Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

I know people say that women should not be exposed to the risks of a missionary's life, but the answer is that were women not employed, half the mission work would be left undone and the heroism with which women have endured death and danger has been no small factor in the spread of Christianity and in producing the change in China.

CHAPTER XVII

THE EFFECT OF WESTERN LITERATURE IN CHINA

Among the influences that have awakened China, outside the great lesson of political events, none has been more influential than literature in its many branches. The Chinese have always been a literary race. They invented printing about the same time that the savage Saxons welcomed the first book written by the Venerable Bede, and the influence of literature has therefore held sway many hundred years in China. But for the last six hundred years there have not been many works of original thought produced in native literature. Most of their writings have been commentaries on the Classics following along the beaten paths, or works of poetry full of references to the Shi-King or the classic poetry of the Chinese. The literature of China is characteristic of her civilisation. It is confined by an artificiality which has its origin in an inordinate respect for the past and an absolute distrust of the future. Every book looks backward to the period when China's thought was pure and great.

This period continued till the Anglo-Saxon influence made itself felt through its missions. Very early in the history of Protestant missions it was perceived that in a country like China some other appeal must be made than could be made by the white missionary. A nation reverencing the printed page to such a degree that men will carefully pick up a piece of paper and put it on one side rather than trample it heedlessly, for fear lest that piece of paper should contain words of wisdom, is obviously a nation that can best be reached through printed matter, and so Dr. Morrison, the pioneer of Protestant missions, devoted the greater part of his missionary life to translating the Holy Scriptures. The matter was not so simple as might appear to those who are only conversant with the civilisation of younger and less artificial races than the Chinese. It is not enough to translate a work into Chinese; the spoken language is nowhere used for literature. The literary language commonly called Wenli probably never was spoken, and is so full of artificial rules of construction that it is only after many years that a man can hope to write it efficiently. Chang-Chih-Tung says that it requires ten years for a Chinaman to become an efficient translator. That does not mean that it takes ten years for a Chinaman to learn English, but ten years for a man to be able to put into good Chinese the thoughts that he has learned from the West.

The written language of China, it should be remembered, is not a language in which sounds are portrayed by means of signs as it is with Western languages. Each character represents an idea, the only analogy in our language being the numerals and some few signs we have for simple words such as "cross" or "and." Therefore when new ideas are developed new signs are required. These can be created out of old signs. For instance, I understand that a railway engine is called a fire carriage. This, by the way, caused great confusion of mind in a certain district to the Christian converts who were conversant with the story of Elijah, for some of them erroneously concluded that Elijah left this earth in a railway train.

Another instance of the difficulty of expressing new things was afforded when a certain mission started work in China. They were in some perplexity as to the title that they should choose for their society. They wanted to convey to the Chinese that their denomination claimed especially to feed the souls of men. They explained all this to an educated Chinaman, and quoted some well-known texts. He immediately wrote down two characters, and assured them that they represented what they had said about the spiritual food that they provided, and would also be very popular with the Chinese, as indeed it proved. The moment they opened the door of the chapel they were besieged by hundreds of Chinese of the poorer class, who, after listening for a short time, went away discontentedly. The missionaries found out afterwards that the title they had been given literally translated was "Health-giving Free Restaurant," a most attractive title to the hungry Chinaman.

There is indeed another way of representing new words. The word can be borrowed bodily from another language and pronounced in a Chinese way, and the word-signs which best represent the sounds can then be employed. This is often done with proper names. For instance, a great Chinese statesman told me that he referred to Sir Edward Grey in his despatches to China by three signs which had the three sounds Ga La Hay, but this system is obviously open to misconstruction, because the reader might be tempted to give the words their normal meaning. I believe that such terms as X-rays and ultimatum have been so adopted bodily into the Chinese language. Ninety per cent., however, of the new word-signs which go to make up what the Chinese call modern style are new combinations of ancient ideographs.