Two hundreds miles north of Angkor, at Korat, are further Khmer ruins. The other ruins and tombs of old China are those of the Ming dynasty at Nankou pass, north of Peking, and Nanking; the Manchu dynasty at Mukden and northwest of Peking; and the Sung dynasty at Hangchow. The tomb of Prince Ki Chah of the then Wu principality, who died B. C. 530, and which bears an inscription prepared by Confucius, can be seen to-day lying between the new British-built railway and the Grand Canal, twenty miles east of Changchow in the south of Kiangsu province. The laws of the Tsin principality, 513 B. C., were engraved on iron, but have not been recovered in any tomb or on any wall. Individual pagoda ruins and ancient walls cover the land, as does star-dust the sky. Laws, customs, history and a relation of the Rites, were engraved on metal bowls, which stood on three legs. These bowls were handed down through the dynasties to the princes, together with the ancestral tablets, as a sign of royal authority. There exists to-day in a temple on Silver Island, near Chinkiang in Kiangsu province, such a tripod bowl of the Chow princely dynasty, date 812 B. C. This was about the date when Jeroboam recovered Damascus from Israel. When Confucius was a boy of twelve, and already deep in his study of history, Cyrus the Elder had captured ancient Babylon and founded the Persian empire. It is quite probable that the old Hia, Shang and Chou kings (2200 B. C. onward) left their records, as the contemporary Egyptians and Babylonians did, in brick tablets, but those tablets, being made of non-adhesive, fibrous loess mud of the present Shensi and Shansi provinces, soon crumbled. It was a different thing when centuries later, the Chinese kings, having traveled farther south, employed better potters to use the more adhesive clays of the present Kiangsi province. The Hia kings of what is now Shensi province reigned when the giant sequoia evergreen trees of California were seedlings 4010 years ago.
Chinese bronzes date back as far as the imperial Chou dynasty (1120 B. C.) which instituted the sacrifices and ancestor worship, and a few majestically simple bronze tripods, elemental monsters and sacrificial vessels date back to the Shang dynasty 1800 B. C. These tripods are similar to those that Homer describes in the ninth book of The Iliad, 2500 B. C. The oldest bronzes are, of course, noble and plain in design, the warmer, richer art of Buddhism coming in at a far later date, and bringing in the innovation of the human figure, flowers and incense burners. The Natural History Museum at New York has precious collections of the old mortuary bronzes of the Chou dynasty referred to in Professor Parker’s illuminating work on the days of Confucius. Bronze vases, goblets, censers, mirrors, tablets, baskets, bells, some of them studded, are in the collection which dates as far back as 1800 B. C. Chinese form has been persistent, its ornamentation progressive. When we are looking at these bronzes, we should realize that they were fashioned by men contemporary with Homer. The oldest tombs were in Turkestan, Kansu and Shensi provinces, lying alongside the path of the primeval emigration along the Tarim’s banks from Eden. In various articles I have instanced the similarity between old Greek and old Chinese designs. The dragon was used in art designs and considered a sacred Jovian portent by the Homerian Greeks who were camped before Troy, B. C. 2500. In anthropological customs, Pope relates that the Homerian Greeks of the Euboea tribe, drawn up before Troy’s walls, 2500 B. C., shaved their foreheads but left the hair on the back of their heads to grow long, like the present Manchus.
The new bronze portrait statue of Li Hung Chang at the Sicawei Gardens, Shanghai, is unusual, and marks a new era in memorials in China, pailoo arches and tablets having formerly been erected. True, there are many fanciful statues to Buddha and Confucius, and one to Marco Polo in the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii at Canton, but they are rather to be considered as effigies. In Tibet, they erect engraved, square stone monuments, a figure of Buddha being cut into three of the top panels, representing the past, present and future Buddha. A horned roof, with a little central pagoda covers the monument. These strikingly symmetrical monuments are erected on high places along the mountain passes. The Buddhists cut gigantic figures of the god into cliffs, bushes serving as hair, and grass as eyebrows. Notable among these are the colossal cliff Buddhas at Kiating and Yung Hsien in Szechuen province. Old caves and cave-temples are generally in proximity with these images.
