As the Chinese see us

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Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. INTERNATIONAL ANTIPATHIES . I

II. RIVAL SYSTEMS OF EDUCATION . 32

Chapter I

*' The superior man is catholic and no partisan." —Confucian Analects.

Vice-Consul West. — I am a little uncertain about the translation of one or two phrases in the Prefect's despatch. Please look through the rough draft on the table, and afterwards I will trouble you to test my mastery of the local tones in a few sentences of colloquial. I am afraid iht patois^ if I get saturated with it, may spoil my enunciation of the Court dialect.

Pufidit Tung. — The main idea of the despatch is correctly grasped, but when I have explained the history of two or three technical terms, you will be able to set forth the meaning a little more closely in the English rendering. A

Vue-Censul West. — I will soon put the details right, and embody your suggestions in my Qnal copy.

Pundit Tung.— Yes ! yes ! The tones are good, but you drawl the lower departing a little too much, and the local sound for Buddha is neither a long ^'u" nor a short "a," but two parts of the one and three parts of the other. The nasal **ng" you must produce as if you had polypus. Do not let the breath come through the lips ; keep the mouth open, and coop up the sound half-way between the throat and the nose. . . . Yes ! better. The Vice- Consul will speak like a man of the province in another year, better even.than the missionaries.

Vice -Consul West. — Nothing going on of interest in the city just now, I suppose }

Pundit Tung. — The news is scanty, and as savourless as cold rice. The second harvest was not up to the average ; business is quiet, and the loafers at the city gates and in the less reputable neighbourhoods are getting a little restless as the end of the year draws near. I was told that two foreigners passed up the river a little while before the setting of the watch last night, and that they were rather roughly handled. They went ashore at the ferry-boat landing, and the boys began pelting them with chewed sugar-cane, banana husks and lumps of mud. By some mischance or other, they got into the streets of the gambling shops, and the small boys were reinforced by a knot of loafers, who, as usual, hustled them, and threatened them with the knife. A friend who saw the mild riot told me they hurried back to the boat, and no harm befell them beyond a slight wetting. The older of the two in jumping from the bank fell short of the bows and got soaked up to the knees. One of the crew, however, caught him by the wrist and hauled him on board. The gentlemen were probably merchants or travellers, for they did not speak to the crowd in Chinese, and seemed not quite at their ease.

Vice-Consul West. — It is strange they did not call here or send their cards. In a few days we shall have an alarmist paragraph in one of the Hong-Kong papers, saying that the people are extremely hostile to foreigners, and a crisis of trouble is at hand. The town has not the best of reputations, although it is not quite so bad as it is painted.

Pundit Tung. — It was unlucky they should have come ashore just when the schools had been dismissed, and swarms of boys were buzzing about the streets, and still more unlucky that they should have landed on the side of the creek where the vicious classes live, rather than amongst the respectable shops on the opposite bank. It was their misfortune that they could not chaff the people into smiles by a few sentences of the local patois. The Chinese servant on the boat was insolent to the bystanders, and did not mend matters. Had things been just a little different in these particulars, they would have gone back and praised the citizens for their courtesy and friendliness.

Vice-Consul West. — Some travellers do seem to have a trick of smelling out the special places where they will be roughly handled. I rarely meet now with signs of ill-will, and when I go out for a day's shooting, nothing can exceed the kindness of the village folk, although I do cross their Buddhist prejudices against taking life, for notices against shooting birds seem to be stuck up on every wayside shrine and banyan tree. In the temper of the street crowds here I find a distinct improvement. A year or two ago I could not take a walk without seeing half a dozen Chinamen thrust their noses into their sleeves as I passed them, in token of their disgust and contempt, but that fashion seems to have passed away. I was often tempted to kick the wretches, and would not swear that I was always superior to the temptation. The antipathy seems to die hard in some of the suburbs, and when it has been quiescent for a time, it suddenly awakens in unpleasant and ominous forms.

Pundit Tung. — The feeling perhaps varies with the rumours circulated by native newspapers, which now find their way into every district city, besides the private letters which come to hand from the coast ports. Sometimes there may be local causes of irritation, or foreigners who pass along the streets may blunder through ignorance of our customs. To bring the Hong-Kong method of treating the Chinamen into the interior, is to fire a powder magazine. As a rule, exasperation arises when France is taking new territory in Tonquin, or Japan is scheming to become dominant in Corea, or Russian railways are creeping nearer to our northern frontier ; and the exasperation subsides when it is found that the eighteen provinces are not all swallowed up by the mysterious powers of the West.

