To call a man a liar is, in England, and in the European world generally, the surest way to provoke anger; but such an epithet has but little weight attached to it in China. This is partly owing to the fact that “white lies” have there a recognised and reputable existence not openly accorded to them elsewhere. In the eyes of a Chinese, as in the code of the Jesuits, a lie in itself is not absolutely criminal, and it may, on the contrary, be very meritorious. According to Confucius, a lie told by a child to benefit a parent is deserving of praise; and a Jeannie Deans, or the stern old father in Mr Warren’s Now and Then, so far from being held models of religion, would be regarded, the one as a stubborn fanatic, and the other as the most heartless and unnatural of parents. But another, and, we suspect, a much more powerful cause of this want of veracity among the Chinese, is their system of government. Here, as throughout Asia generally, Despotism—or, in other words, an Executive power from which there is no proper appeal—generates mendacity in the people, as their sole refuge from irresponsible Power. Duplicity is the resource to which Weakness naturally betakes itself; and it is universally adopted wherever the decrees of Government officials are felt to be unjust as well as unappealable. Everywhere the result is the same; and in this, as in many other respects, a perfect parallel might be drawn between those two vastest empires of modern times, the Chinese and the Russian. In the latter empire, as in the former, the vastness of the country and consequent impossibility of an efficient surveillance over the host of officials, joined to the absence of municipal institutions and a free press to act as checks upon local tyranny, render it most difficult to detect or repress abuses of power on the part of the Government officers. And the consequence in both countries may be told in the words of Alison, applied to Russia:—“So universal is the dread of authority, that it has moulded the national character. Dissimulation is universal; and, like the Greeks under the Mussulman yoke, the Russians have become perfect adepts in all the arts by which talent eludes the force of authority, and astuteness escapes the discoveries of power.” And we suspect we ought to add, in justice to the Chinese, that this disposition has been impressed upon them, as upon the Russians, by the invasion of the Tartar hordes, which in both countries reduced the native race to subjection for three long centuries.
In China, however, the domination of the Tartars has never been in any degree so complete as it was in Russia; and even among the maritime population, with whom foreigners are brought most in contact, and among whom lying is probably most prevalent, there exists a check which is found sufficient for the transaction of all matters of ordinary importance. Every great, busy, and closely-connected society (which Russia is not) requires some bond of mutual trust; and this is found, in China, in the custom of guaranteeing, which pervades all domestic and mercantile relations. Mr Meadows states it as a fact that he has never known an instance in which a Chinese openly violated a guaranty known to have been given by him; and though, under strong temptations, they will sometimes try to evade its fulfilment, yet such instances are extremely rare, and they generally come promptly forward to meet all the consequences of their responsibility. “A Chinaman,” says Mr Lay, “is a man of business, and therefore understands the value of truth.... The standard of honesty is perhaps as high in China as in any other commercial country; and strangers who have known this people during the longest space, speak in the best terms of their integrity. Thieves of a most dexterous kind, and rogues of every description, are plentiful in China, because she has a swarming population to give them birth,—but they are not numerous enough to affect a general estimate of the national character.”
The imperfections of human language render it a difficult matter to give a description, at once short and correct, of national character. Thus it is both true and false to say that the Chinese possess a high degree of fortitude. They bear pain or adversity without murmuring or despondency; and, taken individually, they perhaps possess as much constitutional or animal courage as any other specimens of our race. But they are deficient in that courage which is based on self-reliance, and which enables a man to confront danger with a ready intrepidity—because their institutions and education are as unfavourable to its development as those of the Anglo-Americans are singularly propitious. They possess a great command over their tempers, and instances are common of their bearing, with the greatest apparent equanimity, insults and injuries which would make a European ungovernable; and this proceeds not from cowardice, but from their really regarding self-command as a necessary part of civilisation, and passionate or hasty conduct as indecent, and giving evidence of a low nature. The readiness they evince to yield to the force of reason is another quality for which, says Mr Meadows, “the Chinese certainly deserve to be considered a highly civilised people.” They settle their disputes more by argument than by violence (a strange thing in the East); and a Chinese placard posted at the street-corners, exposing the unreasonable (i. e. unequitable) conduct of a party in any transaction is, if the want of equity be sufficiently proven, to the full as effective, if not more so, than a similar exposure of an Englishman in a newspaper. Bullies seem to be kept in check by the force of public opinion, and the Chinese neither fight duels, nor, though murders occur as in England, can they be said to assassinate or poison. Finally, we may round off this précis of Chinese character in the words of Mr Lay:—“It is an abuse of terms to say that they are a highly moral people, but we may affirm that the moral sense is in many particulars highly refined among them. Respect to parents and elders, obedience to law, chastity, kindness, economy, prudence, and self-possession, are the never-failing themes for remark and illustration.”
