China and the Chinese

by Edmond Plauchut

Kang-Hi, who, in spite of the fulmination of the great edict against the Christians, still in his heart cherished a strong affection for the Jesuits, who had won his love through the interest they had taken in his favourite pursuits, was succeeded by his son, Young-t-Ching who inherited none of his father's sympathy for Europeans, and persecuted the Christians with the utmost severity. His advisers represented to him, "that the missionaries had deceived the late Emperor, and that the monarch had lost a great deal of prestige by his encouragement of the Jesuits." Moreover, the viceroys of outlying provinces sent accounts of the iniquities of the converts to the new faith in their districts, the governor of Fu-Kian distinguishing himself especially by the bitterness of his rancour against them. He begged the Emperor in the interests of his people to banish all foreigners without distinction to Macao, then already occupied by the Portuguese.

A WISE EMPEROR

It was, however, fortunately for the Chinese as well as for the foreigners, one thing to issue these sweeping denunciations, and another to have them fully carried out. Europeans were too useful at the Court of Pekin for the Emperor to be willing to part with them all, and he naïvely decided to keep those about him who were of any service to him, but to banish the rest. The missionaries of the capital who were thus reprieved, hoped to win help for their colleagues of the provinces by writing to a brother of the Emperor, who they believed to be favourable to them, and they received the following disinterested reply: "We have no intention of imitating your way of going on in Europe; your disputes about our customs have done you a great deal of harm, and China will miss nothing when you are no longer there." Moreover the Emperor added a postscript to this letter, which ran thus: "What would you say if I sent a troop of Buddhist priests into your country? When your Father Ricci was here there were only a few of you; you had not then disciples and churches in all the provinces. It was only during the reign of my father that you increased with such rapidity; we saw it then, but we did not dare say anything about it. If, however, you deceived my father, do not hope that you will deceive me too.... You want all the Chinese to become Christians; your religion requires it, I know, but what would become of us then? In times of trouble the people would listen to no voice but yours." This naïve and unanimous testimony to the potency of the Christian faith must have been rather cheering than depressing to those to whom it was addressed, and that they did not fail to perceive that their Imperial enemy was no ordinary man is proved by the eulogy pronounced on him by Father Du Halde, who says: "It is impossible to help admiring his indefatigable application to work; day and night his thoughts are occupied on the establishment of a wise government which will secure the well-being of his subjects; to please him, you have but to propose some project of public utility.... He has made several very good regulations with a view to doing honour to merit, and recompensing virtue, for promoting emulation amongst the labouring classes, and to help the people in barren years. These qualities have won for him in a very short time the respect and love of all his subjects."

These quotations throw a luminous side-light upon the character of the Emperor, and make it the more evident how short-sighted was the conduct which led to the breach between his father and the Jesuits. Had the latter continued the policy with which their predecessors had begun, conciliating public opinion by the study of the arts and sciences to which Government and people were alike devoted, instead of splitting straws about doctrine and phraseology, the sad stories of the massacres of defenceless women and children would never have had to be written. It was one of the Jesuit Fathers who gave Kang-Hi his first clock, and another who won the hearts of all the ladies of the court by making a camera-obscura, which enabled them to see something of the outside world from which they were so rigorously excluded. With the expulsion of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century all the work done by them was destroyed, and the missionaries who succeeded them had to contend with the prejudices their short-sighted policy had aroused, as well as with the difficulties inseparable from every attempt to introduce a new religion.

CONCESSIONS TO FOREIGNERS

In every port thrown open of recent years to European commerce the Imperial Government sets aside what are called concessions to the foreign residents, whom the authorities still look upon as unwelcome intruders, though the citizens are not slow to appreciate the difference between their own unsavoury and crowded quarters, and the well-built, airy streets occupied by the English, the French, or the Germans. In these concessions missionaries of pretty well every sect have, of course, hastened to obtain a footing, and volumes might be filled with the record of their struggles, their difficulties, their triumphs, and their defeats. It will be enough for our present purpose to tell of the massacre, referred to above, of the French Sisters at Tien-tsin, for it was alike one of the most horrible and most typical of modern times. By the treaty signed therein 1858 the port was thrown open to foreign trade, and in 1861 a British consulate was established in it. The memory of the sack of Pekin by the Anglo-French forces was still fresh, and the hatred of the foreign devils was fiercer and if possible more bitter in Tien-tsin than elsewhere, for so far its people had had very little intercourse with Europeans. Only amongst the more enlightened of the Chinese was the fact recognized that the time for opposition to the entry of foreigners was gone by, and that if the country were not opened from within, it would be forced from without, and the dismemberment of the Empire become inevitable.

Situated on the right bank of the Pei-ho, Tien-tsin is the port of the capital, from which it is eighty miles distant. It is therefore one of the keys of China, and even before the opening of the railway from it to Pekin in 1897, it was of immense strategic importance. All this of course intensified the jealousy of the Chinese, when the lock was forced, so to speak, by the white skins, and great indeed was the courage needed to face the turbulent population, and endeavour to win proselytes from amongst them. Even in Shanghai, comparatively inured to the presence of the foreign element, nuns had been insulted; a native spitting in the faces of two holy women in the streets, who had done absolutely nothing to provoke hostility.

Yet there were found devoted women who came to reside in Tien-tsin, carrying their lives in their hands, knowing full well what they had to expect, yet determined to face unflinchingly not only the hostility of the natives, but also the rigours of the inhospitable climate, for the river is blocked with ice from December to May, and before the opening of the railway there could be no hope of help from without in the winter, no matter what the emergency.