Yet they have one redeeming quality, an intense love of personal freedom, strangely contrasting with the almost abject slavish spirit of the Siamese. The feeling extends to all classes, so that servitude is held in abhorrence, and, as in Burma, a democratic sense of equality permeates the social system[469]. Hence, although the State has always been an absolute monarchy, each separate commune constitutes a veritable little oligarchic commonwealth. This has come as a great surprise to the present French administrators of the country, who frankly declare that they cannot hope to improve the social or political position of the people by substituting European for native laws and usages. The Annamese have in fact little to learn from western social institutions.
Language and Letters.
Their language, spoken everywhere with remarkable uniformity, is of the normal Indo-Chinese isolating type, possessing six tones, three high, and three low, and written in ideographic characters based on the Chinese, but with numerous modifications and additions. But, although these are ill-suited for the purpose, the attempt made by the early Portuguese missionaries to substitute the so-called quôc-ngù, or Roman phonetic system, has been defeated by the conservative spirit of the people. Primary instruction has long been widely diffused, and almost everybody can read and write as many of the numerous hieroglyphs as are needed for the ordinary purpose of daily intercourse. Every village has its free school, and a higher range of studies is encouraged by the public examinations to which, as in China, all candidates for government appointments are subjected. Under such a scheme surprising results might be achieved, were the course of studies not based exclusively on the empty formulas of Chinese classical literature. The subjects taught are for the most part puerile, and true science is replaced by the dry moral precepts of Confucius. One result amongst the educated classes is a scoffing, sceptical spirit, free from all religious prejudice, and unhampered by theological creeds or dogmas, combined with a lofty moral tone, not always however in harmony with daily conduct.
Religious Systems.
Even more than in China, the family is the true base of the social system, the head of the household being not only the high-priest of the ancestral cult, but also a kind of patriarch enjoying almost absolute control over his children. In this respect the relations are somewhat one-sided, the father having no recognised obligations towards his offspring, while these are expected to show him perfect obedience in life and veneration after death. Besides this worship of ancestry and the Confucian ethical philosophy, a national form of Buddhism is prevalent. Some even profess all three of these so-called "religions," beneath which there still survive many of the primitive superstitions associated with a not yet extinct belief in spirits and the supernatural power of magicians. While the Buddhist temples are neglected and the few bonzes[470] despised, offerings are still made to the genii of agriculture, of the waters, the tiger, the dolphin, peace, war, diseases, and so forth, whose rude statues in the form of dragons or other fabulous monsters are even set up in the pagodas. Since the early part of the seventeenth century Roman Catholic missionaries have laboured with considerable success in this unpromising field, where the congregations were estimated in 1898 at about 900,000.
The Chinese.
From Annam the ethnical transition is easy to China[471] and its teeming multitudes, regarding whose origins, racial and cultural, two opposite views at present hold the field. What may be called the old, but by no means the obsolete school, regards the Chinese populations as the direct descendants of the aborigines who during the Stone Ages entered the Hoang-ho valley probably from the Tibetan plateau, there developed their peculiar culture independently of foreign influences, and thence spread gradually southwards to the whole of China proper, extirpating, absorbing, or driving to the encircling western and southern uplands the ruder aborigines of the Yang-tse-Kiang and Si-Kiang basins.
The Babylonian Theory.
In direct opposition to this view the new school, championed especially by T. de Lacouperie[472], holds that the present inhabitants of China are late intruders from south-western Asia, and that they arrived not as rude aborigines, but as a cultured people with a considerable knowledge of letters, science, and the arts, all of which they acquired either directly or indirectly from the civilised Akkado-Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia.
Not merely analogies and resemblances, but what are called actual identities, are pointed out between the two cultures, and even between the two languages, sufficient to establish a common origin of both, Mesopotamia being the fountain-head, whence the stream flowed by channels not clearly defined to the Hoang-ho valley. Thus the Chin. yu, originally go, is equated with Akkad gu, to speak; ye with ge, night, and so on. Then the astronomic and chronologic systems are compared, Berossus and the cuneiform tablets dividing the prehistoric Akkad epoch into 10 periods of 10 kings, lasting 120 Sari, or 432,000 years, while the corresponding Chinese astronomic myth also comprises 10 kings (or dynasties) covering the same period of 432,000 years. The astronomic system credited to the emperor Yao (2000 B.C.) similarly corresponds with the Akkadian, both having the same five planets with names of like meaning, and a year of 12 months and 30 days, with the same cycle of intercalated days, while several of the now obsolete names of the Chinese months answer to those of the Babylonians. Even the name of the first Chinese emperor who built an observatory, Nai-Kwang-ti, somewhat resembles that of the Elamite king, Kuder-na-hangti, who conquered Chaldaea about 2280 B.C.