



Produced by John Bickers and Dagny





THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA

by Herbert A. Giles


Professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge,

And sometime H.B.M. Consul at Ningpo




PREFACE

The aim of this work is to suggest a rough outline of Chinese
civilization from the earliest times down to the present period of rapid
and startling transition.

It has been written, primarily, for readers who know little or nothing
of China, in the hope that it may succeed in alluring them to a wider
and more methodical survey.

H.A.G.

Cambridge, May 12, 1911.




THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA



CHAPTER I--THE FEUDAL AGE

It is a very common thing now-a-days to meet people who are going to
"China," which can be reached by the Siberian railway in fourteen or
fifteen days. This brings us at once to the question--What is meant by
the term China?

Taken in its widest sense, the term includes Mongolia, Manchuria,
Eastern Turkestan, Tibet, and the Eighteen Provinces, the whole being
equivalent to an area of some five million square miles, that is,
considerably more than twice the size of the United States of America.
But for a study of manners and customs and modes of thought of the
Chinese people, we must confine ourselves to that portion of the whole
which is known to the Chinese as the "Eighteen Provinces," and to us as
China Proper. This portion of the empire occupies not quite two-fifths
of the whole, covering an area of somewhat more than a million and a
half square miles. Its chief landmarks may be roughly stated as Peking,
the capital, in the north; Canton, the great commercial centre, in the
south; Shanghai, on the east; and the Tibetan frontier on the west.

Any one who will take the trouble to look up these four points on a
map, representing as they do central points on the four sides of a rough
square, will soon realize the absurdity of asking a returning traveller
the very much asked question, How do you like China? Fancy asking a
Chinaman, who had spent a year or two in England, how he liked Europe!
Peking, for instance, stands on the same parallel of latitude as Madrid;
whereas Canton coincides similarly with Calcutta. Within the square
indicated by the four points enumerated above will be found variations
of climate, flowers, fruit, vegetables and animals--not to mention human
beings--distributed in very much the same way as in Europe. The climate
of Peking is exceedingly dry and bracing; no rain, and hardly any snow,
falling between October and April. The really hot weather lasts only for
six or eight weeks, about July and August--and even then the nights are
always cool; while for six or eight weeks between December and February
there may be a couple of feet of ice on the river. Canton, on the other
hand, has a tropical climate, with a long damp enervating summer and a
short bleak winter. The old story runs that snow has only been seen
once in Canton, and then it was thought by the people to be falling
cotton-wool.

The northern provinces are remarkable for vast level plains, dotted
with villages, the houses of which are built of mud. In the southern
provinces will be found long stretches of mountain scenery, vying in
loveliness with anything to be seen elsewhere. Monasteries are built
high up on the hills, often on almost inaccessible crags; and there
the well-to-do Chinaman is wont to escape from the fierce heat of the
southern summer. On one particular mountain near Canton, there are
said to be no fewer than one hundred of such monasteries, all of which
reserve apartments for guests, and are glad to be able to add to their
funds by so doing.

In the north of China, Mongolian ponies, splendid mules, and donkeys are
seen in large quantities; also the two-humped camel, which carries heavy
loads across the plains of Mongolia. In the south, until the advent of
the railway, travellers had to choose between the sedan-chair carried
on the shoulders of stalwart coolies, or the slower but more comfortable
house-boat. Before steamers began to ply on the coast, a candidate for
the doctor's degree at the great triennial examination would take three
months to travel from Canton to Peking. Urgent dispatches, however, were
often forwarded by relays of riders at the rate of two hundred miles a
day.

The market in Peking is supplied, among other things, with excellent
mutton from a fat-tailed breed of sheep, chiefly for the largely
Mohammedan population; but the sheep will not live in southern China,
where the goat takes its place. The pig is found everywhere, and
represents beef in our market, the latter being extremely unpalatable to
the ordinary Chinaman, partly perhaps because Confucius forbade men to
slaughter the animal which draws the plough and contributes so much to
the welfare of mankind. The staple food, the "bread" of the people in
the Chinese Empire, is nominally rice; but this is too costly for the
peasant of northern China to import, and he falls back on millet as its
substitute. Apples, pears, grapes, melons, and walnuts grow abundantly
in the north; the southern fruits are the banana, the orange, the
pineapple, the mango, the pomelo, the lichee, and similar fruits of a
more tropical character.

Cold storage has been practised by the Chinese for centuries. Blocks of
ice are cut from the river for that purpose; and on a hot summer's day a
Peking coolie can obtain an iced drink at an almost infinitesimal cost.
Grapes are preserved from autumn until the following May and June by
the simple process of sticking the stalk of the bunch into a large hard
pear, and putting it away carefully in the ice-house. Even at Ningpo,
close to our central point on the eastern coast of China, thin layers
of ice are collected from pools and ditches, and successfully stored for
use in the following summer.

