Very marked also are the virtues of the Chinese tradespeople and merchants; in other words, of the lower middle class. Here again, what strikes one most is the amount of work done and the indefatigable zeal of the people. In the second place we note with surprise the simplicity of their way of living, their evident contentment with the bare necessities of life, even among the fairly well-to-do, and their desire to be and abide in the state of life in which they have been born. The joiner's son becomes a joiner, the builder's son a builder. Only by way of exception does a Chinaman strike out in a new direction. The height of his ambition is, at most, to become a better joiner or a better builder than his father was before him—to improve in quality more than in quantity. Another prominent feature of the Chinese trader is his respect for his caste. As in Japan with the Daimios and Samurais, whose moral basis was a military one, the pledged word was sacred, and the white flag inviolable, so the peaceable trader of China, whose life is governed by the civil code, is always true to his bargain. There is scarcely an instance on record in which a Chinese tradesman has broken his word. In the large commercial towns, overcrowded with merchants and goods from all parts of the world, written contracts with Chinamen are hardly ever thought necessary. Market prices and rates of exchange may vary—and in many cases the local producer incurs heavy losses by a premature selling of the harvest to the European agent—but when a sale is once concluded, a Chinaman never attempts to evade his obligations.
European bankers and wholesale dealers tell us that the difference between China and Japan in this respect is great. In the case of the latter, unfilled engagements and arrears of payment are a standing rule in the ledger accounts of most Continental firms, and considerable loss is sometimes incurred by these houses through the avarice and the subtle devices of some traders. The Japanese to a certain extent, in imitation of the Latin nations, aims at becoming rich, or at least well-to-do, quickly. It is his object to amass sufficient wealth, by a few profitable speculations, to enable him to retire into private life.
The Chinaman, on the contrary—like the Anglo-Saxon—makes trade his vocation in life. "Life is business," he says.
And so in China as in England, or perhaps even more in America, the industrial classes and the merchants have become the ruling power in the country. Socially they constitute a privileged class. As in Anglo-Saxon states the Chambers of Commerce and the Trade Unions, so in China the ancient Guilds arrange all business matters for themselves. The Guilds, indeed, are a most important institution in Chinese society. Their influence is not confined to trade and commerce; it dominates many other relations in life, and the often secret resolutions passed by the Guilds are of great force in matters of local administration and general politics.
Some of the larger Guild or Club houses are well worth our attention. From an architectural point of view they are good specimens of old Chinese style. They generally consist of several buildings, or more correctly, of a row of halls and pagodas, separated by flower-gardens with small fishponds, and courts with shady groves. Besides the official departments there are conversation-halls and tea-rooms, much frequented by the members after the transaction of business. The most magnificent of these houses are found in the interior, in the cities on the Hoang-ho and the Yang-tze-kiang. The club-house of the tea-merchants at Hankau ranks first in point of artistic perfection. It is a good specimen of the national taste. Slender pagodas, china towers, trim gardens, boldly arched bridges, all harmonious in form and colour, testify to the marvellous creative genius of this people. Never have I seen such finely pointed, tent-shaped roofs, such delicately tapered gables, such carving, and such tracery. Never could I have believed it possible for any architect to build, in fragile clay and line pottery, such bastion-like walls, and towers reaching up into the sky, and surmounted by a roof of porcelain as delicate and rare as a precious teacup. These Guild-houses are truly store-houses of old Chinese art treasures, and in them receptions and dramatic performances often take place.
Among the musical and theatrical entertainments of China, there are some which continue from morning till night. On their merit, however, a European can hardly be expected to pass a fair judgment. The queerness and quaintness of the performance is what strikes one most at first. Yet among the old dramatists there were many of first-rate talent, and life and knowledge of the world were very forcibly expressed by them, but in a form unfamiliar to the European mind. The Chinese, we think, are sometimes too realistic and somewhat formal actors; but yet, even in their modern, degenerate, historical pieces, we find frequent traces of the prehistoric ideals of the Greek drama.
The musical accompaniment of the performance is no less interesting. Contrary to the generally accepted idea that the Chinese have no feeling for music, I venture to think that Chinese music, although it may be discordant and unpleasing to the European ear, is not without great merits. We should not forget that the Chinese musical scale is set quite differently from ours, and is offensive to us chiefly because it is unfamiliar. But notwithstanding its deafening shrillness, it has great rhythmical power; and after all it only sounds harsh to us on account of its complexity. It must not be forgotten that their musical tones are not, as in the West, divided into two, but into four parts. In fact, they have not only half, but third and fourth gradations.
The same with regard to their plastic art—the foreigner is easily apt to consider the external form only. He appreciates or rejects it according as it comes up to our Western standard of beauty or not, but does not stop to look at it from the national cultural point of view. And yet it is impossible to understand Chinese art without doing so. In China art was confined to experts, while in Japan it acquired an ever-increasing popular character. But the Chinese is by far the higher form of art. The Chinese have always been the teachers and pioneers in all matters of thought and creative genius in the Far East. Architecture, sculpture, painting, with all their various ramifications, date back to the remote ages of Chinese antiquity. What we have on record of the time of the first emperors gives us some idea of their refinement and of the art treasures then already in existence, and of still greater value in this respect are the few known monuments of the Shung Dynasty and of the subsequent Mongol period.
Interesting above all are remains of buildings dating back to the Ming Age, which still exist in considerable numbers. Chinese art surprises one principally on account of its force and of the originating power manifested by it. In their colossal structures we chiefly admire the height of the pagodas, the length of the bridges; we are struck by the earnestness of the conception, the magnitude of the design, the masterful execution, the concentration of thought; all these appeal to us even now, in their dilapidated condition. The Imperial Palace at Pekin, although in ruins, is still one of the most magnificent structures in the world. And the same might be said of all other branches of art. We see it in the old bronze statues, in the delicate porcelain work, the exquisite carvings, and the precious cut stones. These relics in themselves may leave us cold, design and colour may not be to our taste, but the artistic idea, and above all the artistic ideal, underlying all these masterpieces, and the power of execution, cannot fail to impress any one at all interested in art.
We must remember that although the Chinese conception of art is so different from ours, the interest of it to us lies not exclusively in the productions themselves, but rather in the mind which produced them. The longer we associate with the Chinese the more we feel attracted to them, the more we recognize their worth, embodied in the versatile spheres of art and culture. In process of time we learn to appreciate, not only the civilization of Chinese antiquity—which was centuries in advance of ours, and had already reached a high state of development when Europe was still peopled by wild, unknown hordes—but we also begin to appreciate the different embodiments of that strange culture too.