Vice- Consul West. — I should like to get down to the real cause of all [this ill-will and misunderstanding. Why should your countrymen dislike us even when they receive kindness at our hands ? Forget your politeness for once in a while, and be quite candid with me. Do not tell me what you think the Englishman would like to hear, as is the habit with teachers, butlers, cooks and house servants. When I visit the officials, of course they flatter me and my countrymen as though we were fresh incarnations of Confucius and his seventy disciples, come by mail steamer from the Western Paradise ; and when I walk through the streets of towns and cities unaccustomed to the presence of Europeans, I am called "imp," " cuckolod," and other epithets, not to be found in either Chinese or English dictionaries. Now I want something about half-way between these two extremes. The foreigner, as you know, is neither a Gautama Buddha on the one hand, nor an ox-headed demon tormentor on the other.

Pundit Tung. — Do not blame me for saying so, but perhaps the praise is in excess of what is really thought, and the railing of the street crowd is not to be taken literally. The dislike is a tradition of our training. Perhaps the attitude towards us into which you are trained does not rest upon a true and just appreciation.

Vice-Consul West. — Perhaps not; but I can well believe all you say about the prejudice, for it was absurdly illustrated in a trifling incident which occurred as I was passing through a neighbouring village yesterday. A little child, held by his mother's hand, shrank back with terror as I came in sight, and I heard the mother whisper: "Do not fear. Say 'great merchant ' as you pass, and it will be all right." The terror was the effect of false views about the foreigner inculcated in the home, and the flattering vocative, "great merchant," a propitiatory expedient of the moment to put the child on safe terms with a passing adversary. I thought it much like the superstitions of the less instructed people, who seek to turn the enmity of mischief-making spirits by adulation and sacrifice. When the child had been got past the place at which he shied, the old prejudice would doubtless be encouraged, and the " great merchant " would be made once more the " demon " with which to frighten a wilful child.

Pundit Tung. — Perhaps it is so. A strange white face, with plenty of hair about it, projecting eyes, and limbs uncouthly clothed in tight, shortcut garments, may be guaranteed to affright and terrorise the imagination, especially when such things are associated with stories told in our homes of what the foreign soldiers did in the wars which broke out during the reigns of T6 Kwong and Ham Fung. We are ruled to some extent by the nightmares of our past history. For three thousand years our race, which has both multiplied and incorporated other and less numerous races, has been in partial contact with inferior, not to say cruel tribes. No civilisation has grown up within sight of our own that has not borrowed the good in it from us. You say we are clever imitators only, but we have originated what has been the pattern civilisation of the eastern half of Asia, centuries before you began to dream of art and letters. And the copies of our civilisation adopted in Corea, Japan, Siam and Thibet were on a small and inferior scale. Pre-historic tribes survive in our hills, and down to the present time raid 'our crops, carry off our cattle, and burn our villages in the valleys abutting on their mountains. These men, who have no letters and no culture, and who play the part of bandits, were the first foreigners we knew. The habit of thought and speech acquired in hundreds of generations of intercourse with these outsiders is strong upon us, and the image of the Nam Man or the I Tik is the first picture of a foreigner in the mind. It maintains its position there till it is displaced by something else. Every schoolboy learns about the wild tribes of the classic times, and brings this prepossessed judgment to his outlook upon the strange visitors who have come across the waves in ships.

Vice-Consul West. — But you must surely admit that it is unjust and misleading to apply to the men from great continents beyond the seas, the names used to describe your frontier tribes and the hillmen of your remote mountains, who could not copy your crafts or fit themselves into the complex life of the plains. We have a literature which is broader and more vital than yours, an art which has touched higher levels, although of course we prize your lacquers and porcelains for their colour and quaintness, and your bronzes for their finish and patient detail. Our civilisation is of a new order, and cannot be classed with any told of in the past history of the world.

Pundit Tung. — Well, we know nothing of your literature, and perhaps cannot acquire a lO AS THE CHINESE SEE US

taste for its special beauties. Your art, represented by second-hand picture papers, often displayed for sale on the street-side, in company with photographs from the nude, does not impress us. As to your civilisation, we allow that it is wonderful, but it is so different from our own that the ignorant look upon it as the product of magic, akin to that of the Tauists, and the less ignorant, as an abnormal development of the sense-faculties which have been trained at the expense of the moral. The Vice-Consul himself speaks lightly of the codes of conduct taught by the missionaries, and does not put himself under any obligation to practise their precepts, by conforming to the rites of the Church, unless on the birthday of Jesus. Our own histories tell of great magicians and inventors, but we do not think of ranging Ts5 Ts'z, or any of his craft, side by side with Confucius. "The sage spake of morals and not of marvels." The precepts out of which our family life is built we look upon as greater than the craft which gets power out of steam, changes the combinations of gases, and controls and directs the vital principle of the lightning. We classify society into scholars, cultivators of the soil, artisans, and traders. Till we re-

INTERNATIONAL ANTIPATHIES II

arrange that classification, your civilisation, which is the work of those who belong to the third class only, cannot be esteemed as highly as it is with you.

