China and the Chinese Part 4

The above three works are in a uniform edition, published in the middle of the eighteenth century under orders from the Emperor Ch'ien Lung.

There are also several other encyclopaedias of information on general topics, extending to a good many volumes in each case.

One of these contains interesting extracts on all manner of subjects taken from the lighter literature of China, such as Dreams, Palmistry, Reminiscences of a Previous State of Existence, and even Resurrection after Death. It was cut on blocks for printing in A.D. 981, only fifty years after the first edition of the Confucian Canon was printed. The Cambridge copy cannot claim to date from 981, but it does date from 1566.

Another work of the same kind was the _San Ts'ai T'u Hui_, issued in 1609, which is bound up in seventeen thick volumes. It is especially interesting for the variety of topics on which information is given, and also because it is profusely ill.u.s.trated with full-page woodcuts. It has chapters on Geography, with maps; on Ethnology, Language, the Arts and Sciences, and even on various forms of Athletics, including the feats of rope-dancers and acrobats, sword-play, boxing, wrestling, and foot-ball.

Under Tricks and Magic we see a man swallowing a sword, or walking through fire, while hard by an acrobat is bending backward and drinking from cups arranged upon the ground.

The chapters on Drawing are exceptionally good; they contain some specimen landscapes of almost faultless perspective, and also clever examples of free-hand drawing. Portrait-painting is dealt with, and ten ill.u.s.trations are given of the ten angles at which a face may be drawn.

The first shows one-tenth of the face from the right side, the second two-tenths, and so on, waxing to full-face five-tenths; then waning sets in on the left side, four, three, and two-tenths, until ten-tenths shows nothing more than the back of the sitter's head.

There is a well-known Chinese story which tells how a very stingy man took a paltry sum of money to an artist-payment is always exacted in advance-and asked him to paint his portrait. The artist at once complied with his request, but in an hour or so, when the portrait was finished, nothing was visible save the back of the sitter's head. "What does this mean?" cried the latter, indignantly. "Oh," replied the artist, "I thought a man who paid so little as you wouldn't care to show his face!"

Perhaps some one may wonder how it is possible to arrange an encyclopaedia for reference when the language in which it is written happens to possess no alphabet.

Arrangement under Categories is the favourite method, and it is employed in the following way:-

A number of such words as Heaven, Earth, Time, Man, Plants, Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Minerals, and others are chosen, and the subjects are grouped under these headings. Thus, Eclipses would come under Heaven, Geomancy under Earth, the Pa.s.sions under Man, though all cla.s.sification is not quite so simple as these specimens, and search is often prolonged by failing to hit upon the right Category. Even when the Category is the right one, many pages of Index have frequently to be turned over; but once fix the reference in the Index, and the rest is easy, the catch-word in each case being printed on the margin of each page, just where the finger comes when turning the pages rapidly over.

The Chinese are very fond of collections of reprints, published in uniform editions and often extending to several hundred volumes. My earliest acquaintance with literature is a.s.sociated with such a collection in English. It was called _The Family Library_, and ran to over a hundred volumes, if I recollect rightly, and included the works of Washington Irving and the immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_. There is also a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, a tale of a man who, wandering one day in the mountains, came upon two boys playing checkers; and after watching them for some time, and eating some dates they gave him, he discovered that the handle of an axe he was carrying had mouldered into dust. Returning home, he found, as the Chinese poet puts it,

"City and suburb as of old, But hearts that loved him long since cold."

Seven generations had pa.s.sed away in the interim.

The Cambridge Library possesses several of these collections of reprints. One of them is perhaps extra valuable because the wooden blocks from which it was printed were destroyed during the T'ai-p'ing Rebellion, some forty years ago.

I may mention here, though not properly belonging to this section, that we possess a good collection of the curious pamphlets issued by the T'ai-p'ing rebels.

Other interesting works to be found in Division B are the Statutes of the present dynasty, which began in 1644, and even those of the previous dynasty, the latter being an edition of 1576.

