Chapter C: W. Kinder, a Briton, of the Kaiping mines, built the first (9)

The farmer is king. He has attacked the old magnificent roads, eight feet wide, cut at great expense in the mountains, carried soil over part of them and planted his corn. Marble-lined lotus gardens of magnificent old estates he has filled up with his rice seed; and the grain waves beneath the windows of deserted palaces, the owners probably long ago, because of their opinions and not their crimes, having, in Manchu days, dropped their heads beneath the blow of the taifo swords while they bowed upon their knees in a line at far-away Peking!

Ginger is grown extensively in China. It is used for cooking and as a medicine. Preserved in sugar, it is known world-wide as a delicious confection. The Chinese prefer it in a heavy syrup. This species of lily grows about two feet high. The roots are very heavy and are kept irrigated in mud. It is one of the few plants which leave their odor in the air in the fields where they grow. The marmalade industry will have a great future in the vast southern provinces. Java, the Philippines and Formosa, are near with their sugar, and the provinces of Kwantung, Kwangsi and Fukien have noble orchards of pumelo, lemon and orange trees. As the family-village farms the apparently undivided fields as a community, watchers have to be set in the fields and at the granary floors, when harvest time approaches. A platform is built of bamboo, and the watcher mounts it, carrying along his gong. As there are no fences and few trees, the watcher commands a wide view, and deters private bands and prowlers of other villages from making sudden raids. Manchuria has been found to be an ideal ground for the sugar beet, the black soil producing a higher percentage of sugar than anywhere in the world. The sugar industry is a most important addition to the agricultural wealth of those three extremely rich provinces, which are destined to help in the feeding of industrial America. Returned Chinese emigrants from Java and America started in 1911, in Fukien and Chekiang provinces the cultivation of cotton on an extended scale, looking to the new mills of Shanghai, Hangchow and Wuchang to buy the product, which will be shipped by junks, steamer and the new coast railway. The Chinese value their highly tilled lands near the large cities at a price equal to forty-five dollars in gold for our acre.

British Hongkong set the example in reforestation. Germany followed at Kiachou, Shangtung, with acacia, fir, ash, larch, walnut and oak trees along the railway line. Japan followed in South Manchuria, and China herself established a forestry school at Mukden in 1908, and in Kansu later. It is absolutely essential to retard the snows and rainfalls at the heads of the great rivers if the awful floods and consequent famines are ever to be obviated in the valleys of the Hoangho, Han, Yangtze and Hwei Rivers. The camphor is China’s own tree, especially in Formosa, Fukien, and the southern provinces. Ceylon, California, Texas, Florida, Jamaica, Malay, Italy and German East Africa have successfully introduced the tree, and will in time help to supply the world’s growing requirements for the arts and industries, which synthetic camphor can not do, because of the deforestation of America’s southern pine, which now supplies the necessary oil of turpentine. Camphor can be distilled from any part of the tree, even the dead leaves, and some conservation foresters, especially Americans and Germans, are urging a world movement to use the leaves, dropped twigs and cuttings alone for this purpose. Camphor formerly was made by cutting up the tree and treating the chips with water in a closed vessel, the volatilized camphor condensing on rice straw packed in the head of the still. The deposit was purified by sublimation in glass retorts in the presence of lime.

I have for years been writing that the Chinese is a born humorist. The humor of their arboriculturists is well known in their stunting and twisting of trees and bamboos. The matched curved bamboos of the Fati and other gardens of Canton are famous. Another quaint form is the splitting of a tree trunk so as to form a living arch. When the tree is young, it is uprooted and split up the trunk and replanted in the road leading to a shrine or temple. As the trunk grows apart, the road leads under the arch. Under the shelter of the north wall of the imperial section of the city of Peking, there are famous old cryptomeria cypresses split in this way. The humorist is saying: “See Nature’s god with his grotesque products laughing at man’s idea of religion!” The farmer and his boy are humorists. They meet you on the highroad and laugh because the pigs and geese which they are driving to market all have tiny straw sandals on their feet, and the water buffalo which they are riding to the exchange has sandals, but they themselves are in their bare feet, and they point out to you the humorous incongruity!

The very handsome Hagenbeck pheasant from the Kobdo valley of Manchuria, fiftieth parallel, can live farthest north of any pheasant, and can therefore withstand our winters. It is large and edible. The Mongolian pheasant has been acclimated on the Rothschild estate in Herts, England. The Manchurian eared pheasant is heavy and edible, but unlike the others is not wild and active enough for the game fields. Accordingly it best suits the poulterer of China. The pheasant is a fairly cheap dish at all the clubs and hotels of China, and the indentured clerk of Hongkong is therefore to his surprise dining like a king daily on the game which the owner of his concern would consider at home a luxury reserved for the Christmas dinner! Some of the native proverbs are:

“No matter where the stream is, the sea is calling it.”

“Frost and ice are made of water, but they don’t grow things like rain and dew.”

“A spark is small, but it can burn a thousand farms.”

“Don’t try to put out the burning field with tears; run for water.”

“One bad bean makes the whole basket rot.”

“Rain on a summer’s dawn means a clear day, but a rain at noon will last.”