In Szechuen province, the piers of bridges have a stone dragon as a terminal, the head looking up-stream, and across the bridge, the tail pointing down-stream. The proportions are beautiful and the effect delightful. The best known and most beautiful camel’s back bridge in the empire is at Wan Hsien at the head of the Yangtze gorges. Stone steps mount up the arch, which is crowned with a beautiful house of blue stucco. The house is used as a rest place, and a restaurant These bridges show how much the Chinese understood of engineering and also that they were good masons. In the caves along the Min River in Szechuen province, pottery coffins have been found, dating back previous to the Christian era, and showing that the early Chinese of the Chou dynasty did not bring all the civilization of China with them, but found many arts among the aborigines. At Ning Hsia, an oasis city in the horn of Kansu province, is a peculiar pagoda where the joylessness of the north has cut the curling ten galleries down to mere ridges, and roofed the eleven stories with a mere turban roof. Each story has Roman windows, except the top, which has circular windows. The architecture shows Mohammedan influence over these Buddhists, and the structure, with that at Liangchow in the same province, is exceedingly unique in so ornate a land of up-curling roofs, carved screens, and overhanging galleries. While the Chinese never build fences, the Manchus, of Manchuria, construct a curious palisade composed of crosses, one end of which is stuck in the ground. The whole of the Grand Canal was crossed by many thousands of beautiful marble bridges, erected during the Sung dynasty. Many of them still remain, with their great beauty of aspiring arch, balustrade, carving and anchorage. At Sui Fu, on the upper Yangtze, is a temple remarkable not for its size, but for the proportion of its galleries and roof, the cornices of which curl upward violently at great width from the walls. The temple is met by steps that climb up the mountain side from the great river. The walls too, with their panels, frieze and balustrade, are interesting, but the design of the roof is an artistic triumph, equaled only by the Loong Wah Temple which is photographed as a frontispiece in my book, The Chinese. It is this sweeping boldness and generosity of curve which should be copied in roofs and galleries in the new Chinese architecture, which lovers of the old China earnestly recommend.
Many of the poorer huts of Pechili province are built of clay poured around a reinforcing of kaoliang stalks. Sometimes tiles are set in the clay roof, which is very heavy, and in the rainy season, it often falls in on the tenant. In Kiangsu province the thatching is made of reeds. Of course improvements are often designed, and they attempt to make a cement or chunam by mixing burnt lime and stone in the clay. The very poor, however, really live in mud burrows like the fox, whether the mud is made into a hut, or the dwelling is cut as a cave in the loess hills of Shensi and Shansi provinces. The Manchurian and northern Pechili style of architecture is severe and strong, but it has its simple beauties. A Buddhist temple not far from Shan Hai Kwan is a good example. A plain brick and stucco wall, the height of the eaves of the buildings, surrounds the compound. It is broken by a fort-gate, with a Roman arched doorway. The tiled roofs of the fort and temple curl up only slightly. A few high pine trees, branching out only near the top, tower like nature’s banners over the temple, which is matched to the austere lives and buildings of the dwellers in the north. The proportions throughout are nobly and chastely balanced in accord with the architectural influence of the stern Great Wall throughout this region.
At the Edinburgh Mission Conference of the nations in 1908, the Chinese pleaded for the preservation of their architecture. Too great praise can not be given the British for their taste in occupying a Chinese palace as legation headquarters at Peking. Many missions, every foreign business house, nearly every foreign college, the government itself in its new buildings, even the kindred Japanese, and nearly every foreign legation, are all housed in an ugly adaptation of a Renaissance building with verandas. The fashion came from Singapore and Hongkong, but Hongkong gets some picturesqueness out of the style because that colonial city has a mountain to terrace it on. The ventilation and light are poor; the roof is hideous. There is one foreign architect whose soul will never escape from the purgatory of bad architects. He designed for the Honan Assembly a hall at Kaifong which is Moorish in general design; the roof is a Roman dome; the arches are Gothic; and the screens are Chinese. The Japanese do not bring their own beautiful buildings, like those gems, the incomparable Horiuji pagoda and monastery, Yakushiji pagoda; and the shrine of Ieasu at Nikko, to China, and they do not copy or adapt any of the tens of thousands of Chinese gems. They often build a ponderous, ugly, dark, Renaissance building like the Japanese consulate at Shanghai, costly enough but unrepresentative.