Vice-Consul West. — But that surely does not justify you in ranking us with barbarians.

Pundit Tung, — Perhaps not, but we act from obstinate prejudice, as your countrymen also do. If you will not blame my bad manners for presuming to say so, I daresay there is physical aversion on both sides, and we each seem to the other as though we belonged to dififerent species. You perhaps remember that when you first came to represent your country at this river-port, a Chinaman from the Eastern suburb called to say that he had a daughter with pink eyes, white hair, and a florid complexion (an albino?) for whom he could not get a betrothal arranged on any terms. He thought that as she was born with a foreigner's physiognomy, the Vice-Consul might be willing to take her as a concubine, and the price should be very cheap. He had made up his mind when she was a little girl to destroy her, but the oracle in the temple had twice given the answer that it would be unlucky. I mention it to show the impression made upon the average Chinese mind by foreign hair, and foreign complexion, not to speak of foreign dress. Everybody says the Vice-Consul himself is majestic in appearance, and has an intelligent eye.

Vice-Consul West. — But the man was a lunatic, and could never have observed so closely as an average Chinaman. If you do keep your eyes half shut we give you credit for being able to see a great deal, and to see correctly.

Pundit Tung. — I am not sure we are more careless in such matters than the men of your esteemed country. L6 Kwok had seen perhaps not more than four or five foreigners when he fell into the delusion that his daughter had European hair and complexion. I have also heard of Europeans who for weeks could only distinguish the cook from one of the chairbearers by the fact that he carried a market basket with a weighing-stick on his arm. The carelessness is on both sides, and concerns other things besides face and feature. If our ignorant classes, and even our mandarins, have spoken of your countrymen as the Yung and the Man, you have rated us less highly than you rate the Greeks and the Romans, and have spoken of our literature as old-world lumber. Your view of our past history, our ethics, our philosophy, our family and civic virtues, is as defective and misleading as our view of foreign geography and Western customs. A few of the consuls and the missioilaries have looked into our sacred books and taken the trouble to understand us, but a consul is satisfied when he can translate a despatch or conduct an interview without the help of his interpreter, and the average missionary seems to think it is a waste of time to learn more colloquial than will enable him to communicate with the common people. As to the few consuls, or vice-consuls, who learn enough of the local dialects to converse freely, they are sent after a year or two to other stations, where different dialects are in use, and their knowledge is academic. Not one in a hundred of the great merchants and their clerks could hail a boat, ask the way, or call for a cup of tea in a refreshment-house. The few of you who have studied Chinese books say we are a learned people, and at the same time despise us. Our kii-yan, tsun-sz, hon-lam, who are honoured as princes in their own neighbourhoods, are flounced and chivied and shouted at by your countrymen as though they were mere cooHes. The boards inscribed with the literary titles of our scholars, and carried before them in full dress processions, are as incomprehensible to you as the badges of your secret societies are to us. In fact, the Chinaman is preferred who is not learned. There can be no lasting and acceptable intercourse unless we can talk about history, literature, poetry, or some topic fit for the educated. We soon tire of hearing about foreign countries and their customs. It is spicier to read " Wonders of the Seas and Mountains," if one has a bent to that kind of ware.

Vice-Consul West. — But the members of the Diplomatic and Consular services at least revere the learning of the country, although foreign merchants laugh at them, saying they have fallen into the ways of the Chinaman; and native newspapers so far overstate the appreciation avowed by some of us, that they say we have found a higher attraction in Confucius than in the traditional teaching of Jesus. Even missionaries, who have come to give you what they think a more perfect religion, have no censure to pass upon the precepts of the sacred books.

