The probability is, so far as sane experience takes us, that the Chinese had been exactly where we first find them for many thousand years, or even for myriads of years, before their own traditions begin. With the exception of the discovery of America, which brought a flood of strangers into a strange land, and speedily exterminated the aborigines, there do not appear to be any authenticated instances in history of extensive and robust populations being entirely displaced like flocks of sheep by others. Any one who travels widely in China can see for himself that, wherever unassimilated tribes live in complete or partial independence, and, á fortiori, where the assimilation has been carried out, all those tribes possess at least this point in common with the original Chinese or the assimilated speakers of Chinese—that their language is monosyllabic, uninflected, not agglutinative, and tonic; i.e. that each word is "sung" in a particular way, besides being pronounced in a particular way. Probably those tribes before they were absorbed, or, despite their not having yet been absorbed by the Chinese, had been there as long as the Chinese had been in the contiguous Chinese parts. It seems reasonable to suppose that the Chinese would absorb their own race-classes more readily than they would absorb Tartars, Japanese, and Coreans, all of whom belong to the same dissyllabic, long-worded, agglutinative family. And so it is: the Chinese followed the lines of least resistance (after themselves becoming cultured) and worked their way down the rivers and other watercourses towards what we call South China. From the very first, their passage northwards across the Yellow River was contested by the Tartars, whom they have since partly driven back, and partly (with great effort) absorbed. They have never been able to assimilate the Coreans, not to say the Japanese, though both peoples took very kindly to Chinese civilization after our Christian era, when first friendly missions began to be interchanged. Indo-China contains many more of the monosyllabic and tonic tribes than of others; if, indeed, there are any at all of the dissyllabic and non-tonal classes; and the Chinese have no difficulty in merging themselves with Annamese, Tonquinese, Cambodgians, Siamese, Shans, Thos, Laos, Mons, and such like peoples: but their own administrative base is too far north; the conditions of food and climate in Indo-China are not quite favourable for the marching of armies, especially when it is remembered that the best troops used have always been Tartars, used to warm clothes and heating food. There have, besides, always been rival Indian religion, rival Indian colonization, rival Indian language, and rival Indian trade influence to contend with. No absorption of Indian races has ever been anywhere effected by China. Tibetans never came into question in ancient times; if they were known, it could only have been to Shuh (Sz Ch'wan) and Ts'in or early Chou (Shen Si).
If it had not been the Chinese of Ho Nan who first used records, it is just as probable that the tonic and monosyllabic absorption which, as things were and are, moved from north to south, might have moved from south to north. During the Chou dynasty (1122 B.C.-222 B.C.), when the extension of the Chinese race took place (which had probably already for long gone on) in the clear light of history, it will be noticed that the rulers of all the great colony nations of the south—Ts'u, Wu, and Yüeh—had, in turn, to remind the Emperor of China of their perfect equality with him in spiritual claim and ancient descent; of their connection with dynasties precedent to his; of times when his ancestor was a mere vassal like themselves. No Tartars of those times ever put forth claims like these, though, it is true, in much later times some of the (non-Turkish) Tartar rulers of North China traced their ancestors back to the mythical Chinese emperors who reigned in Shan Tung. Again, the founder of the Hia dynasty (2205 B.C.) is repeatedly said to have been buried at modern Shao-hing (between Hangchow and Ningpo), and the King of Yüeh even sacrificed to him there. So the Emperor Shun, the predecessor and patron of the same founder, was traditionally buried near Ch'ang-sha in modern Hu Nan province. The First August Emperor included both these "lions" in his pleasure tours among the great sights of China. No sound historical deduction, of course, can be drawn from these traditions, however persistent: if false, they were, at any rate, open to the criticism of a revolutionary and all-powerful Emperor over 2000 years ago, and to a second, almost equally powerful, who visited both places a century later; the suggestion inevitably follows from the existence of these traditions in the south that either the cultured Chinese whom we first find in Ho Nan had moved northwards from Hu Nan, Kiang Si, and the lake districts generally, before they spread themselves backwards; or that the uncultured Chinese had moved north before the cultured Chinese moved south; or that both north and south Chinese were at first equally cultured, until within historical times the north Chinese (i.e. in Ho Nan, along the Yellow River) so perfected their system of records that they carried all before them. After all there is no strain on the imagination in suggesting this, for early Western civilization grew up in the same way.
