give a beat to Chinese verse; at least half the art of the Far Eastern poet is lost when he is read by what we should call a “foreigner.” In the original a Chinese poem at its best is a form as polished and precious as a hawthorn vase; to us it is only a bit of deceptively “free” or “imagist” verse, half caught and weakly rendered by some earnest but alien mind.

What we do see is, above all, brevity. We are apt to think these poems too slight, and feel an unreal disappointment at missing the majesty and boredom of Milton and Homer. But the Chinese believe that all poetry must be brief; that a long poem is a contradiction in terms—since poetry, to them, is a moment’s ecstasy, and dies when dragged out in epic reams. Its mission is to see and paint a picture with a stroke, and write a philosophy in a dozen lines; its ideal is infinite meaning in a little rhythm. Since pictures are of the essence of poetry, and the essence of Chinese writing is pictography, the written language of China is spontaneously poetic; it lends itself to writing in pictures, and shuns abstractions that cannot be phrased as things seen. Since abstractions multiply with civilization, the Chinese language, in its written form, has become a secret code of subtle suggestions; and in like manner, and perhaps for a like reason, Chinese poetry combines suggestion with concentration, and aims to reveal, through the picture it draws, some deeper thing invisible. It does not discuss, it intimates; it leaves out more than it says; and only an Oriental can fill it in. “The men of old,” say the Chinese, “reckoned it the highest excellence in poetry that the meaning should be beyond the words, and that the reader should have to think it out for himself.”⁵⁶ Like Chinese manners and art, Chinese poetry is a matter of infinite grace concealed in a placid simplicity. It foregoes metaphor, comparison and allusion, but relies on showing the thing itself, with a hint of its implications. It avoids exaggeration and passion, but appeals to the mature mind by understatement and restraint; it is seldom romantically excited in form, but knows how to express intense feeling in its own quietly classic way.

Men pass their lives apart like stars that move but never meet.

This eye, how blest it is that the same lamp gives light to both of us!

Brief is youth’s day.

Our temples already tell of waning life.

Even now half of those we know are spirits.

I am moved in the depths of my soul.

We may tire, at times, of a certain sentimentality in these poems, a vainly wistful mood of regret that time will not stop in its flight and let men and states be young forever. We perceive that the civilization of China was already old and weary in the days of Ming Huang, and that its poets, like the artists of the Orient in general, were fond of repeating old themes, and of spending their artistry on flawless form. But there is nothing quite like this poetry elsewhere, nothing to match it in delicacy of expression, in tenderness and yet moderation of feeling, in simplicity and brevity of phrase clothing the most considered thought. We are told that the poetry written under the T’ang emperors plays a large part in the training of every Chinese youth, and that one cannot meet an intelligent Chinese who does not know much of that poetry by heart. If this is so, then Li Po and Tu Fu are part of the answer that we must give to the question why almost every educated Chinese is an artist and a philosopher.

VI. TU FU

T’ao Ch’ien—Po Chü-i—Poems for malaria—Tu Fu and Li Po—A vision of war—Prosperous days—Destitution—Death

Li Po is the Keats of China, but there are other singers almost as fondly cherished by his countrymen. There is the simple and stoic T’ao Ch’ien, who left a government position because, as he said, he was unable any longer to “crook the hinges of his back for five pecks of rice a day”—that is, kow-tow* for his salary. Like many another public man disgusted with the commercialism of official life, he went to live in the woods, seeking there “length of years and depth of wine,” and finding the same solace and delight in the streams and mountains of China that her painters would later express on silk.

I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,

Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.

The mountain air is fresh at the dawn of day;

The flying birds two by two return.

In these things there lies a deep meaning;

Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us. . . .

What folly to spend one’s life like a dropped leaf

Snared under the dust of streets!

But for thirteen years it was so I lived. . . .

For a long time I have lived in a cage;

Now I have returned.

For one must return

To fulfil one’s nature.⁵⁷

Po Chü-i took the other road, choosing public office and life in the capital; he rose from place to place until he was governor of the great city of Hangchow, and President of the Board of War. Nevertheless he lived to the age of seventy-two, wrote four thousand poems, and tasted Nature to his heart’s content in interludes of exile.⁵⁸ He knew the secret of mingling solitude with crowds, and repose with an active life. He made not too many friends, being, as he said, of middling accomplishment in “calligraphy, painting, chess and gambling, which tend to bring men together in pleasurable intercourse.”⁵⁹ He liked to talk with simple people, and story has it that he would read his poems to an old peasant woman, and simplify anything that she could not understand. Hence he became the best-loved of the Chinese poets among the common people; his poetry was inscribed everywhere, on the walls of schools and temples, and the cabins of ships. “You must not think,” said a “sing-song” girl to a captain whom she was entertaining, “that I am an ordinary dancing girl; I can recite Master Po’s “Everlasting Wrong.”⁶⁰*

We have kept for the last the profound and lovable Tu Fu. “English writers on Chinese literature,” says Arthur Waley, “are fond of announcing that Li T’ai-po is China’s greatest poet; the Chinese themselves, however, award this place to Tu Fu.”⁶¹ We first hear of him at Chang-an; he had come up to take the examinations for office, and had failed. He was not dismayed, even though his failure had been specifically in the subject of poetry; he announced to the public that his poems were a good cure for malarial fever, and seems to have tried the cure himself.⁶² Ming Huang read some of his verses, gave him, personally, another examination, marked him successful, and appointed him secretary to General Tsoa. Emboldened, and forgetting for a moment his wife and children in their distant village, Tu Fu settled down in the capital, exchanged songs with Li Po, and studied the taverns, paying for his wine with poetry. He writes of Li:

I love my Lord as younger brother loves elder brother,

In autumn, exhilarated by wine, we sleep under a single quilt;

Hand in hand, we daily walk together.⁶³

Those were the days of the love of Ming for Yang Kwei-fei. Tu celebrated it like the other poets; but when revolution burst forth, and rival ambitions drenched China in blood, he turned his muse to sadder themes, and pictured the human side of war:

Last night a government order came

To enlist boys who had reached eighteen.

They must help defend the capital. . . .

O Mother! O Children, do not weep so!

Shedding such tears will injure you.

When tears stop flowing then bones come through,

Nor Heaven nor Earth has compassion then. . . .

Do you know that in Shantung there are two hundred counties turned to the desert forlorn,

Thousands of villages, farms, covered only with bushes, the thorn?

Men are slain like dogs, women driven like hens along. . . .

If I had only known how bad is the fate of boys

I would have had my children all girls. . . .

Boys are only born to be buried beneath tall grass.

Still the bones of the war-dead of long ago are beside the Blue Sea when you pass.

They are wildly white and they lie exposed on the sand,

Both the little young ghosts and the old ghosts gather here to cry in a band.

When the rains sweep down, and the autumn, and winds that chill,

Their voices are loud, so loud that I learn how grief can kill. . . .

Birds make love in their dreams while they drift on the tide,

For the dusk’s path the fireflies must make their own light.

Why should man kill man just in order to live?

In vain I sigh in the passing night.⁶⁴

For two years, during the revolutionary interlude, he wandered about China, sharing his destitution with his wife and children, so poor that he begged for bread, and so humbled that he knelt to pray for blessings upon the man who took his family in and fed them for a while.⁶⁵ He was saved by the kindly general Yen Wu, who made him his secretary, put up with his moods and pranks, established him in a cottage by Washing Flower Stream, and required nothing more of him than that he should write poetry.* He was happy now, and sang blissfully of rain and flowers, mountains and the moon.

Of what use is a phrase or a fine stanza?

Before me but mountains, deep forests, too black.

I think I shall sell my art objects, my books,

And drink just of nature when pure at the source. . . .

When a place is so lovely

I walk slow. I long to let loveliness drown in my soul.

I like to touch bird-feathers.

I blow deep into them to find the soft hairs beneath.

I like to count stamens, too,

And even weigh their pollen-gold.

The grass is a delight to sit on.

I do not need wine here because the flowers intoxicate me so. . . .

To the deep of my bones I love old trees, and the jade-blue waves of the sea.⁶⁶

The good general liked him so that he disturbed his peace, raising him to high office as a Censor in Ch’ang-an. Then suddenly the general died, war raged around the poet, and, left only with his genius, he soon found himself penniless again. His children, savage with hunger, sneered at him for his helplessness. He passed into a bitter and lonely old age, “an ugly thing now to the eye”; the roof of his cabin was torn away by the wind, and urchins robbed him of the straw of his bed while he looked on, too physically weak to resist.⁶⁷ Worst of all, he lost his taste for wine, and could no longer solve the problems of life in the fashion of Li Po. At last he turned to religion, and sought solace in Buddhism. Prematurely senile at fifty-nine, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Huen Mountain to visit a famous temple. There he was discovered by a magistrate who had read his poetry. The official took the poet home, and ordered a banquet to be served in his honor; hot beef smoked, and sweet wine abounded; Tu Fu had not for many years seen such a feast. He ate hungrily. Then at his host’s request, he tried to compose and sing; but he fell down exhausted. The next day he died.⁶⁸

VII. PROSE

The abundance of Chinese literature—Romances—History—Szuma Ch’ien—Essays—Han Yü on the bone of Buddha

The T’ang poets are but a part of Chinese poetry, and poetry is a small part of China’s literature. It is hard for us to realize the age and abundance of this literature, or its wide circulation among the people. Lack of copyright laws helped other factors to make printing cheap; and it was nothing unusual, before the advent of western ideas, to find bound sets of twenty volumes selling new at one dollar, encyclopedias in twenty volumes selling new at four dollars, and all the Chinese Classics together obtainable for two.⁶⁹ It is harder still for us to appreciate this literature, for the Chinese value form and style far above contents in judging a book, and form and style are betrayed by every translation. The Chinese pardonably consider their literature superior to any other than that of Greece; and perhaps the exception is due to Oriental courtesy.

Fiction, through which Occidental authors most readly rise to fame, is not ranked as literature by the Chinese. It hardly existed in China before the Mongols brought it in;⁷⁰ and even today the best of Chinese novels are classed by the literati as popular amusements unworthy of mention in a history of Chinese letters. The simple folk of the cities do not mind these distinctions, but turn without prejudice from the songs of Po Chü-i and Li Po to the anonymous interminable romances that, like the theatre, use the colloquial dialects of the people, and bring back to them vividly the dramatic events of their historic past. For almost all the famous novels of China take the form of historical fiction; few of them aim at realism, and fewer still attempt such psychological or social analysis as lift The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain, War and Peace and Les Miserables, to the level of great literature. One pf the earliest Chinese novels is the Shui Hu Chuan, or “Tale of the Water Margins,” composed by a bevy of authors in the fourteenth century;* one of the vastest is the Hung Lou Men (ca. 1650), a twenty-four-volume “Dream of the Red Chamber”; one of the best is the Liao Chai Chih I (ca. 1660), or “Strange Stories,” much honored for the beauty and terseness of its style; the most famous is the San Kuo Chih Yen I, or “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” a twelve-hundred-page embellishment, by Lo Kuan-chung (1260-1341), of the wars and intrigues that followed the fall of the Han.† These expansive stories correspond to the picaresque novels of eighteenth-century Europe; often (if one may report mere hearsay in these matters) they combine the jolly portrayal of character of Tom Jones with the lively narrative of Gil Bias. They are recommended to the reader’s leisurely old age.

The most respectable form of literature in China is history; and of all the accepted forms it is also the most popular. No other nation has had so many historians, certainly no other nation has written such extensive histories. Even the early courts had their official scribes, who chronicled the achievements of their sovereigns and the portents of the time; and this office of court historian, carried down to our own generation, has raised up in China a mass of historical literature unequaled in length or dullness anywhere else on the earth. The twenty-four official “Dynastic Histories” published in 1747 ran to 219 large volumes.⁷¹ From the Shu-Ching, or “Book of History,” so edifyingly bowdlerized by Confucius, and the Tso-chuan, a commentary written a century later to illustrate and vivify the book of the Master, and the Annals of the Bamboo Books, found in the tomb of a king of Wei, historiography advanced rapidly in China until, in the second century before Christ, it produced a chef-d’œuvre in the Historical Record painstakingly put together by Szuma Ch’ien.

Succeeding to his father as court astrologer, Szuma first reformed the calendar, and then devoted his life to a task which his father had begun, of narrating the history of China from the first mythical dynasty to his own day. He had no penchant for beauty of style, but aimed merely to make his record complete. He divided his book into five parts: (1) Annals of the Emperors; (2) Chronological Tables; (3) Eight chapters on rites, music, the pitch-pipes, the calendar, astrology, imperial sacrifices, water courses, and political economy; (4) Annals of the Feudal Nobles; and (5) Biographies of Eminent Men. The whole covered a period of nearly three thousand years, and took the form of 526,000 Chinese characters patiently scratched upon bamboo tablets with a style.⁷² Then Szuma Ch’ien, having given his life to his book, sent his volumes to his emperor and the world with this modest preface:

Your servant’s physical strength is now relaxed; his eyes are shortsighted and dim; of his teeth but a few remain. His memory is so impaired that the events of the moment are forgotten as he turns away from them, his energies having been wholly exhausted in production of this book. He therefore hopes that your Majesty may pardon his vain attempt for the sake of his loyal intention, and in moments of leisure will deign to cast a sacred glance over this work, so as to learn from the rise and fall of former dynasties the secret of the successes and failures of the present hour. Then if such knowledge shall be applied for the advantage of the Empire, even though your servant may lay his bones in the Yellow Springs, the aim and ambition of his life will be fulfilled.⁷³

We shall find none of the brilliance of Taine in the pages of Szuma Ch’ien, no charming gossip and anecdotes in the style of Herodotus, no sober concatenation of cause and effect as in Thucydides, no continental vision pictured in music as in Gibbon; for history seldom rises, in China, from an industry to an art. From Szuma Ch’ien to his namesake Szuma Kuang, who, eleven hundred years later, attempted again a universal history of China, the Chinese historians have labored to record faithfully—sometimes at the cost of their income or their lives—the events of a dynasty or a reign; they have spent their energies upon truth, and have left nothing for beauty. Perhaps they were right, and history should be a science rather than an art; perhaps the facts of the past are obscured when they come to us in the purple of Gibbon or the sermons of Carlyle. But we, too, have dull historians, and can match any nation in volumes dedicated to record—and gather—dust.

Livelier is the Chinese essay; for here art is not forbidden, and eloquence has loose rein. Famous beyond the rest in this field is the great Han Yü, whose books are so valued that tradition requires the reader to wash his hands in rose-water before touching them. Born among the humblest, Han Yü reached to the highest ranks in the service of the state, and fell from grace only because he protested too intelligibly against the imperial concessions to Buddhism. To Han the new religion was merely a Hindu superstition; and it offended him to his Confucian soul that the Emperor should lend his sanction to the intoxication of his people with this enervating dream. Therefore he submitted (803 A.D.) a memorial to the Emperor, from which these lines may serve as an example of Chinese prose discolored even by honest translation:

Your servant has now heard that instructions have been issued to the priestly community to proceed to Feng-hsiang and receive a bone of Buddha, and that from a high tower your Majesty will view its introduction into the Imperial Palace; also that orders have been sent to the various temples, commanding that the relic be received with the proper ceremonies. Now, foolish though your servant may be, he is well aware that your Majesty does not do this in the vain hope of deriving advantages therefrom; but that in the fulness of our present plenty, and in the joy which reigns in the heart of all, there is a desire to fall in with the wishes of the people in the celebration at the capital of this delusive mummery. For how could the wisdom of your Majesty stoop to participate in such ridiculous beliefs? Still the people are slow of perception and easily beguiled; and should they behold your Majesty thus earnestly worshiping at the feet of Buddha, they would cry out, “See! the Son of Heaven, the All-Wise, is a fervent believer; who are we, his people, that we should spare our bodies?” Then would ensue a scorching of heads and burning of fingers; crowds would collect together, and tearing off their clothes and scattering their money, would spend their time from morn to eve in imitation of your Majesty’s example. The result would be that by and by young and old, seized with the same enthusiasm, would totally neglect the business of their lives; and should your Majesty not prohibit it, they would be found flocking to the temples, ready to cut off an arm or slice their bodies as an offering to the god. Thus would our traditions and customs be seriously injured, and ourselves become a laughing-stock on the face of the earth. . . .

Therefore your servant, overwhelmed with shame for the Censors,* implores your Majesty that these bones be handed over for destruction by fire and water, whereby the root of this great evil may be exterminated for all time, and the people know how much the wisdom of your Majesty surpasses that of ordinary men. The glory of such a deed will be beyond all praise. And should the Lord Buddha have power to avenge this insult by the infliction of some misfortune, then let the vials of his wrath be poured out upon the person of your servant, who now calls Heaven to witness that he will not repent him of his oath.⁷⁴

In a conflict between superstition and philosophy one may safely wager on the victory of superstition, for the world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom. Han was exiled to a village in Kuang-tung, where the people were still simple barbarians. He did not complain, but set himself, after the teaching of Confucius, to civilize them with his example; and he succeeded so well that his picture today often bears the legend: “Wherever he passed, he purified.”⁷⁵ He was finally recalled to the capital, served his state well, and died loaded with honors. His memorial tablet was placed in the Temple of Confucius—a place usually reserved for the disciples or greatest exponents of the Master—because he had defended the doctrines of Confucianism so recklessly against the invasion of a once noble but now corrupted faith.

VIII. THE STAGE

Its low repute in China—Origins—The play—The audience—The actors—Music

It is difficult to classify Chinese drama, for it is not recognized by China as either literature or art. Like many other elements of human life, its repute is not proportioned to its popularity. The names of the dramatists are seldom heard; and the actors, though they may give a lifetime to preparation and accomplishment, and rise to a hectic fame, are looked upon as members of an inferior order. Something of this odor, no doubt, attached to actors in every civilization, above all in those medieval days when drama was rebelliously differentiating itself from the religious pantomimes that had given it birth.