XXIX

CHINESE ARCHITECTURE AND ART

“The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” are unearthed a foot at a time to the wondering eyes of the world by the tireless antiquarian-architect. China has some extensive ruins that show the death struggle of a dynasty with the tooth of the destroyer, Time. Near Singan, in Shensi province, are the ruins of the tombs, arches and palaces of the builder of the Great Wall. On the left bank of the Orkhon River in Mongolia, southwest of Kuren, are the ruins of the Uigur empire, seventh to ninth centuries, A. D. These Mongols were first Buddhist, then Nestorian Christian, and afterward Mohammedan in faith, and their fathers took part in the terrific invasions of Europe that have made Russia one quarter Asiatic. Ujfalvy, Schott and Professor Thomsen have written books on the race, and Heikel and Radlov explored the ruins in 1890–1. On the right bank of the same river, fifteen miles southeast, at the edge of the Gobi Desert, are the ruins of the Mongol empire of the thirteenth century, founded by Ogodai Khan in 1234 A. D., and whose greatest conqueror, Kublai Khan, of whom Marco Polo wrote, overran all China and Turkestan. Had it not been for a lucky storm that destroyed his armada, he would have overrun Japan also.

One hundred and fifty miles northwest of Pnom Penh, in a deserted tropical jungle, are the ruins of the Khmer dynasty which ruled Cambodia from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. These gorgeous palaces were built for luxurious Oriental kings when the early Mercian, Northumbrian and Wessex chiefs were shivering in wooden huts in our primeval England. The ruins are at Angkor on the north of the Great Summer Lake. The main temple of the Angkor Wat, in a walled enclosure, is in splendid preservation, and is one pf the world’s most wonderful architectural curiosities. It is shaped like a wide Chinese temple, but has in addition splendid pagodas one hundred and eighty feet high over the entrances. The architecture is Indo-Chinese. There is much carving and sculpture, fine corridors and columns that were colored. Five miles north is another walled ruin, thirty feet in height, enclosing an area of two miles square, the walls pierced by five gorgeous gates. The ruins stand alone in the moonlight, unclaimed and untenanted. What few Siamese, Shans or Annamese may wander here, fall down in speechless worship. The dense jungle is filled with insects, reptiles, wild animals, and but for them the silence is primeval. Pierre Loti recently visited the ruins by sailing up the Mekong River from Saigon to Pnom Penh. There he took elephants and oxen one hundred and fifty miles for the Great Summer Lake, across which he paddled. His book, _Un Pelerin d’Angkor_, not yet translated, was issued in French by Calmann-Levy, Paris, in 1912. Other French authors on this subject are Delaporte (_Voyage au Camboge_); Fournereau (_Les Ruins d’Angkor_), and Tissandier (_Cambodje-Java_).

Two hundreds miles north of Angkor, at Korat, are further Khmer ruins. The other ruins and tombs of old China are those of the Ming dynasty at Nankou pass, north of Peking, and Nanking; the Manchu dynasty at Mukden and northwest of Peking; and the Sung dynasty at Hangchow. The tomb of Prince Ki Chah of the then Wu principality, who died B. C. 530, and which bears an inscription prepared by Confucius, can be seen to-day lying between the new British-built railway and the Grand Canal, twenty miles east of Changchow in the south of Kiangsu province. The laws of the Tsin principality, 513 B. C., were engraved on iron, but have not been recovered in any tomb or on any wall. Individual pagoda ruins and ancient walls cover the land, as does star-dust the sky. Laws, customs, history and a relation of the Rites, were engraved on metal bowls, which stood on three legs. These bowls were handed down through the dynasties to the princes, together with the ancestral tablets, as a sign of royal authority. There exists to-day in a temple on Silver Island, near Chinkiang in Kiangsu province, such a tripod bowl of the Chow princely dynasty, date 812 B. C. This was about the date when Jeroboam recovered Damascus from Israel. When Confucius was a boy of twelve, and already deep in his study of history, Cyrus the Elder had captured ancient Babylon and founded the Persian empire. It is quite probable that the old Hia, Shang and Chou kings (2200 B. C. onward) left their records, as the contemporary Egyptians and Babylonians did, in brick tablets, but those tablets, being made of non-adhesive, fibrous loess mud of the present Shensi and Shansi provinces, soon crumbled. It was a different thing when centuries later, the Chinese kings, having traveled farther south, employed better potters to use the more adhesive clays of the present Kiangsi province. The Hia kings of what is now Shensi province reigned when the giant sequoia evergreen trees of California were seedlings 4010 years ago.

Chinese bronzes date back as far as the imperial Chou dynasty (1120 B. C.) which instituted the sacrifices and ancestor worship, and a few majestically simple bronze tripods, elemental monsters and sacrificial vessels date back to the Shang dynasty 1800 B. C. These tripods are similar to those that Homer describes in the ninth book of _The Iliad_, 2500 B. C. The oldest bronzes are, of course, noble and plain in design, the warmer, richer art of Buddhism coming in at a far later date, and bringing in the innovation of the human figure, flowers and incense burners. The Natural History Museum at New York has precious collections of the old mortuary bronzes of the Chou dynasty referred to in Professor Parker’s illuminating work on the days of Confucius. Bronze vases, goblets, censers, mirrors, tablets, baskets, bells, some of them studded, are in the collection which dates as far back as 1800 B. C. Chinese form has been persistent, its ornamentation progressive. When we are looking at these bronzes, we should realize that they were fashioned by men contemporary with Homer. The oldest tombs were in Turkestan, Kansu and Shensi provinces, lying alongside the path of the primeval emigration along the Tarim’s banks from Eden. In various articles I have instanced the similarity between old Greek and old Chinese designs. The dragon was used in art designs and considered a sacred Jovian portent by the Homerian Greeks who were camped before Troy, B. C. 2500. In anthropological customs, Pope relates that the Homerian Greeks of the Euboea tribe, drawn up before Troy’s walls, 2500 B. C., shaved their foreheads but left the hair on the back of their heads to grow long, like the present Manchus.

