Chapter VIII: Chinese Literature (1)

The literature of China is remarkable (1) for its antiquity, coupled with an unbroken continuity down to the present day; (2) for the variety of subjects presented, and for the exhaustive treatment which, not only each subject, but also each subdivision, each separate item, has received, as well as for the colossal scale on which so many literary monuments have been conceived and carried out; (3) for the accuracy of its historical statements, so far as it has been possible to test them; and further (4) for its ennobling standards and lofty ideals, as well as for its wholesome purity and an almost total absence of coarseness and obscenity.

No history of Chinese literature in the Chinese language has yet been produced; native scholars, however, have adopted, for bibliographical purposes, a rough division into four great classes. Under the first of these, we find the Confucian Canon, together with lexicographical, philological, and other works dealing with the elucidation of words. Under the second, histories of various kinds, officially compiled, privately written, constitutional, &c.; also biography, geography and bibliography. Under the third, philosophy, religion, e.g. Buddhism; the arts and sciences, e.g. war, law, agriculture, medicine, astronomy, painting, music and archery; also a host of general works, monographs, and treatises on a number of topics, as well as encyclopaedias. The fourth class is confined to poetry of all descriptions, poetical critiques, and works dealing with the all-important rhymes.

_Poetry._--Proceeding chronologically, without reference to Chinese classification, we have to begin, as would naturally be expected, with the last of the above four classes. Man's first literary utterances in China, as elsewhere, took the form of verse; and the earliest Chinese records in our possession are the national lyrics, the songs and ballads, chiefly of the feudal age, which reaches back to over a thousand years before Christ. Some pieces are indeed attributed to the 18th century B.C.; the latest bring us down to the 6th century B.C. Such is the collection entitled _Shih Ching_ (or _She King_), popularly known as the Odes, which was brought together and edited by Confucius, 551-479 B.C., and is now included among the Sacred Books, forming as it does an important portion of the Confucian Canon. These Odes, once over three thousand in number, were reduced by Confucius to three hundred and eleven; hence they are frequently spoken of as "the Three Hundred." They treat of war and love, of eating and drinking and dancing, of the virtues and vices of rulers, and of the misery and happiness of the people. They are in rhyme. Rhyme is essential to Chinese poetry; there is no such thing as blank verse. Further, the rhymes of the Odes have always been, and are still, the only recognized rhymes which can be used by a Chinese poet, anything else being regarded as mere jingle. Poetical licence, however, is tolerated; and great masters have availed themselves freely of its aid. One curious result of this is that whereas in many instances two given words may have rhymed, as no doubt they did, in the speech of three thousand years ago, they no longer rhyme to the ear in the colloquial of to-day, although still accepted as true and proper rhymes in the composition of verse.

It is noticeable at once that the Odes are mostly written in lines of
four words, examples of lines consisting of any length from a single
word to eight, though such do exist, being comparatively rare. These
lines of four words, generally recognized as the oldest measure in
Chinese poetry, are frequently grouped as quatrains, in which the
first, second and fourth lines rhyme; but very often only the second
and fourth lines rhyme, and sometimes there are groups of a larger
number of lines in which occasional lines are found without any rhyme
at all. A few stray pieces, as old as many of those found among the
Odes, have been handed down and preserved, in which the metre consists
of two lines of three words followed by one line of seven words. These
three lines all rhyme, but the rhyme changes with each succeeding
triplet. It would be difficult to persuade the English reader that
this is a very effective measure, and one in which many a gloomy or
pathetic tale has been told. In order to realise how a few Chinese
monosyllables in juxtaposition can stir the human heart to its lowest
depths, it is necessary to devote some years to the study of the
language.

At the close of the 4th century B.C., a dithyrambic measure, irregular
and wild, was introduced and enjoyed considerable vogue. It has indeed
been freely adopted by numerous poets from that early date down to the
present day; but since the 2nd century B.C. it has been displaced from
pre-eminence by the seven-word and five-word measures which are now,
after much refinement, the accepted standards for Chinese poetry. The
origin of the seven-word metre is lost in remote antiquity; the
five-word metre was elaborated under the master-hand of Mei Sheng, who
died 140 B.C. Passing over seven centuries of growth, we reach the
T'ang dynasty, A.D. 618-905, the most brilliant epoch in the history
of Chinese poetry. These three hundred years produced an
extraordinarily large number of great poets, and an output of verse of
almost incredible extent. In 1707 an anthology of the T'ang poets was
published by Imperial order; it ran to nine hundred books or sections,
and contained over forty-eight thousand nine hundred separate poems. A
copy of this work is in the Chinese department of the University
Library at Cambridge.

It was under the T'ang dynasty that a certain finality was reached in
regard to the strict application of the tones to Chinese verse. For
the purposes of poetry, all words in the language were ranged under
one or the other of two tones, the _even_ and the _oblique_, the
former now including the two even tones, of which prior to the 11th
century there was only one, and the latter including the rising,
sinking and entering tones of ordinary speech. The incidence of these
tones, which may be roughly described as sharps and flats, finally
became fixed, just as the incidence of certain feet in Latin metres
came to be governed by fixed rules. Thus, reading downward from right
to left, as in Chinese, a five-word stanza may run:

Sharp Flat Flat Sharp
sharp flat flat sharp
flat sharp flat sharp
o o o o
flat sharp sharp flat
sharp flat sharp flat

A seven-word stanza may run:

