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CHINA AND THE CHINESE
CHINA AND THE CHINESE
BY
HERBERT ALLEN GILES, LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF CHINESE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
LECTURER (1902) ON THE DEAN LUNG FOUNDATION
IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, Agents.
66 Fifth Avenue
1902
_All rights reserved._
Copyright, 1902,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1902.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
The following Lectures were delivered during March, 1902, at Columbia
University, in the city of New York, to inaugurate the foundation by
General Horace W. Carpentier of the Dean Lung Chair of Chinese.
By the express desire of the authorities of Columbia University these
Lectures are now printed, and they may serve to record an important and
interesting departure in Oriental studies.
It is not pretended that Chinese scholarship will be in any way advanced
by this publication. The Lectures, slight in themselves, were never
meant for advanced students, but rather to draw attention to, and
possibly arouse some interest in, a subject which will occupy a larger
space in the future than in the present or in the past.
HERBERT A. GILES.
Cambridge, England,
April 15, 1902.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE
Its Importance--Its Difficulty--The Colloquial--Dialects--"Mandarin"--
Absence of Grammar--Illustrations--Pidgin-English--Scarcity of Vocables
--The Tones--Coupled Words--The Written Language--The Indicators--
Picture Characters--Pictures of Ideas--The Phonetics--Some Faulty
Analyses ... 3
LECTURE II
A CHINESE LIBRARY
The Cambridge (Eng.) Library--(A) The Confucian Canon--(B) Dynastic
History--The "Historical Record"--The "Mirror of History"--Biography--
Encyclopaedias--How arranged--Collections of Reprints--The Imperial
Statutes--The Penal Code--(C) Geography--Topography--An Old Volume--
Account of Strange Nations--(D) Poetry--Novels--Romance of the Three
Kingdoms--Plays--(E) Dictionaries--The Concordance--Its Arrangement--
Imperial Catalogue--Senior Classics ... 37
LECTURE III
DEMOCRATIC CHINA
The Emperor--Provincial Government--Circuits--Prefectures--Magistracies
--Headboroughs--The People--The Magistrate--Other Provincial Officials--
The Prefect--The Intendant of Circuit (_Tao-t'ai_)--Viceroy and
Governor--Taxation--Mencius on "the People"--Personal Liberty--New
Imposts--Combination--Illustrations ... 73
LECTURE IV
CHINA AND ANCIENT GREECE
Relative Values of Chinese and Greek in Mental and Moral Training--Lord
Granville--Wen T'ien-hsiang--Han Yue--An Emperor--A Land of
Opposites--Coincidences between Chinese and Greek Civilisations--The
Question of Greek Influence--Greek Words in Chinese--Coincidences in
Chinese and Western Literature--Students of Chinese wanted ... 107
LECTURE V
TAOISM
Religions in China--What is Tao?--Lao Tzu--The _Tao Te Ching_--Its
Claims--The Philosophy of Lao Tzu---Developed by Chuang Tzu--His View
of Tao--A Taoist Poet--Symptoms of Decay--The Elixir of Life--Alchemy--
The Black Art--Struggle between Buddhism and Taoism--They borrow from
One Another--The Corruption of Tao--Its Last State ... 141
LECTURE VI
SOME CHINESE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
Origin of the Queue--Social Life--An Eyeglass--Street Etiquette--Guest
and Host--The Position of Women--Infanticide--Training and Education of
Women--The Wife's Status--Ancestral Worship--Widows--Foot-binding--
Henpecked Husbands--The Chinaman a Mystery--Customs vary with Places--
Dog's Flesh--Substitutes at Executions--Doctors--Conclusion ... 175
LECTURE I
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE
CHINA AND THE CHINESE
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE
If the Chinese people were to file one by one past a given point, the
interesting procession would never come to an end. Before the last man
of those living to-day had gone by, another and a new generation would
have grown up, and so on for ever and ever.
The importance, as a factor in the sum of human affairs, of this vast
nation,--of its language, of its literature, of its religions, of its
history, of its manners and customs,--goes therefore without saying. Yet
a serious attention to China and her affairs is of very recent growth.