St. John’s University (American Episcopal), of Shanghai, has made the laudable concession of putting a Chinese roof on its valuable foreign buildings. The eaves have a slight Chinese up-turn, but there is little of Chinese ornament in apron, ridge, column, double roof, or pagoda spire here and there. However, America, nearly always the leader in sympathy with the Chinese, has here made a beginning in saving China’s peerless architecture and art. At Kweiyang, the capital of Kweichou, the French have erected a notable pagoda church, which concedes to Chinese canons a five-story pagoda entrance, and the rear façade is formed as a pailoo with five roofs. With the same idea the British architect has placed on the costly Renaissance “Audience Hall”, of Bangkok, three ornate Burmese pagoda spires. As Greece stands for simplicity and line, China stands for richness, curve and color. She should not die, if according to Keats, “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Ruskin insisted in his famous lectures to artistic Edinburgh that the salient feature of a building was the roof, and that there adornment should be rich, like a woman’s hair, or hat, her “crown of glory”. This rule, perhaps indirectly, he took from the Chinese, who from the buried centuries have undeviatingly been faithful to it. The Assembly Herald of the American Presbyterian Church, January, 1912, page twenty-seven, illustrates a gem of modern Chinese architecture. It is a chapel built by a native elder in his simple but beautiful faith. On each side of the entrance there is a rich tile grille that relieves the plain façade. Under the eaves is another beautiful grille that relieves the plain surface. Over the door is a heavy tile canopy with characteristic up-curling points. The tile roof is peaked and might have been more up-curling at the eaves in the beautiful, characteristic Chinese style. The apron under the eaves is richly carved. The Chinese still have a strong rich grasp of beauty, when they are encouraged to develop their architecture.
It is not the custom in stores, temples or homes to keep curios, silks, etc., on view. They are all wrapped in paper, and kept in boxes or cupboards. When a trusted guest arrives, there is an exciting scene as the treasures are unpacked and revealed to admiring eyes. China has always had court painters, a notable one in the reign of the Empress Dowager Tse Hsi being Li Shih Chuan. He was a believer in joy, and developed the more human aspects of the countenance. He was a master in painting fine gowns, dainty embroideries and rich furniture. Portrait paintings are not common, but in the Yangtze provinces some are to be seen. They are in water color and painted on screens. Actors carry an enormous bamboo or ivory tusk, on which is engraved or painted their repertoire. The giver of a feast selects from this the plays which he wishes to have performed for his guests. The Chinese manufacture a hard wall-paper, similar to what we call Lincrusta Walton and use on the walls of our parlor cars and saloons of steamships. The mold is of hard wood, on which the sharp design is carefully chiseled en relievo. The blotter-like bamboo paper composition is hammered on this mold, then taken off and sun-dried. Sizing is applied. Afterward the design and final Ningpo or Szechuen rhus-nut varnishing is added. This paper is damp proof, which is an important quality in so humid a climate.
The Chinese of Queens Road, Hongkong, made me two bamboo trunks that have served me on a trip around the world, and are strong enough to make several more. They are remarkable in five important points, elasticity, lightness, strength, resistance to dampness, and cheapness in purchase price and transportation cost. Travelers and explorers bemoan the fact that excess baggage charges cost them almost as much as passenger fares. This problem the wonderful Chinese solved with these remarkable trunks. The framework is of strong bamboo, on which a tough rattan and bamboo envelope is wound. This is lined with soldered zinc, and covered with strong canvas, and for serviceability in the five important points mentioned, the iron and leather trunks can not compare. Go to the Chinese, thou traveler, and be wise! Many of the chairs used at Tientsin have a dome-top, with curious scale design and knob, and are therefore more Burmese than Chinese in design. The chairs of Hongkong are strictly flat-topped. Jade is green, pink and crystal, and retains a soapy glisten. Jades buried in tombs as mortuary ornaments, however, acquire a brown smoky tinge, and the distinction should be made in assorting collections at museums. The Bishop collection of art jades, and the Peters collection of tomb jades in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, are deservedly world famous.