Flat Sharp Sharp
flat sharp sharp flat
sharp flat flat sharp
sharp flat flat sharp
o o o o
flat sharp flat flat
flat sharp sharp flat
sharp flat sharp sharp

The above are only two metres out of many, but enough perhaps to give
to any one who will read them with a pause or quasi-caesura, as marked
by o in each specimen, a fair idea of the rhythmic lilt of Chinese
poetry. To the trained ear, the effect is most pleasing; and when this
scansion, so to speak, is united with rhyme and choice diction, the
result is a vehicle for verse, artificial no doubt, and elaborate, but
admirably adapted to the genius of the Chinese language. Moreover, in
the hands of the great poets this artificiality disappears altogether.
Each word seems to slip naturally into its place; and so far from
having been introduced by violence for the ends of prosody, it appears
to be the very best word that could have been chosen, even had there
been no trammels of any kind, so effectually is the art of the poet
concealed by art. From the long string of names which have shed lustre
upon this glorious age of Chinese poetry, it may suffice for the
present purpose to mention the following, all of the very first rank.

Meng Hao-jan, A.D. 689-740, failed to succeed at the public
competitive examinations, and retired to the mountains where he led
the life of a recluse. Later on, he obtained an official post; but he
was of a timid disposition, and once when the emperor, attracted by
his fame, came to visit him, he hid himself under the bed. His
hiding-place was revealed by Wang Wei, a brother poet who was present.
The latter, A.D. 699-759, in addition to being a first-rank poet, was
also a landscape-painter of great distinction. He was further a firm
believer in Buddhism; and after losing his wife and mother, he turned
his mountain home into a Buddhist monastery. Of all poets, not one has
made his name more widely known than Li Po, or Li T'ai-po, A.D.
705-762, popularly known as the Banished Angel, so heavenly were the
poems he dashed off, always under the influence of wine. He is said to
have met his death, after a tipsy frolic, by leaning out of a boat to
embrace the reflection of the moon. Tu Fu, A.D. 712-770, is generally
ranked with Li Po, the two being jointly spoken of as the chief poets
of their age. The former had indeed such a high opinion of his own
poetry that he prescribed it for malarial fever. He led a chequered
and wandering life, and died from the effects of eating roast beef and
drinking white wine to excess, immediately after a long fast. Po
Chue-i, A.D. 772-846, was a very prolific poet. He held several high
official posts, but found time for a considerable output of some of
the finest poetry in the language. His poems were collected by
Imperial command, and engraved upon tablets of stone. In one of them
he anticipates by eight centuries the famous ode by Malherbe, _A Du
Perrier, sur la mort de sa fille_.

The T'ang dynasty with all its glories had not long passed away before
another imperial house arose, under which poetry flourished again in
full vigour. The poets of the Sung dynasty, A.D. 960-1260, were many
and varied in style; but their work, much of it of the very highest
order, was becoming perhaps a trifle more formal and precise. Life
seemed to be taken more seriously than under the gay and
pleasure-loving T'angs. The long list of Sung poets includes such
names as Ss[)u]-ma Kuang, Ou-yang Hsiu and Wang An-shih, to be
mentioned by and by, the first two as historians and the last as
political reformer. A still more familiar name in popular estimation
is that of Su Tung-p'o, A.D. 103-1101, partly known for his romantic
career, now in court favour, now banished to the wilds, but still more
renowned as a brilliant poet and writer of fascinating essays.

The Mongols, A.D. 1260-1368, who succeeded the Sungs, and the Mings
who followed the Sungs and bring us down to the year 1644, helped
indeed, especially the Mings, to swell the volume of Chinese verse,
but without reaching the high level of the two great poetical periods
above-mentioned. Then came the present dynasty of Manchu Tatars, of
whom the same tale must be told, in spite of two highly-cultured
emperors, K'ang Hsi and Ch'ien Lung, both of them poets and one of
them author of a collection containing no fewer than 33,950 pieces,
most of which, it must be said, are but four-line stanzas, of no
literary value whatever. It may be stated in this connexion that
whereas China has never produced an epic in verse, it is not true that
all Chinese poems are quite short, running only to ten or a dozen
lines at the most. Many pieces run to several hundred lines, though
the Chinese poet does not usually affect length, one of his highest
efforts being the four-line stanza, known as the "stop-short," in
which "the words stop while the sense goes on," expanding in the mind
of the reader by the suggestive art of the poet. The "stop-short" is
the converse of the epigram, which ends in a satisfying turn of
thought to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up;
it aims at producing an impression which, so far from being final, is
merely the prelude to a long series of visions and of feelings. The
last of the four lines is called the "surprise line"; but the
revelation it gives is never a complete one: the words stop, but the
sense goes on. Just as in the pictorial art of China, so in her
poetic art is suggestiveness the great end and aim of the artist.
Beginners are taught that the three canons of verse composition are
lucidity, simplicity and correctness of diction. Yet some critics have
boldly declared for obscurity of expression, alleging that the
piquancy of a thought is enhanced by its skilful concealment. For the
foreign student, it is not necessary to accentuate the obscurity and
difficulty even of poems in which the motive is simple enough. The
constant introduction of classical allusions, often in the vaguest
terms, and the almost unlimited licence as to the order of words,
offer quite sufficient obstacles to easy and rapid comprehension.
Poetry has been defined by one Chinese writer as "clothing with words
the emotions which surge through the heart." The chief moods of the
Chinese poet are a pure delight in the varying phenomena of nature,
and a boundless sympathy with the woes and sufferings of humanity.
Erotic poetry is not absent, but it is not a feature proportionate in
extent to the great body of Chinese verse; it is always restrained,
and never lapses from a high level of purity and decorum. In his love
for hill and stream which he peoples with genii, and for tree and
flower which he endows with sentient souls, the Chinese poet is
perhaps seen at his very best; his views of life are somewhat too
deeply tinged with melancholy, and often loaded with an overwhelming
sadness "at the doubtful doom of human kind." In his lighter moods he
draws inspiration, and in his darker moods consolation from the
wine-cup. Hard-drinking, not to say drunkenness, seems to have been
universal among Chinese poets, and a considerable amount of talent has
been expended upon the glorification of wine. From Taoist, and
especially from Buddhist sources, many poets have obtained glimpses to
make them less forlorn; but it cannot be said that there is any
definitely religious poetry in the Chinese language.