The new bronze portrait statue of Li Hung Chang at the Sicawei Gardens, Shanghai, is unusual, and marks a new era in memorials in China, pailoo arches and tablets having formerly been erected. True, there are many fanciful statues to Buddha and Confucius, and one to Marco Polo in the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii at Canton, but they are rather to be considered as effigies. In Tibet, they erect engraved, square stone monuments, a figure of Buddha being cut into three of the top panels, representing the past, present and future Buddha. A horned roof, with a little central pagoda covers the monument. These strikingly symmetrical monuments are erected on high places along the mountain passes. The Buddhists cut gigantic figures of the god into cliffs, bushes serving as hair, and grass as eyebrows. Notable among these are the colossal cliff Buddhas at Kiating and Yung Hsien in Szechuen province. Old caves and cave-temples are generally in proximity with these images.

In Szechuen province, the piers of bridges have a stone dragon as a terminal, the head looking up-stream, and across the bridge, the tail pointing down-stream. The proportions are beautiful and the effect delightful. The best known and most beautiful camel’s back bridge in the empire is at Wan Hsien at the head of the Yangtze gorges. Stone steps mount up the arch, which is crowned with a beautiful house of blue stucco. The house is used as a rest place, and a restaurant These bridges show how much the Chinese understood of engineering and also that they were good masons. In the caves along the Min River in Szechuen province, pottery coffins have been found, dating back previous to the Christian era, and showing that the early Chinese of the Chou dynasty did not bring all the civilization of China with them, but found many arts among the aborigines. At Ning Hsia, an oasis city in the horn of Kansu province, is a peculiar pagoda where the joylessness of the north has cut the curling ten galleries down to mere ridges, and roofed the eleven stories with a mere turban roof. Each story has Roman windows, except the top, which has circular windows. The architecture shows Mohammedan influence over these Buddhists, and the structure, with that at Liangchow in the same province, is exceedingly unique in so ornate a land of up-curling roofs, carved screens, and overhanging galleries. While the Chinese never build fences, the Manchus, of Manchuria, construct a curious palisade composed of crosses, one end of which is stuck in the ground. The whole of the Grand Canal was crossed by many thousands of beautiful marble bridges, erected during the Sung dynasty. Many of them still remain, with their great beauty of aspiring arch, balustrade, carving and anchorage. At Sui Fu, on the upper Yangtze, is a temple remarkable not for its size, but for the proportion of its galleries and roof, the cornices of which curl upward violently at great width from the walls. The temple is met by steps that climb up the mountain side from the great river. The walls too, with their panels, frieze and balustrade, are interesting, but the design of the roof is an artistic triumph, equaled only by the Loong Wah Temple which is photographed as a frontispiece in my book, _The Chinese_. It is this sweeping boldness and generosity of curve which should be copied in roofs and galleries in the new Chinese architecture, which lovers of the old China earnestly recommend.

Many of the poorer huts of Pechili province are built of clay poured around a reinforcing of kaoliang stalks. Sometimes tiles are set in the clay roof, which is very heavy, and in the rainy season, it often falls in on the tenant. In Kiangsu province the thatching is made of reeds. Of course improvements are often designed, and they attempt to make a cement or chunam by mixing burnt lime and stone in the clay. The very poor, however, really live in mud burrows like the fox, whether the mud is made into a hut, or the dwelling is cut as a cave in the loess hills of Shensi and Shansi provinces. The Manchurian and northern Pechili style of architecture is severe and strong, but it has its simple beauties. A Buddhist temple not far from Shan Hai Kwan is a good example. A plain brick and stucco wall, the height of the eaves of the buildings, surrounds the compound. It is broken by a fort-gate, with a Roman arched doorway. The tiled roofs of the fort and temple curl up only slightly. A few high pine trees, branching out only near the top, tower like nature’s banners over the temple, which is matched to the austere lives and buildings of the dwellers in the north. The proportions throughout are nobly and chastely balanced in accord with the architectural influence of the stern Great Wall throughout this region.

At the Edinburgh Mission Conference of the nations in 1908, the Chinese pleaded for the preservation of their architecture. Too great praise can not be given the British for their taste in occupying a Chinese palace as legation headquarters at Peking. Many missions, every foreign business house, nearly every foreign college, the government itself in its new buildings, even the kindred Japanese, and nearly every foreign legation, are all housed in an ugly adaptation of a Renaissance building with verandas. The fashion came from Singapore and Hongkong, but Hongkong gets some picturesqueness out of the style because that colonial city has a mountain to terrace it on. The ventilation and light are poor; the roof is hideous. There is one foreign architect whose soul will never escape from the purgatory of bad architects. He designed for the Honan Assembly a hall at Kaifong which is Moorish in general design; the roof is a Roman dome; the arches are Gothic; and the screens are Chinese. The Japanese do not bring their own beautiful buildings, like those gems, the incomparable Horiuji pagoda and monastery, Yakushiji pagoda; and the shrine of Ieasu at Nikko, to China, and they do not copy or adapt any of the tens of thousands of Chinese gems. They often build a ponderous, ugly, dark, Renaissance building like the Japanese consulate at Shanghai, costly enough but unrepresentative.

