When some Chinese literati were questioned about this architecture they freely confessed that they preferred their native buildings, but they seemed to think that a Western school could not be efficient unless it was held in a Western building. Missionaries and others being questioned on this point maintained that Western houses were in the end the cheapest, but the Chinese would not allow this. They said that a Chinese house would cost far more than a Western house if it were beautifully adorned with carving, but if it was built simply it would work out at less cost.
Chinese architecture is obviously a construction which lends itself to the use of iron. A Chinese building with iron substituted for wood would look as well, for they always paint their wood; this ought to be a very cheap form of construction in a land which is going to produce iron at a very low rate. The truth is that it is neither a question of cost nor of efficiency which makes the Chinese architecture despised; it is part of the great movement which expresses itself in stone and brick—a movement which is tending to bring the Eastern countries into misery—a movement which is planting in the East all that is commonplace, all that is hideous in the West, and that is destroying all that is beautiful in the East both in thought and colour and form. It is the counterpart of the movement which is destroying the faith of the Eastern nations and is only substituting the materialism which has degraded the West.
RELIGIONS OF CHINA AND THE MISSIONARY
CHAPTER XII
RELIGIONS IN CHINA
The real power of a race lies in its religion; other motives inevitably tend to egotism, disorganisation, and national death, and China is no exception to the rule; the strength and the weakness of China lies in her religion and in its absence. There are few nations who set less store by the outward observance of religion and yet there are few nations with a greater belief in the supernatural. On the one hand, the temples are deserted or turned into schools, and the Chinese are believed to have no other motives than self-interest. On the other hand, the whole of Chinese life turns round the relation of man to the spirit of his ancestors and to the spiritual world, and the Chinaman obviously believes that a man's soul is immortal and that its welfare has the very closest connection with the welfare of his descendant.
The commercial man will tell you that the Chinese are materialists—people who have no faith; and yet with glorious inconsistency he will explain that the difficulty of using Chinese labour abroad is that even the commonest coolie demands that his body shall be repatriated and shall lie in some place which will not hinder his son doing filial worship to his spirit. The whole question of what the race believes is rendered more difficult of comprehension to a Westerner by the confused nature of that belief, and is complicated by the characteristic of the Chinese of mixing all religions together regardless of their natural incongruity. It is hoped that the reader will bear this in mind during the following explanation.
The religions of China are usually classed as three. Not three well-marked religions in our sense of the word, but three elements which tend to merge into a common religion. There are separate religions. A large number of Chinese, for instance, are Mohammedan, and they neither marry nor are given in marriage to the other Chinese; there is a very small Jewish community; and there is also a native Greek Christian village still tolerated by the Chinese, which was transplanted from Siberia as the result of a Chinese conquest in the days of Peter the Great; there are a quarter of a million Christians converted by non-Roman missions, besides a million belonging to the Roman Catholic Communion. But Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism put all together, form but a small part of the Chinese community, and the greater part of China believes, according to all orthodox expositors, in three religions—Buddhism, Taoism, and what is termed Confucianism.