(B)—Chinese Origins.

Chinese literature contains no record of any kind which might justify us in assuming that the nucleus of the nation may have immigrated from some other part of the world; and the several ingenious theories pointing to Babylonia, Egypt, India, Khotan, and other seats of ancient civilization as the starting-points of ethnical wanderings must be dismissed as untenable. Whether the Chinese were seated in their later homes from times immemorial, as their own historians assume, or whether they arrived there from abroad, as some foreign scholars have pretended, cannot be proved to the satisfaction of historical critics. Indeed, anthropological arguments seem to contradict the idea of any connexion with Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, or Indians. The earliest hieroglyphics of the Chinese, ascribed by them to the Shang dynasty (second millennium B.C.), betray the Mongol character of the nation that invented them by the decided obliquity of the human eye wherever it appears in an ideograph. In a pair of eyes as shown in the most ancient pictorial or sculptural representations in the west, the four corners may be connected by a horizontal straight line; whereas lines drawn through the eyes of one of the oldest Chinese hieroglyphics cross each other at a sharp angle, as shown in the accompanying diagrams:—

Chinese.Egyptian.

This does not seem to speak for racial consanguinity any more than the well-known curled heads and bearded faces of Assyrian sculptures as compared to the straight-haired and almost beardless Chinese. Similarities in the creation of cultural elements may, it is true, be shown to exist on either side, even at periods when mutual intercourse was probably out of the question; but this may be due to uniformity in the construction of the human brain, which leads man in different parts of the world to arrive at similar ideas under similar conditions, or to prehistoric connexions which it is as impossible for us to trace now as is the origin of mankind itself. Our standpoint as regards the origin of the Chinese race is, therefore, that of the agnostic. All we can do is to reproduce the tradition as it is found in Chinese literature. This tradition, as applying to the very earliest periods, may be nothing more than historical superstition, yet it has its historical importance. Supposing it were possible to prove that none of the persons mentioned in the Bible from Adam down to the Apostles ever lived, even the most sceptical critic would still have to admit that the history of a great portion of the human race has been materially affected by the belief in the examples of their alleged lives. Something similar may be said of the alleged earliest history of the Chinese with its model emperors and detestable tyrants, the accounts of which, whether based on reality or not, have exercised much influence on the development of the nation.

The Chinese have developed their theories of prehistoric life. Speculation as to the origin and gradual evolution of their civilization has resulted in the expression of views by authors who may have reconstructed their systems from remnants of ancestral life revealed by excavations, or from observation of neighbouring nations living in a state of barbarism. This may account for a good deal of the repetition found in the Chinese mythological and legendary narratives, the personal and chronological part of which may have been invented merely as a framework for illustrating social and cultural progress. The scene of action of all the prehistoric figures from P‘an-ku, the first human being, down to the beginning of real history has been laid in a part of the world which has never been anything but Chinese territory. P‘an-ku’s epoch, millions of years ago, was followed by ten distinct periods of sovereigns, including the “Heavenly emperors,” the “Terrestrial emperors,” and the “Human emperors,” the Yu-ch‘au or “Nest-builders,” and Sui-jön, the “Fire Producer,” the Prometheus of the Chinese, who borrowed fire from the stars for the benefit of man. Several of the characteristic phases of cultural progress and social organization have been ascribed to this mythological period. Authors of less fertile imagination refer them to later times, when the heroes of their accounts appear in shapes somewhat resembling human beings rather than as gods and demigods.