St. John’s University (American Episcopal), of Shanghai, has made the laudable concession of putting a Chinese roof on its valuable foreign buildings. The eaves have a slight Chinese up-turn, but there is little of Chinese ornament in apron, ridge, column, double roof, or pagoda spire here and there. However, America, nearly always the leader in sympathy with the Chinese, has here made a beginning in saving China’s peerless architecture and art. At Kweiyang, the capital of Kweichou, the French have erected a notable pagoda church, which concedes to Chinese canons a five-story pagoda entrance, and the rear façade is formed as a pailoo with five roofs. With the same idea the British architect has placed on the costly Renaissance “Audience Hall”, of Bangkok, three ornate Burmese pagoda spires. As Greece stands for simplicity and line, China stands for richness, curve and color. She should not die, if according to Keats, “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Ruskin insisted in his famous lectures to artistic Edinburgh that the salient feature of a building was the _roof_, and that there adornment should be rich, like a woman’s hair, or hat, her “crown of glory”. This rule, perhaps indirectly, he took from the Chinese, who from the buried centuries have undeviatingly been faithful to it. The _Assembly Herald_ of the American Presbyterian Church, January, 1912, page twenty-seven, illustrates a gem of modern Chinese architecture. It is a chapel built by a native elder in his simple but beautiful faith. On each side of the entrance there is a rich tile grille that relieves the plain façade. Under the eaves is another beautiful grille that relieves the plain surface. Over the door is a heavy tile canopy with characteristic up-curling points. The tile roof is peaked and might have been more up-curling at the eaves in the beautiful, characteristic Chinese style. The apron under the eaves is richly carved. The Chinese still have a strong rich grasp of beauty, when they are encouraged to develop their architecture.

It is not the custom in stores, temples or homes to keep curios, silks, etc., on view. They are all wrapped in paper, and kept in boxes or cupboards. When a trusted guest arrives, there is an exciting scene as the treasures are unpacked and revealed to admiring eyes. China has always had court painters, a notable one in the reign of the Empress Dowager Tse Hsi being Li Shih Chuan. He was a believer in joy, and developed the more human aspects of the countenance. He was a master in painting fine gowns, dainty embroideries and rich furniture. Portrait paintings are not common, but in the Yangtze provinces some are to be seen. They are in water color and painted on screens. Actors carry an enormous bamboo or ivory tusk, on which is engraved or painted their repertoire. The giver of a feast selects from this the plays which he wishes to have performed for his guests. The Chinese manufacture a hard wall-paper, similar to what we call Lincrusta Walton and use on the walls of our parlor cars and saloons of steamships. The mold is of hard wood, on which the sharp design is carefully chiseled _en relievo_. The blotter-like bamboo paper composition is hammered on this mold, then taken off and sun-dried. Sizing is applied. Afterward the design and final Ningpo or Szechuen rhus-nut varnishing is added. This paper is damp proof, which is an important quality in so humid a climate.

The Chinese of Queens Road, Hongkong, made me two bamboo trunks that have served me on a trip around the world, and are strong enough to make several more. They are remarkable in five important points, elasticity, lightness, strength, resistance to dampness, and cheapness in purchase price and transportation cost. Travelers and explorers bemoan the fact that excess baggage charges cost them almost as much as passenger fares. This problem the wonderful Chinese solved with these remarkable trunks. The framework is of strong bamboo, on which a tough rattan and bamboo envelope is wound. This is lined with soldered zinc, and covered with strong canvas, and for serviceability in the five important points mentioned, the iron and leather trunks can not compare. Go to the Chinese, thou traveler, and be wise! Many of the chairs used at Tientsin have a dome-top, with curious scale design and knob, and are therefore more Burmese than Chinese in design. The chairs of Hongkong are strictly flat-topped. Jade is green, pink and crystal, and retains a soapy glisten. Jades buried in tombs as mortuary ornaments, however, acquire a brown smoky tinge, and the distinction should be made in assorting collections at museums. The Bishop collection of art jades, and the Peters collection of tomb jades in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, are deservedly world famous.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

One of the most ornate pagodas in China, near Shanghai. Surrounding temple buildings are now frequently used for schools.]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Steel truss bridges on modern roads; sentry box for modern police;
modern flats; felt hats, modern umbrellas; telephone wires, steam
launches of the New China.
]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

The Japanese type of girlhood, as contrasted with the Chinese, shown in another photograph.]

The typical Chinese rug shows beautiful apricot ground, spangled with blue medallions. Rich brown and gold rugs are also frequently made, the centers of weaving being Tientsin, Nanking, Hangchow, Canton, etc. The most accessible places where specimens are shown are the large museums. The yellow rugs are used in China in connection with the red tile floorings, and the brown rugs are used often upon blue-tiled floorings, so that if one would catch the true Chinese ensemble, a colored crash must be used in connection with the rugs. Some critics are hasty in declaring that a Chinese rug is glaring when they place a yellow rug on a yellow floor! Chinese rugs were made generally for temples, imperial and viceregal yamens, mandarins’ yamens, and guild halls, as the designs often reveal. Rugs exist which were woven as long ago as the reign of the native Ming kings, fifteenth century. Other rugs date from the Kang Hi and Chien Lung reigns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Temple rugs five by eight feet, or a little over, come from Buddhist monasteries. The ground, as one would expect, is orange, ornamented with clouds, water, figures of Buddha or his mother, Kun Yam, and the zodiac. Imperial Manchu rugs employ the Manchu dragon. Each rug differs slightly, as the artist trusted to his eye alone in following the pattern which hung over his head.