Then there is the Penal Code of this dynasty, in several editions; various collections of precedents; handbooks for magistrates, with recorded decisions and ill.u.s.trative cases.

A magistrate or judge in China is not expected to know anything about law.

Attached to the office of every official who may be called upon to try criminal cases is a law expert, to whom the judge or magistrate may refer, when he has any doubt, in private, just as our unpaid justices of the peace in England refer for guidance to the qualified official attached to the court.

Before pa.s.sing on to the next section, one last volume, taken at haphazard, bears the weird t.i.tle, _A Record in Dark Blood_. This work contains notices of eminent statesmen and others, who met violent deaths, each accompanied by a telling ill.u.s.tration of the tragic scene.

Some of the incidents go far to dispose of the belief that patriotism is quite unknown to the Chinese.

Division C is devoted to Geography and to Topography. Here stands the Imperial Geography of the Empire, in twenty-four large volumes, with maps, in the edition of 1745. Here, too, stand many of the Topographies for which China is justly celebrated. Every Prefecture and every District, or Department,-and the latter number about fifteen hundred,-has its Topography, a kind of local history, with all the noticeable features of the District, its bridges, temples, and like buildings, duly described, together with biographies of all natives of the District who have risen to distinction in any way. Each Topography would occupy about two feet of shelf; consequently a complete collection of all the Topographies of China, piled one upon the other, would form a vertical column as high as the Eiffel Tower. Yet Topography is only an outlying branch of Chinese literature.

Division C further contains the oldest printed book in the Cambridge University Library, and a very interesting one to boot. It is ent.i.tled _An Account of Strange Nations_, and was published between 1368 and 1398. Its contents consist of short notices of about 150 nationalities known more or less to the Chinese, and the value of these is much enhanced by the woodcuts which accompany each notice.

Among the rest we find Koreans, j.a.panese, Hsiung-nu (the forefathers of the Huns), Kitan Tartars, tribes of Central Asia, Arabs, Persians, and even Portuguese, Jean de Montecorvino, who had been appointed archbishop of Peking in 1308, having died there in 1330. Of course there are a few pictures of legendary peoples, such as the Long-armed Nation, the One-eyed Nation, the Dog-headed Nation, the Anthropophagi,

"and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders."

There is also an account of Fusang, the country where grew the famous plant which some have tried to identify with the Mexican aloe, thus securing the discovery of America for the Chinese.

The existence of many of these nations is duly recorded by Pliny in his _Natural History_, in words curiously identical with those we find in the Chinese records.

Some strange birds and animals are given at the end of this book, the most interesting of all being an accurate picture of the zebra, here called the _Fu-lu_, which means "Deer of Happiness," but which is undoubtedly a rough attempt at _fara_, an old Arabic term for the wild a.s.s. Now, the zebra being quite unknown in Asia, the puzzle is, how the Chinese came to be so well acquainted with it at that early date.

The condition of the book is as good as could be expected, after six hundred years of wear and tear. Each leaf, here and there defective, is carefully mounted on sheets of stiff paper, and all together very few characters are really illegible, though sometimes the paper has slipped upon the printing-block, and has thus given, in several cases, a double outline.

Alongside of this stands the modern work of the kind, published in 1761, with an introductory poem from the pen of the Emperor Ch'ien Lung. It contains a much longer list of nations, including the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Russians, Swedes, and others, and the ill.u.s.trations-a man and woman of each country-are perfect triumphs of the block-cutter's art, the lines being inconceivably fine.

Division D contains Poetry, Novels, and Plays. Under Poetry, in addition to collections of the works of this or that writer, there are numerous anthologies, to which the Chinese are very partial. The ma.s.s of Chinese poetry is so vast, that it is hopeless for the general reader to do much more than familiarise himself with the best specimens of the greatest poets. It is interesting to note that all the more extensive anthologies include a considerable number of poems by women, some of quite a high order.