Twenty-five years ago there was but one professor of Chinese in the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and even that one spent his
time more in adorning his profession than in imparting his knowledge to
classes of eager students. Now there are all together five chairs of
Chinese, the occupants of which are all more or less actively employed.
But we are still sadly lacking in what Columbia University appears to
have obtained by the stroke of a generous pen,--adequate funds for
endowment. Meanwhile, I venture to offer my respectful congratulations
to Columbia University on having surmounted this initial difficulty, and
also to prophesy that the foresight of the liberal donor will be amply
justified before many years are over.
I have often been asked if Chinese is, or is not, a difficult language
to learn. To this question it is quite impossible to give a categorical
answer, for the simple reason that Chinese consists of at least two
languages, one colloquial and the other written, which for all practical
purposes are about as distinct as they well could be.
Colloquial Chinese is a comparatively easy matter. It is, in fact, more
easily acquired in the early stages than colloquial French or German. A
student will begin to speak from the very first, for the simple reason
that there is no other way. There are no Declensions or Conjugations
to be learned, and consequently no Paradigms or Irregular Verbs.
In a day or two the student should be able to say a few simple things.
After three months he should be able to deal with his ordinary
requirements; and after six months he should be able to chatter away
more or less accurately on a variety of interesting subjects. A great
deal depends upon the method by which he is taught.
The written or book language, on the other hand, may fairly be regarded
as a sufficient study for a lifetime; not because of the peculiar
script, which yields when systematically attacked, but because the style
of the book language is often so extremely terse as to make it obscure,
and sometimes so lavishly ornate that without wide reading it is not
easy to follow the figurative phraseology, and historical and
mythological allusions, which confront one on every page.
There are plenty of men, and some women, nowadays, who can carry on a
conversation in Chinese with the utmost facility, and even with grace.
Some speak so well as to be practically indistinguishable from Chinamen.
There are comparatively few men, and I venture to say still fewer, if
any, women, who can read an ordinary Chinese book with ease, or write an
ordinary Chinese letter at all.
Speaking of women as students of Chinese, there have been so far only
two who have really placed themselves in the front rank. It gives me
great pleasure to add that both these ladies, lady missionaries, were
natives of America, and that it was my privilege while in China to know
them both. In my early studies of Chinese I received much advice and
assistance from one of them, the late Miss Lydia Fay. Later on, I came
to entertain a high respect for the scholarship and literary attainments
of Miss Adele M. Fielde, a well-known authoress.
Before starting upon a course of colloquial Chinese, it is necessary for
the student to consider in what part of China he proposes to put his
knowledge into practice. If he intends to settle or do business in
Peking, it is absolute waste of time for him to learn the dialect of
Shanghai. Theoretically, there is but one language spoken by the Chinese
people in China proper,--over an area of some two million square miles,
say twenty-five times the area of England and Scotland together.
Practically, there are about eight well-marked dialects, all clearly of
a common stock, but so distinct as to constitute eight different
languages, any two of which are quite as unlike as English and Dutch.
These dialects may be said to fringe the coast line of the Empire of
China. Starting from Canton and coasting northward, before we have left
behind us the province in which Canton is situated, Kuangtung, we reach
Swatow, where a totally new dialect is spoken. A short run now brings
us to Amoy, the dialect of which, though somewhat resembling that of
Swatow, is still very different in many respects. Our next stage is
Foochow, which is in the same province as Amoy, but possesses a special
dialect of its own. Then on to Wenchow, with another dialect, and so on
to Ningpo with yet another, widely spoken also in Shanghai, though the
latter place really has a _patois_ of its own.
Farther north to Chefoo, and thence to Peking, we come at last into the
range of the great dialect, popularly known as Mandarin, which sweeps
round behind the narrow strip of coast occupied by the various dialects
above mentioned, and dominates a hinterland constituting about
four-fifths of China proper. It is obvious, then, that for a person who
settles in a coast district, the dialect of that district must be his
chief care, while for the traveller and explorer Mandarin will probably
stand him in best stead.
The dialect of Peking is now regarded as standard "Mandarin"; but
previous to the year 1425 the capital was at Nanking, and the dialect of
Nanking was the Mandarin then in vogue. Consequently, Pekingese is the
language which all Chinese officials are now bound to speak.