A similar origin is assigned to the Chinese theatre. Under the Chou Dynasty religious ritual included certain dances performed with wands. Tradition says that these dances were later forbidden, on the score that they had become licentious; and it was apparently from this cleavage that secular drama began.⁷⁶ Ming Huang, patron of so many arts, helped the development of an independent drama by gathering about him a company of male and female actors whom he called “The Young Folk of the Pear Garden”; but it was not till the reign of Kublai Khan that the Chinese theatre took on the scope of a national institution. In the year 1031 K’ung Tao-fu, a descendant of Confucius, was sent as Chinese envoy to the Mongol Kitans, and was welcomed with a celebration that included a play. The buffoon, however, represented Confucius. K’ung Tao-fu walked out in a huff, but when he and other Chinese travelers among the Mongols returned to China they brought reports of a form of drama more advanced than any that China had yet known. When the Mongols conquered China they introduced to it both the novel and the theatre; and the classic examples of Chinese drama are still the plays that were written under the Mongol sway.⁷⁷

The art developed slowly, for neither the church nor the state would support it. For the most part it was practised by strolling players, who set up a platform in some vacant field and performed before a village audience standing under the open sky. Occasionally mandarins engaged actors to perform at private dinner-parties, and sometimes a guild would produce a play. Theatres became more numerous during the nineteenth century, but even at its close there were only two in the large city of Nanking.⁷⁸ The drama was a mixture of history, poetry and music; usually some episode from an historical romance was the center of the plot; or scenes might be played from different dramas on the same evening. There was no limit to the length of the performance; it might be brief, or last several days; ordinarily it took six or seven hours, as with the best of contemporary American plays. There was much swashbuckling and oratory, much violence of blood and speech; but the dénouement did its best to atone for reality by making virtue triumph in the end. The drama became an educational and ethical instrument, teaching the people something about their history, and inculcating the Confucian virtues—above all, filial piety—with a demoralizing regularity.

The stage had little furnishing or scenery, and no exits; all the actors in the cast, along with their supernumeraries, sat on the stage throughout the play, rising when their rôles demanded; occasionally attendants served them tea. Other functionaries passed about among the audience selling tobacco, tea and refreshments, and providing hot towels for the wiping of faces during summer evenings; drinking, eating and conversation were now and then interrupted by some exceptionally fine or loud acting on the stage. The actors had often to shout in order to be heard; and they wore masks in order that their rôles might be readily understood. As the result of Ch’ien Lung’s prohibition of woman players, female parts were acted by men, and so well that when women were in our time again admitted to the stage, they had to imitate their imitators in order to succeed. The actors were required to be experts in acrobatics and the dance, for their parts often called for skilful manipulation of the limbs, and almost every action had to be performed according to some ritual of grace in harmony with the music that accompanied the stage. Gestures were symbolic, and had to be precise and true to old conventions; in such accomplished actors as Mei Lan-fang the artistry of hands and body constituted half the poetry of the play. It was not completely theatre, not quite opera, not predominantly dance; it was a mixture almost medieval in quality, but as perfect in its kind as Palestrina’s music, or stained glass.⁷⁹

Music was seldom an independent art, but belonged as a handmaiden to religion and the stage. Tradition ascribed its origin, like so much else, to the legendary emperor Fu Hsi. The Li-Chi, or “Book of Rites,” dating from before Confucius, contained or recorded several treatises on music; and the Tso-chuan, a century after Confucius, described eloquently the music to which the odes of Wei were sung. Already, by Kung-fu-tze’s time, musical standards were ancient, and innovations were disturbing quiet souls; the sage complained of the lascivious airs that were in his day supplanting the supposedly moral tunes of the past.⁸⁰ Greco-Bactrian and Mongolian influences entered, and left their mark upon the simple Chinese scale. The Chinese knew of the division of the octave into twelve semi-tones, but they preferred to write their music in a pentatonic scale, corresponding roughly to our F, G, A, C, and D; to these whole tones they gave the names “Emperor,” “Prime Minister,” “Subject People,” “State Affairs,” and “Picture of the Universe.” Harmony was understood, but was seldom used except for tuning instruments. The latter included such wind instruments as flutes, trumpets, oboes, whistles and gourds; such string instruments as viols and lutes; and such percussion instruments as tambourines and drums, bells and gongs, cymbals and castanets, and musical plates of agate or jade.⁸¹ The effects were as weird and startling to an Occidental ear as the Sonata Appassionata might seem to the Chinese; nevertheless they lifted Confucius to a vegetarian ecstasy, and brought to many hearers that escape from the strife of wills and ideas which comes with the surrender to music well composed. The sages, said Han Yü, “taught man music in order to dissipate the melancholy of his soul.”⁸² They agreed with Nietzsche that life without music would be a mistake.

CHAPTER XXV

The Age of the Artists

I. THE SUNG RENAISSANCE

1. The Socialism of Wang An-shih

The Sung Dynasty—A radical premier—His cure for unemployment—The regulation of industry—Codes of wages and prices—The nationalization of commerce—State insurance against unemployment, poverty and old age—Examinations for public office—The defeat of Wang An-shih

THE T’ang Dynasty never recovered from the revolution of An Lu-shan. The emperors who followed Ming Huang were unable to restore the imperial authority throughout the Empire; and after a century of senile debility the dynasty came to an end. Five dynasties followed in fifty-three years, but they were as feeble as they were brief. As always in such cases a strong and brutal hand was needed to reëstablish order. One soldier emerged above the chaos, and set up the Sung Dynasty, with himself as its first emperor under the name of T’ai Tsu. The bureaucracy of Confucian officials was renewed, examinations for office were resumed, and an attempt was made by an imperial councillor to solve the problems of exploitation and poverty by an almost socialist control over the nation’s economic life.

Wang An-shih (1021-86) is one of the many fascinating individuals who enliven the lengthy annals of Chinese history. It is part of the bathos of distance that our long removal from alien scenes obscures variety in places and men, and submerges the most diverse personalities in a dull uniformity of appearance and character. But even in the judgment of his enemies—whose very number distinguished him—Wang stood out as a man different from the rest, absorbed conscientiously in the enterprise of government, devoted recklessly to the welfare of the people, leaving himself no time for the care of his person or his clothes, rivaling the great scholars of his age in learning and style, and fighting with mad courage the rich and powerful conservatives of his age. By a trick of chance the only great figure in the records of his country who resembled him was his namesake Wang Mang; already the turbid stream of history had traveled a thousand years since China’s last outstanding experiment with socialist ideas.

On receiving the highest office in the command of the Emperor, Wang An-shih laid it down as a general principle that the government must hold itself responsible for the welfare of all its citizens. “The state,” he said, “should take the entire management of commerce, industry and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich.”¹ He began by abolishing the forced labor that had from time immemorial been exacted from the Chinese people by the government, and had often taken men from the fields at the very time when the sowing or the harvesting needed them; and nevertheless he carried out great engineering works for the prevention of floods. He rescued the peasants from the money-lenders who had enslaved them, and lent them, at what were then low rates of interest, funds for the planting of their crops. To the unemployed he gave free seed and other aid in setting up homesteads, on condition that they would repay the state out of the yield of their land. Boards were appointed in every district to regulate the wages of labor and the prices of the necessaries of life. Commerce was nationalized; the produce of each locality was bought by the government, part of it was stored for future local needs, and the rest was transported to be sold in state depots throughout the realm. A budget system was established, a budget commission submitted proposals and estimates of expenditure, and these estimates were so strictly adhered to in administration that the state was saved considerable sums which had previously fallen into those secret and spacious pockets that cross the path of every governmental dollar. Pensions were provided for the aged, the unemployed and the poor. Education and the examination system were reformed; the tests were devised to reveal acquaintance with facts rather than with words, and to shift the emphasis from literary style to the application of Confucian principles to current tasks; the rôle of formalism and rote memory in the training of children was reduced, and for a time, says a Chinese historian, “even the pupils at village schools threw away their text-books of rhetoric and began to study primers of history, geography, and political economy.”²

Why did this noble experiment fail? First, perhaps, because of certain elements in it that were more practical than Utopian. Though most of the taxes were taken from the incomes of the rich, part of the heavy revenue needed for the enlarged expenses of the state was secured by appropriating a portion of the produce of every field. Soon the poor joined with the rich in complaining that taxes were too high; men are always readier to extend governmental functions than to pay for them. Further, Wang An-shih had reduced the standing army as a drain on the resources of the people, but had, as a means of replacing it, decreed the universal liability of every family of more than one male to provide a soldier in time of war. He had presented many families with horses and fodder, but on condition that the animals should be properly cared for, and be placed at the service of the government in its military need. When it turned out that invasion and revolution were multiplying the occasions of war, these measures brought Wang An-shih’s popularity to a rapid end. Again, he had found it difficult to secure honest men to administer his measures; corruption spread throughout the mammoth bureaucracy, and China, like many nations since, saw itself faced with the ancient and bitter choice between private plunder and public “graft.”

Conservatives, led by Wang’s own brother and by the historian Szuma Kuang, denounced the experiment as inherently unsound; they argued that human corruptibility and incompetence made governmental control of industry impracticable, and that the best form of government was a laissez-faire which would rely on the natural economic impulses of men for the production of services and goods. The rich, stung by the high taxation of their fortunes and the monopoly of commerce by the government, poured out their resources in the resolve to discredit the measures of Wang An-shih, to obstruct their enforcement, and to bring them to a disgraceful end. The opposition, well organized, exerted pressure on the Emperor; and when a succession of floods and droughts was capped by the appearance of a terrifying comet in the sky, the Son of Heaven dismissed Wang from office, revoked his decrees, and called his enemies to power. Once again everything was as before.³

2. The Revival of Learning

The growth of scholarship—Paper and ink in China—Steps in the invention of printing—The oldest book—Paper money—Movable type—Anthologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias

Meanwhile, through all wars and revolutions, through all administrations and experiments, the life of the Chinese people flowed evenly on, not much disturbed by events too distant to be heard of until long since past. The Sung rule was overthrown in the north, but reestablished itself in the south; the capital was moved from Pien Liang (now K’aifeng) to Lin-an (now Hangchow); in the new capital, as in the old, luxury and refinement grew, and traders came from many parts of the world to buy the unmatched products of Chinese industry and art. Emperor Hui Tsung (1101-25) set the fashion at Pien Liang by being an artist first and a ruler afterward: he painted pictures while the barbarians marched upon his capital, and founded an art academy that stimulated with exhibitions and prizes the arts that were to be the chief claim of the Sung era to the remembrance of mankind. Inspiring collections were made of Chinese bronzes, paintings, manuscripts and jades; great libraries were collected, and some of them survived the glories of war. Scholars and artists crowded the northern and southern capitals.

It was in this dynasty that printing entered like an imperceptibly completed revolution into the literary life of the Chinese. It had grown step by step through many centuries; now it was ready in both its phases-blocks to print whale pages, and movable type cast of metal in matrices—as a thoroughly Chinese invention,⁴ the greatest, after writing, in the history of our race.

The first step in the development had to be the discovery of some more convenient writing material than the silk or bamboo that had contented the ancient Chinese. Silk was expensive, and bamboo was heavy; Mo Ti needed three carts to carry with him, in his travels, the bamboo books that were his chief possession; and Shih Huang-ti had to go over one hundred and twenty pounds of state documents every day.⁵ About 105 A.D. one Ts’ai Lun informed the Emperor that he had invented a cheaper and lighter writing material, made of tree bark, hemp, rags and fish-nets. Ts’ai was given a high title and office by the Emperor, was involved in an intrigue with the Empress, was detected, “went home, took a bath, combed his hair, put on his best robes, and drank poison.”⁶ The new art spread rapidly and far, for the oldest existing paper, found by Sir Aurel Stein in a spur of the Great Wall, is in the form of state documents pertaining to occurrences in the years 21-137 A.D., and apparently contemporary with the latest of those events; it is dated, therefore, about 150 A.D., only half a century after Ts’ai Lun’s report of his invention.⁷ These early papers were of pure rag, essentially like the paper used in our own day when durability is desired. The Chinese developed paper almost to perfection by using a “sizing” of glue or gelatin, and a base of starchy paste, to strengthen the fibres and accelerate their absorption of ink. When the art was taught by the Chinese to the Arabs in the eighth century, and by the Arabs to Europe in the thirteenth, it was already complete.

Ink, too, came from the East; for though the Egyptian had made both ink and paper in what might be called the most ancient antiquity, it was from China that Europe learned the trick of mixing it out of lamp black; “India ink” was originally Chinese.⁸ Red ink, made of sulphide of mercury, had been used in China as far back as the Han Dynasty; black ink appeared there in the fourth century, and henceforth the use of red ink was made an imperial privilege. Black ink encouraged printing, for it was especially adapted for use on wooden blocks, and enjoyed almost complete indelibility. Blocks of paper have been found, in Central Asia, which had lain under water so long as to become petrified; but the writing, in ink, could still be clearly read.⁹

The use of seals in signatures was the unconscious origin of print; the Chinese word for print is still the same as the word for seal. At first these seals, as in the Near East, were impressed upon clay; about the fifth century they were moistened with ink. Meanwhile, in the second century, the text of the Classics had been cut in stone; and soon thereafter the custom arose of making inked rubbings from these inscriptions. In the sixth century we find large wooden seals used by the Taoists to print charms; a century later the Buddhist missionaries experimented with various methods of duplication, through seals, rubbings, stencils, and textile prints—the last an art of Indian derivation. The earliest extant block prints are a million charms printed in Japan about 770 A.D., in the Sanskrit language and the Chinese character—an excellent instance of cultural interaction in Asia. Many block prints were made during the T’ang Dynasty, but they were apparently destroyed or lost in the chaos of revolution that followed Ming Huang.¹⁰

In 1907 Sir Aurel Stein persuaded the Taoist priests of Chinese Turkestan to let him examine the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” at Tun-huang. In one of these chambers, which had apparently been walled up about the year 1035 A.D. and not opened again until 1900, lay 1130 bundles, each containing a dozen or more manuscript rolls; the whole formed a library of 15,000 books, written on paper, and as well preserved as if they had been inscribed the day before their modern discovery. It was among these manuscripts that the world’s oldest printed book was found—the “Diamond Sutra”—a roll ending with these words: “Printed on (the equivalent of) May 11, 868, by Wang Chieh, for free general distribution, in order in deep reverence to perpetuate the memory of his parents.”¹¹ Three other printed books were found in the mass of manuscripts; one of them marked a new development, for it was not a roll, like the “Diamond Sutra,” but a tiny folded book, the first known of its now multitudinous kind. As in late medieval Europe and among primitive peoples in recent times, the first stimulus to printing came from religion, which sought to spread its doctrines by sight as well as sound, and to put its charms and prayers and legends into every hand. Almost as old as these pious forms of print, however, are playing cards—which appeared in China in 969 or sooner, and were introduced from China into Europe near the end of the fourteenth century¹²

These early volumes had been printed with wooden blocks. In a Chinese letter written about 870 A.D. we find the oldest known mention of such work: “Once when I was in Szechuan I examined in a bookshop a school-book printed from wood.”¹³ Already, it seems, the art of printing had been developed; and it is interesting to observe that this development seems to have come first in western provinces like Szechuan and Turkestan, which had been prodded on to civilization by Buddhist missionaries from India, and had for a time enjoyed a culture independent of the eastern capitals. Block-printing was introduced to eastern China early in the tenth century when a prime minister, Feng Tao, persuaded the Emperor to provide funds for the printing of the Chinese Classics. The work took twenty years and filled one hundred and thirty volumes, for it included not only the texts but the most famous commentaries. When it was completed it gave the Classics a circulation that contributed vigorously to the revival of learning and the strengthening of Confucianism under the Sung kings.

One of the earliest forms of block printing was the manufacture of paper money. Appearing first in Szechuan in the tenth century, it became a favorite occupation of Chinese governments, and led within a century to experiments in inflation. In 1294 Persia imitated this new mode of creating wealth; in 1297 Marco Polo described with wonder the respect which the Chinese showed for these curious scraps of paper. It was not till 1656 that Europe learned the trick, and issued its first paper currency.¹⁴

Movable type was also a Chinese invention, but the absence of an alphabet, and the presence of 40,000 characters in written Chinese, made its use an impossible luxury in the Far East. Pi Sheng formed movable type of earthenware as early as 1041 A.D., but little use was found for the invention. In 1403 the Koreans produced the first metal type known to history: models were engraved in hard wood, moulds of porcelain paste were made from these models, and from these moulds, baked in an oven, the metal type was cast. The greatest of Korean emperors, T’ai Tsung, at once adopted the invention as an aid to government and the preservation of civilization. “Whoever is desirous of governing,” said that enlightened monarch, “must have a wide acquaintance with the laws and the Classics. Then he will be able to act righteously without, and to maintain an upright character within, and thus to bring peace and order to the land. Our eastern country lies beyond the seas, and the number of books reaching us from China is small. The books printed from blocks are often imperfect, and moreover it is difficult to print in their entirety all the books that exist. I ordain therefore that characters be formed of bronze, and that everything without exception upon which I can lay my hands be printed, in order to pass on the tradition of what these works contain. That will be a blessing to us to all eternity. However, the costs shall not be taken from the people in taxes. I and my family, and those ministers who so wish, will privately bear the expense.”¹⁵

From Korea the casting of movable type spread to Japan and back again to China, but not, apparently, until after Gutenberg’s belated discovery in Europe. In Korea the use of movable type continued for two centuries and then decayed; in China its use was only occasional until merchants and missionaries from the West, as if returning an ancient gift, brought to the East the methods of European typography. From the days of Feng Tao to those of Li Hung-chang the Chinese clung to block-printing as the most feasible form for their language. Despite this limitation Chinese printers poured out a great mass of books upon the people. Dynastic histories in hundreds of volumes were issued between 994 and 1063; the entire Buddhist canon, in five thousand volumes, was completed by 972.¹⁶ Writers found themselves armed with a weapon which they had never had before; their audience was widened from the aristocracy to the middle, even to part of the lower, classes; literature took on a more democratic tinge, and a more varied form. The art of block-printing was one of the sources of the Sung Renaissance.

Stimulated with this liberating invention, Chinese literature now became an unprecedented flood. All the glory of the Humanist revival in Italy was anticipated by two hundred years. The ancient classics were honored with a hundred editions and a thousand commentaries; the life of the past was captured by scholarly historians, and put down for millions of readers in the new marvel of type; vast anthologies of literature were collected, great dictionaries were compiled, and encyclopedias like mastodons made their way through the land. The first of any moment was that of Wu Shu (947-1002); for lack of an alphabet it was arranged under categories, covering chiefly the physical world. In 977 A.D. the Sung Emperor T’ai Tsung ordered the compilation of a larger encyclopedia; it ran to thirty-two volumes, and consisted for the most part of selections from 1,690 preexisting books. Later, under the Ming Emperor Yung Lo (1403-25), an encyclopedia was written in ten thousand volumes, and proved too expensive to be printed; of the one copy handed down to posterity all but one hundred and sixty volumes were consumed by fire in the Boxer riots of 1900.¹⁷ Never before had scholars so dominated a civilization.

3. The Rebirth of Philosophy

Chu Hsi—Wang Yang-ming—Beyond good and evil

These scholars were not all Confucians, for rival schools of thought had grown up in the course of fifteen centuries, and now the intellectual life of the exuberant race was stirred with much argument about it and about. The seepage of Buddhism into the Chinese soul had reached even the philosophers. Most of them now affected a habit of solitary meditation; some of them went so far as to scorn Confucius for scorning metaphysics, and to reject his method of approach to the problems of life and mind as too external and crude. Introspection became an accepted method of exploring the universe, and epistemology made its first appearance among the Chinese. Emperors took up Buddhism or Taoism as ways of promoting their popularity or of disciplining the people; and at times it seemed that the reign of Confucius over the Chinese mind was to end.