China is almost depleted of her ceramic treasures. The Anglo-French expedition of 1860 under Lord Wolseley destroyed the Emperor Hien Fung’s summer and other palaces near Peking. Some of the allies of 1900 looted Peking itself. The Manchus in the 1911–12 revolution sold the Peking, Mukden and Jehol palace treasures. The collection of the Roman Bishop of Peking, Monsieur Favier, gathered during a long life, was sold in New York in 1912. The Taiping rebellion of 1854 swept bare the pottery province of Kiangsi, and the distress following the 1911–12 revolution and the floods of 1910–11–12 sent the hidden treasures of the Yangtze and Hwei River provinces to the block. An artist of the King Teh Ching potteries would now have to resort to Occidental museums to find his models of cloisonné and champlevé enamels studded with precious stones; yellow and red Lang Yao monochromes of inimitable purity; Ku Hsu Hsuan translucent glass; Kang Hi hawthorn, ginger, and peach-bloom vases, round and square; Yung Cheng landscape and fish vases; flaming jars of the royal Mings; egg shell, rose, green, peony, medallion, dragon, lion vases and plaques of Yung Cheng and Chien Lung periods; the joyous, finely finished pottery of the Kang Hi (seventeenth century period); the rugged, strong, stern work of the tenth century; strutting camels, grinning griffins, spirited horses; the elegant, soft Ming work; the square, flower-covered, green and yellow vases of the sixteenth century; bulging vases of the seventeenth century, with green decoration on a blue ground, as fine as a mixture of emeralds and amethysts; awful gods and funny men stepping about in priceless porcelain. It was not a slight price that to attain political liberty China had to lose her artistic soul. More fortunate Japan never had to pay this price, though she had little art and architecture to lose as compared with the rich and glorious treasures of vast China. A remarkable catalogue of Chinese porcelains with two hundred and fifty-four gorgeously colored plates was written by Messrs. Gorer and Blacker and published by Quaritch, London, in 1912.

In an attempt, even so late, to save China’s art from the foreigner, the public-spirited Tze Tsan Tai, of Hongkong, a collector himself, proposes the establishing of national museums to preserve at least the paintings of China that are notable for their graphic quality, color, humor and love of nature. The most famous schools were in the Sung, Yuan and Ming dynasties, and Mr. Tze’s collection, which he proposes to give to the cause, includes collections from many other schools also. It would be better to open at first museums at Hongkong and Shanghai, and then at Peking, Nanking, Hankau, etc. Some of the names of the artists can be secured in Paleologue’s _L’Art Chinois_, Owen Jones’ _Chinese Ornament_, Dyer Ball’s _Things Chinese_, and E. F. Penellosa’s _Epochs of Chinese Art_.

Chinese temple and house furniture is made of teak. This wood does not grow in China, but in Siam, Java, Ceylon and the Philippines, the main source of supply being the afforested belt of Northern Siam. The tree is an upland one. It is barked or girdled and allowed to die. After two years the tree is felled, the exposure killing off the small branches and developing the oils which help in giving the extraordinary life of the wood. The government does not permit trees of under six and one-half feet girth to be felled. The Chinese of Canton particularly carve the wood in its rich red color, and they also stain it ebon black. Another desirable quality in the Orient is that the wood resists the white ant. The woodwork and furniture of the palatial Hongkong Club is teak, and many of Hongkong’s, Canton’s, Shanghai’s, Manila’s and San Francisco’s palatial residences and public buildings and yachts now use the wood. Hard as it is, the Chinese seem to prefer to saw it by hand even in Hongkong. They tilt the immense logs on end, and one man works under the log, and one stands on the log, the dust being dragged upward by their contrary cut saws, which are designed to save the eyes of the under-man. The natural oil in the wood prevents driven nails or bolts from rusting, and is therefore valuable in ship-sheathing. It is the most durable wood known. The teak piles of West End, Hongkong, and Kowloon over on the mainland, are a unique sight. Water-buffaloes are used to drag up the immense timbers.

A Chinese proverb is, “Speed for a horse, but a slow race for a good jeweler”. The German machinery-stamping jeweler has not yet reached the Orient with his machines, though his products imitate even the Chinese ideograph-buckles. One of their humorous proverbs is, “He thought he painted a tiger, but only a dog waged his tail at the likeness”, and this is about the relationship between the Chinese and the German products. Wherever you buy, remember the artist can put his soul and his taste only into what he makes by hand.

XXX

SOCIOLOGICAL CHINA

When America was as yet undiscovered, and Europe was largely a forest inhabited by hunting tribes, China had taken up an advanced position on sociology. She has long been the world’s clearest and bravest economical thinker, from whom even Germany has consciously or unconsciously copied, and for thousands of years she has followed a thorough civil service in political appointments. It is not surprising therefore that Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the organizer of the revolution of 1911–12, the first president of republican China, and the leading economist of the race, enunciated himself as follows on April 5, 1912: “I have finished the political revolution and now will commence the greatest social revolution in the world’s history. The abdication of the Manchus is only the beginning of a greater development, and the future policy of the republic will be in the direction of socialism. I am an ardent admirer of Henry George, whose ideas are practicable on the virgin soil of China, as compared with their impracticability in Europe or the United States, where the money is controlled by the capitalists. I have the full consent of the new republican government to start a propaganda immediately, whereby the railroads, mines, and similar industries, will be controlled by the government. The single tax system, and as far as possible, free trade, will be adopted.”