No people in the world consume so little butcher-meat as the Chinese; and, unlike the Eastern nations—such as the Jews, Hindoos, Parsees, and Mohammedans generally—their favourite meat is pork. In fact in China, as in other parts of the world, the cottar-system of land-holding is found unfavourable to the rearing of horses, cattle, or sheep, but quite adapted (as witness Ireland) for the rearing of pigs. The national system of agriculture, like almost everything else in China, is based upon the strictly utilitarian principle of turning everything to the greatest account. We do not pretend to settle off-hand here how far the stimulating diet of animal food is necessary or advantageous to mankind. We would simply remark that butcher-meat is matter in a more highly organised form, and more nearly assimilated in composition to our own frames than vegetable food. It is in diet what alcohol is in drink; and the nations who most indulge in it—such as the British, the Anglo-Americans, and savages who live by the chase, (we beg pardon for the unflattering conjunction!)—are generally as remarkable for gloomy strength and perseverance, as the more vegetarian nations are for cheerful quickness and volatility. But the preference which from time immemorial has been accorded to grain-crops in China is based upon the principle (of which our free-trade authorities are too forgetful in their admonitions to “plough less and graze more”), that grain is the cheapest form in which food can be produced, and that a much more numerous population can be maintained in comfort by tillage than by pasturage. Sheep have been justly styled “the devourers of men;” and the Chinese monarch who first turned the people from pastoral life, and taught them the civilising science of agriculture, is still, after the lapse of more than four thousand years, venerated throughout the empire by the title of “the divine Husbandman.” Fish, which abound in the numerous lakes with which the country is studded, and rice and other kinds of vegetable produce, form the staple of the national diet. From stern necessity, as well as from a wise and unparalleled economy, everything is turned to full account, and even hair-cuttings and parings of all kinds are made matter of traffic,—while everything nutritive, including “rats and mice, and such small deer,” (however unclean, according to European notions), are searched out and eaten for food. Opium is much in use; but both the perniciousness of its effects, and the extent to which it is indulged in, have been overstated by most writers on the subject. The misery caused by it is never to be compared to the plague of drunkenness, which is the bane of our own country. “Redness of the eyes,” as a mark of intoxication, is very conspicuous in the Chinese, as it was in the days of Solomon among the Jews; and if you see two Chinamen walking hand in hand in the street, says Mr Lay, it is ten to one that they are both flustered with drink!
The Chinese, like most Asiatics, do not dance for pleasure, nor are their unmelodious voices formed for song. Their favourite amusements are games of chance,—in which, perhaps, they out-do all Asiatics. The grand aim of a Chinaman, as we have said, is to enjoy himself; and this colours even his gravest doings. With him, banqueting and religious ceremonies are the same thing, and he would never keep any sacred festival if he could not enjoy himself. No festival is without its play, and only a few temples are without a stage; and so fond are the people of theatricals, that they will attend a whole night to them, without showing the least weariness, and will afterwards recount with ecstasy what they have seen. The people in general never pray, nor have they any forms of prayer; and the Mandarins, on public occasions, only recite a formula, in the shape of a simple message, to the idols, but never address them in their own words. The affairs of this life are ever uppermost in the mind of a Chinese; and long life, wealth, and male children, are the great objects of desire. Nothing is regarded with so much horror as death—gloomy death, after which their souls go to wander cheerless among the genii; and strange to say, the elixir of life seems to have been more generally and more perseveringly sought after in reasoning and materialistic China than among the most spiritual and imaginative nations of mankind.