His saviour was Chu Hsi. Just as Shankara, in eighth-century India, had brought into an intellectual system the scattered insights of the Upanishads, and had made the Vedanta philosophy supreme; and just as Aquinas, in thirteenth-century Europe, was soon to weave Aristotle and St. Paul into the victorious Scholastic philosophy; so Chu Hsi, in twelfth-century China, took the loose apothegms of Confucius and built upon them a system of philosophy orderly enough to satisfy the taste of a scholarly age, and strong enough to preserve for seven centuries the leadership of the Confucians in the political and intellectual life of the Chinese.

The essential philosophic controversy of the time centered upon the interpretation of a passage in the Great Learning, attributed by both Chu Hsi and his opponents to Confucius.* What was meant by the astonishing demand that the ordering of states should be based upon the proper regulation of the family, that the regulation of the family should be based upon the regulation of one’s self, that the regulation of one’s self depended upon sincerity of thought, and that sincerity of thought arose from “the utmost extension of knowledge” through “the investigation of things”?

Chu Hsi answered that this meant just what it said; that philosophy, morals and statesmanship should begin with a modest study of realities. He accepted without protest the positivistic bent of the Master’s mind; and though he labored over the problems of ontology at greater length than Confucius might have approved, he arrived at a strange combination of atheism and piety which might have interested the sage of Shantung. Like the Book of Changes, which has always dominated the metaphysics of the Chinese, Chu Hsi recognized a certain strident dualism in reality: everywhere the Yang and the Yin—activity and passivity, motion and rest—mingled like male and female principles, working on the five elements of water, fire, earth, metal and wood to produce the phenomena of creation; and everywhere Li and Chi—Law and Matter—equally external, coöperated to govern all things and give them form. But over all these forms, and combining them, was T’ai chi, the Absolute, the impersonal Law of Laws, or structure of the world. Chu Hsi identified this Absolute with the T’ien or Heaven of orthodox Confucianism; God, in his view, was a rational process without personality or figurable form. “Nature is nothing else than Law.”¹⁸

This Law of the universe is also, said Chu, the law of morals and of politics. Morality is harmony with the laws of nature, and the highest statesmanship is the application of the laws of morality to the conduct of a state. Nature in every ultimate sense is good, and the nature of men is good; to follow nature is the secret of wisdom and peace. “Choi Mao Shu refrained from clearing away the grass from in front of his window, ‘because,’ he said, ‘its impulse is just like my own.’”¹⁹ One might conclude that the instincts are also good, and that one may follow them gayly; but Chu Hsi denounces them as the expression of matter (Chi), and demands their subjection to reason and law (Li).²⁰ It is difficult to be at once a moralist and a logician.

There were contradictions in this philosophy, but these did not disturb its leading opponent, the gentle and peculiar Wang Yang-ming. For Wang was a saint as well as a philosopher; the meditative spirit and habits of Mahayana Buddhism had sunk deeply into his soul. It seemed to him that the great error in Chu Hsi was not one of morals, but one of method; the investigation of things, he felt, should begin not with the examination of the external universe, but, as the Hindus had said, with the far profounder and more revealing world of the inner self. Not all the physical science of all the centuries would ever explain a bamboo shoot or a grain of rice.

In former years I said to my friend Chien: “If, to be a sage or a virtuous man, one must investigate everything under heaven, how can at present any man possess such tremendous power?” Pointing to the bamboos in front of the pavilion, I asked him to investigate them and see. Both day and night Chien entered into an investigation of the principles of the bamboo. For three days he exhausted his mind and thought, until his mental energy was tired out and he took sick. At first I said that it was because his energy and strength were insufficient. Therefore I myself undertook to carry on the investigation. Day and night I was unable to understand the principles of the bamboo, until after seven days I also became ill because of having wearied and burdened my thoughts. In consequence we mutually sighed and said, “We cannot be either sages or virtuous men.”²¹

So Wang Yang-ming put aside the examination of things, and put aside even the classics of antiquity; to read one’s own heart and mind in solitary contemplation seemed to him to promise more wisdom than all objects and all books.²² Exiled to a mountainous wilderness inhabited by barbarians and infested with poisonous snakes, he made friends and disciples of the criminals who had escaped to those parts; he taught them philosophy, cooked for them, and sang them songs. Once, at the midnight watch, he startled them by leaping from his cot and crying out ecstatically: “My nature, of course, is sufficient. I was wrong in looking for principles in things and affairs.” His comrades were not sure that they followed him; but slowly he led them on to his idealistic conclusion: “The mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of the mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?”²³ He did not infer from this that God was a figment of the imagination; on the contrary he conceived of the Deity as a vague but omnipresent moral force, too great to be merely a person, and yet capable of feeling sympathy and anger toward men.²⁴

From this idealistic starting-point he came to the same ethical principles as Chu Hsi. “Nature is the highest good,” and the highest excellence lies in accepting the laws of Nature completely.²⁵ When it was pointed out to him that Nature seems to include snakes as well as philosophers, he replied, with a touch of Aquinas, Spinoza and Nietzsche, that “good” and “bad” are prejudices, terms applied to things according to their advantage or injury to one’s self or mankind; Nature itself, he taught, is beyond good and evil, and ignores our egoistic terminology. A pupil reports, or invents, a dialogue which might have been entitled Jenseits von Gut und Böse:

A little later he said: “This view of good and evil has its source in the body, and is probably mistaken.” I was not able to comprehend. The Teacher said: “The purpose of heaven in bringing forth is even as in the instance of flowers and grass. In what way does it distinguish between good and evil? If you, my disciple, take delight in seeing the flowers, then you will consider flowers good and grass bad. If you desire to use the grass you will, in turn, consider the grass good. This type of good and evil has its source in the likes and dislikes of your mind. Therefore I know that you are mistaken.”

I said: “In that case there is neither good nor evil, is there?” The Teacher said: “The tranquillity resulting from the dominance of natural law is a state in which no discrimination is made between good and evil; while the stirring of the passion-nature is a state in which both good and evil are present. If there are no stirrings of the passion-nature, there is neither good nor evil, and this is what is called the highest good.” . . .

I said: “In that case good and evil are not at all present in things?” He said: “They are only in your mind.”²⁶

It was well that Wang and Buddhism sounded this subtle note of an idealist metaphysic in the halls of the correct and prim Confucians; for though these scholars had the justest view of human nature and government which philosophy had yet conceived, they were a trifle enamored of their wisdom, and had become an intellectual bureaucracy irksome and hostile to every free and creatively erring soul. If in the end the followers of Chu Hsi won the day, if his tablet was placed with high honors in the same hall with that of the Master himself, and his interpretations of the Classics became a law to all orthodox thought for seven hundred years, it was indeed a victory of sound and simple sense over the disturbing subtleties of the metaphysical mind. But a nation, like an individual, can be too sensible, too prosaically sane and unbearably right. It was partly because Chu Hsi and Confucianism triumphed so completely that China had to have her Revolution.

II. BRONZE, LACQUER AND JADE

The rôle of art in China—Textiles—Furniture—Jewelry—Fans—The making of lacquer—The cutting of jade—Some masterpieces in bronze—Chinese sculpture

The pursuit of wisdom and the passion for beauty are the two poles of the Chinese mind, and China might loosely be defined as philosophy and porcelain. As the pursuit of wisdom meant to China no airy metaphysic but a positive philosophy aiming at individual development and social order, so the passion for beauty was no esoteric estheticism, no dilettante concoction of art forms irrelevant to human affairs, but an earthly marriage of beauty and utility, a practical resolve to adorn the objects and implements of daily life. Until it began to yield its own ideals to Western influence, China refused to recognize any distinction between the artist and the artisan, or between the artisan and the worker; nearly all industry was manufacture, and all manufacture was handicraft; industry, like art, was the expression of personality in things. Hence China, while neglecting to provide its people, through large-scale industry, with conveniences common in the West, excelled every country in artistic taste and the multiplication of beautiful objects for daily use. From the characters in which he wrote to the dishes from which he ate, the comfortable Chinese demanded that everything about him should have some esthetic form, and evidence in its shape and texture the mature civilization of which it was a symbol and a part.

It was during the Sung Dynasty that this movement to beautify the person, the temple and the home reached its highest expression. It had been a part of the excellence of T’ang life, and would remain and spread under later dynasties; but now a long period of order and prosperity nourished every art, and gave to Chinese living a grace and adornment which it had never enjoyed before. In textiles and metalworking the craftsmen of China, during and after the Sung era, reached a degree of perfection never surpassed; in the cutting of jade and hard stones they went beyond all rivals anywhere; and in the carving of wood and ivory they were excelled only by their pupils in Japan.²⁷ Furniture was designed in a variety of unique and uncomfortable forms; cabinet-makers, living on a bowl of rice per day, sent forth one objet de vertu—one little piece of perfection—after another; and these minor products of a careful art, taking the place of expensive furniture and luxuries in homes, gave to their owners a pleasure which in the Occident only connoisseurs can know. Jewelry was not abundant, but it was admirably cut. Women and men cooled themselves with ornate fans of feathers or bamboo, of painted paper or silk; even beggars brandished elegant fans as they plied their ancient trade.

The art of lacquer began in China, and came to its fullest perfection in Japan. In the Far East lacquer is the natural product of a tree* indigenous to China, but now most sedulously cultivated by the Japanese. The sap is drawn from trunk and branches, strained, and heated to remove excess liquid; it is applied to thin wood, sometimes to metal or porcelain, and is dried by exposure to moisture.²⁸ Twenty or thirty coats, each slowly dried and painstakingly polished, are laid on, the applications varying in color and depth; then, in China, the finished lacquer is carved with a sharp V-shaped tool, each incision reaching to such a layer as to expose the color required by the design. The art grew slowly; it began as a form of writing upon bamboo strips; the material was used in the Chou Dynasty to decorate vessels, harness, carriages, etc.; in the second century A.D. it was applied to buildings and musical instruments; under the T’ang many lacquered articles were exported to Japan; under the Sung all branches of the .industry took their definite form, and shipped their products to such distant ports as India and Arabia; under the Ming emperors the art was further perfected, and in some phases reached its zenith;²⁹ under the enlightened Manchu rulers K’ang-hsi and Ch’ien Lung great factories were built and maintained by imperial decree, and made such masterpieces as Ch’ien Lung’s throne,³⁰ or the lacquered screen that K’ang-hsi presented to Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.³¹ The art continued at its height until the nineteenth century, when the wars brought on by European merchants, and the poor taste of European importers and clients, caused the withdrawal of imperial support, lowered the standards, debased the designs, and left the leadership in lacquer to Japan.

Jade is as old as Chinese history, for it is found in the most ancient graves. The earliest records attribute its use as a “sound-stone” to 2500 B.C.: jade was cut in the form of a fish or elsewise, and suspended by a thong; when properly cut and struck it emitted a clear musical tone, astonishingly long sustained. The word was derived through the French jade from the Spanish ijada (Lat. ilia), meaning loins; the Spanish conquerors of America found that the Mexicans used the stone, powdered and mixed with water, as a cure for many internal disorders, and they brought this new prescription back to Europe along with American gold. The Chinese word for the stone is much more sensible; jun means soft like the dew.³² Two minerals provide jade: jadeite and nephrite—silicates in the one case of aluminium and sodium, in the other of calcium and magnesium. Both are tough; the pressure of fifty tons is sometimes required to crush a one-inch cube; large pieces are usually broken by being subjected in quick succession first to extreme heat and then to cold water. The ingenuity of the Chinese artist is revealed in his ability to bring lustrous colors of green, brown, black and white out of these naturally colorless materials, and in the patient obstinacy with which he varies the forms, so that in all the world’s collections of jade (barring buttons) no two pieces are alike. Examples begin to appear as far back as the Shang Dynasty, in the shape of a jade toad used in divine sacrifice;³³ and forms of great beauty were produced in the days of Confucius.³⁴ While various peoples used jadeite for axes, knives and other utensils, the Chinese held the stone in such reverence that they kept it almost exclusivly for art; they regarded it as more precious than silver or gold, or any jewelry;³⁵ they valued some small jades, like the thumb rings worn by the mandarins, at five thousand dollars, and some jade necklaces at $100,000; collectors spent years in search of a single piece. It has been estimated that an assemblage of all existing Chinese jades would form a collection unrivaled by any other material.³⁶

Bronze is almost as old as jade in the art of China, and even more exalted in Chinese reverence. Legend tells how the ancient Emperor Yü, hero of the Chinese flood, cast the metals sent him as tribute by the nine provinces of his empire into the form of three nine-legged cauldrons, possessed of the magic power to ward off noxious influences, cause their contents to boil without fire, and generate spontaneously every delicacy. They became a sacred symbol of the imperial authority, were handed down carefully from dynasty to dynasty, but disappeared mysteriously on the fall of the Chou—a circumstance extremely injurious to the prestige of Shih Huang-ti. The casting and decoration of bronze became one of the fine arts of China, and produced collections that required forty-two volumes to catalogue them.³⁷ It made vessels for the religious ceremonies of the government and the home, and transformed a thousand varieties of utensils into works of art. Chinese bronzes are equaled only by the work of the Italian Renaissance, and there, perhaps, only by those “Gates of Paradise” which Ghiberti designed for the Baptistery of Florence.

The oldest existing pieces of Chinese bronze are sacrificial vessels recently discovered in Honan; Chinese scholars assign them to the Shang Dynasty, but European connoisseurs give them a later, though uncertain, date. The earliest dated remains are from the period of the Chou; an excellent example of these is the set of ceremonial vessels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Most of the Chou bronzes were confiscated by Shih Huang-ti, lest the people melt them down and recast them as weapons. With the accumulated metal his artisans made twelve gigantic statues, each fifty feet high;³⁸ but not one foot of the fifty remains. Under the Han many fine vessels were made, often inlaid with gold. Artists trained in China cast several masterpieces for the Temple of Horiuji at Nara in Japan, the loveliest being three Amida-Buddhas seated in lotus-beds;³⁹ there is hardly anything finer than these figures in the history of bronze.* Under the Sung the art reached its height, if not of excellence, certainly of fertility; cauldrons, wine vessels, beakers, censers, weapons, mirrors, bells, drums, vases, plaques and figurines filled the shelves of connoisseurs and found some place in nearly every home. An attractive sample of Sung work is an incense burner in the form of a water buffalo mounted by Lao-tze, who bestrides it calmly in proof 01 the power of philosophy to tame the savage breast.⁴⁰ The casting is throughout of the thinness of paper, and the lapse of time has given the piece a patina or coating of mottled green that lends it the meretricious beauty of decay.† Under the Ming a slow deterioration attacked the art; the size of the objects increased, the quality fell. Bronze, which had been a miraculous novelty in the Chalcolithic Age of the Emperor Yü, became a commonplace, and yielded its popularity to porcelain.

Sculpture was not one of the major arts, not even a fine art, to the Chinese.⁴¹ By an act of rare modesty the Far East refused to class the human body under the rubric of beauty; its sculptors played a little with drapery, and used the figures of men—seldom of women—to study or represent certain types of consciousness; but they did not glorify the body. For the most part they confined their portraits of humanity to Buddhist saints and Taoist sages, ignoring the-athletes and courtesans who gave such inspiration to the artists of Greece. In the sculpture of China animals were preferred even to philosophers and saints.

The earliest Chinese statues known to us are the twelve bronze colossi erected by Shih Huang-ti; they were melted by a Han ruler to make “small cash.” A few little animals in bronze remain from the Han Dynasty; but nearly all the statuary of that epoch was destroyed by war or the negligence of time. The only important Han remains are the tomb-reliefs found in Shantung; here again the human figures are rare, the scenes being dominated by animals carved in thin relief. More akin to sculpture are the funerary statuettes of clay—mostly of animals, occasionally of servants or wives—which were buried with male corpses as a convenient substitute for suttee. Here and there animals in the round survive from this period, like the marble tiger, all muscle and watchfulness, that guarded the temple of Sniang-fu,⁴² or the snarling bears in the Gardner collection at Boston, or the winged and goitrous lions of the Nanking tombs.⁴³ These animals, and the proud horses of the tomb-reliefs, show a mixture of Greco-Bactrian, Assyrian and Scythian influences; there is nothing about them distinctively Chinese.⁴⁴

Meanwhile another influence was entering China, in the form of Buddhist theology and art. It made a home for itself first in Turkestan, and built there a civilization from which Stein and Pelliot have unearthed many tons of ruined statuary; some of it⁴⁵ seems equal to Hindu Buddhist art at its best. The Chinese took over those Buddhist forms without much alteration, and produced Buddhas as fair as any in Gandhara or India. The earliest of these appear in the Yün Kan cave temples of Shansi (ca. 490 A.D.); among the best are the figures in the Lung Men grottoes of Honan. Outside these grottoes stand several colossi, of which the most unique is a graceful Bodhisattwa, and the most imposing is the “Vairochana” Buddha (ca. 672 A.D.), destroyed at the base but still instructively serene.⁴⁶ Farther east, in Shantung, many cave temples have been found whose walls are carved with mythology in Hindu fashion, with here and there a powerful Bodhisattiva like that in the cave of Yun Men (ca. 600 A.D.).⁴⁷ The T’ang Dynasty continued the Buddhist tradition in sculpture, and carried it to perfection in the seated stone Buddha (ca. 639) found in the province of Shensi.⁴⁸ The later dynasties produced in clay some massive Lohans—disciples of the gentle Buddha who have the stern faces of financiers;* and some very beautiful figures of the Mahayana deity Kuan-yin, almost in the process of turning from a god into a goddess.⁴⁹

After the T’ang Dynasty sculpture lost its religious inspiration, and took on a secular, occasionally a sensuous, character; moralists complained, as in Renaissance Italy, that the artists were making saints as graceful and supple as women; and Buddhist priests laid down severe iconographic rules for-bidding the individualization of character or the accentuation of the body. Probably the strong moral bent of the Chinese impeded the development of sculpture; when the religious motif lost its impelling force, and the attractiveness of physical beauty was not allowed to take its place, sculpture in China decayed; religion destroyed what it could no longer inspire. Towards the end of the T’ang the fount of sculptural creation began to run dry. The Sung produced only a few extant pieces of distinction; the Mongols gave their energies to war; the Mings excelled for a passing moment in bizarreries and such colossi as the stone monsters that stand before the tombs of the Mings. Sculpture, choked by religious restrictions, gave up the ghost, and left the field of Chinese art to porcelain and painting.