_History._--One of the labours undertaken by Confucius was connected with a series of ancient documents--that is, ancient in his day--now passing under a collective title as _Shu Ching_ (or _Shoo King_), and popularly known as the Canon, or Book, of History. Mere fragments as some of these documents are, it is from their pages of unknown date that we can supplement the pictures drawn for us in the Odes, of the early civilization of China. The work opens with an account of the legendary emperor Yao, who reigned 2357-2255 B.C., and was able by virtue of an elevated personality to give peace and happiness to his "black-haired" subjects. With the aid of capable astronomers, he determined the summer and winter solstices, and calculated approximately the length of the year, availing himself, as required, of the aid of an intercalary month. Finally, after a glorious reign, he ceded the throne to a man of the people, whose only claim to distinction was his unwavering practice of filial piety. Chapter ii. deals with the reign, 2255-2205 B.C., of this said man, known in history as the emperor Shun. In accordance with the monotheism of the day, he worshipped God in heaven with prayer and burnt offerings; he travelled on tours of inspection all over his then comparatively narrow empire; he established punishments, to be tempered with mercy; he appointed officials to superintend forestry, care of animals, religious observances, and music; and he organized a system of periodical examinations for public servants. Chapter iii. is devoted to details about the Great Yue, who reigned 2205-2197 B.C., having been called to the throne for his engineering success in draining the empire of a mighty inundation which early western writers sought to identify with Noah's Flood. Another interesting chapter gives various geographical details, and enumerates the articles, gold, silver, copper, iron, steel, silken fabrics, feathers, ivory, hides, &c., &c., brought in under the reign of the Great Yue, as tribute from neighbouring countries. Other chapters include royal proclamations, speeches to troops, announcements of campaigns victoriously concluded, and similar subjects. One peculiarly interesting document is the Announcement against Drunkenness, which seems to have been for so many centuries a national vice, and then to have practically disappeared as such. For the past two or three hundred years, drunkenness has always been the exception rather than the rule. The Announcement, delivered in the 12th century B.C., points out that King Wen, the founder of the Chou dynasty, had wished for wine to be used only in connexion with sacrifices, and that divine favours had always been liberally showered upon the people when such a restriction had been observed. On the other hand, indulgence in strong drink had invariably attracted divine vengeance, and the fall and disruption of states had often been traceable to that cause. Even on sacrificial occasions, drunkenness is to be condemned. "When, however, you high officials and others have done your duty in ministering to the aged and to your sovereign, you may then eat to satiety and drink to elevation." The Announcement winds up with an ancient maxim, "Do not seek to see yourself reflected in water, but in others,"--whose base actions should warn you not to commit the same; adding that those who after a due interval should be unable to give up intemperate habits would be put to death. It is worth noting, in concluding this brief notice of China's earliest records, that from first to last there is no mention whatever of any distant country from which the "black-haired people" may have originally come; no vestige of any allusion to any other form of civilization, such as that of Babylonia, with its cuneiform script and baked-clay tablets, from which an attempt has been made to derive the native-born civilization of China. A few odd coincidences sum up the chief argument in favour of this now discredited theory.

Annals of the Lu state.

The next step lands us on the confines, though scarcely in the domain,
of history properly so called. Among his other literary labours,
Confucius undertook to produce the annals of Lu, his native state; and
beginning with the year 722 B.C., he carried the record down to his
death in 479, after which it was continued for a few years, presumably
by Tso-ch'iu Ming, the shadowy author of the famous Commentary, to
which the text is so deeply indebted for vitality and illumination.
The work of Confucius is known as the _Ch'un Ch'iu_, the Springs and
Autumns, q.d. Annals. It consists of a varying number of brief entries
under each year of the reign of each successive ruler of Lu. The
feudal system, initiated more than four centuries previously, and
consisting of a number of vassal states owning allegiance to a central
suzerain state, had already broken hopelessly down, so far as
allegiance was concerned. For some time, the object of each vassal
ruler had been the aggrandizement of his own state, with a view either
to independence or to the hegemony, and the result was a state of
almost constant warfare. Accordingly, the entries in the _Ch'un Ch'iu_
refer largely to covenants entered into between contracting rulers,
official visits from one to another of these rulers, their births and
deaths, marriages, invasions of territory, battles, religious
ceremonies, &c., interspersed with notices of striking natural
phenomena such as eclipses, comets and earthquakes, and of important
national calamities, such as floods, drought and famine. For instance,
Duke Wen became ruler of Lu in 625 B.C., and under his 14th year, 612
B.C., we find twelve entries, of which the following are specimens:--

2. In spring, in the first month, the men of the Chu State invaded our
southern border.

3. In summer, on the I-hai day of the fifth month, P'an, Marquis of
the Ch'i State, died.

5. In autumn, in the seventh month, there was a comet, which entered
Pei-ton ([Greek: abgd] in Ursa Major).

9. In the ninth month, a son of the Duke of Ch'i murdered his ruler.

Entry 5 affords the earliest trustworthy instance of a comet in China.
A still earlier comet is recorded in what is known as The Bamboo
Annals, but the genuineness of that work is disputed.