“Polygamy,” says Mr Lay, “is not practised by all, and is seldom indulged in till the husband is advanced in years. It appears that by far the greater number among the rich, as well as all among the poor, reap the solaces of connubial life without suffering this hemlock to grow in their furrows. A few, from the surfeit of too much ease and prosperity, indulge in this practice, and a few more have recourse to it for the sake of building up their house with an heir, or a more numerous progeny;” while on the other side, it is fostered by “the anxiety of parents to see their daughters provided for in the houses of the great, and to reap a personal advantage from noble alliances.” For untiring industry, cheerfulness of temper, fidelity to their husbands, and care of their offspring, the poor women are every way exemplary. Any one who visits China will find proofs of this wherever he turns his eyes, and a traveller has only to lay his hand upon the head of a little child to earn applause from a whole crowd of bystanders.
Constancy, habit of respect, and the social feeling are easily recognisable in the character of the Chinese women. Chinese stories are full of examples of love that knows no bounds. “There is only one heaven,” said a forlorn maiden, when her parents upbraided her for spending her days in sorrowful libations of salt tears at the tomb of her lover, “and he was that heaven to me!” “A native of the United States,” says Mr Lay, “married a Chinese female, who had never felt the benefits of education, and therefore could scarcely have learnt to cultivate this sentiment by lessons from those who were older than herself. She accompanied her husband to America, and afterwards back again to Macao, where a friend of mine paid her lord a visit. On his return, I asked him how she demeaned herself towards her better half. ‘With great respect,’ was the answer. And this testimony in her favour was not solitary; for the captain who conveyed the pair across the Atlantic declared he had never met with such passengers before, and that the wife rendered the services of a stewardess unnecessary in the cabin, and with her own hands kept everything in an admirable state of order and neatness.” When a stranger sees that a Chinese lady of the house is not entitled to receive any civilities or acts of courtesy from the friend of her husband, and forgets that this interdict is founded upon motives of propriety, consecrated by the usage of the earliest times, he is very apt to think her slighted, and that those apartments which the Chinese have decorated with so many flowery names are but a sort of prison. This is a great mistake, however, and the women of China are not only exempt from that rigid seclusion which prevails elsewhere in the East; but are treated much more nearly on terms of equality with their husbands. There is nothing abject or mean, either in principle or practice, in the deference which is paid, among high and low alike, to husbands; and “the air of a Chinawoman,” says Mr Lay, “has a majesty about it which is only compatible with sentiments of freedom; and the tone of her voice, and the glance of her eye indicate a consciousness that she was not born to be despised.”
