China and the Chinese

by Herbert Allen Giles

A scholar of old was so absent-minded, that on one occasion, when he was changing houses, he forgot to take his wife. This was reported to Confucius as a most unworthy act. "Nay," replied the Master, "it is indeed bad to forget one's wife; but 'tis worse to forget one's self!"

Points of this kind are, no doubt, trivial, as I have said above, and may be regarded by many even as flippant; but the fact is that a successful study of the Chinese people cannot possibly be confined to their classics and higher literature, and to the problem of their origin and subsequent development where we now find them. It must embrace the lesser, not to say meaner, details of their everyday life, if we are ever to pierce the mystery which still to a great extent surrounds them.

In this sense an Italian student of Chinese, Baron Vitale, has gone so far as to put together and publish a collection of Chinese nursery rhymes, from which it is not difficult to infer that Chinese babies are very much as other babies are in other parts of the world.

And it has always seemed to me that the Chinese baby's father and mother, so far as the ordinary springs of action go, are very much of a pattern with the rest of mankind.

One reason why the Chinaman remains a mystery to so many is due, no doubt, to the vast amount of nonsense which is published about him.

First of all, China is a very large country, and from want of proper means of communication for many centuries, there has been nothing like extensive intercourse between North, South, East, West, and Central. Of course the officials visit all parts of the Empire, as they are transferred from post to post; but the bulk of the people never get far beyond the range of their own district city.

The consequence is that as regards manners and customs, while retaining an indelible national imprint, the Chinese people have drifted apart into separate local communities; so that what is true of one part of the country is by no means necessarily true of another.

The Chinese themselves say that manners, which they think are due to climatic influences, change every thirty miles; customs, which they attribute to local idiosyncrasies, change every three hundred miles.

Now, a globe-trotter goes to Canton, and as one of the sights of that huge collection of human beings, he is taken to shops,—there used to be three,—where the flesh of dogs, fed for the purpose, is sold as food.

He comes home, and writes a book, and says that the Chinese people live on dogs' flesh.