It will be readily admitted that the _Ch'un Ch'iu_, written throughout
in the same style as the quotations given, would scarcely enable one
to reconstruct in any detail the age it professes to record. Happily
we are in possession of the _Tso Chuan_, a so-called commentary,
presumably by some one named Tso, in which the bald entries in the
work of Confucius are separately enlarged upon to such an extent and
with such dramatic brilliancy that our commentary reads more like a
prose epic than "a treatise consisting of a systematic series of
comments or annotations on the text of a literary work." Under its
guidance we can follow the intrigues, the alliances, the treacheries,
the ruptures of the jealous states which constituted feudal China; in
its picture pages we can see, as it were with our own eyes,
assassinations, battles, heroic deeds, flights, pursuits and the
sufferings of the vanquished from the retribution exacted by the
victors. Numerous wise and witty sayings are scattered throughout the
work, many of which are in current use at the present day.

The Historical Record.

History as understood in Europe and the west began in China with the
appearance of a remarkable man. Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien, who flourished
145-87 B.C., was the son of an hereditary grand astrologer, also an
eager student of history and the actual planner of the great work so
successfully carried out after his death. By the time he was ten years
of age, Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien was already well advanced with his studies;
and at twenty he set forth on a round of travel which carried him to
all parts of the empire. Entering the public service, he was employed
upon a mission of inspection to the newly-conquered regions of
Ss[)u]ch'uan and Yuennan; in 110 B.C. his father died, and he stepped
into the post of grand astrologer. After devoting some time and energy
to the reformation of the calendar, he took up the work which had
been begun by his father and which was ultimately given to the world
as the _Shih Chi_, or Historical Record. This was arranged under five
great headings, namely, (l) Annals of Imperial Reigns, (2)
Chronological Tables, (3) Monographs, (4) Annals of Vassal Princes,
and (5) Biographies.

Burning of the Books.

The Historical Record begins with the so-called Yellow Emperor, who is
said to have come to the throne 2698 B.C. and to have reigned a
hundred years. Four other emperors are given, as belonging to this
period, among whom we find Yao and Shun, already mentioned. It was
China's Golden Age, when rulers and ruled were virtuous alike, and all
was peace and prosperity. It is discreetly handled in a few pages by
Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien, who passes on to the somewhat firmer but still
doubtful ground of the early dynasties. Not, however, until the Chou
dynasty, 1122-255 B.C., had held sway for some three hundred years can
we be said to have reached a point at which history begins to separate
itself definitely from legend. In fact, it is only from the 8th
century before Christ that any trustworthy record can be safely dated.
With the 3rd century before Christ, we are introduced to one of the
feudal princes whose military genius enabled him to destroy beyond
hope of revival the feudal system which had endured for eight hundred
years, and to make himself master of the whole of the China of those
days. In 221 B.C. he proclaimed himself the "First Emperor," a title
by which he has ever since been known. Everything, including
literature, was to begin with his reign; and acting on the advice of
his prime minister, he issued an order for the burning of all books,
with the exception only of works relating to medicine, divination and
agriculture. Those who wished to study law were referred for oral
teaching to such as had already qualified in that profession. To carry
out the scheme effectively, the First Emperor made a point of
examining every day about 120 lb weight of books, in order to get rid
of such as he considered to be useless; and he further appointed a
number of inspectors to see that his orders were carried out. The
result was that about four hundred and sixty scholars were put to
death for having disobeyed the imperial command, while many others
were banished for life. This incident is known as the Burning of the
Books; and there is little doubt that, but for the devotion of the
literati, Chinese literature would have had to make a fresh start in
212 B.C. As it was, books were bricked up in walls and otherwise
widely concealed in the hope that the storm would blow over; and this
was actually the case when the Ch'in (Ts'in) dynasty collapsed and the
House of Han took its place in 206 B.C. The Confucian books were
subsequently recovered from their hiding-places, together with many
other works, the loss of which it is difficult now to contemplate.
Unfortunately, however, a stimulus was provided, not for the recovery,
but for the manufacture of writings, the previous existence of which
could be gathered either from tradition or from notices in the various
works which had survived. Forgery became the order of the day; and the
modern student is confronted with a considerable volume of literature
which has to be classified as genuine, doubtful, or spurious,
according to the merits of each case. To the first class belongs the
bulk, but not all, of the Confucian Canon; to the third must be
relegated such books as the _Tao Te Ching_, to be mentioned later on.

Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien, dying in 87 B.C., deals of course only with the
opening reigns of the Han dynasty, with which he brings to a close the
first great division of his history. The second division consists of
chronological tables; the third, of eight monographs on the following
topics: (1) Rites and Ceremonies, (2) Music, (3) Natural Philosophy,
(4) The Calendar, (5) Astronomy, (6) Religion, (7) Water-ways, and (8)
Commerce. On these eight a few remarks may not be out of place, (1)
The Chinese seem to have been in possession, from very early ages, of
a systematic code of ceremonial observances, so that it is no surprise
to find the subject included, and taking an important place, in
Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien's work. The _Li Chi_, or Book of Rites, which now
forms part of the Confucian Canon, is however a comparatively modern
compilation, dating only from the 1st century B.C. (2) The
extraordinary similarities between the Chinese and Pythagorean systems
of music force the conclusion that one of these must necessarily have
been derived from the other. The Jesuit Fathers jumped to the
conclusion that the Greeks borrowed their art from the Chinese; but it
is now common knowledge that the Chinese scale did not exist in China
until two centuries after its appearance in Greece. The fact is that
the ancient Chinese works on music perished at the Burning of the
Books; and we are told that by the middle of the 2nd century B.C. the
hereditary Court music-master was altogether ignorant of his art. What
we may call modern Chinese music reached China through Bactria, a
Greek kingdom, founded by Diodotus in 256 B.C., with which intercourse
had been established by the Chinese at an early date. (3) The term
Natural Philosophy can only be applied by courtesy to this essay,
which deals with twelve bamboo tubes of varying lengths, by means of
which, coupled with the twenty-eight zodiacal constellations and with
certain calendaric accords, divine communication is established with
the influences of the five elements and the points of the compass
corresponding with the eight winds. (4) In this connexion, it is worth
noting that in 104 B.C. the Chinese first adopted a cycle of nineteen
years, a period which exactly brings together the solar and the lunar
years; and further that this very cycle is said to have been
introduced by Meton, 5th century B.C., and was adopted at Athens about
330 B.C., probably reaching China, via Bactria, some two centuries
afterwards. (5) This chapter deals specially with the sun, moon and
five planets, which are supposed to aid in the divine government of
mankind. (6) Refers to the solemn sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, as
performed by the emperor upon the summit of Mt. T'ai in Shan-tung. (7)
Refers to the management of the Hoang Ho, or Yellow river, so often
spoken of as "China's Sorrow," and also of the numerous canals with
which the empire is intersected. (8) This chapter, which treats of the
circulation of money, and its function in the Chinese theory of
political economy, is based upon the establishment in 110 B.C. of
certain officials whose business it was to regularize commerce. It was
their duty to buy up the chief necessaries of life when abundant and
when prices were in consequence low, and to offer these for sale when
there was a shortage and when prices would otherwise have risen
unduly. Thus it was hoped that a stability in commercial transactions
would be attained, to the great advantage of the people. The fourth
division of the _Shih Chi_ is devoted to the annals of the reigns of
vassal princes, to be read in connexion with the imperial annals of
the first division. The final division, which is in many ways the most
interesting of all, gives biographical notices of eminent or notorious
men and women, from the earliest ages downwards, and enables us to
draw conclusions at which otherwise it would have been impossible to
arrive. Confucius and Mencius, for instance, stand out as real
personages who actually played a part in China's history; while all we
can gather from the short life of Lao Tz[)u], a part of which reads
like an interpolation by another hand, is that he was a more or less
legendary individual, whose very existence at the date usually
assigned to him, 7th and 6th centuries B.C., is altogether doubtful.
Scattered among these biographies are a few notices of frontier
nations; e.g. of the terrible nomads known as the Hsiung-nu, whose
identity with the Huns has now been placed beyond a doubt.

Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien's great work, on which he laboured for so many vears
and which ran to five hundred and twenty-six thousand five hundred
words, has been described somewhat at length for the following reason.
It has been accepted as the model for all subsequent dynastic
histories, of which twenty-four have now been published, the whole
being produced in 1747 in a uniform edition, bound up (in the
Cambridge Library) in two hundred and nineteen large volumes. Each
dynasty has found its historian in the dynasty which supplanted it;
and each dynastic history is notable for the extreme fairness with
which the conquerors have dealt with the vanquished, accepting without
demur such records of their predecessors as were available from
official sources. The T'ang dynasty, A.D. 618-906, offers in one sense
a curious exception to the general rule. It possesses two histories,
both included in the above series. The first of these, now known as
the Old T'ang History, was ultimately set aside as inaccurate and
inadequate, and a New T'ang History was compiled by Ou-yang Hsiu, a
distinguished scholar, poet and statesman of the 11th century.
Nevertheless, in all cases, the scheme of the dynastic history has,
with certain modifications, been that which was initiated in the 1st
century B.C. by Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien.

The Mirror of History.

The output of history, however, does not begin and end with the
voluminous records above referred to, one of which, it should be
mentioned, was in great part the work of a woman. History has always
been a favourite study with the Chinese, and innumerable histories of
a non-official character, long and short, complete and partial,
political and constitutional, have been showered from age to age upon
the Chinese reading world. Space would fail for the mere mention of a
tithe of such works; but there is one which stands out among the rest
and is especially enshrined in the hearts of the Chinese people. This
is the _T'ung Chien_, or Mirror of History, so called because "to view
antiquity as though in a mirror is an aid in the administration of
government." It was the work of a statesman of the 11th century, whose
name, by a coincidence, was Ss[)u]-ma Kuang. He had been forced to
retire from office, and spent nearly all the last sixteen years of his
life in historical research. The Mirror of History embraces a period
from the 5th century B.C. down to A.D. 960. It is written in a
picturesque style; but the arrangement was found to be unsuited to the
systematic study of history. Accordingly, it was subjected to
revision, and was to a great extent reconstructed by Chu Hsi, the
famous commentator, who flourished A.D. 1130-1200, and whose work is
now regarded as the standard history of China.