There is not the smallest hint of any immigration of Chinese from the Tarim Valley, from any part of Tartary, from India, Tibet, Burma, the Sea, or the South Sea Islands: in fact, there is no hint of immigration from anywhere even in China itself, except as above hypothetically described. There the Chinese are, and there they were; and there is an end to the question, so far as documentary evidence goes. Of course, the persistent Tarim Valley scheme proposed is only a means to get in the thin end of the wedge, in order to drive home the thick end in the shape of a definite start from the Tower of Babel, and an ultimate reference to the Garden of Eden. If there are still people who believe it their duty on Scriptural principle to accept this naïve Western origin of the Chinese, there is no reason why religious belief or imagination should not be perfectly respected, and even find a working compromise with the principle of strict adherence to human evidence. If supernatural agencies be once admitted (as the limited human intellect understands Nature), there seems to be no more reason for accepting the creation of a complete whale (already a hundred years old, according to the growth period of later whales), than for accepting the creation of complete men with 1000 years' history behind them instead of 100; or that of the earth with 20,000, or even 20,000,000 years' history behind it, and even before it; for as the first whale, or pair of whales, must set the standard of natural history for all future whales, so the man created with history behind him may equally well have history created in front of him. "Nature," according to the imperfect human understanding, is no more outraged in one case than in the other, nor can mere time or size count as anything towards increasing our wonder when we tell ourselves what supernatural things unseen powers superior to ourselves may have done. This amounts to the same thing as saying that dogmatic belief, personal religious conviction, agnosticism, superstition, and imagination are all on equal terms, and are equally respectable factors when confronted with human historical evidence, so long as they are kept rigidly apart from the latter, As an eminent Catholic has recently said: "The Church has no more reason to be afraid of modern science than it was of ancient science." In other words, however pious and religious a man may be (as we understand the words in Europe), there is no reason why, as a recreation apart from his faith, he should not rigidly adhere to the human evidence of history so far as it goes. On the other hand, however sceptical and discriminating a man may be, from the point of view of imperfect human knowledge, in the admittance of humanly proved fact, there is no reason why, from the emotional and imaginative side of his existence, he should not rigidly subscribe to dogma or personal conviction, whether the abstract idea of virtue, the concrete idea of love for some cherished human being, or the yearning for some supernatural state of sinlessness be concerned. A distinguished financier, for instance, may regale his imagination with socialistic dreams of a perfect Utopia; but, when the weekly household bills are presented to him, he deals with overcharges in pence like any other practical individual.
From one point of view, the Chinese, already provided with their tonic language at the Confusion of Tongues, marched to the Yellow River, where we find them. From the other, there is no evidence whatever to connect the Chinese with any people other than those we find near them now, and which have from the earliest times been near them; no evidence that their language, their civilization, their manners, ever received anything from, or gave anything to, India, Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, or Greece, except so far as has been suggested above, or will be suggested below.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE CALENDAR
Allusion has already been made to the eclipses mentioned in Confucius' history as a means by which the probability of his general truth as a historian may in a certain measure be gauged. A few words upon the Chinese calendar, as it is and was, may therefore not be amiss. The Chinese month has from first to last been uncompromisingly lunar; that is to say, the first day of each month, or "moon" as it may strictly and properly be called, always falls within the day (beginning at midnight) during which the new moon occurs. Of course, Peking is the administrative centre now, and therefore the observations are taken there with reference to the Peking meridian. As Confucius took his facts and records mainly from the Lu archives, and (we must suppose) noted celestial movements from what was seen by the Lu astronomers, it has always been presumed that the eclipses mentioned by him were observed from Lu too; that is, from a station over four degrees of longitude and one of latitude removed from the imperial capital as it then was (modern Ho-nan Fu). It was the duty of all sovereign princes to proclaim the first day of the moon at their ancestral temple; and even if the Chinese of those days had discovered the difference in "time" between east and west, these princes must each of them have proclaimed the day during which the new moon occurred as it occurred to themselves, in their own State, and not as it occurred to the Emperor's astronomers. On the other hand, when eclipses were observed from the comparatively small territory of Lu, it must have occurred, at least occasionally, that visitors from other states had either the same eclipse or other eclipses to report. If the Emperor's astronomer reported eclipses in Ho-nan- Fu on a given day, it is difficult to see how Lu, which was a centre almost of equal standing with the imperial capital for orthodoxy in rites and records, could have entirely ignored such reports.