Those who come from certain parts of the vast hinterland speak Mandarin
almost as a mother tongue, while those from the seaboard and certain
adjacent parts of the interior have nearly as much difficulty in
acquiring it, and quite as much difficulty in speaking it with a correct
accent, as the average foreigner.
The importance of Mandarin, the "official language" as the Chinese call
it, is beyond question. It is the vehicle of oral communication between
all Chinese officials, even in cases where they come from the same part
of the country and speak the same _patois_, between officials and their
servants, between judge and prisoner. Thus, in every court of justice
throughout the Empire the proceedings are carried on in Mandarin,
although none of the parties to the case may understand a single word.
The prosecutor, on his knees, tells his story in his native dialect.
This story is rendered into Mandarin by an official interpreter for the
benefit of the magistrate; the magistrate asks his questions or makes
his remarks in Mandarin, and these are translated into the local dialect
for the benefit of the litigants. Even if the magistrate knows the
dialect himself,--as is often the case, although no magistrate may hold
office in his own province,--still it is not strictly permissible for him
to make use of the local dialect for magisterial purposes.
It may be added that in all large centres, such as Canton, Foochow, and
Amoy, there will be found, among the well-to-do tradesmen and merchants,
many who can make themselves intelligible in something which
approximates to the dialect of Peking, not to mention that two out of
the above three cities are garrisoned by Manchu troops, who of course
speak that dialect as their native tongue.
Such is Mandarin. It may be compared to a limited extent with Urdu, the
camp language of India. It is obviously the form of colloquial which
should be studied by all, except those who have special interests in
special districts, in which case, of course, the _patois_ of the
locality comes to the front.
We will now suppose that the student has made up his mind to learn
Mandarin. The most natural thing for him, then, to do will be to look
around him for a grammar. He may have trouble in finding one. Such works
do actually exist, and they have been, for the most part, to quote a
familiar trade-mark, "made in Germany." They are certainly not made by
the Chinese, who do not possess, and never have possessed, in their
language, an equivalent term for grammar. The language is quite beyond
reach of the application of such rules as have been successfully deduced
from Latin and Greek.
The Chinese seem always to have spoken in monosyllables, and these
monosyllables seem always to have been incapable of inflection,
agglutination, or change of any kind. They are in reality root-ideas,
and are capable of adapting themselves to their surroundings, and of
playing each one such varied parts as noun, verb (transitive, neuter,
or even causal), adverb, and conjunction.
The word [wo] _wo_, which for convenience' sake I call "I," must be
rendered into English by "me" whenever it is the object of some other
word, which, also for convenience' sake, I call a verb. It has further
such extended senses as "egoistic" and "subjective."
For example: [wo ai ta] _wo ai t'a_.
The first of these characters, which is really the root-idea of "self,"
stands here for the pronoun of the first person; the last, which is
really the root-idea of "not self," "other," stands for the pronoun of
the third person; and the middle character for the root-idea of "love."
This might mean in English, "I love him," or "I love her," or "I love
it,"--for there is no gender in Chinese, any more than there is any other
indication of grammatical susceptibilities. We can only decide if "him,"
"her," or "it" is intended by the context, or by the circumstances of
the case.
Now if we were to transpose what I must still call the pronouns,
although they are not pronouns except when we make them so, we should
have--
[ta ai wo] _t'a ai wo_
"he, she, _or_ it loves me," the only change which the Chinese words
have undergone being one of position; while in English, in addition to
the inflection of the pronouns, the "love" of the first person becomes
"loves" in the third person.
Again, supposing we wished to write down--
"People love him (or her),"
we should have--
[ren ai ta] _jen ai t'a_,
in which once more the noticeable feature is that the middle character,
although passing from the singular to the plural number, suffers no
change of any kind whatever.
Further, the character for "man" is in the plural simply because such a
rendering is the only one which the genius of the Chinese language will
here tolerate, helped out by the fact that the word by itself does not
mean "_a_ man," but rather what we may call the root-idea of humanity.
Such terms as "a man," or "six men," or "some men," or "many men," would
be expressed each in its own particular way.
"All men," for instance, would involve merely the duplication of the
character _jen_:--
[ren ren ai ta] _jen jen ai t'a_.
It is the same with tenses in Chinese. They are not brought out by
inflection, but by the use of additional words.