_Biography._--In regard to biography, the student is by no means limited to the dynastic histories. Many huge biographical collections have been compiled and published by private individuals, and many lives of the same personages have often been written from different points of view. There is nothing very much by which a Chinese biography can be distinguished from biographies produced in other parts of the world. The Chinese writer always begins with the place of birth, but he is not so particular about the year, sometimes leaving that to be gathered from the date of death taken in connexion with the age which the person may have attained. Some allusion is usually made to ancestry, and the steps of an official career, upward by promotion or downward by disgrace, are also carefully noted.

_Geography and Travel._--There is a considerable volume of Chinese literature which comes under this head; but if we exclude certain brief notices of foreign countries, there remains nothing in the way of general geography which had been produced prior to the arrival of the Jesuit Fathers at the close of the 16th century. Up to that period geography meant the topography of the Chinese empire; and of topographical records there is a very large and valuable collection. Every prefecture and department, some eighteen hundred in all, has each its own particular topography, compiled from records and from tradition with a fullness that leaves nothing to be desired. The buildings, bridges, monuments of archaeological interest, &c., in each district, are all carefully inserted, side by side with biographical and other local details, always of interest to residents and often to the outside public. An extensive general geography of the empire was last published in 1745; and this was followed by a chronological geography in 1794.

Fa Hsien.

The Chinese have always been fond of travel, and hosts of travellers have published notices, more or less extensive, of the different parts of the empire, and even of adjacent nations, which they visited either as private individuals or, in the former case, as officials proceeding to distant posts. With Buddhism came the desire to see the country which was the home of the Buddha; and several important pilgrimages were undertaken with a view to bring back images and sacred writings to China. On such a journey the Buddhist priest, Fa Hsien, started in A.D. 399; and after practically walking the whole way from central China, across the desert of Gobi, on to Khoten, and across the Hindu Kush into India, he visited many of the chief cities of India, until at length reaching Calcutta he took ship, and after a most adventurous voyage, in the course of which he remained two years in Ceylon, he finally arrived safely, in A.D. 414, with all his books, pictures, and images, at a spot on the coast of Shan-tung, near the modern German port of Kiao-chow.

Hsuean Tsang.

Another of these adventurous priests was Hsuean Tsang (wrongly, Yuean Chwang), who left China on a similar mission in 629, and returned in 645, bringing with him six hundred and fifty-seven Buddhist books, besides many images and pictures, and one hundred and fifty relics. He spent the rest of his life in translating, with the help of other learned priests, these books into Chinese, and completed in 648 the important record of his own travels, known as the Record of Western Countries.

Lao Tz[)u].

_Philosophy._--Even the briefest _resume_ of Chinese philosophical literature must necessarily include the name of Lao Tz[)u], although his era, as seen above, and his personality are both matters of the vaguest conjecture. A number of his sayings, scattered over the works of early writers, have been pieced together, with the addition of much incomprehensible jargon, and the whole has been given to the world as the work of Lao Tz[)u] himself, said to be of the 6th century B.C., under the title of the _Tao Te Ching_. The internal evidence against this book is overwhelming; e.g. one quotation had been detached from the writer who preserved it, with part of that writer's text clinging to it--of course by an oversight. Further, such a treatise is never mentioned in Chinese literature until some time after the Burning of the Books, that is, about four centuries after its alleged first appearance. Still, after due expurgation, it forms an almost complete collection of such apophthegms of Lao Tz[)u] as have come down to us, from which the reader can learn that the author taught the great doctrine of Inaction--Do nothing, and all things will be done. Also, that Lao Tz[)u] anticipated the Christian doctrine of returning good for evil, a sentiment which was highly reprobated by the practical mind of Confucius, who declared that evil should be met by justice. Among the more picturesque of his utterances are such paradoxes as, "He who knows how to shut, uses no bolts; yet you cannot open. He who knows how to bind uses no ropes; yet you cannot untie"; "The weak overcomes the strong; the soft overcomes the hard," &c.

Chuang Tz[)u].

These, and many similar subtleties of speech, seem to have fired the
imagination of Chuang Tz[)u], 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., with the
result that he put much time and energy into the glorification of Lao
Tz[)u] and his doctrines. Possessed of a brilliant style and a master
of irony, Chuang Tz[)u] attacked the schools of Confucius and Mo Ti
(see below) with so much dialectic skill that the ablest scholars of
the age were unable to refute his destructive criticisms. His pages
abound in quaint anecdotes and allegorical instances, arising as it
were spontaneously out of the questions handled, and imparting a
lively interest to points which might otherwise have seemed dusty and
dull. He was an idealist with all the idealist's hatred of a
utilitarian system, and a mystic with all the mystic's contempt for a
life of mere external activity. Only thirty-three chapters of his work
now remain, though so many as fifty-three are known to have been still
extant in the 3rd century; and even of these, several complete
chapters are spurious, while in others it is comparatively easy to
detect here and there the hand of the interpolator. What remains,
however, after all reductions, has been enough to secure a lasting
place for Chuang Tz[)u] as the most original of China's philosophical
writers. His book is of course under the ban of heterodoxy, in common
with all thought opposed to the Confucian teachings. His views as
mystic, idealist, moralist and social reformer have no weight with the
aspirant who has his way to make in official life; but they are a
delight, and even a consolation, to many of the older men, who have no
longer anything to gain or to lose.

Confucius.