But the Chinese year has always been luni-solar. From the earliest times they had observed the twelve ecliptical "mansions" and zodiacal signs, and also that the time occupied by the sun in travelling through a mansion was rather longer than one lunation, or the time intervening between two new moons. Their object has accordingly always been to bring the lunar and solar years into manageable combination, so that the equinoxes, solstices, and "seasons" might occur with as much regularity as possible in the same months, and so that the husbandman might know when to sow his grain. Formerly they regulated this discrepancy according to the mean movements of the sun and moon; but, ever since the Jesuits first instructed them more accurately, they have regulated the two years, that is, the solar year and the twelve lunations, according to the true movements, and with reference to the meridian of Peking. If the moons were each exactly 29 1/2 days in length, instead of being 44 minutes 2.87 seconds longer, it would have been a simple matter to halve the ordinary lunar year, and make six months "large" (30 days) and six "small" (29 days); but the extra 44 minutes and a fraction accumulate, and the result is that there must always be a larger number of "great" months than "small" in the year. The way the Chinese arranged this was to call a month "great" (30 days) if the interval between mid-night (beginning of the new-moon day) and the hour of the next new moon was full 30 days or over in duration; if less than 30 days, then the month was a "small" one (29 days). Not more than two long months ever followed in succession, and two short months never did so.
But, in any case, even twelve regular moons of 291/2 days only make 354 days, whereas a solar year is about 3651/4 days, whilst the sun's time in passing through a "mansion" (one-twelfth of the solar year) is about 301/2 days. Thus there was a "superfluity" of about ten days in every lunar year, or about one lunation in every third year; not to mention that a "mansion" was about a day longer than a lunation, and that therefore the husbandman was liable to be thrown out of his reckoning. In order to remedy this, the Chinese intercalated a month once in about thirty-three moons, and called the intercalary month by the same name as the one preceding it, both with regard to the common numbers 1-12, and with regard to the two endless cycles of twelve signs and sixty signs, by which moons are calculated for ever, in the past and in the future. Regarding the difficulty of seasons, the solar year was divided into twenty-four "joints," and each "joint" was about half a "mansion" (the difference rarely exceeding one hour). However, the spring equinox is always the sixth "joint," and is the middle of spring season: this and the other "joints" being all about 151/4 days in length, the Chinese seasons can be symmetrically divided with relation to both equinoxes and both solstices; for the intercalary moon (judiciously made unobtrusive, and kept out of vulgar sight as far as possible) settles the lunar year difficulty; and the seasons conform, as of course they should do, to the heat of the sun, which is a much more natural and practical arrangement than our own arbitrarily assorted and unequal months.
The endless sixty-year cycle of years is usually referred back to for a beginning to either 2697 or 2637 B.C.; but, apart from the fact that there is little or no accurate knowledge anterior to 842 B.C., it is of no importance when it began, so long as sixty pairs of equinoxes and solstices are calculated backwards indefinitely. It goes back, in any case, to a date beyond which the memory of Chinese man runneth not to the contrary; it is unbroken and continuous; we are free to take up any date we like at sixty-year intervals, and say "here I agree to begin": we cannot deny that 1908 is the cycle year it purports to be; and even if we did, batches of sixty years backwards from any other cyclic year called 1908, would always have a fixed relation to the other 4604 years recorded; nor, having accepted 1908, can we deny 1808, 1708, and so on, as far back as we like, in order to test how any given event, eclipse or other, coincides relatively with our own date: it is not a question of beginning, but of counting back, and stopping. We find Confucius of Lu (Chou clan state) using the calendar of the Chou dynasty (1122 B.C.-249 B.C.); whose founder had said: "In future we make the eleventh month the beginning of the year instead of the twelfth month." The previous dynasty of Shang (1766-1123) had similarly said: "In future we make the twelfth month begin the year instead of the first." The previous dynasty of Hia (2205-1767) and the individual emperors before had all said (or taken for granted): "The year begins in the first month," from which we may naturally conclude that there could not have been an earlier calendar, as no "sage" could reasonably begin anywhere but at the beginning. At the same time, it must be explained that the astronomical order of the months, counting the first as being that when the sun enters Capricorn, is different from the civil order. Thus the Hia, Shang, and Chou first civil months were the third, second, and first astronomical months, representing the sun's entry into Pisces, Aquarius, and Capricorn, respectively. When the First August Emperor conquered the whole of China, and proceeded to unify cart-axles, weights and measures, written characters, and many other discrepant popular arrangements, he said: "Let the tenth month be in future the first in the year instead of the eleventh." That is to say, he took as civil first month the twelfth astronomical month, or that in which the sun enters Sagittarius. Thus we see that in 2000 years the calendar had got about 90 days out of gear; or, roughly, about an hour a year.