III. PAGODAS AND PALACES

Chinese architecture—The Porcelain Tower of Nanking—The Jade Pagoda of Peking—The Temple of Confucius—The Temple and Altar of Heaven—The palaces of Kublai Khan—A Chinese home—The interior—Color and form

Architecture, too, has been a minor art in China. Such master-builders as have labored there have hardly left a name behind them, and seem to have been less admired than the great potters. Large structures have been rare in China, even in honoring the gods; old buildings are seldom found, and only a few pagodas date back beyond the sixteenth century. Sung architects issued, in 1103 A.D., eight handsomely illustrated volumes on The Method of Architecture; but the masterpieces that they pictured were all of wood, and not a fragment of them survives. Drawings in the National Library at Paris, purporting to represent the dwellings and temples of Confucius’ time, show that through its long history of over twenty-three centuries Chinese architecture has been content with the same designs, and the same modest proportions.⁵⁰ Perhaps the very sensitivity of the Chinese in matters of art and taste made them forego structures that might have seemed immodest and grandiose; and perhaps their superiority in intellect has somewhat hindered the scope of their imagination. Above all, Chinese architecture suffered from the absence of three institutions present in almost every other great nation of antiquity: an hereditary aristocracy, a powerful priesthood,⁵¹ and a strong and wealthy central government. These are the forces that in the past have paid for the larger works of art—for the temples and palaces, the masses and operas, the great frescoes and sculptured tombs. And China was fortunate and unique: she had none of these institutions.

For a time the Buddhist faith captured the Chinese soul, and sufficient of China’s income to build the great temples whose ruins have been so lately discovered in Turkestan.⁵² Buddhist temples of a certain middling majesty survive throughout China, but they suffer severely when compared with the religious architecture of India. Pleasant natural approaches lead to them, usually up winding inclines marked by ornate gateways called p’ai-lus, and apparently derived from the “rails” of the Hindu topes; sometimes the entrance is spiritually barred by hideous images designed, in one sense or another, to frighten foreign devils away. One of the best of the Chinese Buddhist shrines is the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, near the Summer Palace outside Peking; Fergusson called it “the finest architectural achievement in China.”⁵³

More characteristic of the Far East are the pagodas that dominate the landscape of almost every Chinese town.* Like the Buddhism that inspired them, these graceful edifices took over some of the superstitions of popular Taoism, and became centers not only of religious ceremony, but of geomantic divination—i.e., the discovery of the future by the study of lines and clefts in the earth. Communities erected pagodas in the belief that such structures could ward off wind and flood, propitiate evil spirits, and attract prosperity. Usually they took the form of octagonal brick towers rising on a stone foundation to five, seven, nine or thirteen stories, because even numbers were unlucky.⁵⁶ The oldest standing pagoda is at Sung Yüeh Ssu, built in 523 A.D. on the sacred mountain of Sung Shan in Honan; one of the loveliest is the Pagoda of the Summer Palace; the most spectacular are the Jade Pagoda at Peking and the “Flask Pagoda” at Wu-tai-shan; the most famous was the Porcelain Tower of Nanking, built in 1412-31, distinguished by a facing of porcelain over its bricks, and destroyed by the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion in 1854.

The fairest temples of China are those dedicated to the official faith at Peking. The Temple of Confucius is guarded by a magnificent p’ai-lu, most delicately carved, but the temple itself is a monument to philosophy rather than to art. Built in the thirteenth century, it has been remodeled and restored many times since. On a wooden stand in an open niche is the “Tablet of the Soul of the Most Holy Ancestral Teacher Confucius;” and over the main altar is the dedication to “The Master and Model of Ten Thousand Generations.” Near the South Tatar Wall of Peking stand the Temple of Heaven and the Altar of Heaven. The altar is an impressive series of marble stairs and terraces, whose number and arrangement had a magical significance; the temple is a modified pagoda of three stories, raised upon a marble platform, and built of unprepossessing brick and tile. Here, at three o’clock in the morning of the Chinese New Year, the Emperor prayed for the success of his dynasty and the prosperity of his people, and offered sacrifice to a neuter but, it was hoped, not neutral, Heaven. However, the temple was badly damaged by lightning in 1889.⁵⁷

More attractive than these stolid shrines are the frail and ornate palaces that once housed princes and mandarins at Peking. A burst of architectural genius during the reign of Ch’eng Tsu (1403-25) reared the Great Hall at the tombs of the Ming Emperors, and raised a medley of royal residences in an enclosure destined to become known as the “Forbidden City,” on the very site where Kublai Khan’s palaces had amazed Marco Polo two centuries before. Ogrish lions stand watch at either side of the marble balustrades that lead to the marble terrace; hereon are official buildings with throne rooms, reception rooms, banquet rooms, and the other needs of royalty; and scattered about are the elaborate homes in which once lived the Imperial Family, their children and relatives, their servants and retainers, their eunuchs and concubines. The palaces hardly vary one from another; all have the same slender columns, the same pretty lattices, the same carved or lettered cornices, the same profusion of brilliant colors, the same upward-curving eaves of the same massively tiled roofs. And like these forbidden delicacies is the second Summer Palace, some miles away; perhaps more completely perfect of its kind, more gracefully proportioned and fastidiously carved, than the once royal homes of Peking.

If we try to express in brief compass the general characteristics of Chinese architecture, we find as a first feature the unpleasant wall that hides the main structures from the street. In the poorer sections these outer walls are continuous from home to home, and betray an ancient insecurity of life. Within the wall is a court, upon which open the doors and lattices of one or several homes. The houses of the poor are gloomy tenements, with narrow entrances and corridors, low ceilings, and floors of the good earth; in many families pigs, dogs, hens, men and women live in one room. The poorest of all live in rain-swept, wind-beaten huts of mud and straw. Those with slightly better incomes cover the floor with mats, or pave it with tiles. The well-to-do adorn the inner court with shrubs and flowers and pools, or surround their mansions with gardens in which nature’s wild variety and playful sports find assiduous representation. Here are no primrose paths, no avenues of tulip-beds, no squares or circles or octagons of grass or flowers; instead, precarious footways wind casually through rock-laid gulleys over devious rivulets, and among trees whose trunks or limbs have been taught to take strange shapes to satisfy sophisticated souls. Here and there dainty pavilions, half hidden by the foliage, offer the wanderer rest.

The home itself is not an imposing affair, even when it is a palace. It is never more than one story in height; and if many rooms are needed, the tendency is to raise new edifices rather than to enlarge the old. Hence a palatial dwelling is seldom one united structure; it is a group of buildings of which the more important follow in a line from the entrance to the enclosure, while the secondary buildings are placed at either side. The favorite materials are wood and brick; stone rarely rises above the foundation terrace; brick is usually confined to the outer walls, earthen tiles provide the roof, and wood builds the decorative columns and the inner walls. Above the brightly colored walls an ornamental cornice runs. Neither the walls nor the columns support the roof; this, heavy though it is, rests only upon the posts that form part of the wooden frame. The roof is the major part of a Chinese temple or home. Built of glazed tiles—yellow if covering imperial heads, otherwise green, purple, red or blue—the roof makes a pretty picture in a natural surrounding, and even in the chaos of city streets. Perhaps the projecting bamboos of ancient tent-tops gave the Far Eastern roof its graceful upward curve at the eaves; but more probably this celebrated form arose merely from the desire of the Chinese builder to protect his structure from rain.⁵⁸ For there were few windows in China; Korean paper or pretty lattices took their place, and lattices would not keep out the rain.

The main doorway is not at the gable end, but on the southern façade; within the ornamented portal is usually a screen or wall, barring the visitor from an immediate view of the interior, and offering some discouragement to evil spirits, who must travel in a straight line. The hall and rooms are dim, for most of the daylight is kept out by the latticed openings and the projecting eaves. There are seldom any arrangements for ventilation, and the only heat supplied is from portable braziers, or brick beds built over a smoky fire; there are no chimneys and no flues.⁵⁹ Rich and poor suffer from cold, and go to bed fully clothed.⁶⁰ “Are you cold?” the traveler asks the Chinese; and the answer is often “Of course.”⁶¹ The ceiling may be hung with gaudy paper lanterns; the walls may be adorned with calligraphic scrolls, or ink sketches, or silk hangings skilfully embroidered and painted with rural scenes. The furniture is usually of heavy wood, stained to an ebony black, and luxuriantly carved; the lighter pieces may be of brilliant lacquer. The Chinese are the only Oriental nation that sits on chairs; and even they prefer to recline or squat. On a special table or shelf are the vessels used to offer sacrifice to the ancestral dead. In the rear are the apartments of the women. Separate rooms or detached buildings may house a library or a school.

The general impression left by Chinese architecture upon the foreign and untechnical observer is one of charming frailty. Color dominates form, and beauty here has to do without the aid of sublimity. The Chinese temple or palace seeks not to dominate nature, but to cooperate with it in that perfect harmony of the whole which depends upon the modesty of the parts. Those qualities that give a structure strength, security and permanence are absent here, as if the builders feared that earthquakes would stultify their pains. These buildings hardly belong to the same art as that which raised its monuments at Karnak and Persepolis, and on the Acropolis; they are not architecture as we of the Occident have known it, but rather the carving of wood, the glazing of pottery and the sculpture of stone; they harmonize better with porcelain and jade than with the ponderous edifices that a mixture of engineering and architecture gave to India, Mesopotamia or Rome. If we do not ask of them the grandeur and the solidity which their makers may never have cared to give them, if we accept them willingly as architectural cameos expressing the most delicate of tastes in the most fragile of structural forms, then they take their place as a natural and appropriate variety of Chinese art, and among the most gracious shapes ever fashioned by men.

IV. PAINTING

1. Masters of Chinese Painting

Ku K’ai-chhi, the “greatest painter, wit and fool”—Han Yü’s miniature—The classic and the romantic schools—Wang Wei—Wu Tao-tze—Hui Tsung, the artist-emperor—Masters of the Sung age

The Occident has been forgivably slow in acquainting itself with Chinese painting, for almost every aspect and method of the art in the East differed from its practice in the West. First, the paintings of the Far East were never on canvas; occasionally they were wall frescoes, as in the period of Buddhist influence; sometimes, as in later days, they were on paper; but for the most part they were on silk, and the frailty of this material shortened the life of every masterpiece, and left the history of the art with mere memories and records of accomplishment. Further, the paintings had an air of thinness and slightness; most of them were in water-color, and lacked the full-bodied and sensuous tints of European pictures in oil. The Chinese tried oil-painting, but seem to have abandoned it as too coarse and heavy a method for their subtle purposes. To them painting, at least in its earliest forms, was a branch of calligraphy, or beautiful penmanship; the brush which they used for writing served them also for painting; and many of their chef-d’œuvres were drawn simply with brush and ink.* Finally, their greatest achievements were unconsciously hidden from Western travelers. For the Chinese do not flaunt their pictures on public or private walls; they roll them up and store them carefully away, and unfold them for occasional enjoyment as we take down and read a book. Such scroll paintings were arranged in sequence on a roll of paper or silk, and were “read” like a manuscript; smaller pictures were hung on a wall, but were seldom framed; sometimes a series of pictures was painted on a screen. By the time of the later Sung Dynasty the art of painting had already developed thirteen “branches,”⁶³ and innumerable forms.

Painting is mentioned in Chinese literature as an established art several centuries before Christ; and despite the interruptions of war it has continued in China to our own time. Tradition makes the first Chinese painter a woman, Lei, sister of the pious Emperor Shun; “alas,” cried a disgusted critic, “that this divine art should have been invented by a woman!”⁶⁴ Nothing survives of Chou painting; but that the art was then already old appears from Confucius’ report of how deeply he was affected by the frescoes in the Grand Temple at Lo-yang.⁶⁵ During the early years of the Han Dynasty a writer complained that a hero whom he admired had not been sufficiently painted: “Good artists are many; why does not one of them draw him?”⁶⁶ The story is told of an artist virtuoso of the time, Lieh-I, who could draw a perfectly straight line one thousand feet long, could etch a detailed map of China on a square inch of surface, and could fill his mouth with colored water and spit it out in the form of paintings; the phoenixes which he painted were so lifelike that people wondered why they did not fly away.⁶⁷ There are signs that Chinese painting reached one of its zeniths at the beginning of our era,⁶⁸ but war and time have destroyed the evidence. From the days when the Ch’in warriors sacked Lo-yang (ca. 249 B.C.), burning whatever they could not use, down to the Boxer Uprising (1900 A.D.), when the soldiers of Tung Cho employed the silk pictures of the Imperial Collection for wrapping purposes, the victories of art and war have alternated in their ancient conflict—destruction always certain, but creation never still.

As Christianity transformed Mediterranean culture and art in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, so Buddhism, in the same centuries, effected a theological and esthetic revolution in the life of China. While Confucianism retained its political power, Buddhism, mingling with Taoism, became the dominating force in art, and brought to the Chinese a stimulating contact with Hindu motives, symbols, methods and forms. The greatest genius of the Chinese Buddhist school of painting was Ku K’ai-chih, a man of such unique and positive personality that a web of anecdote or legend has meshed him in. He loved the girl next door, and offered her his hand; but she, not knowing how famous he was to be, refused him. He painted her form upon a wall, and stuck a thorn into the heart, whereupon the girl began to die. He approached her again, and she yielded; he removed the thorn from his picture, and forthwith the girl grew well. When the Buddhists tried to raise money to build a temple at Nanking he promised the fund one million “cash”; all China laughed at the offer, for Ku was as poor as an artist. “Give me the use of a wall,” he asked. Having found a wall and secured privacy, he painted there the Buddhist saint Uimala-Kirti. When it was finished he sent for the priests, and explained to them how they might raise the million “cash.” “On the first day you must charge 100,000 ‘cash’ for admission” to see the picture; “on the second day, 50,000; on the third day let visitors subscribe what they please.” They did as he told them, and took in a million “cash.”⁶⁹ Ku painted a long series of Buddhist pictures, and many others, but nothing certainly his has come down to our day.* He wrote three treatises on painting, of which some fragments survive. Men, he said, were the most difficult things to paint; next came landscapes, then horses and gods.⁷² He insisted on being a philosopher, too; under his portrait of the emperor he wrote: “In Nature there is nothing high which is not soon brought low. . . . When the sun has reached its noon, it begins to sink; when the moon is full it begins to wane. To rise to glory is as hard as to build a mountain out of grains of dust; to fall into calamity is as easy as the rebound of a tense spring.”⁷³ His contemporaries ranked him as the outstanding man of his time in three lines: in painting, in wit, and in foolishness.⁷⁴

Painting flourished at the T’ang court. “There are as many painters as morning stars,” said Tu Fu, “but artists are few.”⁷⁵ In the ninth century Chang Yen-yüan wrote a book called Eminent Painters of All Ages, in which he described the work of three hundred and seventy artists. A picture by a master, he tells us, brought in those days as much as twenty thousand ounces of silver. But he warns us against rating art in monetary terms; “good pictures,” he writes, “are more priceless than gold or jade; bad ones are not worth a potsherd.”⁷⁶ Of T’ang painters we still know the names of two hundred and twenty; of their work hardly anything remains, for the Tatar revolutionists who sacked Chang-an in 756 A.D. did not care for painting. We catch something of the art atmosphere that mingled with the poetry of the time, in the story of Han Yü, the famous “Prince of Literature.” One day he won, from a fellow lodger at an inn, a precious miniature portraying, in the smallest compass, one hundred and twenty-three human figures, eighty-three horses, thirty other animals, three chariots, and two hundred and fifty-one articles. “I thought a great deal of it, for I could not believe that it was the work of a single man, uniting as it did in itself such a variety of excellences; and no sum would have tempted me to part from it. Next year I left the city, and went to Ho-yang; and there, one day, while discussing art with strangers, I produced the picture for them to see. Among them was a Mr. Chao, a Censor,* a highly cultivated man, who, when he saw it, seemed rather overcome, and at length said: ‘That picture is a copy, made by me in my youth, of a work from the Imperial Gallery. I lost it twenty years ago while traveling in the province of Fukien.’” Han Yü at once presented the miniature to Mr. Chao.

Just as in Chinese religion two schools had taken shape, Confucian and Taoist-Buddhist—and just as two schools, led by Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming, were soon to develop in philosophy, representing respectively what we in the West would call the classic and the romantic types of mind; so in Chinese painting the northern artists accepted a stern tradition of classical sobriety and restraint, while the south gave color and form to feeling and imagination. The northern school set itself severely to secure correct modeling of figure and full clarity of line; the southern rebelled like Montmartre against such limitations, disdained a simple realism, and tried to use objects merely as elements in a spiritual experience, tones in a musical mood.⁷⁷. Li Ssu-hsün, painting at the court of Ming Huang, found time, amid the fluctuations of political power and lonely exile, to establish the northern school. He painted some of the first Chinese landscapes, and achieved a degree of realism carried down in many a tale; the Emperor said he could hear, at night, the splash of the water that Li had painted upon an imperial screen; and a fish leaped to life out of another of his pictures and was later found in a pool—every nation tells such stories of its painters. The southern school sprouted out of the natural innovations of art, and the genius of Wang Wei; in his impressionist style a landscape became merely the symbol of a mood. A poet as well as a painter, Wang sought to bind the two arts by making the picture express a poem; it was of him that men first used the now trite phrase so applicable to nearly all Chinese poetry and painting: “Every poem is a picture, and every picture is a poem.” (In many cases the poem is inscribed upon the picture, and is itself a calligraphic work of art.) Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, we are told, spent his whole life searching for a genuine Wang Wei.⁷⁸*

The greatest painter of the T’ang epoch, and, by common consent, of all the Far East, rose above distinctions of school, and belonged rather to the Buddhist tradition of Chinese art. Wu Tao-tze deserved his name—Wu, Master of the Tao or Way, for all those impressions and formless thoughts which Lao-tze and Chuang-tze had found too subtle for words seemed to flow naturally into line and color under his brush. “A poverty stricken orphan,” a Chinese historian describes him, “but endowed with a divine nature, he had not assumed the cap of puberty ere he was already a master artist, and had flooded Lo-yang with his works.” Chinese tradition has it that he was fond of wine and feats of strength, and thought like Poe that the spirit could work best under a little intoxication.⁸¹ He excelled in every subject: men, gods, devils, Buddhas, birds, beasts, buildings, landscapes—all seemed to come naturally to his exuberant art. He painted with equal skill on silk, paper, and freshly-plastered walls; he made three hundred frescoes for Buddhist edifices, and one of these, containing more than a thousand figures, became as famous in China as “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper” in Europe. Ninety-three of his paintings were in the Imperial Gallery in the twelfth century, four hundred years after his death; but none remains anywhere today. His Buddhas, we are told, “fathomed the mysteries of life and death”; his picture of purgatory frightened some of the butchers and fishmongers of China into abandoning their scandalously un-Buddhistic trades; his representation of Ming Huang’s dream convinced the Emperor that Wu had had an identical vision.⁸² When the monarch sent Wu to sketch the scenery along the Chia-ling River in Szechuan he was piqued to see the artist return without having sketched a line. “I have it all in my heart,” said Wu; and isolating himself in a room of the palace, he threw off, we are assured, a hundred miles of landscape.⁸³† When General Pei wished his portrait painted, Wu asked him not to pose, but to do a sword dance; after which the artist painted a picture that contemporaries felt constrained to ascribe to divine inspiration. So great was his reputation that when he was finishing some Buddhist figures at the Hsing-shan Temple, “the whole of Chang-an” came to see him add the finishing touches. Surrounded by this assemblage, says a Chinese historian of the ninth century, “he executed the haloes with so violent a rush and swirl that it seemed as though a whirlwind possessed his hand, and all who saw it cried that some god was helping him”:⁸⁵ the lazy will always attribute genius to some “inspiration” that comes for mere waiting. When Wu had lived long enough, says a pretty tale, he painted a vast landscape, stepped into the mouth of a cave pictured in it, and was never seen again.⁸⁶ Never had art known such mastery and delicacy of line.