Shang, a minister of the Tsin clan of Confucius’ time--the age of courageous statesmen--said: “To restore balance in the state, and remove the dangerous discontent of the poor, renew taxes on the privileged classes.” The Chinese predate all that we claim in America, Britain and Germany as the modern discovery of the formulæ of sociology, economics, commerce, taxes and tariffs, and their aim is always toward free trade, repression of monopoly, opportunity for the ordinary man, who, instead of the privileged, represents the importance of a state, and the necessity of the greater punishment of the rich than the poor for the same offense, because hunger and self-preservation do not drive the rich to crime. Under the ancient criminal code, the hsiang lao (village head) under penalty of the bamboo, must compel all available land to be cultivated, not only that government may receive taxes, but that famine may be averted. The Chinese, Koun Tze, as early as B. C. 100, wrote: “The more horses that are put to the chariots of the rich, the more those who are poor will have to walk.”

“The more the houses of the rich are vast and magnificent, the more those of the poor will be small and miserable.”

“The more the tables of the rich are covered with dainties, the more people there will be reduced to plain rice.”

“At all costs, government should secure to all, all the necessities of life.”

This last sentence is worthy of being linked with the immortal epigram in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.

Other notable economic writers were Tsien Tche and Leang Tsien, but towering above them all for adaptability to the convictions and crying necessities of our day was Wang Ngan Shih, 1069 A. D., a Rooseveltian statesman of the Sung dynasty, whose capital was the present Kaifong. Remember that this statesman-author wrote when William the Conqueror was putting England under the yoke of feudalism, which hated the principles of liberty. Wang taught partly as follows:

1. The first duty of government is to secure plenty and relaxation for the common people.

2. The state should take possession of all important resources and become the main and dictating employer in commerce, industry and transportation, with the view of preventing the working classes being ground to the dust by the monopolizing rich.

3. Government tribunals should fix the local prices of provisions and merchandise.

4. The rich shall pay all taxes; the small owner shall pay nothing as long as he remains small.

5. Old age pensions.

6. The state to insure work for workmen.

7. The state to assign land, distribute seed and direct sowing, so that there shall neither be cornering of food by the rich, nor lack of food for the poor.

8. Destruction of usurers.

9. Confiscation of large and criminally-won estates; that is, retroactive laws and restitution, instead of “Go and sin no more, but keep what you got by former sins.”

The Boswell of Confucius in the Ta Hio (Great Study) writes: “If those who govern states only think of amassing riches for their personal use, they will infallibly attract toward them depraved men, and these depraved men will really govern the state. The administration of these unworthy ministers will call down the chastisements of heaven, and also excite the vengeance of the aggrieved people. The riches of those who have the honor to govern states should rather be justice and equity, and not only talk of justice and equity.” Is this not excellent statesmanship, even if written in China long before the Christian era?

China’s love of peace was inculcated brilliantly by Lao Tse (604 B. C.) in these words: “The least glorious peace is preferable to the most brilliant successes of war. The most splendid victory is but the light from a conflagration.” The Ancients said: “Render no funeral honors to conquerors; receive them with tears and cries in memory of the homicides they have committed, and let the monuments of their victories be surrounded with the tombs of those whose death they brought about.” Confucius, a practical statesman, fifty-three years later, ineffectually combated this philosophy with these words: “They who discuss by diplomacy should always have the support of a military backing”; that is, the mailed fist and the soft word! The feudal system began to totter in China in B. C. 250, under the reign of the emperor-builder of the Great Wall, Tsin Chih Hwang-Ti. The classical examinations gave it the death blow in A. D. 600. With its martial accessory, the feudal system continued in Japan, which tolerated no democratic examinations for office, until the very late date of 1869 A. D., thus lasting there the longest in the world, for it had died in England eight centuries earlier. Such was the beneficent effect of the famous classical examinations and civil service in old China.

The most brilliant maxim on sociology ever written is Chinese:

“Gold is tested by fire:
Man is tested by gold.”

On this subject of hardships, Mencius himself wrote, in 315 B. C.: “When Heaven (Tien) is about to confer a responsible office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his bravest undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his courage and increases his adaptability.” China was the first country to establish a Price Board, now recommended by all political parties in America for dealing with monopolies until real competition can be again set up. Salt production is a government monopoly. The dealer must buy from the government and sell a fixed quantity at a fixed price in a fixed district. The justice that the government regulates is that the dealer may not adulterate and may not charge an unreasonable profit. If the cost of production is high, the people profit, because the government will not need to collect high taxes in other ways. There is no chance for a crowd of drone-middlemen to get away with immense profits, or for private monopolists to lay a whole people under economic slavery. This is the Chinese theory. In many parts of Eastern Szechuen every farm has its little salt well with bamboo wheel and men treaders. The salt is sold to the government at a fixed price, about two and one-half cents a pound. The Chinese say: “Why do your trusts now want consolidation? The divisions of Europe, by the competition of various ambitions, have made Europe bright and progressive. America’s trusts, by making all things one, will produce decay of genius, invention, liberty and individualism.” A Chinese reformer had written to a rich bribe-taker and bribe-giver for work in one of the industries which he controlled, and he also endeavored to sell to the rich man a copy of one of his books. Chided in later years with seeking employment in his earlier years from a man whom he had later cause to criticize, the reformer said: “The devil is king and has usurped the seats of employment; yet, although he is devil, he owes me employment. A man’s right to work and to retain free opinion are inalienable, and a government, in granting a monopoly, can not sell such rights of the individual; they are a perpetual lien on the monopoly.” Intelligent municipal philanthropy has not been unknown of late years. I will instance an occurrence at Lanchow, a city on the Yellow River (Hoang-Ho) in far western Kansu province. In the fall of 1911 large numbers of people had become a charge upon the city on account of summer floods and consequent famine. By the end of August the moat of the city had become dry. The authorities roofed and partitioned this trench into many houses so as to shelter hundreds of vagrant families.