The existing monuments of ancient civilisation in China are not of the same kind as those of Egypt and Assyria, of Greece and Rome. Time has spared the mighty structures of these latter empires, as if in compensation for having buried the nations that reared them; but in China, where the dynasties have succeeded one another without interruption, and the people have gone on increasing in numbers, down to our own day, the wars which have swept over it, and the revolutions which have shaken it, have destroyed almost all the monuments which would have attested its former magnificence. We refer particularly to the great revolution effected by the Emperor Che-hoang-te, (about 246 A.C.), who, for political purposes, ordered the destruction of every monument of the past, whether in metal, in stone, or on paper,—a proscription which lasted for nearly a century, and which left comparatively little to be regained by the most persevering researches of after ages. Nevertheless, the early ages of the Chinese empire seem to have been distinguished by not a little science, and many rare discoveries. In their carefully kept ancient annals, we have full particulars of the circumstances attending an eclipse of the sun, which happened 2155 years before Christ; and in the reign of Shun, a century before this, we read of “the instrument adorned with precious stones, which represented the stars, and the movable tube which served to observe them”—words which plainly indicate a celestial sphere, and a telescope, of some kind or other. After speaking of the discussions which took place in Europe last century, in regard to the high antiquity of astronomical observations in China, M. Pauthier remarks,—“All that we know of the reigns of the philosophical emperors, Yao, Shun, and Yu, and of the state of astronomical science in their time, justifies the supposition that, in the days of those emperors, sure methods were known for calculating beforehand the precise date of eclipses of the sun and moon, and all that concerned the calendar.” Another piece of knowledge possessed by the ancient Chinese, which is calculated to astonish our modern astronomers and mathematicians, is that not merely of the general spherical shape of the earth, but of its oblate form, in consequence of the flattening of the poles. We have not space to set forth the grounds we have for holding it probable that they really were acquainted with this recondite fact in physics; we must hasten on to add that the Sacred Book of Annals mentions facts which indirectly prove that music, poetry, and painting were known from the earliest historic times of China, and we know for certain that in the days of Confucius, the first of those arts was carefully studied, and apparently highly developed. Gunpowder was known four centuries before our era, and we read not only of this “devouring fire,” but of “fireboxes,” “fire-tubes,” and “globes containing the fire of heaven,”—which latter expression, by its allusion to lightning, seems to indicate as if powder, even in those days, was used as something more than a mere toy. A knowledge of the properties of the magnet or loadstone is another thing in which the Chinese were some two thousand or more years in advance of us Europeans; and the art of printing (by means of wooden blocks—xylography) was in use among them six centuries before anything of the kind was thought of elsewhere.
The character of Chinese literature may be guessed from what we have said of their system of education, which eschews speculation, and attends to little else than the precepts of public and private morality. The grandest, or we may say, the only grand, achievements of their literature are in the department of practical politics and morals; and next to this are their annals and statistical reports upon the various provinces of the empire. Poetry is much studied by the educated classes in early life for the sake of obtaining command of language and elegance of expression, the latter of which is highly valued in the communications and epistles of the government officials; but the Chinese temperament possesses little of the vis poetica; and of the millions of Mandarins who have learned to rhyme, very few indeed have written anything that would pass as mediocre in Europe. They have a good command of poetic figures and expressions, and their descriptive pieces and moral odes are fair productions; but that is all that can be said in their favour. Historical writings occupy a prominent place in their literature, and the greatest pains are taken to insure accuracy of statement; but these works are mere annals or chronologies, and have no pretensions to those intellectual and artistic qualities which distinguish the Livys and Xenophons, the Gibbons and Humes of ancient and modern Europe. It is to the credit of China that it has had a drama from a very early period, although we cannot speak particularly as to its merits. The writing of novels, also, dates as far back as the third century, and seems to be a department of literature very congenial to the Chinese mind. Such works exist in great numbers, and amongst much trash there are some very able productions.
In the appreciation of beauty, the Chinese are below any other nation that ever emerged from barbarism. Their painting is of a very commonplace description,—though not so bad, we believe, as it is generally supposed to be in this country; and their only notion of sculpture is, to represent a thing lusty in order that it may look grand. Their architecture, says Mr Barrow, “is void of taste, grandeur, beauty, solidity, or convenience; their houses are merely tents [an exaggeration]; and there is nothing magnificent even in the palace of the emperor.” One of the few notable exceptions to this remark is the celebrated Porcelain Pagoda at Nanking, which Du Halde thought “the most solid, remarkable, and magnificent structure in the eastern world.” For this want of beauty in their buildings, some excuse may be found in the circumstance that the law does not permit them to deviate from the established rules, and that any Mandarin who should venture to indulge an architectural fancy of his own would quickly draw down upon himself the vengeance of the Board of Rites; but “when there’s a will there’s a way,” and had the general taste ever advanced beyond the tent-shaped domiciles of their early ancestors, the administration of the law would hardly have proved an insurmountable barrier to improvement.