However admirable and ingenious the modern Chinese may be, it is in the minor arts—such as carving in wood and ivory, the manufacture of vessels of porcelain and bronze, and all that relates to silk and cotton manufactures. In these they certainly excel, and reached a high degree of perfection while Europe was still barbarous, but in all the higher branches of art they take a very low position, and seem utterly unprogressive.
They have no poetry, properly so called, and no literature worthy of the name. Their painting never rose much above the scale of decoration, their sculpture is more carving than anything we know by the higher name, and their architecture stands on the same low level as their other arts. It is rich, ornamental, and appropriate for domestic purposes, but ephemeral and totally wanting in dignity and grandeur of conception. Still it is pleasing, because truthful; but after all, its great merit in the eyes of the student of architecture will probably turn out to rest on the light it throws on the earlier styles, and on the ethnographic relations of China to the surrounding nations of Eastern Asia.
APPENDIX.
APPENDIX A.
ON SOME DISPUTED POINTS OF INDIAN CHRONOLOGY.
Throughout the preceding pages the dates of kings’ reigns, where quoted, have been assumed as known, and the eras from which they are calculated as ascertained. This has been done in order not to interrupt the narrative of events by introducing a chronological disquisition at every point where a date occurs; but no one at all familiar with the subject needs to be told that the dates of mediæval dynasties in India are far from settled, and that few are universally acquiesced in. Great progress has, it is true, been made in the last ten or twenty years in clearing away the difficulties that surround the subject. So much is this the case, that there are only one or two dates of sufficient importance to affect our reasoning which still remain in doubt; but though this may be true, there are many others about which the world in general feel considerable hesitation. It consequently becomes almost indispensable to state briefly the grounds on which the chronology used throughout this work is based, in order that the correctness of most of the inductions stated in it may be estimated at their true value.[660]
The earliest reasonable statement bearing on the subject which we possess is in the 9th chapter of Arrian’s ‘Indica.’ It is there stated—quoting from Megasthenes—“That from Bacchus (Ixwaku) to Sandrocottus (Chandragupta), the Indians reckon one hundred and fifty-three monarchs, who reigned during the space of six thousand and forty-two years.”
The first part of this statement is eminently satisfactory, as it seems clear from it that we possess in the Puranas the same lists as were submitted to the Greeks in the fourth century B.C. In the Solar lists, we have in the Treta Yug sixty-two reigns, from Ixwaku to Rama.[661] There is no complete Lunar list in that age. For the Dwapar age we have three Solar lists: one for Kusha to Vrihadsana, thirty-five reigns; another from Dishta to Janamejaya, thirty-three reigns; and a third, from the son of Swadhaja, the father of Sita, wife of Rama, to Mahabasi, thirty-four reigns. In the Kali Yug we have no complete Solar list, but the Lunar list gives fifty descents from Jarasandha to the last Nanda. This gives 145 or 146 reigns, or rather too few. But the Lunar lists, from the Dwapar Yug, give forty-four from Puru to Yudhishihira, and fifty from Yadu to Krishna, so that the average is as nearly as may be that stated by Megasthenes.
The second part of the statement, giving these kings’ reigns an average duration of nearly forty years, must of course be rejected, but it is satisfactory to find that, at that early age, the falsification of the chronology had only gone to the extent of duplication, and that the monstrous system of Yugs, with all their attendant absurdities, had not then been invented.
Though it may not at present be capable of direct proof, I have myself no doubt that the date assigned by the Hindus for the Kali Yug (3101 B.C.) is a true date, though misapplied. It either was the date when the Aryans assumed that their ancestors had first crossed the Indus, or when they had first settled on the banks of the Saraswati or the Ghoghra. It forms no part of any subsequently invented system, and seems the only one fixed point in a sea of falsification. Assuming it for the present, and deducting Chandragupta’s date from it, we have 3101-325 = 2776 years from Ixwaku to Chandragupta, which, divided by 153, gives the reasonable number of eighteen years for the duration of each king’s reign. Of course it is not contended that these lists are absolutely to be depended upon—many names may be lost, and many misplaced, from the carelessness of copyists, or from other causes; but, on the whole, when treated in this manner, they afford a reasonable framework for the reconstruction of the ancient history of India, and one that accords perfectly with all we at present know about the ancient history of the immigrant Aryans.
If this view can be sustained, the events which are described in the Ramayana—not of course the poem, which is comparatively modern—took place about 2000 years before Christ. Adhering to the above average, we gather that the events described in the ‘Mahabharata,’ in like manner, occurred 900 years before Chandragupta, or 1225, or more precisely, according to the Puranic chronology, thus—