The inhabitants of the coast provinces are distinguished from the
dwellers in the north and in the far interior by a marked alertness of
mind and general temperament. The Chinese themselves declare that virtue
is associated with mountains, wisdom with water, cynically implying that
no one is both virtuous and wise. Between the inhabitants of the
various provinces there is little love lost. Northerners fear and
hate southerners, and the latter hold the former in infinite scorn and
contempt. Thus, when in 1860 the Franco-British force made for Peking,
it was easy enough to secure the services of any number of Cantonese,
who remained as faithful as though the attack had been directed against
some third nationality.

The population of China has never been exactly ascertained. It has been
variously estimated by foreign travellers, Sacharoff, in 1842, placing
the figure at over four hundred millions. The latest census, taken in
1902, is said to yield a total of four hundred and ten millions. Perhaps
three hundred millions would be a juster estimate; even that would
absorb no less than one-fifth of the human race. From this total it is
easy to calculate that if the Chinese people were to walk past a given
point in single file, the procession would never end; long before the
last of the three hundred millions had passed by, a new generation would
have sprung up to continue the neverending line. The census, however, is
a very old institution with the Chinese; and we learn that in A.D. 156
the total population of the China of those days was returned as a little
over fifty millions. In more modern times, the process of taking the
census consists in serving out house-tickets to the head of every
household, who is responsible for a proper return of all the inmates;
but as there is no fixed day for which these tickets are returnable, the
results are approximate rather than exact.

Again, it is not uncommon to hear people talking of the Chinese language
as if it were a single tongue spoken all over China after a more or less
uniform standard. But the fact is that the colloquial is broken up into
at least eight dialects, each so strongly marked as to constitute eight
languages as different to the ear, one from another, as English, Dutch
and German, or French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. A Shanghai man,
for instance, is unintelligible to a Cantonese, and so on. All officials
are obliged, and all of the better educated merchants and others
endeavour, if only for business purposes, to learn something of the
dialect spoken at the court of Peking; and this is what is popularly
known as "Mandarin." The written language remains the same for the whole
empire; which merely means that ideas set down on paper after a uniform
system are spoken with different sounds, just as the Arabic numerals are
written uniformly in England, France and Germany, but are pronounced in
a totally different manner.

The only difficulty of the spoken language, of no matter what dialect,
lies in the "tones," which simply means the different intonations which
may be given to one and the same sound, thus producing so many entirely
different meanings. But for these tones, the colloquial of China would
be absurdly easy, inasmuch as there is no such thing as grammar, in the
sense of gender, number, case, mood, tense, or any of the variations we
understand by that term. Many amusing examples are current of blunders
committed by faulty speakers, such as that of the student who told his
servant to bring him a goose, when what he really wanted was some salt,
both goose and salt having the same sound, _yen_, but quite different
intonations. The following specimen has the advantage of being true.
A British official reported to the Foreign Office that the people of
Tientsin were in the habit of shouting after foreigners, "Mao-tsu,
mao-tsu" (pronounced _mowdza_, _ow_ as in _how_), from which he gathered
that they were much struck by the head-gear of the barbarian. Now, it is
a fact that _mao-tsu_, uttered with a certain intonation, means a hat;
but with another intonation, it means "hairy one," and the latter,
referring to the big beards of foreigners, was the meaning intended to
be conveyed. This epithet is still to be heard, and is often preceded by
the adjective "red."

The written characters, known to have been in use for the past three
thousand years, were originally rude pictures, as of men, birds, horses,
dogs, houses, the numerals (one, two, three, four), etc., etc., and
it is still possible to trace in the modified modern forms of these
characters more or less striking resemblances to the objects intended.
The next step was to put two or more characters together, to express by
their combination an abstract idea, as, for instance, a _hand_ holding
a _rod_ = father; but of course this simple process did not carry the
Chinese very far, and they soon managed to hit on a joint picture and
phonetic system, which enabled them to multiply characters indefinitely,
new compounds being formed for use as required. It is thus that new
characters can still be produced, if necessary, to express novel objects
or ideas. The usual plan, however, is to combine existing terms in
such a way as to suggest what is wanted. For instance, in preference
to inventing a separate character for the piece of ordnance known as
a "mortar," the Chinese, with an eye to its peculiar pose, gave it the
appropriate name of a "frog gun."

Again, just as the natives and the dialects of the various parts of
China differ one from another, although fundamentally the same people
and the same language, so do the manners and customs differ to such an
extent that habits of life and ceremonial regulations which prevail in
