Lion and Dragon in Northern China

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

Some one at last suggested that if they humoured her to the extent of sprinkling her with a light covering of earth which she could easily throw off as soon as the desire of life once more asserted itself, she might be permanently restored to a normal condition and all might be well. This suggestion was acted upon. Some handfuls of earth were thrown loosely over the living and the dead, each mourner, in accordance with custom, contributing a portion.[185] Having by this time concluded the sacrificial rites and ceremonies, the mourners now withdrew from the graveside. When some of the nearest relatives of Chang Shih returned an hour later they found that the light covering of earth had not been disturbed. The desire of life had never asserted itself after all. The girl was dead.

Carefully and tenderly she was taken up and brought back to the sad bridal chamber that had witnessed no bridal. Long before her beautiful body had been prepared for burial and placed in its splendid coffin her fame had already spread far through town and countryside. Vast was the crowd of mourners who, when her body was once more laid beside that of her husband, never to be disturbed again, flocked from distances of over a thousand li to show their admiration of the bravest of women and most faithful of wives.

With the exception of the last, all these little stories have been translated almost word for word from the official records of Weihaiwei and the three neighbouring districts. Similar cases could be collected by the thousand. Honorific portals and handsome marble monuments stand by the roadside in every part of the Empire, silent witnesses to noble Chinese womanhood. There is not a district in China that does not possess its roll of women who have sacrificed their lives in obedience to what they believed to be the call of a sacred obligation. Probably none but the most bigoted or the most ignorant will read of these poor women—many of them hardly more than children—with feelings of either contempt or abhorrence. They died no doubt from a mistaken sense of duty: but to die for an idea that is based on error surely requires as much courage and resolution as to die for an idea that is radiant with truth, and—what is perhaps of greater practical significance—the women who go willingly to the grave for a cause that to us seems a poor one may be counted on to suffer as cheerfully and die as bravely for a cause that is truly great.

Brave women do not give birth to ignoble sons; and when we contemplate the present and speculate as to the future condition of China we may do well to remember that women like those of whom we have just read are among the mothers of the great race that constitutes perhaps more than a quarter of the world's population. The woman who offers herself as a willing sacrifice to-day on the altar of what may be called a domestic ideal is the mother of a man who may, to-morrow, offer himself with readiness and gladness on the altar of a political or a national ideal. In the marvellous evolution that has taken place during the past half-century in the island Empire of Japan one has hardly known which to admire most: the splendid daring and patriotism shown by the Japanese soldier and civilian or the patience and trustfulness shown in times of trial and hardship by the Japanese woman. China has surprises in store for us as startling as those that were given us by Japan; and not the least of these surprises, to many Western minds, will perhaps be the unflinching steadiness of the Chinese soldier on the field of battle when his regenerated country calls upon him to defend her from the spoiler, and the heroism and fidelity of the Chinese woman at home. Europeans will doubtless wonder at what they take to be the sudden evolution of hitherto undreamed-of features in the Chinese character; yet those supposed new features will only be the ancestral qualities of loyalty and devotion directed into new channels broader and deeper than the old.

In spite of these considerations, most Western readers, whatever may be their views on the ethics of suicide, will probably confess themselves utterly unable to understand how a young betrothed girl can work herself into the state of intense emotional excitement which the act of self-destruction implies, merely as the result of the untimely death of the man to whom she happened to be engaged. The suicide of real widows, distracted with grief for the loss of a beloved husband, they can understand: but it cannot be love, and it can hardly be grief in the ordinary sense, that induces a Chinese girl to throw away her life when she hears of the decease of a young man with whom she has never exchanged a word and whose face perhaps she has never seen. It may be pointed out, in partial explanation of a phenomenon so strange to Western notions, that not only is a betrothal in China practically as binding as a marriage, but that marriage, and therefore the betrothal that precedes it, are according to Chinese belief founded on mysterious ante-natal causes. When the sceptical Englishman says jestingly that "marriages are made in heaven" he is giving expression to a theory that in China is held to be essentially true, though it is not expressed by the Chinese in exactly the same terms. The theory is independent of and perhaps older than Buddhism, though no doubt popular Buddhism has done a great deal to strengthen it; and it has certainly helped to keep the Chinese people satisfied with their traditional marriage customs, which, as every one knows, are quite independent of love-making. It is partly this theory that makes a Chinese woman contented and even happy in the contemplation of her approaching marriage to an unknown bridegroom, and often fixes in a girl's mind the idea that to give herself to any man other than her first betrothed, even if the latter died during the betrothal, would be as shameful a proceeding as to commit an act of unfaithfulness in wedlock.

Probably it is only the fear of social disorder and many other practical inconveniences that have prevented the second betrothals and second marriages of women from being more severely discouraged by public opinion than is actually the case. The first are in ordinary practice passed over without comment, though the fact of the original betrothal is "hushed up," or is at least not talked of; the second are in many parts of China still regarded with austere disfavour, though circumstances such as extreme poverty may render them necessary. In any case, the girl who refuses a second betrothal is still honoured and respected just as if she were a widow who had virtuously refused a second marriage.

It should be noted that the discredit of a second marriage or the lesser discredit of contracting a second betrothal does not attach to the woman only. But a man is in practice more at liberty than a woman to consult his own inclinations. The young widower who refrains from a second marriage after his wife's death is regarded as deserving of the greatest praise and respect, but if he is childless he is in the dilemma of having to be either unfaithful to the memory of his wife or undutiful towards his parents and ancestors; and as the parents "count" more than the wife in China he must choose to be unfaithful rather than undutiful. It is an important part of Chinese teaching that the most unfilial of sons is he who has no children: the reason being, of course, that childlessness means the extinction of the family and the cessation of the ancestral sacrifices. Thus a childless widower not only may, but must, seek a second marriage, especially if he has no married brothers. A common way out of the difficulty is for the widower to take a concubine: for the concubine's position in China is a perfectly legal one, and her children, as we have seen, are legitimate.

After all, it is perhaps impossible for any European mind to understand the real nature of the impulse that occasionally drives a Chinese girl to kill herself on the death of an unknown betrothed; not indeed because the occidental mind is essentially different from the oriental, but because of the unbridged chasm that lies between the social, religious and ethical systems and traditions of East and West. Considerations of this kind should perhaps teach us something of the limitations of our minds and characters, by showing how comparative a thing is our boasted independence of thought, and with what humiliating uniformity our ideals and impulses are conditioned by the social and traditional surroundings in which we live and move. However this may be, it will perhaps be comforting to know that the Chinese, unsentimental as they are in their methods of courtship, are no strangers to what in Europe we recognise as the romance of love.