“Yes; I should be awfully sorry to leave him behind. He has been with me as long as I can remember. My uncle only brought him over here in order that I might keep up my Chinese. I am sure that he would go through fire and water for me. It is a good thing to have a man like that, for, putting aside the fact that I like him tremendously, I would trust myself anywhere with him, for he is very strong, and, as he showed when he attacked those two fellows who upset the boat soon after I came here, there is no doubt that he is plucky. I expect he will be very glad to be home again. He has got accustomed to European clothes now, but I have no doubt that he would prefer his own; and then, of course, his family are there, and in China family ties are very strong. Families always stick together, even to distant relations. My uncle says that the population should be counted by families and not by individuals. Of course I did not think of such matters before I came away, but he says that it is like the old Scotch clans: the State deals with the families and not with the different members of it. If a man commits a crime and gets away, the family are held responsible for it, and one of them has to suffer penalties and pays either a large money fine or is executed.”
“That would be very rough on a family that happens to have one scamp among the sons.”
“Yes, I suppose so; but it helps to keep them all straight. A fellow who committed a crime, for which his father or any of his near relations had to suffer, would be considered not only as a disgrace to the family but as a man altogether accursed and beyond the pall of pity whatever fate might befall him. My uncle says crime is very rare in China, and that this is very largely due to the family ties.”
“But there are pirates on the coast and, as I hear, robbers on many of the rivers?”
“Yes; uncle says these men are fellows who have left their native villages and have banded together, so that if they are caught it is never known to what families they belong. They are beheaded, and there is an end of them, and their family never know anything about their case. The Chinese are a very peaceable lot, except that they sometimes get tremendously stirred up, as in the case of the Taiping insurrection. The people hear stories that the foreigners are trying to upset their religion or to take some of the land. Hideous stories go about that they have killed and eaten children or sacrificed them in some terrible way. Then they seem to go mad; they throw down their hoes and take up swords and muskets, if they have them, and blindly fall upon the whites.”
“They call us the foreign devils, donʼt they?”
“No, that is a mistake; the real meaning of the words is ʻocean devils,ʼ which answers to our word ʻpirates.ʼ Europeans were called so because the Chinese coasts were ravaged, sacked, and burnt by adventurers who first sailed into the Chinese seas, and the name has been applied to the whites ever since. It is the same way with the name of their country. By a misunderstanding, when we first had diplomatic relations with them the word ʻCelestialʼ was applied to their empire, and people ever since have believed that that is what they call the country. The word ʻCelestialʼ is applied only to the emperor, who is viewed almost as a god, but they would never dream of applying it to the country. Because the document said ʻthe Celestial Emperor,ʼ it was supposed that the kingdom over which he reigned was called the ʻCelestial Kingdom.ʼ On the contrary, they call it the ʻTerrestrial Kingdom,ʼ believing, as they did before they had anything to do with foreigners, that it was, in fact, the only kingdom existing on earth worthy of the name.”
“And can you write Chinese as well as you can talk it, Bateman?”
“I can write the ordinary Chinese, but not the language of the literati class; that is entirely different, and the ordinary Chinaman has no more knowledge of it than I have. I believe that it contains twenty thousand different characters, and it is very doubtful if even the most learned Chinaman understands them all. Even the popular language is scarcely understood in all parts of China. The dialects differ as much as some of the English dialects, and the native of the Northern Provinces has the greatest difficulty in conversing with a man from the South.”
“There is the bell ringing, and I must run round to the boarding–house to get my books.”