Under the Sung emperors painting became a passion with the Chinese. Emancipating itself from subserviency to Buddhist themes, it poured forth an unprecedented number and variety of pictures. The Sung Emperor Hui Tsung was himself not the least of the eight hundred known painters of the day. In a roll which is one of the treasures of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston he portrayed with astonishing simplicity and clarity the stages through which women carried the preparation of silk;⁸⁷ he founded an art museum richer in masterpieces than any collection that China has ever again known;⁸⁸ he elevated the Painting Academy from a mere department of the Literary College into an independent institution of the highest rank, substituted art tests for some of the literary exercises! traditionally used in the examinations for political office, and raised men to the ministry for their excellence in art as often as for their skill in statesmanship.⁸⁹ The Tatars, hearing of all this, invaded China, deposed the Emperor, sacked the capital and destroyed nearly all of the paintings in the Imperial Museum, whose catalogue had filled twenty volumes.⁹⁰ The artist-emperor was carried away by the invaders, and died in captivity and disgrace.

Greater than this royal painter were Kuo Hsi and Li Lung-mien. “For tall pines, huge trees, swirling streams, beetling crags, steep precipices, mountain peaks, now lovely in the rising mist, now lost in an obscuring pall, with all their thousand ten thousand shapes—critics allow that Kuo Hsi strode across his generation.”*⁹¹ Li Lung-mien was an artist, a scholar, a successful official and a gentleman, honored by the Chinese as the perfect type of Chinese culture at its richest. He passed from the profession of calligraphy to sketching and painting, and rarely used anything but ink; he gloried in the strict traditions of the Northern School, and spent himself upon accuracy and delicacy of line. He painted horses so Well that when six that he had painted died, it was charged that his picture had stolen their vital principle from them. A Buddhist priest warned him that he would become a horse if he painted horses so often and so intently; he accepted the counsel of the monk, and painted five hundred Lohans. We may judge of his repute by the fact that Hui Tsung’s imperial gallery, when it was sacked, contained one hundred and seven works by Li Lung-mien.

Other masters crowded the Sung scene: Mi Fei, an eccentric genius who was forever washing his hands or changing his clothes when he was not collecting old masters or transforming landscape painting with his “method of blobs”—daubs of ink laid on without the guidance of any contour line;* Hsia Kuei, whose long roll of scenes from the Yang-tze—its modest sources, its passage through loess and gorges, its gaping mouth filled with merchant ships and sampans—has led many students⁹³ to rank him at the head of all landscape painters of Orient and Occident; Ma Yuan, whose delicate landscapes and distant vistas adorn the Boston Museum of Fine Arts;† Liang K’ai, with his stately portrait of Li Po; Mu-ch’i, with his terrible tiger, his careless starling, and his morose but gentle Kuan-yin; and others whose names strike no familiar chords in Occidental memories, but are the tokens of a mind rich in the heritage of the East. “The Sung culture,” says Fenollosa, “was the ripest expression of Chinese genius.”⁹⁵

When we try to estimate the quality of Chinese painting in the heyday of T’ang and Sung we are in the position of future historians who may try to write of the Italian Renaissance when all the works of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo have been lost. After the ravages of barbaric hosts had destroyed the masterpieces of Chinese painting, and interrupted for centuries the continuity of Chinese development, painting seems to have lost heart; and though the later dynasties, native and alien, produced many artists of delicacy or power, none could rank with the men who had known paradise for a time at the courts of Ming Huang and Hui Tsung. When we think of the Chinese we must see them not merely as a people now stricken with poverty, weakened with corruption, torn with factions and disgraced with defeat, but as a nation that has had, in the long vista of its history, ages that could compare with those of Pericles, Augustus and the Medici, and may have such ages again.

2. Qualities of Chinese Painting

The rejection of perspective—Of realism—Line as nobler than color—Form as rhythm—Representation by suggestion—Conventions and restrictions—Sincerity of Chinese art

What is it that distinguishes Chinese painting, and makes it so completely different from every other school of painting in history except its own pupils in Japan? First, of course, its scroll or screen form. But this is an external matter; far more intrinsic and fundamental is the Chinese scorn of perspective and shadow. When two European painters accepted the invitation of the Emperor K’ang-hsi to come and paint decorations for his palaces, their work was rejected because they had made the farther columns in their pictures shorter than the nearer ones; nothing could be more false and artificial, argued the Chinese, than to represent distances where obviously there were none.⁹⁶ Neither party could understand the prejudice of the other, for the Europeans had been taught to look at a scene from a level with it, while the Chinese artists were accustomed to visualize it as seen from above.⁹⁷ Shadows, too, seemed to the Chinese to be out of place in a form of art which, as they understod it, aimed not to imitate reality, but to give pleasure, convey moods, and suggest ideas through the medium of perfect form.

The form was everything in these paintings, and it was sought not in warmth or splendor of color, but in rhythm and accuracy of line. In the early paintings color was sternly excluded, and in the masters it was rare; black ink and a brush were enough, for a color had nothing to do with form. Form, as the artist-theorist Hsieh Ho said, is rhythm: first in the sense that a Chinese painting is the visible record of a rhythmic gesture, a dance executed by the hand;⁹⁸ and again in the sense that a significant form reveals the “rhythm of the spirit,” the essence and quiet movement of reality.⁹⁹ Finally, the body of rhythm is line—not as describing the actual contours of things, but as building forms that, through suggestion or symbol, express the soul. The skill of execution, as distinct from the power of perception, feeling and imagination, lies—in Chinese painting—almost entirely in accuracy and delicacy of line. The painter must observe with patient care, possess intense feeling under strict control, conceive his purpose clearly, and then, without the possibility of correction, transfer to the silk, with a few continuous and easeful strokes, his representative imagination. The art of line reached its apex in China and Japan, as the art of color touched its zenith in Venice and the Netherlands.

Chinese painting never cared for realism, but sought rather to suggest than to describe; it left “truth” to science, and gave itself to beauty. A branch emerging nowhence, and bearing a few leaves or blossoms against a clear sky, was sufficient subject for the greatest master; his handling and proportion of the empty background were tests of his courage and his skill. One of the subjects proposed to candidates for admission to Hui Tsung’s Painting Academy may serve to illustrate the Chinese emphasis on indirect suggestion as against explicit representation: the contestants were asked to illustrate by paintings a line of poetry—“The hoof of his steed comes back heavily charged with the scent of the trampled flowers.” The successful competitor was an artist who painted a rider with a cluster of butterflies following at the horse’s heels.

As the form was everything, the subject might be anything. Men were rarely the center or essence of the picture; when they appeared they were almost always old, and nearly all alike. The Chinese painter, though he was never visibly a pessimist, seldom looked at the world through the eyes of youth. Portraits were painted, but indifferently well; the artist was not interested in individuals. He loved flowers and animals, apparently, far more than men, and spent himself upon them recklessly; Hui Tsung, with an empire at his command, gave half his life to painting birds and flowers. Sometimes the flowers or the animals were symbols, like the lotus or the dragon; but for the-most part they were drawn for their own sake, because the charm and mystery of life appeared as completely in them as in a man. The horse was especially loved, and artists like Han Kan did hardly anything else but paint one form after another of that living embodiment of artistic line.

It is true that painting suffered in China, first from religious conventions, and then from academic restrictions; that the copying and imitation of old masters became a retarding fetich in the training of students, and that the artist was in many matters confined to a given number of permitted ways of fashioning his material.¹⁰⁰ “In my young days,” said an eminent Sung critic, “I praised the master whose pictures I liked; but as my judgment matured I praised myself for liking what the masters had chosen to have me like.”¹⁰¹ It is astonishing how much vitality remained in this art despite its conventions and canons; it was here as Hume thought it had been with the censored writers of the French Enlightenment: the very limitations from which the artist suffered compelled him to be brilliant.

What saved the Chinese painters from stagnation was the sincerity of their feeling for nature. Taoism had taught it to them, and Buddhism had made it stronger by teaching them that man and nature are one in the flow and change and unity of life. As the poets found in nature a retreat from urban strife, and the philosophers sought in it a model of morals and a guide to life, so the painters brooded by solitary streams, and lost themselves in deeply wooded hills, feeling that in these speechless and lasting things the nameless spirit had expressed itself more clearly than in the turbulent career and thought of men.* Nature, which is so cruel in China, lavishing death with cold and flood, was accepted stoically as the supreme god of the Chinese, and received from them not merely religious sacrifice, but the worship of their philosophy, their literature and their art. Let it serve as an indication of the age and depth of culture in China that a thousand years before Claude Lorraine, Rousseau, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand the Chinese made nature a passion, and created a school of landscape painting whose work throughout the Far East became one of the sovereign expressions of mankind.

V. PORCELAIN

The ceramic art—The making of porcelain—Its early history—“Céladon”—Enamels—The skill of Hao Shih-chiu—“Cloisonné”—The age of K’ang-hsi—Of Ch’ien Lung

As we approach the most distinct art of China, in which her leadership of the world is least open to dispute, we find ourselves harassed by our tendency to class pottery as an industry. To us, accustomed to think of “china” in terms of the kitchen, a pottery is a place where “china” is made; it is a factory like any other, and its products do not arouse exalted associations. But to the Chinese, pottery was a major art; it pleased their practical and yet esthetic souls by combining beauty with use; it gave to their greatest national institution—the drinking of tea—utensils as lovely to the finger-tips as to the eye; and it adorned their homes with shapes so fair that even the poorest families might live in the presence of perfection. Pottery is the sculpture of the Chinese.

Pottery is, first, the industry that bakes clay into usable forms, second, the art that makes those forms beautiful, and third, the objects produced by that industry and that art. Porcelain is vitrified pottery; that is, it is clay so mixed with minerals that when exposed to fire it melts or fuses into a translucent, but not transparent, substance resembling glass.* The Chinese made porcelain out of two minerals chiefly: kaolin—a pure white clay formed from decomposed felspar of granite, and pe-tun-tse—a fusible white quartz that gave the product its translucency. These materials were ground into a powder, worked up into a paste with water, moulded by hand or on the wheel, and subjected to high temperatures that fused the composition into a vitreous form, brilliant and durable. Sometimes the potters, not content with this simple white porcelain, covered the “paste”—i.e., the vessel formed but not yet fired—with a “glaze” or coating of fine glass, and then placed the vessel in the kiln; sometimes they applied the glaze after baking the paste into a “biscuit,” and then placed the vessel over the fire again. Usually the glaze was colored; but in many cases the paste was painted in color before applying a transparent glaze, or colors were painted on the fired glaze and fused upon it by re-firing. These “over-glaze” colors, which we call enamels, were made of colored glass ground to powder and reduced to a liquid applicable with the painter’s slender brush. Life-trained specialists painted the flowers, others the animals, others the landscapes, others the saints or sages who meditated among the mountains or rode upon strange beasts over the waves of the sea.

Chinese pottery is as old as the Stone Age; Professor Andersson has found pottery, in Honan and Kansu, which “can hardly be later in time than 3000 B.C.”;¹⁰³ and the excellent form and finish of these vases assure us that even at this early date the industry had long since become an art. Some of the pieces resemble the pottery of Anau, and suggest a western origin for Chinese civilization. Far inferior to these neolithic products are the fragments of funerary pottery unearthed in Honan and ascribed to the declining years of the Shang Dynasty. No remains of artistic value appear again before the Han, when we find not only pottery, but the first known use of glass in the Far East.† Under the T’ang emperors the growing popularity of tea provided a creative stimulus for the ceramic art; genius or accident revealed, about the ninth century, the possibility of producing a vessel vitrified not only on the glazed surface (as under the Han arid in other civilizations before this age) but throughout—i.e., true porcelain. In that century a Moslem traveler, Suleiman, reported to his countrymen: “They have in China a very fine clay with which they make vases as transparent as glass; water is seen through them.” Excavations have recently discovered, on a ninth-century site at Samarra on the Tigris, pieces of porcelain of Chinese manufacture. The next recorded appearance of the substance outside of China was about 1171, when Saladin sent forty-one pieces of porcelain as a precious gift to the Sultan of Damascus.¹⁰⁵ The manufacture of porcelain is not known to have begun in Europe before 1470; it is mentioned then as an art which the Venetians had learned from the Arabs in the course of the Crusades.¹⁰⁶

Sung was the classic period of Chinese porcelain. Ceramists ascribe to it both the oldest extant wares and the best; even the Ming potters of a later age, who sometimes equaled them, spoke of Sung pottery in reverential terms, and collectors treasured its masterpieces as beyond any price. The great factories at Ching-te-chen, founded in the sixth century near rich deposits of the minerals used for making and coloring earthenware, were officially recognized by the imperial court, and began to pour out upon China an unprecedented stream of porcelain plates, cups, bowls, vases, beakers, jars, bottles, ewers, boxes, chess-boards, candlesticks, maps, even enameled and gold-inlaid porcelain hat-racks.¹⁰⁷ Now for the first time appeared those jade-green pieces known as céladon,* which it has long been the highest ambition of the modern potter to produce, and of the collector to acquire.† Specimens of it were sent to Lorenzo de’ Medici by the Sultan of Egypt in 1487. The Persians and the Turks valued it not only for its incredibly smooth texture and rich lustre, but as a detector of poisons; the vessels would change color, they believed, whenever poisonous substances were placed in them.¹⁰⁹ Pieces of céladon are handed down from generation to generation as priceless heirlooms in the families of connoisseurs.¹¹⁰

For almost three hundred years the workers of the Ming Dynasty labored to keep the art of porcelain on the high level to which the Sung potters had raised it, and they did not fall far short of success. Five hundred kilns burned at Ching-te-chen, and the imperial court alone used 96,000 pieces of chinaware to adorn its gardens, its tables and its rooms.¹¹¹ Now appeared the first good enamels—colors fired over the glaze. Yellow monochromes and “egg-shell” blue and white porcelains reached perfection; the blue and white silver-mounted cup named from the Emperor Wan-li (or Shen Tsung) is one of the world’s masterpieces of the potter’s art. Among the experts of the Wan-li age was Hao Shih-chiu, who could make wine-cups weighing less than one forty-eighth of an ounce. One day, says a Chinese historian, Hao called at the home of a high official and begged permission to examine a porcelain tripod owned by the statesman, and numbered among the choicest of Sung wares. Hao felt the tripod carefully with his hands, and secretly copied the form of its design on a paper concealed in his sleeve. Six months later he visited the official again, and said: “Your Excellency is the possessor of a tripod censer of white Ting-yao.* Here is a similar one of mine.” Tang, the official, compared the new tripod with his own, and could detect no difference; even the stand and cover of the tripod fitted Hao’s completely. Hao smilingly admitted that his own piece was an imitation, and then sold it for sixty pieces of silver to Tang, who sold it for fifteen hundred.¹¹²

It was under the Mings that Chinese cloisonné attained its highest excellence. Both the word and the art came from outside: the word from the French cloison (partition), the art from the Near East of Byzantine days; the Chinese referred to its products occasionally as Kuei kuo yao—wares of the devils’ country.¹¹³ The art consists in cutting narrow strips of copper, silver or gold, soldering them edgewise upon the lines of a design previously drawn upon a metal object, filling the spaces between the cloisons (or wire lines) with appropriately colored enamel, exposing the vessel repeatedly to fire, grinding the hardened surface with pumice stone, polishing it with charcoal, and gilding the visible edges of the cloisons. The earliest known Chinese examples are some mirrors imported into Nara, Japan, about the middle of the eighth century. The oldest wares definitely marked belong to the end of the Mongol or Yüan Dynasty; the best, to the reign of the Ming Emperor Ching Ti. The last great period of Chinese cloisonné was under the great Manchu emperors of the eighteenth century.

The factories at Ching-te-chen were destroyed in the wars that ended the Ming Dynasty, and were not revived again until the accession of one of China’s most enlightened rulers, K’ang-hsi, who, quite as much as his contemporary Louis XIV, was every inch a king. The factories at Ching-te-chen were rebuilt under his direction, and soon three thousand furnaces were in operation. Never had China, or any other country, seen such an abundance of elegant pottery. The Kang-hsi workers thought their wares inferior to those of Ming, but modern connoisseurs do not agree with them. Old forms were imitated perfectly, and new forms were developed in rich diversity. By coating a paste with a glaze of a different tempo of fusibility the Manchu potters produced the prickly surface of “crackle” ware; and by blowing bubbles of paint upon the glaze they turned out soufflé wares covered with little circles of color. They mastered the art of monochrome, and issued peach-bloom, coral, ruby, vermilion, sang-de-bœuf and Rose-du-Barry reds; cucumber, apple, peacock, grass and céladon greens; “Mazarin,” azure, lilac and turquoise (or “kingfisher”) blues; and yellows and whites of such velvet texture that one could only describe them as smoothness made visible. They created ornate styles distinguished by French collectors as Famille Rose, Famille Verte, Famille Noir and Famille Jaune—rose, green, black and yellow families.* In the field of polychromes they developed the difficult art of subjecting a vessel, in the kiln, to alternate draughts of clear and soot-laden air—the first providing, the second withdrawing, oxygen—in such ways that the green glaze was transformed into a flame of many colors, so that the French have called this variety flambé. They painted upon some of their wares high officials in flowing queue and robes, and created the “Mandarin” style. They painted flowers of the plum in white upon a blue (less often a black) background, and gave to the world the grace and delicacy of the hawthorn vase.

The last great age of Chinese porcelain came in the long and prosperous reign of Ch’ien Lung. Fertility was undiminished; and though the new forms had something less than the success of the K’ang-hsi innovations, the skill of the master-potters was still supreme. The Famille Rose attained its fullest perfection, and spread half the flowers and fruits of nature over the most brilliant glaze, while egg-shell porcelain provided costly lampshades for extravagant millionaires.¹¹⁴ Then, through fifteen bloody years (1850-64), came the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion, ruining fifteen provinces, destroying six hundred cities, killing twenty million men and women, and so impoverishing the Manchu Dynasty that it withdrew its support from the potteries, and allowed them to close their doors and scatter their craftsmen into a disordered world.