[lai] _lai_ is the root-idea of "coming," and lends itself as follows to
the exigencies of conjugation:--
Standing alone, it is imperative:--
[lai] _Lai!_ = "come!" "here!"
[wo lai] _wo lai_ = "I come, _or_ am coming."
[ta lai] _t'a lai_ = "he comes, _or_ is coming."
And by inserting [bu] _pu_, a root-idea of negation,--
[ta bu lai] _t'a pu lai_ = "he comes not, _or_ is not coming."
To express an interrogative, we say,--
[ta lai bu lai] _t'a lai pu lai_ = "he come no come?" _i.e._ "is he
coming?"
submitting the two alternatives for the person addressed to choose from
in reply.
The indefinite past tense is formed by adding the word [liao] _liao_ or
_lo_ "finished":--
[ta lai liao] _t'a lai lo_ = "he come finish," = "he has come."
This may be turned into the definite past tense by inserting some
indication of time; _e.g._
[ta zao shang lai liao] = "he came this morning."
Here we see that the same words may be indefinite or definite according
to circumstances.
It is perhaps more startling to find that the same words may be both
active and passive.
Thus, [diu] _tiu_ is the root-idea of "loss," "to lose," and [liao] puts
it into the past tense.
Now [wo diu liao] means, and can only mean, "I have lost"--something
understood, or to be expressed. Strike out [wo] and substitute [shiu] "a
book." No Chinaman would think that the new sentence meant "The book has
lost"--something understood, or to be expressed, as for instance its
cover; but he would grasp at once the real sense, "The book is or has
been lost."
In the case of such, a phrase as "The book has lost" its cover, quite a
different word would be used for "lost."
We have the same phenomenon in English. In the _New York Times_ of
February 13, I read, "Mr. So-and-so dined," meaning not that Mr.
So-and-so took his dinner, but had been entertained at dinner by a party
of friends,--a neuter verb transformed into a passive verb by the logic
of circumstances.
By a like process the word [su] _ssu_ "to die" may also mean "to make to
die" = "to kill."
The word [jin] _chin_ which stands for "gold" as a substantive may also
stand, as in English, for an adjective, and for a verb, "to gold,"
_i.e._ to regard as gold, to value highly.
There is nothing in Chinese like love, loving, lovely, as noun
substantive, verb, and adverb. The word, written or spoken, remains
invariably, so far as its own economy is concerned, the same. Its
function in a sentence is governed entirely by position and by the
influence of other words upon it, coupled with the inexorable logic
of attendant circumstances.
When a Chinaman comes up to you and says, "You wantchee my, no
wantchee," he is doing no foolish thing, at any rate from his own point
of view. To save himself the trouble of learning grammatical English, he
is taking the language and divesting it of all troublesome inflections,
until he has at his control a set of root-ideas, with which he can
juggle as in his own tongue. In other words, "you wantchee my, no
wantchee," is nothing more nor less than literally rendered Chinese:--
[ni yao wo u yao] _ni yao wo, pu yao_ = do you want me or not?
In this "pidgin" English he can express himself as in Chinese by merely
changing the positions of the words:--
"He wantchee my." "My wantchee he."
"My belong Englishman."
"That knife belong my."
Some years back, when I was leaving China for England with young
children, their faithful Chinese nurse kept on repeating to the little
ones the following remarkable sentence, "My too muchey solly you go
steamah; you no solly my."
All this is very absurd, no doubt; still it is _bona fide_ Chinese,
and illustrates very forcibly how an intelligible language may be
constructed of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence.
If the last word had now been said in reference to colloquial, it would
be as easy for us to learn to speak Chinese as it is for a Chinaman to
learn to speak Pidgin-English. There is, however, a great obstacle still
in the way of the student. The Chinese language is peculiarly lacking
in vocables; that is to say, it possesses very few sounds for the
conveyance of speech. The dialect of Peking is restricted to four
hundred and twenty, and as every word in the language must fall under
one or other of those sounds, it follows that if there are 42,000 words
in the language (and the standard dictionary contains 44,000), there
is an average of 100 words to each sound. Of course, if any sound
had less than 100 words attached to it, some other sound would have
proportionately more. Thus, accepting the average, we should have 100
things or ideas, all expressed in speech, for instance, by the one
single sound _I_.