The Chinese themselves look upon Fu-hi as their first historical emperor; and they place his lifetime in the years 2852-2738 B.C. Some accounts represent him as a supernatural being; and we see him depicted as a human figure with a fish tail something like a mermaid. He is credited with having established social order among his people, who, before him, had lived like animals in the wilds. The social chaos out of which Chinese society arose is described as being characterized by the absence of family life; for “children knew only their mothers and not their fathers.” Fu-hi introduced matrimony; and in so doing he placed man as the husband at the head of the family and abolished the original matriarchate. This quite corresponds with his views on the dualism in natural philosophy, of which he is supposed to have laid the germs by the invention of the so-called pa-kua, eight symbols, each consisting of three parallel lines, broken or continuous. The continuous lines represented the male element in nature; the broken ones, the female. It is characteristic that the same ruler who assigned to man his position as the head of the family is also credited with the invention of that natural philosophy of the “male and female principles,” according to which all good things and qualities were held to be male, while their less sympathetic opposites were female, such as heaven and earth, sun and moon, day and night, south and north. If these traditions really represent the oldest prehistoric creations of the popular mind, it would almost seem that the most ancient Chinese shared that naïve sentiment which caused our own forefathers to invent gender. The difference is that, with us, the conception survives merely in the language, where the article or suffixes mark gender, whereas with the Chinese, whose language does not express gender, it survives in their system of metaphysics. For all their attempts at fathoming the secrets of nature are based on the idea that male or female powers are inherent in all matter.

To the same Emperor Fu-hi are ascribed many of the elementary inventions which raise man from the life of a brute to that of a social being. He taught his people to hunt, to fish, and to keep flocks; he constructed musical instruments, and replaced a kind of knot-writing previously in use by a system of hieroglyphics. All this cannot of course be considered as history; but it shows that the authors of later centuries who credited Fu-hi with certain inventions were not quite illogical in starting from the matriarchal chaos, after which he is said to have organized society with occupations corresponding to those of a period of hunting, fishing and herding. This period was bound to be followed by a further step towards the final development of the nation’s social condition; and we find it quite logically succeeded by a period of agricultural life, personified in the Emperor, Shön-nung, supposed to have lived in the twenty-eighth century B.C. His name may be freely translated as “Divine Labourer”; and to him the Chinese ascribe the invention of agricultural implements, and the discovery of the medicinal properties of numerous plants.

The third historical emperor was Huang-ti, the “Yellow emperor,” according to the literal translation. Ssï-ma Ts‘ién, the Herodotus of the Chinese, begins his history with him; but Fu-hi and Shön-nung are referred to in texts much older than this historian, though many details relating to their alleged reigns have been added in later times. Huang-ti extended the boundaries of the empire, described as being originally confined to a limited territory near the banks of the Yellow river and the present city of Si-an-fu. Here were the sites of cities used as capitals of the empire under various names during long periods since remote antiquity. To Huang-ti, whose reign is said to have commenced in 2704 according to one source and in 2491 according to another, are ascribed most of the cultural innovations which historians were not able otherwise to locate within historical times. Under Huang-ti we find the first mention of a nation called the Hun-yü, who occupied the north of his empire and with whom he is represented to have engaged in warfare. The Chinese identify this name with that of the Hiung-nu, their old hereditary enemy and the ancestors of Attila’s Huns. Even though the details of these legendary accounts may deserve little confidence, there must have been an old tradition that a nation called the Hun-yü, occupying the northern confines of China, were the ancestors of the Hiung-nu tribes, well known in historical times, a scion of whose great khans settled in territory belonging to the king of Sogdiana during the first century B.C., levied tribute from his neighbours, the Alans, and with his small but warlike horde initiated that era of migrations which led to the overrunning of Europe with Central-Asiatic Tatars.