The art of porcelain, in China, has not recovered from that devastation, and perhaps it never will. For other factors have reinforced the destructiveness of war and the ending of imperial patronage. The growth of the export trade tempted the artists to design such pieces as best satisfied the taste of European buyers, and as that taste was not as fine as the Chinese, the bad pieces drove the good pieces out of circulation by a ceramic variation of Gresham’s law. About the year 1840 English factories began to make inferior porcelain at Canton, exported it to Europe, and gave it the name of “chinaware”; factories at Sèvres in France, Meissen in Germany, and Burslem in England imitated the work of the Chinese, lowered the cost of production by installing machinery, and captured yearly more and more of China’s foreign ceramic trade.

What survives is the memory of an art perhaps as completely lost as that of medieval stained glass; try as they will, the potters of Europe have been unable to equal the subtler forms of Chinese porcelain. Connoisseurs raise with every decade their monetary estimate of the masterpieces that survive; they ask five hundred dollars for a tea-cup, and receive $23,600 for a hawthorn vase; as far back as 1767 two “turquoise” porcelain “Dogs of Fo,” at auction, brought five times as much as Guido Reni’s “Infant Jesus,” and thrice as much as Raphael’s “Holy Family.”¹¹⁵ But any one who has felt, with eyes and fingers and every nerve, the loveliness of Chinese porcelain will resent these valuations, and count them as sacrilege; the world of beauty and the world of money never touch, even when beautiful things are sold. It is enough to say that Chinese porcelain is the summit and symbol of Chinese civilization, one of the noblest things that men have done to make their species forgivable on the earth.

CHAPTER XXVI

The People and the State

I. HISTORICAL INTERLUDE

1. Marco Polo Visits Kublai Khan

The incredible travelers—Adventures of a Venetian in China—The elegance and prosperity of Hangchow—The palaces of Peking—The Mongol Conquest—Jenghiz Khan—Kublai Khan—His character and policy—His harem—“Marco Millions”

IN THE golden age of Venice, about the year 1295, two old men and a man of middle age, worn with hardship, laden with bundles, dressed in rags and covered with the dust of many roads, begged and then forced their way into the home from which, they claimed, they had set forth twenty-six years before. They had (they said) sailed many dangerous seas, scaled high mountains and plateaus, crossed bandit-ridden deserts, and passed four times through the Great Wall; they had stayed twenty years in Cathay,* and had served the mightiest monarch in the world. They told of an empire vaster, of cities more populous, and of a ruler far richer, than any known to Europe; of stones that were used for heating, of paper accepted in place of gold, and of nuts larger than a man’s head; of nations where virginity was an impediment to marriage, and of others where strangers were entertained by the free use of the host’s willing daughters and wives.¹ No man would believe them; and the people of Venice gave to the youngest and most garrulous of them the nickname “Marco Millions,” because his tale was full of numbers large and marvelous.²

Mark and his father and uncle accepted this fate with good cheer, for they had brought back with them many precious stones from the distant capital, and these gave them such wealth as maintained them in high place in their city. When Venice went to war with Genoa in 1298, Marco Polo received command of a galley; and when his ship was captured, and he was kept for a year in a Genoese jail, he consoled himself by dictating to an amenuensis the most famous travel-book in literature. He told with the charm of a simple and straightforward style how he, father Nicolo and uncle Maffeo had left Acre when Mark was but a boy of seventeen; how they had climbed over the Lebanon ranges and found their way through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, and thence through Persia, Khorassan and Balkh to the Plateau of Pamir; how they had joined caravans that slowly marched to Kashgar and Khotan, and across the Gobi Desert to Tangut, and through the Wall to Shangtu, where the Great Khan received them as humble emissaries from the youthful West.*

They had not thought that they would stay in China beyond a year or two, but they found such lucrative service and commercial opportunities under Kublai that they remained almost a quarter of a century. Marco above all prospered, rising even to be governor of Hangchow. In fond memory he describes it as far ahead of any European city in the excellence of its building and bridges, the number of its public hospitals, the elegance of its villas, the profusion of facilities for pleasure and vice, the charm and beauty of its courtesans, the effective maintenance of public order, and the manners and refinement of its people. The city, he tells us, was a hundred miles in circuit.

Its streets and canals are extensive, and of sufficient width to allow of boats on the one, and carriages on the other, to pass easily with articles necessary for the inhabitants. It is commonly said that the number of bridges, of all sizes, amounts to twelve thousand. Those which are thrown over the principal canals and are connected with the main streets, have arches so high, and built with so much skill, that vessels with their masts can pass under them. At the same time carts and horses can pass over, so well is the slope from the street graded to the height of the arch. . . . There are within the city ten principal squares or market-places, besides innumerable shops along the streets. Each side of these squares is half a mile in length, and in front of them is the main street, forty paces in width, and running in a direct line from one extremity of the city to the other. In a direction parallel to that of the main street . . . runs a very large canal, on the nearer bank of which capacious warehouses are built of stone, for the accommodation of the merchants who arrive from India and other parts with their goods and effects. They are thus conveniently situated with respect to the market-places. In each of these, upon three days in every week, there is an assemblage of from forty to fifty thousand persons. . . .

The streets are all paved with stone and bricks. . . . The main street of the city is paved . . . to the width of ten paces on each side, the intermediate part being filled up with small gravel, and provided with arched drains for carrying off the rain-water that falls into the neighboring canals, so that it remains always dry. On this gravel carriages continually pass and repass. They are of a long shape, covered at the top, have curtains and cushions of silk, and are capable of holding six persons. Both men and women who feel disposed to take their pleasure are in the daily practice of hiring them for that purpose. . . .

There is an abundant quantity of game of all kinds. . . . From the sea, which is fifteen miles distant, there is daily brought up the river, to the city, a vast quantity of fish. . . . At the sight of such an importation of fish, you would think it impossible that it could be sold; and yet, in the course of a few hours, it is all taken off, so great is the number of inhabitants. . . . The streets connected with the market-squares are numerous, and in some of them are many cold baths, attended by servants of both sexes. The men and women who frequent them have from their childhood been accustomed at all times to wash in cold water, which they reckon conducive to health. At these bathing places, however, they have apartments provided with warm water, for the use of strangers, who cannot bear the shock of the cold. All are in the daily practice of washing their persons, and especially before their meals. . . .

In other streets are the quarters of the courtesans, who are here in such numbers as I dare not venture to report, . . . adorned with much finery, highly perfumed, occupying well-furnished houses, and attended by many female domestics. . . . In other streets are the dwellings of the physicians and the astrologers. . . . On each side of the principal street there are houses and mansions of great size. . . . The men as well as the women have fair complexions, and are handsome. The greater part of them are always clothed in silk. . . . The women have much beauty, and are brought up with delicate and languid habits. The costliness of their dresses, in silks and jewelry, can scarcely be imagined.³

Peking (or, as it was then called, Cambaluc) impressed Polo even more than Hangchow; his millions fail him in describing its wealth and population. The twelve suburbs were yet more beautiful than the city; for there the business class had built many handsome homes.⁴ In the city proper there were numerous hotels, and thousands of shops and booths. Food of all kinds abounded, and every day a thousand loads of raw silk entered the gates to be turned into clothing for the inhabitants. Though the Khan had residences at Hangchow, Shangtu and other places, the most extensive of his palaces was at Peking. A marble wall surrounded it, and marble steps led up to it; the main building was so large that “dinners could be served there to great multitudes of people.” Marco admired the arrangement of the chambers, the delicate and transparent glazing of the windows, and the variety of colored tiles in the roof. He had never seen so opulent a city, or so magnificent a king.⁵

Doubtless the young Venetian learned to speak and read Chinese; and perhaps he learned from the official historians how Kublai and his Mongol ancestors had conquered China. The gradual drying up of the regions along the northwestern frontier into a desert land incapable of supporting its hardy population had sent the Mongols (i.e., “the brave”) out on desperate raids to win new fields; and their success had left them with such a taste and aptitude for war that they never stopped until nearly all Asia, and parts of Europe, had fallen before their arms. Story had it that their fiery leader, Genghis Khan, had been born with a clot of blood in the palm of his hand. From the age of thirteen he began to weld the Mongol tribes into one, and terror was his instrument. He had prisoners nailed to a wooden ass, or chopped to pieces, or boiled in cauldrons, or flayed alive. When he received a letter from the Chinese Emperor Ning Tsung demanding his submission, he spat in the direction of the Dragon Throne and began at once his march across twelve hundred miles of the Gobi desert into the western provinces of China. Ninety Chinese cities were so completely destroyed that horsemen could ride over the devastated areas in the dark without stumbling. For five years the “Emperor of Mankind” laid north China waste. Then, frightened by an unfavorable conjunction of planets, he turned back towards his native village, and died of illness on the way.⁶

His successors, Ogodai, Mangu and Kublai, continued the campaign with barbaric energy; and the Chinese, who had for centuries given themselves to culture and neglected the arts of war, died with individual heroism and national ignominy. At Juining-fu a local Chinese ruler held out until all the aged and infirm had been killed and eaten by the beseiged, all the able-bodied men had fallen, and only women remained to guard the walls; then he set fire to the city and burned himself alive in his palace. The armies of Kublai swept down through China until they stood before the last retreat of the Sung Dynasty, Canton. Unable to resist, the Chinese general, Lu Hsiu-fu, took the boy emperor on his back, and leaped to a double death with him in the sea; and it is said that a hundred thousand Chinese drowned themselves rather than yield to the Mongol conqueror. Kublai gave the imperial corpse an honorable burial, and set himself to establish that Yüan (“Original”) or Mongol Dynasty which was to rule China for less than a hundred years.

Kublai himself was no barbarian. The chief exception to this statement was not his treacherous diplomacy, which was in the manner of his time, but his treatment of the patriot and scholar, Wen T’ien-hsian, who, out of loyalty to the Sung Dynasty, refused to acknowledge Kublai’s rule. He was imprisoned for three years, but would not yield. “My dungeon,” he wrote, in one of the most famous passages in Chinese literature,

is lighted by the will-o’-the-wisp alone; no breath of spring cheers the murky solitude in which I dwell. . . . Exposed to mist and dew, I had many times thought to die; and yet, through the seasons of two revolving years, disease hovered around me in vain. The dank, unhealthy soil to me became paradise itself. For there was that within me which misfortune could not steal away. And so I remained firm, gazing at the white clouds floating over my head, and bearing in my heart a sorrow boundless as the sky.

At length Kublai summoned him into the imperial presence. “What is it that you want?” asked the monarch. “By the grace of the Sung Emperor,” answered Wen, “I became his Majesty’s minister. I cannot serve two masters. I only ask to die.” Kublai consented; and as Wen awaited the sword of the executioner upon his neck he made obeisance toward the south as though the Sung emperor were still reigning in the southern capital, Nanking.⁷

Nevertheless, Kublai had the grace to recognize the civilized superiority of the Chinese, and to merge the customs of his own people into theirs. Of necessity he abandoned the system of examinations for public office, since that system would have given him a completely Chinese bureaucracy; he restricted most higher offices to his Mongol followers, and tried for a time to introduce the Mongol alphabet. But for the greater part he and his people accepted the culture of China, and were soon transformed by it into Chinese. He tolerated the various religions philosophically, and flirted with Christianity as an instrument of pacification and rule. He reconstructed the Grand Canal between Tientsin and Hangchow, improved the highways, and provided a rapid postal service throughout a domain larger than any that has accepted the government of China since his day. He built great public granaries to store the surplus of good crops for public distribution in famine years, and remitted taxes to all peasants who had suffered from drought, storms, or insect depredations;* he organized a system of state care for aged scholars, orphans and the infirm; and he patronized munificently education, letters and the arts. Under him the calendar was revised, and the Imperial Academy was opened.⁹ At Peking he reared a new capital, whose splendor and population were the marvel of visitors from other lands. Great palaces were built, and architecture flourished as never in China before.

“Now when all this happened,” says Marco Polo, “Messer Polo was on the spot.”¹⁰ He became fairly intimate with the Khan, and describes his amusements in fond detail. Besides four wives called empresses, the Khan had many concubines, recruited from Ungut in Tatary, whose ladies seemed especially fair to the royal eye. Every second year, says Marco, officers of proved discrimination were sent to this region to enlist for his Majesty’s service a hundred young women, according to specifications carefully laid down by the king.

Upon their arrival in his presence, he causes a new examination to be made by a different set of inspectors, and from amongst them a further selection takes place, when thirty or forty are retained for his own chamber. . . . These are committed separately to the care of certain elderly ladies of the palace, whose duty it is to observe them attentively, during the course of the night, in order to ascertain that they have not any concealed imperfections, that they sleep tranquilly, do not snore, have sweet breath, and are free from unpleasant scent in any part of the body. Having undergone this rigorous scrutiny, they are divided into parties of five, each taking turn for three days and three nights in his Majesty’s interior apartment, where they are to perform every service that is required of them, and he does with them as he likes. When this term is completed they are relieved by another party, and in this manner successively, until the whole number have taken their turn; when the first five recommence their attendance.¹¹

After remaining in China for twenty years, Marco Polo, with his father and his uncle, took advantage of an embassy sent by the Khan to Persia, to return to their native city with a minimum of danger and expense. Kublai gave them a message to the Pope, and fitted them out with every comfort then known to travelers. The voyage around the Malay Peninsula to India and Persia, the overland journey to Trebizond on the Black Sea, and the final voyage to Venice, took them three years; and when they reached Europe they learned that both the Khan and the Pope were dead.* Marco himself, with characteristic obstinacy, lived to the age of seventy. On his deathbed his friends pleaded with him, for the salvation of his soul, to retract the obviously dishonest statements that he had made in his book; but he answered, stoutly: “I have not told half of what I saw.” Soon after his death a new comic figure became popular at the Venetian carnivals. He was dressed like a clown, and amused the populace by his gross exaggerations. His name was Marco Millions.¹³

2. The Ming and the Ch’ing

Fall of the Mongols—The Ming Dynasty—The Manchu invasion—The Ch’ing Dynasty—An enlightened monarch—Ch’ien Lung rejects the Occident

Not for four centuries was China to know again so brilliant an age. The Yüan Dynasty quickly declined, for it was weakened by the collapse of the Mongol power in Europe and western Asia, and by the sinification (if so pedantic a convenience may be permitted for so repeated a phenomenon) of the Mongols in China itself. Only in an era of railroads, telegraph and print could so vast and artificial an empire, so divided by mountains, deserts and seas, be held permanently under one rule. The Mongols proved better warriors than administrators, and the successors of Kublai were forced to restore the examination system and to utilize Chinese capacity in government. The conquest produced in the end little change in native customs or ideas, except that it introduced, perhaps, such new forms as the novel and the drama into Chinese literature. Once more the Chinese married their conquerors, civilized them, and overthrew them. In 1368 an ex-Buddhist priest led a revolt, entered Peking in triumph, and proclaimed himself the first emperor of the Ming (“Brilliant”) Dynasty. In the next generation an able monarch came to the throne, and under Yung Lo China again enjoyed prosperity and contributed to the arts. Nevertheless, the Brilliant Dynasty ended in a chaos of rebellion and invasion; at the very time when the country was divided into hostile factions, a new horde of conquerors poured through the Great Wall and laid seige to Peking.

The Manchus were a Tungusic people who had lived for many centuries in what is now Manchukuo (i.e., the Kingdom of the Manchus). Having extended their power northward to the Amur River, they turned back southward, and marched upon the Chinese capital. The last Ming emperor gathered his family about him, drank a toast to them, bade his wife kill herself,* and then hanged himself with his girdle after writing his last edict upon the lapel of his robe: “We, poor in virtue and of contemptible personality, have incurred the wrath of God on high. My ministers have deceived me. I am ashamed to meet my ancestors. Therefore I myself take off my crown, and with my hair covering my face await dismemberment at the hands of the rebels. Do not hurt a single one of my people.”¹⁵ The Manchus buried him with honor, and established the Ch’ing (“Unsullied”) Dynasty that was to rule China until our own revolutionary age.

They, too, soon became Chinese, and the second ruler of the Dynasty, K’ang-hsi, gave China the most prosperous, peaceful and enlightened reign in the nation’s history. Mounting the throne at the age of seven, K’ang-hsi took personal control, at the age of thirteen, of an empire that included not only China proper but Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, Indo-China, Annam, Tibet and Turkestan; it was without doubt the largest, richest and most populous empire of its time. K’ang-hsi ruled it with a wisdom and justice that filled with envy the educated subjects of his contemporaries Aurangzeb and Louis XIV. He was a man energetic in body and active in mind; he found health in a vigorous outdoor life, and at the same time labored to make himself acquainted with the learning and arts of his time. He traveled throughout his realm, corrected abuses wherever he saw them, and reformed the penal code. He lived frugally, cut down the expenses of administration, and took pride in the welfare of the people.¹⁶ Under his generous patronage and discriminating appreciation literature and scholarship flourished, and the art of porcelain reached one of the peaks of its career. He tolerated all the religions, studied Latin under the Jesuits, and put up patiently with the strange practices of European merchants in his ports. When he died, after a long and beneficent reign (1661-1722), he left these as his parting words: “There is cause for apprehension lest, in the centuries or millenniums to come, China may be endangered by collisions with the various nations of the West who come hither from beyond the seas.”¹⁷

These problems, arising out of the increasing commerce and contacts of China with Europe came to the front again under another able emperor of the Manchu line—Ch’ien Lung. Ch’ien Lung wrote 34,000 poems; one of them, on “Tea,” came to the attention of Voltaire, who sent his “compliments to the charming king of China.”¹⁸ French missionaries painted his portrait, and inscribed under it these indifferent verses:

Occupé sans relâche à tous les soins divers

D’un gouvernement qu’on admire,

Le plus grand potentat qui soit dans l’univers

Est le Meilleur lettré qui soit dans son Empire *

He ruled China for two generations (1736-96), abdicated in his eightyfifth year, and continued to dominate the government until his death (1799). During the last years of his reign an incident occurred which might have led the thoughtful to recall the forebodings of K’ang-hsi. England, which had aroused the Emperor’s anger by importing opium into China, sent, in 1792, a commission under Lord Macartney to negotiate a commercial treaty with Ch’ien Lung. The commissioners explained to him the advantages of trading with England, and added that the treaty which they sought would take for granted the equality of the British ruler with the Chinese emperor. Ch’ien Lung dictated this reply to George III:

I set no value on objects strange and ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures. This, then, is my answer to your request to appoint a representative at my court, a request contrary to our dynastic usage, which could only result in inconvenience to yourself. I have expounded my views in detail and have commanded your tribute envoys to leave in peace on their homeward journeys. It behooves you, O King, to respect my sentiments and to display even greater devotion and loyalty in future, so that, by perpetual submission to our throne, you may secure peace and prosperity for your country hereafter.¹⁹

In these proud words China tried to stave off the Industrial Revolution. We shall see in the sequel how, nevertheless, that Revolution came. Meanwhile let us study the economic, political and moral elements of the unique and instructive civilization which that Revolution seems destined to destroy.

II. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE*

Population—Appearance—Dress—Peculiarities of Chinese speech—Of Chinese writing

The first element in the picture is number: there are many Chinese. Learned guessers calculate that the population of the Chinese states in 280 B.C. was around 14,000,000; in 200 A.D., 28,000,000; in 726, 41,500,000; in 1644, 89,000,000; in 1743, 150,000,000; in 1919, 330,000,000.²⁰ In the fourteenth century a European traveler counted in China “two hundred cities all greater than Venice.”²¹ The Chinese census is obtained through a registration law requiring every household to inscribe the names of its occupants upon a tablet at the entrance;²² we do not know how accurate these tablets are, or the reports which purport to be based upon them. It is probable that China now harbors some 400,000,000 souls.

The Chinese vary in stature, being shorter and weaker in the south, taller and stronger in the north; in general they are the most vigorous people in Asia. They show great physical stamina, magnificent courage in the bearing of hardships and pain, exceptional resistance to disease, and a climatic adaptability which has enabled them to prosper in almost every zone. Neither opium nor inbreeding nor syphilis has been able to impair their health, and the collapse of their social system has not been due to any visible deterioration in their biological or mental vitality.

The Chinese face is one of the most intelligent on earth, though not universally attractive. Some of the pauper class are incomparably ugly to our Western prejudice, and some criminals have an evil leer admirably suited to cinematic caricature; but the great majority have regular features calm with the physiological accident of low eyelids, and the social accumulation of centuries of civilization. The slant of the eyes is not so pronounced as one had been led to expect, and the yellow skin is often a pleasant suntanned brown. The women of the peasantry are almost as strong as the men; the ladies of the upper strata are delicate and pretty, starch themselves with powder, rouge their lips and cheeks, blacken their eyebrows, and train or thin them to resemble a willow leaf or the crescent moon.²³ The hair in both sexes is coarse and vigorous, and never curls. The women wear theirs in a tuft, usually adorned with flowers. Under the last dynasty the men, to please their rulers, adopted the Manchu custom of shaving the fore half of the head; in compensation they left the remainder uncut and gathered it into a long queue, which became in time an instrument of correction and a support of pride.²⁴ Beards were small, and were always shaved, though seldom by the owners thereof; barbers carried their shops about with them, and throve.

The head was ordinarily left bare; when men covered it they used in winter a cap of velvet or fur with a turned-up rim, and in summer a conical cap of finely woven filaments of bamboo, surmounted, in persons of any rank, by a colored ball and a silken fringe. Women, when they could afford it, clothed their heads with silk or cotton bands adorned with tinsel, trinkets or artificial flowers. Shoes were usually of warm cloth; since the floor was often of cold tile or earth, the Chinese carried a miniature carpet with him under each foot. By a custom begun at the court of the Emperor Li Hou-chu (ca. 970 A.D.), the feet of girls, at the age of seven, were compressed with tight bandages to prevent their further growth, so that the mature lady might walk with a mincing step erotically pleasing to the men. It was regarded as immodest to speak of a woman’s foot, and as scandalous to look at one; in the presence of a lady even the word for shoe was tabu.²⁵ The practice spread to all ranks and groups except the Manchus and Tatars, and became so rigid that a deception about the size of the bride’s foot sufficed to annul an engagement or a marriage.²⁶ K’ang-hsi tried to stop the custom, but failed; today it is one of the happier casualties of the Revolution.

Men covered their nakedness with trousers and tunics, almost always blue. In winter the trousers were overlaid with leggings, and additional tunics, sometimes to the number of thirteen, were put on. These were kept on night and day throughout the winter, and were removed one by one with the progress of spring.²⁷ The tunic fell variously to the loins, or the knees, or the feet; it was buttoned closely up to the neck, and had immense sleeves instead of pockets; China does not say that a man “pocketed” an object, but that he “sleeved” it. Shirts and underwear were well-nigh unknown.²⁸ In the country women wore trousers like the men, since they were accustomed to doing a man’s work and more; in the towns they covered the trousers with skirts. In the cities silk was almost as common as cotton.²⁹ No belt compressed the waist, and no corsets held in the breasts. In general the Chinese dress was more sensible, healthy and convenient than the garb of the modern West. No tyranny of fashion harassed or exalted the life of the Chinese woman; all urban classes dressed alike, and nearly all generations; the quality of the garment might differ, but not the form; and all ranks might be sure that the fashion would last as long as the gown.

The language of the Chinese differed from the rest of the world even more distinctly than their dress. It had no alphabet, no spelling, no grammar, and no parts of speech; it is amazing how well and how long this oldest and most populous nation on earth has managed without these curses of Occidental youth. Perhaps in forgotten days there were inflections, declensions, conjugations, cases, numbers, tenses, moods; but the language as far back as we can trace it shows none of them. Every word in it may be a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb, according to its context and its tone. Since the spoken dialects have only from four to eight hundred monosyllabic word-sounds or vocables, and these must be used to express the 40,000 characters of the written language, each vocable has from four to nine “tones,” so that its meaning is made to differ according to the manner in which it is sung. Gestures and context eke out these tones, and make each sound serve many purposes; so the vocable I may mean any one of sixty-nine things, shi may mean fifty-nine, ku twenty-nine.³⁰ No other language has been at once so complex, so subtle and so brief.

The written language was even more unique than the spoken. The objects exhumed in Honan, and tentatively dated back to the Shang Dynasty, bear writing in characters substantially like those in use until our own generation, so that—barring a few Copts who still speak ancient Egyptian—Chinese is both the oldest and the most widespread language spoken on the earth today. Originally, as we infer from a passage in Lao-tze, the Chinese used knotted cords to communicate messages. Probably the needs of priests in tracing magic formulas, and of potters in marking their vessels, led to the development of a pictorial script.³² These primitive pictograms were the original form of the six hundred signs that are now the fundamental characters in Chinese writing. Some two hundred and fourteen of them have been named “radicals” because they enter as elements into nearly all the characters of the current language. The present characters are highly complex symbols, in which the primitive pictorial element has been overlaid with additions designed to define the term specifically, usually through some indication of its sound. Not only every word, but every idea, has its own separate sign; one sign represents a horse, another sign “a bay horse with a white belly,” another “a horse with a white spot on his forehead.” Some of the characters are still relatively simple: a curve over a straight line (i.e., the sun over the horizon) means “morning”; the sun and the moon together represent “light”; a mouth and a bird together mean “singing”; a woman beneath a roof means “peace”; a woman, a mouth and the sign for “crooked” constitute the character for “dangerous”; a man and a woman together mean “talkative”; “quarreling” is a woman with two mouths; “wife” is represented by signs for a woman, a broom and a storm.³³

From some points of view this is a primitive language that has by supreme conservatism survived into “modern” times. Its difficulties are more obvious than its virtues. We are told that the Chinese takes from ten to fifty years to become acquainted with all the 40,000 characters in his language; but when we realize that these characters are not letters but ideas, and reflect on the length of time it would take us to master 40,000 ideas, or even a vocabularly of 40,000 words, we perceive that the terms of the comparison are unfair to the Chinese; what we should say is that it takes any one fifty years to master 40,000 ideas. In actual practice the average Chinese gets along quite well with three or four thousand signs, and learns these readily enough by finding their “radicals.” The clearest advantage of such a language—expressing not sounds but ideas—is that it can be read by Koreans and Japanese as easily as by the Chinese, and provides the Far East with an international written language. Again it unites in one system of writing all the inhabitants of China, whose dialects differ to the point of mutual unintelligibility; the same character is read as different sounds or words in different localities. This advantage applies in time as well as in space; since the written language has remained essentially the same while the spoken language has diverged from it into a hundred dialects, the literature of China, written for two thousand years in these characters, can be read today by any literate Chinese, though we cannot tell how the ancient writers pronounced the words, or spoke the ideas, which the signs represent. This persistence of the same script amidst a flux and diversity of speech made for the preservation of Chinese thought and culture, and at the same time served as a powerful force for conservatism; old ideas held the stage and formed the mind of youth. The character of Chinese civilization is symbolized in this phenomenon of its unique script: its unity amid diversity and growth, its profound conservatism, and its unrivaled continuity. This system of writing was in every sense a high intellectual achievement; it classified the whole world—of objects, activities and qualities—under a few hundred root or “radical” signs, combined with these signs some fifteen hundred distinguishing marks, and made them represent, in their completed forms, all the ideas used in literature and life. We must not be too sure that our own diverse modes of writing down our thoughts are superior to this apparently primitive form. Leibnitz in the seventeenth century, and Sir Donald Ross in our time, dreamed of a system of written signs independent of spoken languages, free from their nationalist diversity and their variations in space and time, and capable, therefore, of expressing the ideas of different peoples in identical and mutually intelligible ways. But precisely such a sign language, uniting a hundred generations and a quarter of the earth’s inhabitants, already exists in the Far East. The conclusion of the Oriental is logical and terrible: the rest of the world must learn to write Chinese.

III. THE PRACTICAL LIFE

1. In the Fields

The poverty of the peasant—Methods of husbandry—Crops—Tea—Food—The stoicism of the village

All the varied literature of that language, all the subtleties of Chinese thought and the luxuries of Chinese life, rested in the last analysis on the fertility of the fields. Or rather on the toil of men—for fertile fields are not born but made. Through many centuries the early inhabitants of China must have fought against jungle and forest, beast and insect, drought and flood, saltpetre and frost to turn this vast wilderness into fruitful soil. And the victory had to be periodically rewon; a century of careless timbercutting left a desert,* and a few years of neglect allowed the jungle to return. The struggle was bitter and perilous; at any moment the barbarians might rush in, and seize the slow growths of the cleared earth. Therefore the peasants, for their protection, lived not in isolated homesteads but in small communities, surrounded their villages with walls, went out together to plant and cultivate the soil, and often slept through the night on guard in their fields.

Their methods were simple, and yet they did not differ much from what they are today. Sometimes they used ploughs—first of wood, then of stone, then of iron; but more often they turned up their little plots patiently with the hoe. They helped the soil with any natural fertilizer they could find, and did not disdain to collect for this purpose the offal of dogs and men. From the earliest times they dug innumerable canals to bring the water of their many rivers to rice paddies or millet fields; deep channels were cut through miles of solid rock to tap some elusive stream, or to divert its course into a desiccated plain. Without rotation of crops or artificial manures, and often without draft animals of any kind, the Chinese have wrung two or three crops annually from at least half their soil, and have won more nourishment from the earth than any other people in history.³⁴

The cereals they grew were chiefly millet and rice, with wheat and barley as lesser crops. The rice was turned into wine as well as food, but the peasant never drank too much of it. His favorite drink, and next to rice his largest crop, was tea. Used first as a medicine, it grew in popularity until, in the days of the T’angs, it entered the realms of export and poetry. By the fifteenth century all the Far East was esthetically intoxicated with the ceremony of drinking tea; epicures searched for new varieties, and drinking tournaments were held to determine whose tea was the best.³⁵ Added to these products were delicious vegetables, sustaining legumes like the soy bean and its sprouts, doughty condiments like garlic and the onion, and a thousand varieties of berries and fruits.³⁶ Least of all products of rural toil was meat; now and then oxen and buffalos were used for ploughing, but stock-raising for food was confined to pigs and fowl.³⁷ A large part of the population lived by snaring fish from the streams and the sea.

Dry rice, macaroni, vermicelli, a few vegetables, and a little fish formed the diet of the poor; the well-to-do added pork and chicken, and the rich indulged a passion for duck; the most pretentious of Peking dinners consisted of a hundred courses of duck.³⁸ Cow’s milk was rare and eggs were few and old, but the soy bean provided wholesome milk and cheese. Cooking was developed into a fine art, and made use of everything; grasses and seaweeds were plucked and birds’ nests ravished to make tasty soups; dainty dishes were concocted out of sharks’ fins and fish intestines, locusts and grasshoppers, grubs and silkworms, horses and mules, rats and water-snakes, cats and dogs.⁴⁰ The Chinese loved to eat; it was not unusual for a rich man’s dinner to have forty courses, and to require three or four hours of gentlemanly absorption.

The poor man did not need so much time for his two meals a day. With all his toil the peasant, with exceptions here and there, was never secure from starvation until he was dead. The strong and clever accumulated large estates, and concentrated the wealth of the country into a few hands; occasionally, as under Shih Huang-ti, the soil was redivided among the population, but the natural inequality of men soon concentrated wealth again.⁴¹ The majority of the peasants owned land, but as the population increased faster than the area under cultivation, the average holding became smaller with every century. The result was a poverty equaled only by destitute India: the typical family earned but $83 a year, many men lived on two cents a day, and millions died of hunger in each year.⁴² For twenty centuries China has had an average of one famine annually;⁴³ partly because the peasant was exploited to the verge of subsistence, partly be’ cause reproduction outran the fertility of the soil, and partly because transport was so undeveloped that one region might starve while another had more than it required. Finally, flood might destroy what the landlord and the tax-collector had left; the Hoang-ho—which the people called “China’s Sorrow”—might change its course, swamp a thousand villages, and leave another thousand with desiccated land.

The peasants bore these evils with stolid fortitude. “All that a man needs in this transitory life,” said one of their proverbs, “is a hat and a bowl of rice.’⁴⁴ They worked hard, but not fast; no complex machine hurried them, or racked their nerves with its noise, its danger and its speed. There were no weekends and no Sundays, but there were many holidays; periodically some festival, like the Feast of the New Year, or the Feast of the Lanterns, gave the worker some rest from his toil, and brightened with myth and drama the duller seasons of the year. When the winter turned away its scowling face, and the snow-nourished earth softened under the spring rains, the peasants went out once more to plant their narrow fields, and sang with good cheer the hopeful songs that had come down to them from the immemorial past.

2. In the Shops

Handicrafts—Silk—Factories—Guilds—Men of burden—Roads and canals—Merchants—Credit and coinage—Currency experiments—Printing-press inflation

Meanwhile industry flourished as nowhere else on earth before our eighteenth century. As far back as we can delve into Chinese history we find busy handicrafts in the home and thriving trade in the towns. The basic industries were the weaving of textiles and the breeding of worms for the secretion of silk; both were carried on by women in or near their cottages. Silk-weaving was a very ancient art, whose beginnings in China went back to the second millennium before Christ.*⁴⁵ The Chinese fed the worms on fresh-cut mulberry leaves, with startling results: on this diet a pound of (700,000) worms increased in weight to 9,500 pounds in forty-two days.⁴⁷ The adult worms were then placed in little tents of straw, around which they wove their cocoons by emitting silk. The cocoons were dropped in hot water, the silk came away from its shell, was treated and woven, and was skilfully turned into a great variety of rich clothing, tapestries, embroideries and brocades for the upper classes of the world.* The raisers and weavers of silk wore cotton.

Even in the centuries before Christ this domestic industry had been supplemented with shops in the towns. As far back as 300 B.C. there had been an urban proletariat, organized with its masters into industrial guilds.⁴⁹ The growth of this shop industry filled the towns with a busy population, making the China of Kublai Khan quite the equal, industrially, of eighteenth-century Europe. “There are a thousand workshops for each craft,” wrote Marco Polo, “and each furnishes employment for ten, fifteen, or twenty workmen, and in a few instances as many as forty. . . . The opulent masters in these shops do not labor with their own hands, but on the contrary assume airs of gentility and affect parade.”⁵⁰ These guilds, like codified industries of our time, limited competition, and regulated wages, prices and hours; many of them restricted output in order to maintain the prices of their products; and perhaps their genial content with traditional ways must share some of the responsibility for retarding the growth of science in China, and obstructing the Industrial Revolution until all barriers and institutions are today being broken down by its flood.

The guilds undertook many of the functions which the once proud citizens of the West have surrendered to the state: they passed their own laws, and administered them fairly; they made strikes infrequent by arbitrating the disputes of employers and employees through mediation boards representing each side equally; they served in general as a self-governing and self-disciplining organization for industry, and provided an admirable escape from the modern dilemma between laissez-faire and the servile state. These guilds were formed not only by merchants, manufacturers and their workmen, but by such less exalted trades as barbers, coolies and cooks; even the beggars were united in a brotherhood that subjected its members to strict laws.⁵¹ A small minority of town laborers were slaves, engaged for the most part in domestic service, and usually bonded to their masters for a period of years, or for life. In times of famine girls and orphans were exposed for sale at the price of a few “cash,” and a father might at any time sell his daughters as bondservants. Such slavery, however, never reached the proportions that it attained in Greece and Rome; the majority of the workers were free agents or members of guilds, and the majority of the peasants owned their land, and governed themselves in village communities largely independent of national control.⁵²

The products of labor were carried on the backs of men; even human transport moved, for the most part, in sedan chairs raised upon the bruised but calloused shoulders of uncomplaining coolies.* Heavy buckets or enormous bundles were balanced on the ends of poles, and slung over the shoulder. Sometimes dray-carts were drawn by donkeys, but more often they were pulled by men. Muscle was so cheap that there was no encouragement to the development of animal or mechanical transport; and the primitiveness of transportation offered no stimulus to the improvement of roads. When European capital built the first Chinese railway (1876)—a ten-mile line between Shanghai and Woosung—the people protested that it would disturb and offend the spirit of the earth; and the opposition grew so vigorous that the government bought the railroad and heaved its rolling stock into the sea.⁵³ In the days of Shih Huang-ti and Kublai Khan imperial highways existed, paved with stone; but only their outlines now remain. The city streets were mere alleys eight feet wide, designed with a view to keeping out the sun. Bridges were numerous, and sometimes very beautiful, like the marble bridge at the Summer Palace. Commerce and travel used avenues of water almost as frequently as the land; 25,000 miles of canals served as a leisurely substitute for railways; and the Grand Canal between Hangchow and Tientsin, 650 miles long, begun about 300 A.D. and completed by Kublai Khan was surpassed only by the Great Wall in the modest list of China’s engineering achievements. “Junks” and sampans plied the rivers busily, and provided not only cheap transportation for goods, but homes for millions of the poor.