The confusion likely to arise from such conditions needs not to be
enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the
following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from
a newspaper in England:--
"In China, the letter _I_ has one hundred and forty-five different ways
of being pronounced, and each pronunciation has a different meaning."
It would be difficult to squeeze more misleading nonsense into a smaller
compass. Imagine the agonies of a Chinese infant school, struggling
with the letter _I_ pronounced in 145 different ways, with a different
meaning to each! It will suffice to say, what everybody here present
must know, that Chinese is not in any sense an alphabetic language, and
that consequently there can be no such thing as "the letter _I_."
When closely examined, this great difficulty of many words with but one
common sound melts rapidly away, until there is but a fairly small
residuum with which the student has to contend. The same difficulty
confronts us, to a slighter extent, even in English. If I say, "I met a
bore in Broadway," I may mean one of several things. I may mean a tidal
wave, which is at once put out of court by the logic of circumstances.
Or I may mean a wild animal, which also has circumstances against it.
To return to Chinese. In the first place, although there are no doubt
42,000 separate written characters in the Chinese language, about
one-tenth of that number, 4200, would more than suffice for the needs of
an average speaker. Adopting this scale, we have 420 sounds and 4200
words, or ten words to each sound,--still a sufficient hindrance to
anything like certain intelligibility of speech. But this is not the
whole case. The ten characters, for instance, under each sound, are
distributed over four separate groups, formed by certain modulations of
the voice, known as Tones, so that actually there would be only an
average of 21/2 words liable to absolute confusion. Thus [yan1] yen^1
means "smoke"; [yan2] yen^2 means "salt"; [yan3] yen^3 means "an eye";
and [yan4] yen^4 means "a goose."
These modulations are not readily distinguished at first; but the ear is
easily trained, and it soon becomes difficult to mistake them.
Nor is this all. The Chinese, although their language is monosyllabic,
do not make an extensive use of monosyllables in speech to express a
single thing or idea. They couple their words in pairs.
Thus, for "eye" they would say, not _yen_, which strictly means "hole,"
or "socket," but _yen ching_, the added word _ching_, which means
"eyeball," tying down the term to the application required, namely,
"eye."
In like manner it is not customary to talk about _yen_, "salt," as we
do, but to restrict the term as required in each case by the addition of
some explanatory word; for instance, [bai yan] "white salt," _i.e._ "table
salt"; [he yan] "black salt," _i.e._ "coarse salt"; all of which tends very
much to prevent confusion with other words pronounced in the same tone.
There are also certain words used as suffixes, which help to separate
terms which might otherwise be confused. Thus [guo3] _kuo_^3 means "to
wrap," and [guo3] _kuo_^3 means "fruit," the two being identical in
sound and tone. And _yao kuo_ might mean either "I want fruit" or "I
want to wrap." No one, however, says _kuo_ for "fruit," but _kuo tzu_.
The suffix _tzu_ renders confusion impossible.
Of course there is no confusion in reading a book, where each thing or
idea, although of the same sound and tone, is represented by a different
symbol.
On the whole, it may be said that misconceptions in the colloquial are
not altogether due to the fact that the Chinese language is poorly
provided with sounds. Many persons, otherwise gifted, are quite unable
to learn any foreign tongue.
Let us now turn to the machinery by means of which the Chinese arrest
the winged words of speech, and give to mere thought and utterance a
more concrete and a more lasting form.
The written language has one advantage over the colloquial: it is
uniformly the same all over China; and the same document is equally
intelligible to natives of Peking and Canton, just as the Arabic and
Roman numerals are understood all over Europe, although pronounced
differently by various nations.
To this fact some have attributed the stability of the Chinese Empire
and the permanence of her political and social institutions.
If we take the written language of to-day, which is to all intents and
purposes the written language of twenty-five hundred years ago, we gaze
at first on what seems to be a confused mass of separate signs, each
sign being apparently a fortuitous concourse of dots and dashes.
Gradually, however, the eye comes to perceive that every now and again
there is to be found in one character a certain portion which has
already been observed in another, and this may well have given rise to
the idea that each character is built up of parts equivalent to our
letters of the alphabet. These portions are of two kinds, and must be
considered under two separate heads.