Pundit Tung. — Much of that is of course the language of compliment, and we take a little off for politeness, just as you do not allow yourselves to be entirely misled by the extravagant flatteries our officials pay to your taste, learning, and virtue, whilst they offer you sweets and tea. Of those who come from the West, the rank and file never take the trouble to learn our language at all, and of those who learn our language few dive into the treasures of our literature and prepare the way for intelligent intercourse with us. You know the story of Tsz Kung, a disciple of Confucius. Some one had said he was greater than his master, and he replied by a parable. " My wall is only shoulder-high. One may peep over it and see what is of worth in the apartments. The wall of my master is several fathoms high. If one does not gain the door and enter, he cannot see the beauty of the ancestral temple nor the sumptuous attire of the officers attending there." The foreigners who become Chinese scholars peep over the wall and do not enter by the door, and as to the rest, they treat the temple of our literature as if it were a cow-byre, and pass by on the other side. Is it any wonder that we live together without any pretence at social l6 AS THE CHINESE SEE US

intercourse. Our dealings with each other are official or strictly mercenary.

Vice-Consul West. — But foreigners are birds of passage. We are here for a time only, and you are here always, and will have to do with those who come after us. It is quite as easy for you to learn our language; and you may have occasion to use it to the end of your days. You might inaugurate the period of a more perfect understanding by making a study of our literature.

Pmidit Tung. — Some of our younger generation do learn it, because it is profitable, but from no other motive. Our native traders think you speak nothing better than the coolie English of Hong-Kong (pidgin). How can a language that has no greater variety of sounds in it than the quack of a duck-raft or the cackle of a poultry-pen, and that is represented by twentysix featureless characters, lead up to a literature that will delight the mind of a scholar ? The social fellowship of which we get glimpses through coolie English does not tempt us. Of course your merchants go once or twice to a Chinese feast, where they taste trepang, shark'sfins and bird's-nest soup, and drink health and good-will with native business clients, by tossing cups of samshoo into each other's open mouths, but that is for the fun of the thing, or to make their firms popular with Chinese customers.

Vice-Consul West. — Perhaps one of the reasons why foreigners are not attracted to Chinese society is that it represents one half of human life only. We never speak to your women and the children, and unless they appear upon the scene, there is a lack of piquancy and romance. Your countrymen are deficient in sentiment, and will probably continue so whilst men and women live so rigidly apart.

Pundit Tung. — It will be a long time before we shall change our family traditions. In the more important settlements there are clubs at which foreigners meet each other, and they seem to find men's company satisfying, for they spend much time together, even when their families are within easy reach. Perhaps they will by-and-by come over to our view about the separation of the sexes. The coarse manners of some of the foreigners do not incline us to make changes in our social life. Some of them at least have never learned the proprieties, and think themselves honest when they are only rude, and amusing when they are viciously familiar. Not many years ago one of our £

Chinese ministers was returning with his retinue from Europe, and a merchant's clerk on board chucked the female attendant of His Excellency's wife under the chin, and called her " handsome facey." A Chinaman who would dare to offer such an insult to a waiting-maid here would be knived on the spot. When such things are rumoured abroad we ask, "Are Western manners like this ? " Do not be surprised that we are jealous and inaccessible. We look upon it as contempt when foreigners are too indifferent to learn our speech and respect our customs, and it is only human nature to meet contempt with contempt.

Vice-Consul West. — But such looseness is against Western etiquette, no less. We have our code of manners, which is simple and spontaneous. Chinese ceremony is complex and elaborate in its requirements, and needs almost as much learning as the Chinese ideograph itself. Your people could learn our few rules of courtesy, and if they do not feel bound to practise the rules in their comings and goings amongst us, they might at least allow that we have our own proprieties of behaviour, and not rate us as unmannerly barbarians.

Pundit Tung, — Well, our rules are better,

INTERNATIONAL ANTIPATHIES I9

particularly where women are concerned. It is forbidden us to touch a woman's hand, a restriction Mencius, of course, allows to be broken if a woman has stumbled into a well, and needs to be pulled out. But in foreign life women seem to be always in wells, judging by the constant need they have of being helped. Our distant manners make for domestic morality, and however bad we may be in some things, seductions, illegitimate births, and public divorces are fewer than with you. Foot-binding may be as wanting in pitifulness as you assert, yet we think it better than the promiscuous dancing of under-dressed women, which is practised at some of the Legations and Consulates, as well as in the merchants' ^^ hofigs.^'

Vice-Consul West. — But it is scarcely reasonable for us to give up social pleasures which involve no real evil, as a concession to Chinese prejudice. We are not missionaries who are under an obligation to deny themselves of everything through which they might forfeit the respect and good-will of their Chinese neighbours.