Confucius, 551-479 B.C., who imagined that his Annals of the Lu State
would give him immortality, has always been much more widely
appreciated as a moralist than as an historian. His talks with his
disciples and with others have been preserved for us, together with
some details of his personal and private life; and the volume in which
these are collected forms one of the Four Books of the Confucian
Canon. Starting from the axiomatic declaration that man is born good
and only becomes evil by his environment, he takes filial piety and
duty to one's neighbour as his chief themes, often illustrating his
arguments with almost Johnsonian emphasis. He cherished a shadowy
belief in a God, but not in a future state of reward or punishment for
good or evil actions in this world. He rather taught men to be
virtuous for virtue's sake.

Mencius.

Mo Ti.

Yang Chu.

Hsuen Tz[)u].

Yang Hsiung.

The discourses of Mencius, who followed Confucius after an interval of
a hundred years, 372-289 B.C., form another of the Four Books, the
remaining two of which are short philosophical treatises, usually
ascribed to a grandson of Confucius. Mencius devoted his life to
elucidating and expanding the teachings of the Master; and it is no
doubt due to him that the Confucian doctrines obtained so wide a
vogue. But he himself was more a politician and an economist (see
below) than a simple preacher of morality; and hence it is that the
Chinese people have accorded to him the title of The Second Sage. He
is considered to have effectually "snuffed out" the heterodox school
of Mo Ti, a philosopher of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. who
propounded a doctrine of "universal love" as the proper foundation for
organized society, arguing that under such a system all the calamities
that men bring upon one another would altogether disappear, and the
Golden Age would be renewed. At the same time Mencius exposed the
fallacies of the speculations of Yang Chu, 4th century B.C., who
founded a school of ethical egoism as opposed to the exaggerated
altruism of Mo Ti. According to Mencius, Yang Chu would not have
parted with one hair of his body to save the whole world, whereas Mo
Ti would have sacrificed all. Another early philosopher is Hsuen
Tz[)u], 3rd century B.C. He maintained, in opposition to Mencius, who
upheld the Confucian dogma, and in conformity with Christian doctrine,
that the nature of man at his birth is evil, and that this condition
can only be changed by efficient moral training. Then came Yang
Hsiung, 53-18 B.C., who propounded an ethical criterion midway between
the rival positions insisted on by Mencius and Hsuen Tz[)u], teaching
that the nature of man at birth is neither good nor evil, but a
mixture of both, and that development in either direction depends
wholly upon circumstances.

Huai-nan Tz[)u].

There is a voluminous and interesting work, of doubtful age, which
passes under the title of _Huai-nan Tz[)u]_, or the Philosopher of
Huai-nan. It is attributed to Liu An, prince of Huai-nan, who died 122
B.C., and who is further said to have written on alchemy; but alchemy
was scarcely known in China at the date of his death, being introduced
about that time from Greece. The author, whoever he may have been,
poses as a disciple of Lao Tz[)u]; but the speculations of Lao Tz[)u],
as glorified by Chuang Tz[)u], were then rapidly sinking into vulgar
efforts to discover the elixir of life. It is very difficult in many
cases of this kind to decide what books are, and what books are not,
partial or complete forgeries. In the present instance, the aid of the
_Shuo Wen_, a dictionary of the 1st century A.D. (see below), may be
invoked, but not in quite so satisfactory a sense as that in which it
will be seen lower down to have been applied to the _Tao Te Ching_.
The _Shuo Wen_ contains a quotation said to be taken from _Huai-nan
Tz[)u]_; but that quotation cannot be found in the work under
consideration. It may be argued that the words in question may have
been taken from another work by the same author; but if so, it becomes
difficult to believe that a book, more than two hundred years old,
from which the author of the _Shuo Wen_ quoted, should have been
allowed to perish without leaving any trace behind. China has produced
its Bentleys in considerable numbers; but almost all of them have
given their attention to textual criticism of the Confucian Canon, and
few have condescended to examine critically the works of heterodox
writers. The foreign student therefore finds himself faced with many
knotty points he is entirely unable to solve.

Wang Ch'ung.

Of Wang Ch'ung, a speculative and materialistic philosopher, A.D.
27-97, banned by the orthodox for his attacks on Confucius and
Mencius, only one work has survived. it consists of eighty-four essays
on such topics as the nature of things, destiny, divination, death,
ghosts, poisons, miracles, criticisms of Confucius and Mencius,
exaggeration, sacrifice and exorcism. According to Wang Ch'ung, man,
endowed at birth sometimes with a good and sometimes with an evil
nature, is informed with a vital fluid, which resides in the blood and
is nourished by eating and drinking, its two functions being to
animate the body and keep in order the mind. It is the source of all
sensation, passing through the blood like a wave. When it reaches the
eyes, ears and mouth, the result is sight, hearing and speech
respectively. Disturbance of the vital fluid leads to insanity.
Without the fluid, the body cannot be maintained; without the body,
the fluid loses its vitality. Therefore, argues Wang Ch'ung, when the
body perishes and the fluid loses its vitality, each being dependent
on the other, there remains nothing for immortality in a life beyond
the grave. Ghosts he held to be the hallucinations of disordered
minds, and miracles to be natural phenomena capable of simple
explanations. His indictments of Confucius and Mencius are not of a
serious character; though, as regards the former, it must be borne in
mind that the Chinese people will not suffer the faintest aspersion on
the fair fame of their great Sage. It is related in the _Lun Yue_ that
Confucius paid a visit to the notoriously immoral wife of one of the
feudal nobles, and that a certain disciple was "displeased" in
consequence, whereupon the Master swore, saying, "If I have done any
wrong, may the sky fall and crush me!" Wang Ch'ung points out that the
form of oath adopted by Confucius is unsatisfactory and fails to carry
conviction. Had he said, "May I be struck dead by lightning!" his
sincerity would have been more powerfully attested, because people are
often struck dead by lightning; whereas the fall of the sky is too
remote a contingency, such a thing never having been known to happen
within the memory of man. As to Mencius, there is a passage in his
works which states that a thread of predestination runs through all
human life, and that those who accommodate themselves will come off
better in the end than those who try to oppose; it is in fact a
statement of the [Greek: ouk uper moron] principle. On this Wang
Ch'ung remarks that the will of God is consequently made to depend on
human actions; and he further strengthens his objection by showing
that the best men have often fared worst. For instance, Confucius
never became emperor; Pi Kan, the patriot, was disembowelled; the bold
and faithful disciple, Tz[)u] Lu, was chopped into small pieces.