Under the first head come a variety of words, which also occur as
substantive characters, such as dog, vegetation, tree, disease, metal,
words, fish, bird, man, woman. These are found to indicate the direction
in which the sense of the whole character is to be sought.
Thus, whenever [CJK:72AD] "dog" occurs in a character, the reader may
prepare for the name of some animal, as for instance [shi] _shih_
"lion," [mao] _mao_ "cat," [lang] _lang_ "wolf", [zhu] _ehu_ "pig."
Two of these are interesting words. (1) There are no lions in China;
_shih_ is merely an imitation of the Persian word _shir_. (2) _Mao_, the
term for a "cat," is obviously an example of onomatopoeia.
The character [CJK:72AD] will also indicate in many cases such
attributes as [hua] _hua_ "tricky," [heng] _hen_, "aggressive," [meng]
_meng_ "fierce," and other characteristics of animals.
Similarly, [CJK:8279] _ts'ao_ "vegetation" will hint at some plant;
_e.g._ [tsao] _ts'ao_ "grass," [he] _ho_ "the lily," [zhi] _chih_ "the
plant of immortality."
[mu] _mu_ "a tree" usually points toward some species of tree; _e.g._
[song] _sung_ "a fir tree," [sang] _sang_ "a mulberry tree"; and by
extension it points toward anything of wood, as [ban] _pan_ "a board,"
[zhuo] _cho_ "a table," [yi] _i_ "a chair," and so on.
So [yu] _yue_ "a fish" and [diao] _niao_ "a bird" are found in all
characters of ichthyological or ornithological types, respectively.
[ren] _jen_ "a man" is found in a large number of characters dealing
with humanity under varied aspects; _e.g._ [ni] _ni_ "thou," [ta] _t'a_
"he," [zuo] _tso_ "to make," [zhang] _chang_ "a weapon," [jie] _chieh_
"a hero," [ru] _ju_ "a scholar," "a Confucianist"; while it has been
pointed out that such words as [jian] _chien_ "treacherous," [mei] _mei_
"to flatter," and [du] _tu_ "jealousy," are all written with the
indicator [nu] _nue_ "woman" at the side.
The question now arises how these significant parts got into their
present position. Have they always been there, and was the script
artificially constructed off-hand, as is the case with Mongolian and
Manchu? The answer to this question can hardly be presented in a few
words, but involves the following considerations.
It seems to be quite certain that in very early times, when the
possibility and advantage of committing thought to writing first
suggested themselves to the Chinese mind, rude pictures of _things_
formed the whole stock in trade. Such were
[Illustration: Sun, moon, mountains, hand, child, wood, bending official,
mouth, ox, and claws.]
in many of which it is not difficult to trace the modern forms of
to-day,
[mi yue shan shiu zi mu chen kou niu zhao]
It may here be noted that there was a tendency to curves so long as the
characters were scratched on bamboo tablets with a metal stylus. With
the invention of paper in the first century A.D., and the substitution
of a hair-pencil for the stylus, verticals and horizontals came more
into vogue.
The second step was the combination of two pictures to make a third; for
instance, a mouth with something coming out of it is "the tongue," [gua];
a mouth with something else coming out of it is "speech," "words," [yan];
two trees put side by side make the picture of a "forest," [lin].
The next step was to produce pictures of ideas. For instance, there
already existed in speech a word _ming_, meaning "bright." To express
this, the Chinese placed in juxtaposition the two brightest things known
to them. Thus [mi] the "sun" and [yue] the "moon" were combined to form
[ming] _ming_ "bright." There is as yet no suggestion of phonetic
influence. The combined character has a sound quite different from that
of either of its component parts, which are _jih_ and _yueeh_
respectively.
In like manner, [mi] "sun" and [mu] "tree," combined as [dong], "the sun
seen rising through trees," signified "the east"; [yan] "words" and
[gua] "tongue" = [hua] "speech"; [you] (old form [Illustration]) "two
hands" = "friendship"; [nue] "woman" and [zi] "child" = [hao] "good";
[nue] "woman" and [sheng] "birth," "born of a woman" = [xing] "clan
name," showing that the ancient Chinese traced through the mother and
not through the father; [wu] streamers used in signalling a negative =
"do not!"