Two years ago, an eminent scientist at Cambridge said to me, "Have the Chinese anything in the nature of poetry in their language?" In reply to this, I told him of a question once put to me by a friendly Mandarin in China: "Have you foreigners got books in your honourable country?" We are apt to smile at Chinese ignorance of Western inst.i.tutions; but if we were Chinamen, the smile perhaps would sometimes be the other way about.

Such novels as we have in our library belong entirely to what may be called the cla.s.sical school, and may from many points of view be regarded as genuine works of art. Besides these, there is in the market a huge quant.i.ty of fiction which appeals to the less highly educated cla.s.ses, and even to those who are absolutely unable to read. For the latter, there are professional readers and story-tellers, who may often be seen at some convenient point in a Chinese town, delighting large audiences of coolies with tales of love, and war, and heroism, and self-sacrifice. These readers do not read the actual words of the book, which no coolie would understand, but transpose the book-language into the colloquial as they go along.

_a propos_ of novels, I should like just to mention one, a romantic novel of war and adventure, based upon the _History of the Three Kingdoms_, third century A.D., an epoch when China was split up under three separate sovereigns, who fought one another very much after the style of the Wars of the Roses in English history. This novel, a very long one, occupies perhaps the warmest corner in the hearts of the Chinese people. They never tire of listening to its stirring episodes, its hair-breadth escapes, its successful ruses, and its appalling combats.

Some twelve years ago, a friend of mine undertook to translate it into English. After writing out a complete translation,-a gigantic task,-he rewrote the whole from beginning to end, revising every page thoroughly.

In the spring of 1900, after ten years of toil, it was ready for the press; three months later it had been reduced to ashes by the Boxers at Peking.

"Sunt lacrymae rerum ..."

Chinese plays in the acting editions may be bought singly at street-stalls for less than a cent apiece. For the library, many good collections have been made, and published in handsome editions.

This cla.s.s of literature, however, does not stand upon a high level, but corresponds with the low social status of the actor; and it is a curious fact-true also of novels-that many of the best efforts are anonymous.

Plays by women are also to be found; but I have never yet come across, either on the stage or in literature, any of those remarkable dramas which are supposed to run on month after month, even into years.

Division E is a very important one for students of the Chinese language.

Here we find a number of works of reference, most of which may be characterised as indispensable, and the great majority of which are easily procurable at the present day.

Beginning with dictionaries, we have the famous work of Hsu Shen, who died about A.D. 120. There was at that date no such thing as a Chinese dictionary, although the language had already been for some centuries ripe for such a production, and accordingly Hsu Shen set to work to fill the void. He collected 9353 written characters,-presumably all that were in existence at the time,-to which he added 1163 duplicates, _i.e._ various forms of writing the same character, and then arranged them in groups under those parts which, as we have already seen in the preceding Lecture, are indicators of the direction in which the sense of a character is to be looked for. Thus, all characters containing the element ? "dog" were brought together; all those containing ?

"vegetation," ? "disease," etc.

So far as we know, this system originated with him; and we are therefore not surprised to find that in his hands it was on a clumsier scale than that in vogue to-day. Hsu Shen uses no fewer than 540 of these indicators, and even when the indicator to a character is satisfactorily ascertained, it still remains to search through all the characters under that particular group. Printing from movable types would have been impossible under such a system.

In the modern standard dictionary, published in 1716, under the direction of the Emperor K'ang Hsi, there are only 214 indicators employed, and there is a further sub-arrangement of these groups according to the number of strokes in the other, the phonetic portion of the character. Thus, the indicators "hand," "wood," "fire," "water," or whatever it may be, settle the group in which a given character will be found, and the number of strokes in the remaining portion will refer it to a comparatively small sub-group, from which it can be readily picked out. For instance, ? "a fir tree" will be found under the indicator ?

"tree," sub-group No. 4, because the remaining portion ? consists of four strokes in writing.

Good copies of this dictionary are not too easily obtained nowadays. The "Palace" edition, as it is called, is on beautifully white paper, and is a splendid specimen of typography.