An American Diplomat in China

by Paul S. Reinsch

At the hospitable board of Mr. Liang Chi-chao, while the dishes were served in Chinese style and the food eaten with chopsticks, some modifications of the usual dinner procedure had been made. The etiquette of a Chinese meal requires that when a new set of dishes with food has been placed in the centre of the table, the host, hostess, and other members of the family survey what is there and pick out the choicest morsels to lay on the plates of their guests. The guests then reciprocate the courtesy, and the interchange of favours continues throughout the dinner, giving the whole affair a most sociable aspect. At Mr. Liang Chi-chao's table these courtesies were observed, but there were special chopsticks provided for taking the food from the central dishes and transferring it to a neighbour's or to one's own.

The conversation after dinner wandered toward Chinese ethics. Mr. Liang Chi-chao is one of the most competent authorities on this subject and on its relations to Western thought and life. I ventured this opinion: "While the high respect in which the elders are held by the younger generation in China is a remarkably strong social cement, it is discouraging to progress in that it gives the younger and more active little chance to carry out their own ideas."

"But the system does not," Mr. Liang rejoined, "necessarily work to retard change; because it is, after all, society rather than individuals which controls. With all proper respect for elders, the younger element has ample opportunity to bring forward and carry out ideas of social change."

He regarded the principle of respect for elders and of ancestor worship of fundamental importance; in addition to its direct social effects, it gave to Chinese society all that the Western peoples derive from the belief in immortality. The living individual feels a keen sense of permanence through the continuity of a long line of ancestors, whose influence perceptibly surrounds those actually living; moreover, their own actions are raised to a higher plane, as seen not from the narrow interests of the present, but in relation to the life of the generations that are to succeed, in whom the character and action of the individual now living will persist.

This evening's entertainment, with its intimate Chinese setting and its conversation dealing with the deeper relationships between different civilizations, has remained a memorable experience for those who attended it. Only recently it was thus recalled by one of the guests: "Think of going to a dinner with the 'Secretary of Justice' in Washington, and conversing about the immortality of the soul!"

Interested to see how, despite the new ways in China, the old Confucianism persisted, I determined upon a pilgrimage to the Confucian shrines. Dr. Henry C. Adams invited me in November, 1914, to join him on a trip to the sacred mountain, Taishan, in Shantung Province, and to Chüfu, the home of Confucius.

A small party was made up. I slipped away quietly in order to avoid official attentions and to spare the local authorities all the bother of formally entertaining a foreign representative. We arrived at Taianfu early in the morning, where with the help of missionaries chair-bearers had been secured to carry us up the mountain.

The trip to these sacred heights is of an unusual character. The ascent from the base is almost continuously over stair-ways. Up these steep and difficult grades two sturdy chairmen, with a third as alternate, will carry the traveller rapidly and with easy gait. The route is fascinating not only because of the singular natural beauty of the ravines through which it passes, and of the constantly broadening prospects over the fruitful plains of Shantung from every eminence, but because of the historic interest of the place; this is testified to by innumerable temples, monuments, tablets, and inscriptions sculptured in the living rock which line the path up the mountain. It must be remembered that in the time of Confucius this was already a place of pilgrimage of immemorial tradition; a place of special grandeur, wherein the mind might be freed of its narrow needs and find its place in the infinite. Many of its monuments refer to Confucius and record his sayings as he stopped by the way to rest or to behold the prospect. At one point, whence one looks off a steep precipice down to the plain thousands of feet below, his saying, as reported, was: "Seen from this height, man is indeed but a speck or insect." But not all of his remarks were of this obvious nature, which justifies itself in its appeal to the common mind, to be initiated into the truths of the spirit.

In these thousands of years many other sages, emperors, and statesmen have ascended the sacred hill, also leaving memorials in the shape of sculptured stones bearing their sentiments. It would be an agreeable task for a vacation to read these inscriptions and to let the imagination shadow forth again these unending pilgrimages extending back to the dawn of history.