The Chinese are natural merchants, and work many hours at the business of bargaining. Chinese philosophy and officialdom agreed in despising traders, and the Han emperors taxed them heavily, and forbade them to use carriages or silk. The educated classes displayed long nails as Western women wore French heels—to indicate their exemption from physical toil.⁵⁴ It was the custom to rank scholars, teachers and officials as the highest class, farmers as the next, artisans as the third, merchants as the lowest; for, said China, these last merely made profits by exchanging the fruits of other men’s toil. Nevertheless they prospered, carried the products of Chinese fields and workshops to all corners of Asia, and became in the end the chief financial support of the government. Internal commerce was hindered by the likin tax, and foreign trade was made hazardous by robbers on land and pirates on the sea; but the merchants of China found a way, by sailing around the Malay Peninsula or plodding the caravan routes through Turkestan, to get their goods to India, Persia, Mesopotamia, at last even to Rome.⁵⁵ Silk and tea, porcelain and paper, peaches and apricots, gunpowder and playing cards, were the staple exports; in return for which the world sent to China alfalfa and glass, carrots and peanuts, tobacco and opium.

Trade was facilitated by an ancient system of credit and coinage. Merchants lent to one another at high rates of interest, averaging some thirty-six per cent—though this was no higher than in Greece and Rome.⁵⁶ Money-lenders took great risks, charged commensurate fees, and were popular only at borrowing time; “wholesale robbers,” said an old Chinese proverb, “start a bank.”⁵⁷ The oldest known currency of the country took the form of shells, knives and silk; the first metal currency went back at least to the fifth century B.C.⁵⁸ Under the Ch’in Dynasty gold was made the standard of value by the government; but an alloy of copper and tin served for the smaller coins, and gradually drove out the gold.* When Wu Ti’s experiment with a currency of silver alloyed with tin was ruined by counterfeiters, the coins were replaced with leather strips a foot long, which became the foster-parents of paper money. About the year 807, the supply of copper having, like modern gold, become inadequate as compared with the rising abundance of goods, the Emperor Hsien Tsung ordered that all copper currency should be deposited with the government, and issued in exchange for it certificates of indebtedness which received the name of “flying money” from the Chinese, who appear to have taken their fiscal troubles as good-naturedly as the Americans of 1933. The practice was discontinued after the passing of the emergency; but the invention of block-printing tempted the government to apply the new art to the making of money, and about 935 A.D. the semi-independent province of Szechuan, and in 970 the national government at Ch’ang-an, began the issuance of paper money. During the Sung Dynasty a fever of printing-press inflation ruined many fortunes.⁵⁹ “The Emperor’s Mint,” wrote Polo of Kublai’s treasury, “is in the city of Cambaluc (Peking); and the way it is wrought is such that you might say that he hath the Secret of Alchemy in perfection, and you would be right. For he makes his money after this fashion”—and he proceeded to arouse the incredulous scorn of his countrymen by describing the process by which the bark of the mulberry tree was pressed into bits of paper accepted by the people as the equivalent of gold.⁶⁰ Such were the sources of that flood of paper money which, ever since, has alternately accelerated and threatened the economic life of the world.

3. Invention and Science

Gunpowder, fireworks and war—The compass—Poverty of industrial invention—Geography—Mathematics—Physics—“Fengshui”—Astronomy—Medicine—Hygiene

The Chinese have been more facile in making inventions than in using them. Gunpowder appeared under the T’angs, but was very sensibly restricted to fireworks; not until the Sung Dynasty (1161 A.D.) was it formed into hand-grenades and employed in war. The Arabs became acquainted with saltpetre—the main constituent of gunpowder—in the course of their trade with China, and called it “Chinese snow”; they brought the secret of gunpowder westward, the Saracens turned it to military use, and Roger Bacon, the first European to mention it, may have learned of it through his study of Arab lore or his acquaintance with the central Asiatic traveler, De Rubruquis.⁶¹

The compass is of much greater antiquity. If we may believe Chinese historians, it was invented by the Duke of Chou in the reign of the Emperor Cheng Wang (1115-1078 B.C.) to guide certain foreign ambassadors back to their home lands; the Duke, we are told, presented the embassy with five chariots each equipped with a “south-pointing needle.”⁶² Very probably the magnetic properties of the lodestone were known to ancient China, but the use of it was confined to orienting temples. The magnetic needle was described in the Sung-shu, an historical work of the fifth century A.D., and was attributed by the author to the astronomer Chang Heng (d. 139 A.D.), who, however, had only rediscovered what China had known before. The oldest mention of the needle as useful for mariners occurs in a work of the early twelfth century, which ascribes this use of it to foreign—probably Arab—navigators plying between Sumatra and Canton.⁶³ About 1190 we find the first known European notice of the compass in a poem by Guyot de Provins.⁶⁴

Despite the contribution of the compass and gunpowder, of paper and silk, of printing and porcelain, we cannot speak of the Chinese as an industrially inventive people. They were inventive in art, developing their own forms, and reaching a degree of sensitive perfection not surpassed in any other place or time; but before 1912 they were content with ancient economic ways, and had a perhaps prophetic scorn of labor-saving devices that hectically accelerate the pace of human toil and throw half the population out of work in order to enrich the rest. They were among the first to use coal for fuel, and mined it in small quantities as early as 122 B.C.;⁶⁵ but they developed no mechanisms to ease the slavery of mining, and left for the most part unexplored the mineral resources of their soil. Though they knew how to make glass they were satisfied to import it from the West. They made no watches or clocks or screws, and only the coarsest nails.⁶⁶ Through the two thousand years that intervened between the rise of the Han and the fall of the Manchus, industrial life remained substantially the same in China—as it remained substantially the same in Europe from Pericles to the Industrial Revolution.

In like manner China preferred the quiet and mannerly rule of tradition and scholarship to the exciting and disturbing growth of science and plutocracy. Of all the great civilizations it has been the poorest in contributions to the material technique of life. It produced excellent textbooks of agriculture and sericulture two centuries before Christ, and excelled in treatises on geography.⁶⁷ Its centenarian mathematician, Chang Ts’ang (d. 152 B.C.), left behind him a work on algebra and geometry, containing the first known mention of a negative quantity. Tsu Ch’ung-chih calculated the correct value of π to six decimal places, improved the magnet or “south-pointing vehicle,” and is vaguely recorded to have experimented with a self-moving vessel.⁶⁸ Chang Heng invented a seismograph in 132 A.D.,* but for the most part Chinese physics lost itself in the occultism of feng shut and the metaphysics of the yang and the yin.† Chinese mathematicians apparently derived algebra from India, but developed geometry for themselves out of their need for measuring the land.⁷⁰ The astronomers of Confucius’ time correctly calculated eclipses, and laid the bases of the Chinese calendar—twelve hours a day, and twelve months each beginning with the new moon; an extra month was added periodically to bring this lunar calendar in accord with the seasons and the sun.⁷¹ Life on earth was lived in harmony with life in the sky; the festivals of the year were regulated by sun and moon; the moral order of society itself was based upon the regularity of the planets and the stars.

Medicine in China was a characteristic mixture of empirical wisdom and popular superstition. It had its beginnings before recorded history, and produced great physicians long before Hippocrates. Already under the Chous the state held yearly examinations for admission to medical practice, and fixed the salaries of the successful applicants according to their showing in the tests. In the fourth century before Christ a Chinese governor ordered a careful dissection and anatomical study of forty beheaded criminals; but the results were lost in theoretical discussion, and dissection stopped. Chang Chung-ning, in the second century, wrote treatises on dietetics and fevers, which remained standard texts for a thousand years. In the third century Hua To wrote a volume on surgery, and made operations popular by inventing a wine which produced a general anesthesia; it is one of the stupidities of history that the formula for mixing this drink has been lost. About 300 A.D. Wang Shu-ho wrote a celebrated treatise on the pulse.⁷² Towards the beginning of the sixth century T’ao Hung-ching composed an extensive description of the 730 drugs used in Chinese medicine; and a hundred years later Ch’ao Yuan-fang wrote a classic on the diseases of women and children. Medical encyclopedias were frequent under the T’angs, and specialist monographs under the Sungs.⁷³ A medical college was established in the Sung Dynasty, but most medical education was through apprenticeship. Drugs were abundant and various; one store, three centuries ago, sold a thousand dollars’ worth every day.⁷⁴ Diagnosis was pedantically detailed; ten thousand varieties of fever were described, and twenty-four conditions of the pulse were distinguished. Inoculation—not vaccination—was used, probably in imitation of India, in the treatment of small-pox; and mercury was administered for syphilis. This disease seems to have appeared in China in the later years of the Ming Dynasty, to have run wild through the population, and to have left behind its course a comparative immunity to its more serious effects. Public sanitation, preventive medicine, hygiene and surgery made little progress in China; sewage and drainage systems were primitive, or hardly existed;⁷⁵ and some towns failed to solve the primary obligations of an organized society—to secure good water, and to dispose of waste.

Soap was a rare luxury, but lice and vermin were easily secured. The simpler Chinese learned to itch and scratch with Confucian equanimity. Medical science made no ascertainable progress from Shih Huang-ti to the Dowager; perhaps the same might be said of European medicine between Hippocrates and Pasteur. European medicine invaded China as an annex to Christianity; but the sick natives, until our own time, confined their use of it to surgery, and for the rest preferred their own physicians and their ancient herbs.

IV. RELIGION WITHOUT A CHURCH

Superstition and scepticism—Animism—The worship of Heaven—Ancestor-worship—Confucianism—Taoism—The elixir of immortality—Buddhism—Religious toleration and eclecticism—Mohammedanism—Christianity—Causes of its failure in China

Chinese society was built not on science but on a strange and unique mixture of religion, morals and philosophy. History has known no people more superstitious, and none more sceptical; no people more devoted to piety, and none more rationalistic and secular; no nation so free from clerical domination, and none but the Hindus so blessed and cursed with gods. How shall we explain these contradictions, except by ascribing to the philosophers of China a degree of influence unparalleled in history, and at the same time recognizing in the poverty of China an inexhaustible fountain of hopeful fantasy?

The religion of the primitive inhabitants was not unlike the faith of nature peoples generally: an animistic fear and worship of spirits lurking anywhere, a poetic reverence for the impressive forms and reproductive powers of the earth, and an awed adoration of a heaven whose energizing sunlight and fertilizing rains were part of the mystic rapport between terrestrial life and the secret forces of the sky. Wind and thunder, trees and mountains, dragons and snakes were worshiped; but the greater festivals celebrated above all the miracle of growth, and in the spring girls and young men danced and mated in the fields to give example of fertility to mother earth. Kings and priests were in those days near allied, and the early monarchs of China, in the edifying accounts which tendentious historians gave of them in later years, were statesmen-saints whose heroic deeds were always prefaced with prayers, and aided by the gods.⁷⁶

In this primitive theology heaven and earth were bound together as two halves of a great cosmic unity, and were related very much as man and woman, lord and vassal, yang and yin. The order of the heavens and the moral behavior of mankind were kindred processes, parts of a universal and necessary rhythm called Tao—the heavenly way; morality, like the law of the stars, was the cooperation of the part with the whole. The Supreme God was this mighty heaven itself, this moral order, this divine orderliness, that engulfed both men and things, dictating the right relationship of children to parents, of wives to husbands, of vassals to lords, of lords to the emperor, and of the emperor to God. It was a confused but noble conception, hovering between personality when the people prayed to T’ien—heaven as a deity—and impersonality when the philosophers spoke of T’ien as the just and beneficent, but hardly human or personal, sum of all those forces that ruled the sky, the earth, and men. Gradually, as philosophy developed, the personal conception of “Heaven” was confined to the masses of the people, and the impersonal conception was accepted by the educated classes and in the official religion of the state.⁷⁷

Out of these beginnings grew the two elements of the orthodox religion of China: the nation-wide worship of ancestors, and the Confucian worship of heaven and great men. Every day some modest offering—usually of food—was made to the departed, and prayers were sent up to their spirits; for the simple peasant or laborer believed that his parents and other forbears still lived in some ill-defined realm, and could bring him good or evil fortune. The educated Chinese offered similar sacrifice, but he looked upon the ritual not as worship so much as commemoration; it was wholesome for the soul and the race that these dead ones should be remembered and revered, for then the ancient ways which they had followed would also be revered, innovation would hesitate, and the empire would be at peace. There were some inconveniences in this religion, for it littered China with immense inviolable graves, impeding the construction of railroads and the tillage of the soil; but to the Chinese philosopher these were trivial difficulties when weighed in the balance against the political stability and spiritual continuity which ancestor worship gave to civilization. For through this profound institution the nation, which was shut out from physical and spatial unity by great distances and the poverty of transport, achieved a powerful spiritual unity in time; the generations were bound together with the tough web of tradition, and the individual life received an ennobling share and significance in a drama of timeless majesty and scope.

The religion adopted by the scholars and the state was at once a widening and a narrowing of this popular faith. Slowly, by increments of reverence from century to century, Confucius was lifted up, through imperial decrees, to a place second only to that of Heaven itself; every school raised a tablet, every city a temple, in his honor; and periodically the emperor and the officials offered incense and sacrifice to his spirit or his memory, as the greatest influence for good in all the rich memories of the race. He was not, in the understanding of the intelligent, a god; on the contrary he served for many Chinese as a substitute for a god; those who attended the services in his honor might be agnostics or atheists, and yet—if they honored him and their ancestors—they were accepted by their communities as pious and religious souls. Officially, however, the faith of the Confucians included a recognition of Shang-ti, the Supreme Ruling Force of the world; and every year the emperor offered ceremonious sacrifice, on the Altar of Heaven, to this impersonal divinity. Nothing was said, in this official faith, of immortality.⁷⁸ Heaven was not a place but the will of God, or the order of the world.

This simple and almost rationalistic religion never quite satisfied the people of China. Its doctrines gave too little room to the imagination of men, too little answer to their hopes and dreams, too little encouragement to the superstitions that enlivened their daily life. For the people, here as everywhere, brightened the prose of reality with the poetry of the supernatural; they felt a world of good or evil spirits hovering in the air about them and the earth beneath, and longed to appease the enmity or enlist the aid of these secret powers by magic incantation or prayer. They paid diviners to read the future for them in the lines of the 1-Ching, or on the shells of tortoises, or in the movements, of the stars; they hired magicians to orient their dwellings and graves to wind and water, and sorcerers to bring them sunshine or rain.⁷⁹ They exposed to death such children as were born to them on “unlucky” days,⁸⁰ and fervent daughters sometimes killed themselves to bring good or evil fortune to their parents.⁸¹ In the south, particularly, the Chinese soul inclined to mysticism; it was repelled by the frigid rationalism of the Confucian faith, and hungered for a creed that would give China, like other nations, deathless consolations.

Therefore some popular theologians took the misty doctrine of Lao-tze and gradually transformed it into a religion. To the Old Master and to Chuang-tze the Tao had been a way of life for the attainment of individual peace on earth; they do not seem ever to have dreamed of it as a deity, much less as a price to be paid here for a life beyond the grave.⁸² But in the second century of our era these doctrines were improved upon by men who claimed to have received, in direct line from Lao-tze, an elixir that would confer immortality. This drink became so popular that several emperors are said to have died from pious indulgence in it.⁸³ A mystagogue in Szechuan (ca. 148 A.D.) offered to cure all diseases with a simple talisman to be given in exchange for five packages of rice. Apparently miraculous cures were effected, and those who were not cured were told that their faith had been too weak.⁸⁴ The people flocked to the new religion, built temples for it, supported its priesthood generously, and poured into the new faith some part of their inexhaustible superstitious lore. Lao-tze was made a god, and was credited with a supernatural conception; he had been born, the faithful believed, already old and wise, having been in his mother’s womb for eighty years.⁸⁵ They peopled the world with new devils and deities, frightened away the one with firecrackers exploding merrily in the temple courts, and with mighty gongs called the others out of slumber to hear their importunate prayers.

For a thousand years the Taoist faith had millions of adherents, converted many emperors, and fought long battles of intrigue to wrest from the Confucians the divine right to tax and spend. In the end it was broken down not by the logic of Confucius, but by the coming of a new religion even better suited than itself to inspire and console the common man. For the Buddhism that began its migration from India to China in the first century after Christ was not the hard and gloomy doctrine that the Enlightened One had preached five hundred years before; it was no ascetic creed, but a bright and happy faith in helping deities and a flowering paradise; it took the form, as time went on, of the Greater Vehicle, or Mahayana, which Kanishka’s theologians had adapted to the emotional needs of simple men; it presented China with freshly personal and humane gods, like Amitabha, Ruler of Paradise, and Kuan-yin, god-then-goddess of mercy; it filled the Chinese pantheon with Lohans or Arhats—eighteen of the original disciples of Buddha—who stood ready at every turn to give of their merits to help a bewildered and suffering mankind. When, after the fall of the Han, China found itself torn with political chaos, and life seemed lost in a welter of insecurity and war, the harassed nation turned to Buddhism as the Roman world was at the same time turning to Christianity. Taoism opened its arms to take in the new faith, and in time became inextricably mingled with it in the Chinese soul. Emperors persecuted Buddhism, philosophers complained of its superstitions, statesmen were concerned over the fact that some of the best blood of China was being sterilized in monasteries; but in the end the government found again that religion is stronger than the state; the emperors made treaties of peace with the new gods; the Buddhist priests were allowed to collect alms and raise temples, and the bureaucracy of officials and scholars was perforce content to keep Confucianism as its own aristocratic creed. The new religion took possession of many old shrines, placed its monks and fanes along with those of the Taoists on the holy mountain Tai-shan, aroused the people to many pious pilgrimages, contributed powerfully to painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and the development of printing, and brought a civilizing measure of gentleness into the Chinese soul. Then, it, too, like Taoism, fell into decay; its clergy became corrupt, its doctrine was permeated more and more by sinister deities and popular superstitions, and its political power, never strong, was practically destroyed by the renaissance of Confucianism under Chu Hsi. Today its temples are neglected, its resources are exhausted, and its only devotees are its impoverished priests.⁸⁶

Nevertheless it has sunk into the national soul, and is still part of the complex but informal religion of the simpler Chinese. For religions in China are not mutually exclusive as in Europe and America, nor have they ever precipitated the country into religious wars. Normally they tolerate one another not only in the state but in the same breast; and the average Chinese is at once an animist, a Taoist, a Buddhist and a Confucianist. He is a modest philosopher, and knows that nothing is certain; perhaps, after all, the theologian may be right, and there may be a paradise; the best policy would be to humor all these creeds, and pay many diverse priests to say prayers over one’s grave. While fortune smiles, however, the Chinese citizen does not pay much attention to the gods; he honors his ancestors, but lets the Taoist and the Buddhist temples get along with the attentions of the clergy and a few women. He is the most secular spirit ever produced, as a type, in known history; this life absorbs him; and when he prays he asks not for happiness in paradise, but for some profit here on earth.⁸⁷ If the god does not answer his prayers he may overwhelm him with abuse, and end by throwing him into the river. “No image-maker worships the gods,” says a Chinese proverb; “he knows what stuff they are made of.”⁸⁸