Pundit Tung. — Perhaps not, but it is the only price at which you can secure the secret respect and good-will of the Chinese. If you prize codes of manners, objectionable from our standpoint but innocent from yours, more than friendship with our people, be it so. You cannot have it both ways. Our manners have helped our morals, and are consecrated by the authority of the sacred books, as well as by the usage of many dynasties. If your merchants come as the guests of our country, they should surely conform to our manners rather than expect us to copy theirs. When we go as guests into your territories, it is only fitting we should observe the etiquette of your houses. Our countrymen say a foreigner comes into our midst as though he were a manifestation of Yuk Wong Tai tai, and scholars, craftsmen and traders were a celestial host enlisted to bow down and serve him. The Son of Heaven himself could scarcely require more.

Vice-Consul West. — Perhaps we are a little overbearing, for we belong to a conquering race, but you greatly exaggerate the case. There is no racial antipathy on our side, theoretically at least. The antipathy on the part of your countrymen is ingrained rather than superficial, and shows itself towards those foreigners who adopt Chinese dress, and bend themselves to native customs. And the Japanese, who are step-brothers in race and affiliated to the same Oriental stock, you dislike more even than the rest of us. That was so even before the war broke out, which of course added greatly to the exasperation.

Pundit Tung. — The Japanese at first belonged to the barbarians of the East, and although we half reformed them, they retained some of their earlier manners and customs, which we regard as licentious. Within the last few tens of years Japan, which was once our apprentice, has turned round, and wishes to be our instructor. It is not easy for us to resign ourselves to such an inverted relationship. The ancient and lowly tribute-bearer comes back to our Court a dictator.

Vice-Consul West. — It seems to me that you are impartial, and dislike all nationalities in much the same degree. And the dislike is rooted in ignorance.

Pundit Tung. — Perhaps the people as a whole put all foreign races [into one vague group for hatred, but those of us who have been brought into contact with the outside world discriminate in the degree and quaUty of our disfavour. The Russians are more sociable with us than the rest, but are more ruthless. They are the worst of enemies but the best of friends, and our feelings towards them are consequently a mixture of extremes. French suavity pleases us, but their politeness lacks dignity and reserve, and their policy at times threatens to overwhelm our country as remorselessly as the Yellow River. Perhaps they still make the fighting Emperor their pattern saint. We respect the Germans and their methods, for they believe in authority, like ourselves, and they keep women in their place. But they are rough. Americans treat us well, and have an affable ceremoniousness, but it is too hurried. Our returned emigrants like their ideas and their institutions, and those who have learned English in the Sunday-schools worship the young ladies who have taught them, and say that in spite of their easy manners they are as good as Kun Yam or T'in Hau. England might stand first with us, if she would listen to our side of some of the questions in dispute, but her policy wavers with her statesmen, and is not so trustworthy as it once was. Perhaps we do not like any foreigners, but those who know admit that there are differences.

Vice- Consul West — In every case special explanations may doubtless be found, but there is a vague and historic dislike to everything un-Chinese. You have not always been at peace with your own subject tribes, and it is practically the same temper of suspicion and contempt which you allow to grow up towards all outsiders.

Pundit Tung. — That is perhaps because our nation is a huge family, for the sages taught that the nation rests upon the family, and its unity must be secured by the faithful cultivation of domestic sentiments. Large and firmly compacted families are usually jealous of the intrusion of strangers. I am told that in the extreme north'of your country the clan still survives, and that when the clansmen go forth for purposes of trade and commerce, although they do not return to their villages at the Spring Festival to worship the ancestral graves, they dine together once a year. Those who do not belong to such clans are looked upon with coldness, and often feel lonesome and friendless. By naming regiments from the districts in which they are recruited, your Government perhaps desires to retrieve the errors of the past and to restore the clan. It is said that your Prime Minister is the head of a clan, and that he shows great kindness to those of his own house, so that many in the Grand Council bear the same name, and are his kinsmen in different degrees. Clans resent any intrusion upon their privileges, pride themselves upon their superiority, look down upon unclanned folk as though they were tramps, and perhaps thieves, and scorn even clans of another surname. Suppose, for example, that your Prime Minister's clan, or the clan of the Minister of State for the Colonies, held together for two thousand years and multiplied in numbers exceedingly, it would perhaps look with disdain and misgiving upon the rest of the world. China is a huge clan, or cluster of clans, held together by ties the strength of which you do not duly estimate. Our clans quarrel amongst themselves, but they lose their sense of separateness and become one body when an outside stranger is to be dealt with. Clans do not brook interference with their domestic interests. And our clans are walled in by the protecting guilds of the towns and cities, and if the defence of the guilds is at fault, the secret societies, which are a bulwark against the oppression of our rulers, can always be used against invaders.