From [lin] "two trees," the picture of a forest, we come to [sen] "three
trees," suggesting the idea of density of growth and darkness; [xiao]
"a child at the feet of an old man" = "filial piety"; [ge] "a spear"
and [shou] "to kill," suggesting the defensive attitude of individuals
in primeval times = [wo] "I, me"; [wo] "I, my," and [yang] "sheep,"
suggesting the obligation to respect another man's flocks = [yi] "duty
toward one's neighbour"; [da] "large" and [yang] "sheep" = [mei]
"beautiful"; and [shan], "virtuous," also has "sheep" as a component
part,--why we do not very satisfactorily make out, except that of course
the sheep would play an important role among early pastoral tribes.
The idea conveyed by what we call the conjunction "and" is expressed in
Chinese by an ideogram, viz. [ji], which was originally the picture of
a hand, seizing what might be the tail of the coat of a man preceding,
_scilicet_ following.
The third and greatest step in the art of writing was reached when the
Chinese, who had been trying to make one character do for several
similar-sounding words of different meanings, suddenly bethought
themselves of distinguishing these several similar-sounding words by
adding to the original character employed some other character
indicative of the special sense in which each was to be understood.
Thus, in speech the sound _ting_ meant "the sting of an insect," and was
appropriately pictured by what is now written [ding].
There were, however, other words also expressed by the sound _ting_,
such as "a boil," "the top or tip," "to command," "a nail," "an ingot,"
and "to arrange." These would be distinguished in speech by the tones
and suffixes, as already described; but in writing, if [ding] were used
for all alike, confusion would of necessity arise. To remedy this, it
occurred to some one in very early ages to make [ding], and other
similar pictures of things or ideas, serve as what we now call
Phonetics, _i.e._ the part which suggests the sound of the character,
and to add in each case an indicator of the special sense intended to be
conveyed. Thus, taking [ding] as the phonetic base, in order to express
_ting_, "a boil," the indicator for "disease," [chuang], was added,
making [ding]; for _ting_, "the top," the indicator for "head," [ye],
was added, making [ding]; for "to command," the symbol for "mouth,"
[kou] was added, making [ding]; for "nail," and also for "ingot," the
symbol for "metal," [jin], was added, making [ding]; and for "to
arrange," the symbol for "speech," [yan], was added, making [ding]. We
thus obtain five new words, which, so far as the written language is
concerned, are easily distinguishable one from another, namely, _ting_
"a sting," disease-_ting_ = "a boil," head-_ting_ = "the top,"
mouth-_ting_ = "to command," metal-_ting_ = "a nail," speech-_ting_ =
"to arrange." In like manner, the words for "mouth," "to rap," and "a
button," were all pronounced _k'ou_. Having got [kou] _k'ou_ as the
picture of a mouth, that was taken as the phonetic base, and to express
"to rap," the symbol for "hand," [shou] or [CJK:624C], was added, making
[kou]; while to express "button," the symbol for "metal," [jin] was
added, making [kou]. So that we have _k'ou_ = "mouth," hand-_k'ou_ = "to
rap," and metal-_k'ou_ = "button."
Let us take a picture of an idea. We have [dong] _tung_ = the sun seen
through the trees,--"the east." When the early Chinese wished to write
down _tung_ "to freeze," they simply took the already existing [dong] as
the phonetic base, and added to it "an icicle," [bing], thus [dong]. And
when they wanted to write down _tung_ "a beam," instead of "icicle,"
they put the obvious indicator [mu] "wood," thus [dong].
We have now got the two portions into which the vast majority of Chinese
characters can be easily resolved.
There is first the phonetic base, itself a character originally intended
to represent some thing or idea, and then borrowed to represent other
things and ideas similarly pronounced; and secondly, the indicator,
another character added to the phonetic base in order to distinguish
between the various things and ideas for which the same phonetic base
was used.
All characters, however, do not yield at once to the application of our
rule. [yao] _yao_ "to will, to want," is composed of [xi] "west" and
[nue] "woman." What has western woman to do with the sign of the future?
