Within the last few weeks another edict has gone forth, directed against the practice of foot-binding. Let us hope it will have a better fate.

Many years ago the prefect of T'ai-wan Fu said to me, in the course of an informal conversation after a friendly dinner, "Do you foreigners fear the inner ones?"—and on my asking what was meant, he told me that a great many Chinese stood in absolute awe of their wives. "He does," added the prefect, pointing to the district magistrate, a rather truculent-looking individual, who was at the dinner-party; and the other guests went into a roar of laughter.

The general statement by the prefect is borne out by the fact that the "henpecked husband" is constantly held up to ridicule in humorous literature, which would be quite impossible if there were no foundation of fact.

I have translated one of these stories, trivial enough in itself, but, like the proverbial straw, well adapted for showing which way the wind blows. Here it is:—

Ten henpecked husbands agreed to form themselves into a society for resisting the oppression of their wives. At the first meeting they were sitting talking over their pipes, when suddenly the ten wives, who had got wind of the movement, appeared on the scene.

There was a general stampede, and nine of the husbands incontinently bolted through another door, only one remaining unmoved to face the music. The ladies merely smiled contemptuously at the success of their raid, and went away.

The nine husbands them all agreed that the bold tenth man, who had not run away, should be at once appointed their president; but on coming to offer him the post, they found that he had died of fright!

To judge by the following story, the Chinese woman's patience is sometimes put to a severe test.

A scholar of old was so absent-minded, that on one occasion, when he was changing houses, he forgot to take his wife. This was reported to Confucius as a most unworthy act. "Nay," replied the Master, "it is indeed bad to forget one's wife; but 'tis worse to forget one's self!"

Points of this kind are, no doubt, trivial, as I have said above, and may be regarded by many even as flippant; but the fact is that a successful study of the Chinese people cannot possibly be confined to their classics and higher literature, and to the problem of their origin and subsequent development where we now find them. It must embrace the lesser, not to say meaner, details of their everyday life, if we are ever to pierce the mystery which still to a great extent surrounds them.

In this sense an Italian student of Chinese, Baron Vitale, has gone so far as to put together and publish a collection of Chinese nursery rhymes, from which it is not difficult to infer that Chinese babies are very much as other babies are in other parts of the world.

And it has always seemed to me that the Chinese baby's father and mother, so far as the ordinary springs of action go, are very much of a pattern with the rest of mankind.

One reason why the Chinaman remains a mystery to so many is due, no doubt, to the vast amount of nonsense which is published about him.

First of all, China is a very large country, and from want of proper means of communication for many centuries, there has been nothing like extensive intercourse between North, South, East, West, and Central. Of course the officials visit all parts of the Empire, as they are transferred from post to post; but the bulk of the people never get far beyond the range of their own district city.

The consequence is that as regards manners and customs, while retaining an indelible national imprint, the Chinese people have drifted apart into separate local communities; so that what is true of one part of the country is by no means necessarily true of another.

The Chinese themselves say that manners, which they think are due to climatic influences, change every thirty miles; customs, which they attribute to local idiosyncrasies, change every three hundred miles.

Now, a globe-trotter goes to Canton, and as one of the sights of that huge collection of human beings, he is taken to shops,—there used to be three,—where the flesh of dogs, fed for the purpose, is sold as food.

He comes home, and writes a book, and says that the Chinese people live on dogs' flesh.

When I was a boy, I thought that every Frenchman had a frog for breakfast. Each statement would be about equally true. In the north of China, dogs' flesh is unknown; and even in the south, during all my years in China I never succeeded in finding any Chinaman who either could, or would, admit that he had actually tasted it.

Take the random statement that any rich man condemned to death can procure a substitute by payment of so much. So long as we believe stuff of that kind, so long will the Chinese remain a mystery for us, it being difficult to deduce true conclusions from false premises.

As a matter of fact, that is, so far as my own observations go, the Chinese people value life every whit as highly as we do, and a substitute of the kind would be quite unprocurable under ordinary circumstances. It is thinkable that some poor wretch, himself under sentence of death, might be substituted with the connivance of the officials, to hoodwink foreigners; but even then the difficulties would be so great as to render the scheme almost impracticable.

For in China everything leaks out. There is none of that secrecy necessary to conceal and carry out such a plot.

At any rate, the uncertainty which gathers around many of these points emphasises the necessity of more and more accurate scholarship in Chinese, and more and more accurate information on the people of China and their ways.

How the latter article is supplied to us in England, you may judge from some extracts which I have recently taken from respectable daily and weekly newspapers.

For instance, "China has only one hundred physicians to a population of four hundred millions."

To me it is inconceivable how such rubbish can be printed, especially when it is quite easy to find out that there is no medical diploma in China, and that any man who chooses is free to set up as a doctor.

By a pleasant fiction, he charges no fees; a fixed sum, however, is paid to him for each visit, as "horse-money,"—I need hardly add, in advance.

There are, as with us, many successful, and consequently fashionable, doctors whose "horse-money" runs well into double figures. Their success must be due more to good luck and strictly innocent prescriptions than to any guidance they can find in the extensive medical literature of China.

All together, medicine is a somewhat risky profession, as failure to cure is occasionally resented by surviving relatives.

There is a story of a doctor who had mismanaged a case, and was seized by the patient's family and tied up. In the night he managed to free himself, and escaped by swimming across a river. When he got home, he found his son, who had just begun to study medicine, and he said to him, "Don't be in a hurry with your books; the first and most important thing is to learn to swim!"

Here is another newspaper gem: "In China, the land of opposites, the dials of the clocks are made to turn round, while the hands stand still."

Personally, I never noticed this arrangement.

Again: "Some of the tops with which the Chinese amuse themselves are as large as barrels. It takes three men to spin one, and it gives off a sound that may be heard several hundred yards away."

"The Chinese National Anthem is so long that it takes half a day to sing it."

"Chinese women devote very little superfluous time to hair-dressing. Their tresses are arranged once a month, and they sleep with their heads in boxes."

What we want in place of all this is a serious and systematic examination of the manners and customs, and modes of thought, of the Chinese people.

Their long line of Dynastic Histories must be explored and their literature ransacked by students who have got through the early years of drudgery inseparable from the peculiar nature of the written language, and who are prepared to devote themselves, not, as we do now, to a general knowledge of the whole, but to a thorough acquaintance with some particular branch.

The immediate advantages of such a course, as I must point out once more, for the last time, to commerce and to diplomatic relations will be incalculable. And they will be shared in by the student of history, philosophy, and religion, who will then for the first time be able to assign to China her proper place in the family of nations.

The founder of this Chinese Chair has placed these advantages within the grasp of Columbia University.

 





INDEX

 





INDEX