The beauty of China and the excellence of the Chinese are vividly backgrounded by all that is grotesque or faulty in the people of China. Strangely, we seem to be blind to the flower, while we see the background only too clearly.
I have heard that the Chinese roses are scentless. That proves how much I must be the slave of my potent imagination. I thought that I had known no sweeter flower than the wild white rose of China.
There is no country that we misunderstand more grossly than we misunderstand China; but there is no country that can more afford to be indifferent to misconception.
CHAPTER XVIII
ORIENTAL OBSEQUIES
Chinese Coffins
If I may say so, without appearing over-anxious to advertise my Irish ancestry, the most important event in a Chinaman’s life is his funeral.
A Chinese crowd is the culmination of human noise; and the Chinese are never so noisy as at a funeral. They have hearty appetites at all times, but they never eat so much as they do at a funeral feast. When I first lived in China I used to find it almost impossible to distinguish between a funeral procession and a marriage procession. In the centre of one the coffined corpse is borne on the shoulders of men. In the centre of the other similar men bear upon their shoulders the bride, who is in an enclosed sedan chair, and she is followed by her bridesmaids. But, to the casual observer, the two ends of the two processions are quite alike in every other respect. Tom-toms, red-clothed coolies carrying roasted pigs and other dainties, smaller coolies carrying cheap paper ornaments of a Mongolian theatrical type,—these are the invariable elements of both processions.
China, if you know it at all, is the easiest of the Oriental countries to write about; although it is very difficult to inform yourself about the Chinese, they are so bitterly exclusive. For any scrap of information you once obtain is necessarily exact. The versatile Japanese have a hundred modes of life; the conservative Chinese have one. The Indian peninsula is inhabited by a hundred distinct peoples; peoples of varying origins, speaking different languages, obeying differing laws, wearing dissimilar dress. These Indian tribes intermingle more or less; their country is so over-populated that they must. But they learn almost nothing from each other; they adopt nothing from each other. They so rarely intermarry that for the purposes of general writing I may say they never do it. The narrow prejudice or the magnificent conservatism (whichever it is) that has kept the petty Indian tribes distinctly separated from one another has kept the great unnumbered and almost numberless Chinese nation, a nation apart from all the rest of the human world. But, unlike the rigidly conservative Indians, the Chinese have taken a great many ideas from aliens. We must not think, because as a people they will not mingle with us nor admit us into their national heart, nor into their homes, nor into the bowels of their country, that they never learn anything from us. They have learned a great deal, they are learning, and they will learn. But what they adopt from us they so assimilate with their vividly characteristic national modes of thought and life, that that superficial mammal, the travelling European, never suspects that many of the conveniences of everyday Chinese life are adaptations of Aryan customs or of European tools.
The Chinese are to-day the most unique, the most ancient, and the most misunderstood people on the earth. I say the most ancient because they are the least changed from what they were long centuries ago. The least changed—they are not changed at all! The China of to-day is the China Marco Polo knew. In the thirteenth century commercial intercourse was frequent between China and Europe. A long caravan route extended from the southern provinces of China to Genoa. The men who took a year to go from their Chinese homes to the great Italian mart, taking with them their precious merchandise of silk and ivory, of tissue and of pearls, differed in almost no way from the men that of recent years have flocked to the Australian diggings and the Californian goldfields.