Fu-hi, Shön-nung and Huang-ti represent a group of rulers comprised by the Chinese under the name of San-huang, i.e. “The Three Emperors.” Although we have no reason to deny their existence, the details recorded concerning them contain enough in the way of improbabilities to justify us in considering them as mythical creations. The chronology, too, is apparently quite fictitious; for the time allotted to their reigns is much too long as a term of government for a single human life, and, on the other hand, much too short, if we measure it by the cultural progress said to have been brought about in it. Fu-hi’s period of hunting life must have lasted many generations before it led to the agricultural period represented by the name Shön-nung; and this period in turn could not possibly have led within a little more than one hundred years to the enormous progress ascribed to Huang-ti. Under the latter ruler a regular board of historians is said to have been organized with Ts‘ang-kié as president, who is known also as Shi-huang, i.e. “the Emperor of Historians,” the reputed inventor of hieroglyphic writing placed by some authors into the Fu-hi period and worshipped as Tz‘ï-shön, i.e. “God of writing,” to the present day. Huang-ti is supposed to have been the first builder of temples, houses and cities; to have regulated the calendar, to which he added the intercalary month; and to have devised means of traffic by cars drawn by oxen and by boats to ply on the lakes and rivers of his empire. His wife, known as “the lady of Si-ling,” is credited with the invention of the several manipulations in the rearing of silkworms and the manufacture of silk. The invention of certain flutes, combined to form a kind of reed organ, led to a deeper study of music; and in order to construct these instruments with the necessary accuracy a system of weights and measures had to be devised. Huang-ti’s successors, Shau-hau, Chuan-hü, and Ti-k‘u, were less prominent, though each of them had their particular merits.

The Model Emperors.—Most of the stories regarding the “Three Emperors” are told in comparatively late records. The Shu-king, sometimes described as the “Canon of History,” our oldest source of pre-Confucian history, supposed to have been edited by Confucius himself, knows nothing of Fu-hi, Shön-nung and Huang-ti; but it begins by extolling the virtues of the emperor Yau and his successor Shun. Yau and Shun are probably the most popular names in Chinese history as taught in China. Whatever good qualities may be imagined of the rulers of a great nation have been heaped upon their heads; and the example of their lives has at all times been held up by Confucianists as the height of perfection in a sovereign’s character. Yau, whose reign has been placed by the fictitious standard chronology of the Chinese in the years 2357-2258, and about 200 years later by the less extravagant “Annals of the Bamboo Books,” is represented as the patron of certain astronomers who had to watch the heavenly bodies; and much has been written about the reputed astronomical knowledge of the Chinese in this remote period. Names like Deguignes, Gaubil, Biot and Schlegel are among those of the investigators. On the other side are the sceptics, who maintain that later editors interpolated statements which could have been made only with the astronomical knowledge possessed by their own contemporaries. According to an old legend, Shun banished “the four wicked ones” to distant territories. One of these bore the name T‘au-t‘ié, i.e. “Glutton”; called also San-miau. T‘au-t‘ié is also the name of an ornament, very common on the surface of the most ancient bronze vessels, showing the distorted face of some ravenous animal. The San-miau as a tribe are said to have been the forefathers of the Tangutans, the Tibetans and the Miau-tz‘ï in the south-west of China. This legend may be interpreted as indicating that the non-Chinese races in the south-west have come to their present seats by migration from Central China in remote antiquity. During Yau’s reign a catastrophe reminding one of the biblical deluge threatened the Chinese world. The emperor held his minister of works, Kun, responsible for this misfortune, probably an inundation of the Yellow river such as has been witnessed by the present generation. Its horrors are described with poetical exaggeration in the Shu-king. When the efforts to stop the floods had proved futile for nine years, Yau wished to abdicate, and he selected a virtuous young man of the name of Shun as his successor. Among the legends told about this second model emperor is the story that he had a board before his palace on which every subject was permitted to note whatever faults he had to find with his government, and that by means of a drum suspended at his palace gate attention might be drawn to any complaint that was to be made to him. Since Kun had not succeeded in stopping the floods, he was dismissed and his son Yü was appointed in his stead. Probably the waters began to subside of their own accord, but Yü has been praised up as the national hero who, by his engineering works, saved his people from utter destruction. His labours in this direction are described in a special section of the Confucian account known as Yü-kung, i.e. “Tribute of Yü.” Yü’s merit has in the sequel been exaggerated so as to credit him with more than human powers. He is supposed to have cut canals through the hills, in order to furnish outlets to the floods, and to have performed feats of engineering compared to which, according to Von Richthofen, the construction of the St Gotthard tunnel without blasting materials would be child’s play, and all this within a few years.