THE CHINESE PEOPLE.
Severity of the Judgment of Americans and Chinese Against One Another—Each Sees the Worst Side of the Other—Characteristics of the Chinese, Their Physique, Temperament, and Morals—Tests of Intellectuality—Marriage Customs of the Chinese—The Engagement—The Wedding Ceremony—The Position of Women—Concubinage—Divorce—Family Relationships—Dress of Men and Women—Distorted Feet versus Queues—Chinese Houses and Home Life—Children—Education and Schools—National Festivities—Music and Art—Chinese Religions—Language and Literature.
In treating of the personal characteristics and customs of the Chinese people it is the desire of the writer to get away from the hackneyed descriptions of pigtails, shaven heads, thick soled shoes, assumption of dignity and superiority, and great ignorance concerning many subjects with which we are familiar, which usually mark the pages of articles and books concerning this race. The Chinaman is believed by many to be the personification of stupidity, and many writers who wish to make readable matter gladly seize upon and exaggerate anything which can be made to appear grotesque and ridiculous. It would be but a poor answer to these views to say that they correspond remarkably with those which the Chinese entertain of us. They also enjoy a great deal of pleasantry at our expense, finding it almost impossible to regard otherwise than as ludicrous our short cropped hair, tight fitting, ungraceful, and uncomfortable looking clothes, men’s thin soled leather shoes, tall stiff hats, gloves in summer time, the wasp-like appearance of ladies with their small waists, our remarkable ignorance of the general rules of propriety, and the strange custom of a man and his wife walking together in public! These views we can afford to laugh at as relating to comparatively trivial matters, but they think they have the evidence that we are also inferior to them in intellectuality, in refinement, in civilization, and especially morals. It is evident that one party or the other has made a serious mistake, and it would be but a natural and reasonable presumption that both may have erred to some extent. We should look at this matter from an impartial standpoint, and take into view not simply facts which are comparatively unimportant and exceptional, but those which are fundamental and of widespread influence, and should construe these facts justly and generously. We should take pains not to form the judgment that because a people or a custom is different from our own it is therefore necessarily worse.
There are many reasons why unfair judgments have been formed by us against the Chinese and by the Chinese against Europeans and Americans. Each nation is apt to see the worst side of the other. It so happens that the Chinese who have come to America are almost all from the southern provinces and from the lower classes of the worst part of the empire. We have formed many of our impressions from our observation of these low class adventurers. They on the other hand have not received the treatment here which would cause them to carry back to China kindly opinions of Americans.
In China the same or similar conditions have existed. In the open ports, where a large foreign commerce has sprung up, an immense number of Chinese congregate from the interior. Many of them are adventurers who come to these places to engage in the general scramble for wealth. The Chinamen of the best class are, as a matter of fact, not the most numerous in the open ports. Moreover foreign ideas and customs prevail to a great extent in these foreign communities, and the natives, whatever they might have been originally, gradually become more or less denationalized, and present a modified type of their race. The Chinese being every day brought into contact with drunken sailors and unscrupulous traders from the west, new lessons are constantly learned from them in the school of duplicity and immorality. The Chinese of this class are no fitting type of the race. It is an accepted fact that the great seaports of the world, where international trade holds sway, are the worst centers of vice, and no estimate of a people formed from these cities can be just.
The Chinese as a race are of a phlegmatic and impassive temperament, and physically less active and energetic than European and American nations. Children are not fond of athletic and vigorous sports, but prefer marbles, kite flying, and quiet games of ball or spinning tops. Men take an easy stroll for recreation, but never a rapid walk for exercise and are seldom in a hurry or excited. They are also characteristically timid and docile. But while the Chinese are deficient in active courage and daring, they are not in passive resistance. They are comparatively apathetic as regards pain and death, and have great powers of physical endurance as well as great persistency and obstinacy. Physical development and strength and longevity vary in different parts of the empire. In and about Canton, as well as in most parts of the south, from which we have derived most of our impressions of China, the people are small in stature; but in the province of Shan-tung in the north, men varying in height from five feet eight inches to six feet are very common, while some of them are considerably taller. In this part of China too, one frequently finds laborers more than seventy years of age working daily at their trades, and it is not unusual to hear of persons who have reached the age of ninety or more.
The intellectuality of the Chinese is made evident by so many obvious and weighty facts, that it seems strange that persons of ordinary intelligence and information should ever have questioned it. We have before us a system of government and code of laws which will bear favorable comparison with those of European nations, and have elicited a generous tribute of admiration and praise from the most competent students. The practical wisdom and foresight of those who constructed this system are evidenced by the fact that it has stood the test of time, enduring longer than any other which man has devised during the world’s history; that it has bound together under one common rule, a population to which the world affords no parallel, and given a degree of prosperity and wealth which may well challenge our wonder. It is intelligent thought which has given China such a prominence in the east and also in the eyes of Christendom. She may well point with pride to her authentic history reaching back through more than thirty centuries; to her extensive literature, containing many works of sterling and permanent value; to her thoroughly elaborated language possessed of a remarkable power of expression; to her list of scholars, and her proficiency in belles-lettres. If these do not constitute evidences of intellectuality, it would be difficult to say where such evidences could be found, or on what basis we ourselves will rest our claim of intellectual superiority.
China has been so arrogant and extravagant in her assumptions of pre-eminence, that we have perhaps for this very reason been indisposed to accord to her the position to which she is fairly entitled. It should be remembered, that ignorant until recently of western nations, as they have been of her, she has compared herself simply with the nations around her, and a partial excuse for her overweening self conceit may be found in the fact that she only regarded herself as the nations with which she is acquainted have regarded her. She has been for ages the great center of light and civilization in eastern Asia. She has given literature and religion to Japan, to Corea, and to Manchooria, and has been looked up to by these and other smaller nations as their acknowledged teacher. The Japanese have produced no great teachers or sages which they would presume to compare with those of China; and it is clearest evidence of their acknowledgment of the literary superiority of the Chinese that they use Chinese classics as text books in their schools much as we do those of Greece and Rome. It is true that the Chinese know hardly anything of the modern arts and sciences and that there is no word in their language to designate some of them; but how much did our ancestors know two hundred years ago of chemistry, geology, philosophy, anatomy, and other kindred sciences. What did we know fifty years ago of the steamboat, the railroad, and the telegraph? And is our comparative want of knowledge a few years ago and that of our ancestors to be taken as evidence of inferiority of race and intellect? Furthermore, if we go back a few hundred years we are apt to find many things to establish the claims of the Chinese as a superior rather than inferior race. There are excellent grounds to credit the Chinese with the invention or discovery of printing, the use of the magnetic needle, the manufacture and use of gunpowder, of silk fabrics, and of chinaware and porcelain, and there seems no doubt that the Chinese discovered America from the westward, long before the discoveries of Europeans.
Intellectual power manifests itself in a variety of ways, and glaring defects are often found associated in the same individual with remarkable powers and capabilities, as particular faculties both of mind and body are often cultivated and developed at the expense of others. Chinese education has very little regard to the improvement of the reasoning powers, and Chinese scholars are deficient in logical acumen and very inferior to the Hindoos in this respect; but in developing and storing the memory they are without a rival. Again their system of training effectually discourages and precludes freedom and originality of thought, while it has the compensating advantages of creating a love of method and order, habitual subjection to authority, and a remarkable uniformity in character and ideas. Perhaps the results which they have realized in fusing such a vast mass of beings into one homogeneous body, could have been reached in no other way.