China has specialized in localization, or home rule. Even in charities this operates. No province, district or city encourages any other district’s imposing its public charges upon it. To illustrate, we shall say that your Chinese interpreter and his wife have accompanied you from Amoy to Chingtu City. The interpreter dies. If you do not send the woman back to Amoy, she will report to the Amoy Guild in Chingtu. That guild will subscribe and send her on her way as far as Chungking, where the Amoy Guild will subscribe and send her in care of the Amoy Guild at Hankau. Eventually, to her great pleasure no doubt, she will reach her people in Amoy. A widow is not molested on her travels; her persistence in widowhood and desire not to sell herself, either as a second wife, slave or strumpet, are highly respected. She would not be encouraged, however, nor would she desire to remain in Chingtu, where, being a stranger, she would be unable to secure employment. The same system would operate inversely if a Chingtu woman were, through misfortune, stranded in far-away Amoy. The Chingtu Guilds in Amoy, Fuchau, Shanghai, Hankau, etc., would relay her onward to her home, where she would be more likely to secure work, remarriage, or properly be a charge upon her own community. A criminal is treated in the same way. He is driven on toward his own community, which can elect whether they desire to board him in jail at public expense or make life so uncomfortable for him by corporal punishment that he will select a virtuous existence in preference to crime.

The community, closely related in cousinship, makes the family clan responsible for the misfortunes and crimes of its members. If a criminal breaks the law, the law does not bother itself long with the criminal. By one fell swoop it makes the clan take the criminal’s course in hand for the rest of his life. There is much talk of revising China’s code, the slogan being the American maxim: “Crime is personal.” China’s code in this particular does not need revision. It saves the state much expense; it is more effective also in real permanent reform. It is the most scientific system of reform ever invented, and beats all farming out of criminals, parole, coals of kindness, pellets of advice, pardons, abolishing of stripes, preachings, coddlings, threats, music-treatment, trepannings, religious advice, hypnotic treatment, flowers, sentiment, visits of the jail angel, etc.! Don’t whip the criminal alone; whip the criminal’s six elder brothers and cousins because they must have been lax in instruction and watch. They will see that never again will they suffer for the scamp’s dereliction! The Chinese say, “Don’t whip your trusts; whip your electorate! They will forever after see that the trusts do not break bounds; they will watch the charters.” Guilt then is not personal; it is communal. We are our brother’s keeper, and if we allow him to meet with misfortune or do wrong, we must suffer with him. How quickly would the Chinese scientific system of localization and communism correct and limit crime, poverty and misfortune.

British vessels trading in China are manned entirely with Chinese crews. During the dock strike in Britain, in August, 1911, the dockers refused to handle the cargoes of vessels which employed Chinese. China then entered a claim for damages, because her citizens were ill-treated, and the Chinese guilds threatened to embarrass the British vessels when they returned to load in the East. The writer has had some experience with such a situation in Hongkong, where the British government exercises a strong hand in preventing the spread of stevedore strikes. The use of the boycott in China calls for special study. In no land is it more in use. It is a powerful weapon for securing justice when laws and diplomacy fail either because of weakness or venalty. China, of course, has no navy to support her diplomacy. Recent boycotts in China have been the following: In 1904 the merchant guilds of Canton and Hongkong desired to support, among other things, China’s protest against the American Exclusion Act. A boycott of American goods and American ships was ordered, and the loss to American trade ran into the millions. In 1908 the Japanese landed arms for pirates in Macao, South China, and with the powerful Japanese navy compelled the Chinese officials who had seized the smuggling steamer _Tatsu Maru_ to give her up. The Chinese guilds of Hongkong and Canton then boycotted Japanese ships, causing the Toyo Kisen Kaisha a loss of millions in earnings and a deficit of $300,000 for the year’s operation. Japan probably would have again declared war on China with this excuse if she had not feared America’s naval support of China’s general cause under the Hay “non-partition of China” policy. The loss to Japan ran into many millions. In 1910 the same body of Chinese guilds boycotted American trade as a reply to the long and costly detainment of Chinese on Angel Island, San Francisco.

We shall hear more and more of international boycotts by the Chinese, and should study the question. They hover on the borderland of justice, and are recommended by many of the women’s clubs of America in dealing with monopolies. They will be misunderstood. They will produce much annoyance and trouble. They are mighty weapons in the hands of the clannish Chinese. Many fortunes of millionaires were really produced by boycotts. For instance, Mr. B controls the X railway, which latter has used the Y railway as a connection for freight. Mr. B wants to buy the Y railway for a song. He diverts all the freight he can to the Z railway, and when the Y railway fails, he buys its stock for a song. Then he restores the freight of the X railway to the Y railway, whose earnings rise and make his fortune, which is immediately entrenched under nonretroactive and nonrestitution laws. In China the boycott is only used by the guilds for patriotic purposes. Of course, we traders in America and Britain object because we suffer, but looking with Chinese eyes and with a world-economical vision at the matter, we must admit that the Chinese guilds are not ignoble or selfish and that their use of the boycott is a mighty diplomatic weapon. It has humbled Japan without the use of a soldier or a thirteen-inch broadside. By threatening a boycott, Wu Ting Fang and the Shanghai Assembly at the darkest hour of the republican revolution, prevented certain nations from making a loan to the imperialists, which was the most brilliant and potential move of the revolution. It really won for the southern cause, the military capture of Nanking following as a matter of course. Let Japan, Russia and others beware how they take advantage of China, whether in Manchuria, the Yangtze provinces, Shangtung, Yunnan, Szechuen or other provinces, or territories like Tibet, Mongolia and Turkestan; the Chinese guilds with their boycott are a sure refuge in time of trouble, back of any failing walls of arms, finance or diplomacy.