Book of Changes.

But the tale of Chinese philosophers is a long one. It is a department
of literature in which the leading scholars of all ages have mostly
had something to say. The great Chu Hsi, A.D. 1130-1200, whose fame is
chiefly perhaps that of a commentator and whose monument is his
uniform exegesis of the Confucian Canon, was also a voluminous writer
on philosophy. He took a hand in the mystery which surrounds the _I
Ching_ (or _Yih King_), generally known as the Book of Changes, which
is held by some to be the oldest Chinese work and which forms part of
the Confucian Canon. It is ascribed to King Wen, the virtual founder
of the Chou dynasty, 1122-249 B.C., whose son became the first
sovereign and posthumously raised his father to kingly rank. It
contains a fanciful system of divination, deduced originally from
eight diagrams consisting of triplet combinations of a line and a
broken line, either one of which is necessarily repeated twice, and in
two cases three times, in the same combination. Thus there may be
three lines , or three broken lines , and
other such combinations as and .
Confucius declared that he would like to give another fifty years to
the elucidation of this puzzling text. Shao Yung, A.D. 1011-1077,
sought the key in numbers: Ch'eng I., A.D. 1033-1107, in the eternal
fitness of things. "But Chu Hsi alone," says a writer of the 17th
century, "was able to pierce through the meaning and appropriate the
thoughts of the inspired man who composed it." No foreigner, however,
has been able quite to understand what Chu Hsi did make of it, and
several have gone so far as to set all native interpretations aside in
favour of their own. Thus, the _I Ching_ has been discovered by one to
be a calendar of the lunar year; by another, to contain a system of
phallic worship; and by a third, to be a vocabulary of the language of
a tribe, whose very existence had to be postulated for the purpose.

Kuan Chung.

_Political Economy._--This department of literature has been by no
means neglected by Chinese writers. So early as the 7th century B.C.
we find Kuan Chung, the prime minister of the Ch'i state, devoting his
attention to economic problems, and thereby making that state the
wealthiest and the strongest of all the feudal kingdoms. Beginning
life as a merchant, he passed into the public service, and left behind
him at death a large work, parts of which, as we now possess it, may
possibly have come direct from his own hand, the remainder being
written up at a later date in accordance with the principles he
inculcated. His ideal State was divided into twenty-one parts, fifteen
of which were allotted to officials and agriculturists, and six to
manufacturers and traders. His great idea was to make his own state
self-contained; and accordingly he fostered agriculture in order to be
independent in time of war, and manufactures in order to increase his
country's wealth in time of peace. He held that a purely agricultural
population would always remain poor; while a purely manufacturing
population would risk having its supplies of raw material cut off in
time of war. He warmly encouraged free imports as a means of enriching
his countrymen, trusting to their ability, under these conditions, to
hold their own against foreign competition. He protected capital, in
the sense that he considered capitalists to be necessary for the
development of commerce in time of peace, and for the protection of
the state in time of war.

Mencius (see above) was in favour of heavily taxing merchants who
tried to engross for the purpose of regrating, that is, to buy up
wholesale for the purpose of retailing at monopoly prices; he was in
fact opposed to all trusts and corners in trade. He was in favour of a
tax to be imposed upon such persons as were mere consumers, living
upon property which had been amassed by others and doing no work
themselves. No tax, however, was to be exacted from property-owners
who contributed by their personal efforts to the general welfare of
the community. The object of the tax was not revenue, but the
prevention of idleness with its attendant evil consequences to the
state.

Wang An-shih.

Wang An-shih, the Reformer, or Innovator, as he has been called,
flourished A.D. 1021-1086. In 1069 he was appointed state councillor,
and forthwith entered upon a series of startling reforms which have
given him a unique position in the annals of China. He established a
state monopoly in commerce, under which the produce of a district was
to be used first for the payment of taxes, then for the direct use of
the district itself, and the remainder was to be purchased by the
government at a cheap rate, either to be held until there was a rise
in price, or to be transported to some other district in need of it.
The people were to profit by fixity of prices and escape from further
taxation; and the government, by the revenue accruing in the process
of administration. There was also to be a system of state advances to
cultivators of land; not merely to the needy, but to all alike. The
loan was to be compulsory, and interest was to be paid on it at the
rate of 2% per month. The soil was to be divided into equal areas and
taxed according to its fertility in each case, without reference to
the number of inhabitants contained in each area. All these, and other
important reforms, failed to find favour with a rigidly conservative
people, and Wang An-shih lived long enough to see the whole of his
policy reversed.

Sun-Tz[)u].