The following are some of the sociological proverbs of the Chinese:

“The chain is as strong as its weakest ring, and a corporation is as moral as its most corrupt director.”

“Taking rocks away makes a smooth stream, as removing wrongs makes a placid nation.”

“We can’t all agree exactly, for many faces, many minds, and the ten fingers are not all of one length; but they are all useful.”

“Money covers a multitude of sins.”

“Fire will burn through anything, and money will get through anything.”

“The deeper you go in your cave, the smaller seems your heaven.”

“A living poor man is better than a dead rich man.”

“Some have had a thousand years of sorrow in a hundred years of life.”

“You may think you’re on the right way, but you lose nothing by asking.”

“You can’t carve much on a rotten stick.”

“Some dogs are so intent on chasing the rabbit that they don’t see the tiger chasing them.”

“Right is the only might that lasts.”

“Of all the fools the greatest is the miser. He breaks his back with the burden which he carries when the goal is in sight.”

“Before you beat an irresponsible dog for its howl, think of the manners you owe to its master.”

“If you would have a long twilight of life, you must begin old age early.”

“Riches may ornament a wall, but only virtue can adorn a person.”

“The heart has one language the world over, but the tongues of men have many languages.”

“When you are rich the whole world is your cousin; when you are poor, even your cousin doesn’t know you.”

“He who deserves an increase in his wage is a coward if he does not ask for it.”

“It’s a pretty mean traveler who destroys the bridge which has served his purpose; there are other brother-travelers.”

“With money you can yell like a lion; without it you must squeak like a mouse.”

“There were two fools: one when he was poor thought of days of riches; the other when he was rich never thought of days of poverty.”

“A kind stranger at hand is better than a cold relative afar.”

“Repentance is only good when it looks forward.”

“Be hard on yourself and easy on your fellows.”

“The same thing can be fact to a friend and fiction to a foe.”

“Rough food is strongest, as rough wool is warmest.”

“Emulation is only proper in charities.”

“Charity is like smoking, hard to learn and hard to stop.”

“Jewels in a pig’s nose and riches in a snob’s hand.”

“He gives more who gives a penny to the poor than he who adds a fortune to the wealth of the rich.”

“Those who rose from nothing lord it most.”

“Get at the cause rather than attack the effect.”

“A headlong hero is not so good as a timid man who knows just what he is after.”

“If you would serve a fair master, work for yourself.”

“Once books, art, music, poetry and gardening used to interest the men of China and the world; now it is the new age, when only food and power engage; is materialism progress?”

“The best place to await your enemy is at the graveyard boundary, for he must pass there at last.”

“Another mouth at the table shrinks the bowl on the fire.”

“You can only give a man a stone for bread once.”

“The old boat is full of nails, and the old man is full of experiences.”

XXXI

AWAKENED INTEREST IN AMERICA

Three recent manifestations, selected from many, will indicate the awakened interest in America in things Chinese and the New China. Like the ostrich which pushed its head in the sand, and concluded that the world that was not seen, did not exist, our stage has for centuries persisted in ignoring Sinim-histrionics. Now Chinese plays are not uncommon. One in particular is worthy of mention. William Winter, the dean of the American critics, says of _The Daughter of Heaven_, playing at the Century Theater, New York: “I have seen every important spectacle displayed in America during the last sixty years and I think _The Daughter of Heaven_ is superior to anything of the kind I ever saw.” The Liebler Company state that it has cost them $100,000.00 to stage the play. How my eminent Thespian friends in old China will marvel when they read this amount! For the same sum they would agree to give four thousand simultaneous plays in the four thousand walled cities of China! _Revenons à nos moutons._ There are eight gorgeous scenes, the exact detail of which the stage manager brought from Peking and Nanking, where he specially went for local color, and where the play is laid. Scene one introduces a moving state sanpan boat, lighted by lanterns, as a setting for a beautiful tenor love song. Scene two shows the Manchu emperor’s room in the Peking palace. Scene three is of the Ming empress’ gardens at Nanking. This lovely scene is made realistic by living flocks of sacred cranes and peacocks moving about the stage. Scene four is the throne room of the Ming palace at Nanking, a gorgeous representation of Chinese luxury such as we shall never see again, now that the old royal China has passed away. Scene five is outside the pavilion of the Ming empress. Scene six, in contrast to previous gorgeousness, gives a somber Craig-like setting to the battlements of Nanking, and all the remarkable modern art of the stage manager is called into exercise to produce thrilling battle effects. Scene seven is outside the Chien Men gate at Peking, executions taking place, and all the daily life of the Manchus holding one spellbound by its accuracy. Scene eight is the Manchu throne room at Peking.