In the days before writing, the Chinese called the waist of the body
_yao_. By and by they wrote [yao], a rude picture of man with his arms
akimbo and his legs crossed, thus accentuating the narrower portion, the
waist. Then, when it was necessary to write down _yao_, "to will," they
simply borrowed the already existing word for "waist." In later times,
when writing became more exact, they took the indicator [yue] "flesh,"
and added it wherever the idea of waist had to be conveyed. And thus
[yao] it is still written, while _yao_, "to will, to want," has usurped
the character originally invented for "waist."
In some of their own identifications native Chinese scholars have often
shown themselves hopelessly at sea. For instance, [tian] "the sky,"
figuratively God, was explained by the first Chinese lexicographer,
whose work has come down to us from about one hundred years after the
Christian era, as composed of [yi] "one" and [da] "great," the "one great"
thing; whereas it was simply, under its oldest form, [Illustration], a
rude anthropomorphic picture of the Deity.
Even the early Jesuit Fathers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, to whom we owe so much for pioneer work in the domain of
Sinology, were not without occasional lapses of the kind, due no doubt
to a laudable if excessive zeal. Finding the character [chuan], which is
the common word for "a ship," as indicated by [zhou], the earlier
picture-character for "boat" seen on the left-hand side, one ingenious
Father proceeded to analyse it as follows:--
[zhou] "ship," [ba] "eight," [kou] "mouth" = eight mouths on a
ship--"the Ark."
But the right-hand portion is merely the phonetic of the character; it
was originally [qian] "lead," which gave the sound required; then the
indicator "boat" was substituted for "metal."
So with the word [jin] "to prohibit." Because it could be analysed into
two [mu][mu] "trees" and [qi] "a divine proclamation," an allusion was
discovered therein to the two trees and the proclamation of the Garden
of Eden; whereas again the proper analysis is into indicator and
phonetic.
Nor is such misplaced ingenuity confined to the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1892 a Protestant missionary published and circulated broadcast what
he said was "evidence in favour of the Gospels," being nothing less than
a prophecy of Christ's coming hidden in the Chinese character [lai]
"to come." He pointed out that this was composed of [Illustration] "a
cross," with two [ren][ren] "men," one on each side, and a "greater man"
[ren] in the middle.
That analysis is all very well for the character as it stands now; but
before the Christian era this same character was written [Illustration]
and was a picture, not of men and of a cross, but of a sheaf of corn. It
came to mean "come," says the Chinese etymologist, "because corn _comes"
from heaven."
Such is the written language of China, and such indeed it was, already
under the dominion of the phonetic system, by which endless new
combinations may still be formed, at the very earliest point to which
history, as distinguished from legend, will carry us,--some eight or nine
centuries B.C. There are no genuine remains of pure picture-writing, to
enable us to judge how far the Chinese had got before the phonetic
system was invented, though many attempts have been made to palm off
gross forgeries as such.
The great majority of characters, as I have said, are capable of being
easily resolved into the two important parts which I have attempted to
describe--the original phonetic portion, which guides toward
pronunciation, and the added indicator, which guides toward the sense.
Even the practical student, who desires to learn to read and write
Chinese for purely business purposes, will find himself constrained to
follow out this analysis, if he wishes to commit to memory a serviceable
number of characters. With no other hold upon them beyond their mere
outlines, he will find the characters so bewildering, so elusive, as to
present almost insuperable difficulties.
But under the influence of systematic study, coupled with a fair amount
of perseverance, these difficulties disappear, and leave the triumphant
student amply rewarded for his pains.
LECTURE II
A CHINESE LIBRARY
A CHINESE LIBRARY
The endowment of a Chinese chair at Columbia University naturally
suggests the acquisition of a good Chinese library. At the University of
Cambridge, England, there is what I can only characterise as an ideal
Chinese library. It was not bought off-hand in the market,--such a
collection indeed would never come into the market,--but the books were
patiently and carefully brought together by my predecessor in the
Chinese chair during a period of over forty years' residence in China.
The result is an admirable selection of representative works, always in
good, and sometimes in rare, editions, covering the whole field of what
is most valuable in Chinese literature.
I now propose, with your approval, to give a slight sketch of the
Cambridge Library, in which I spend a portion of almost every day of
my life, and which I further venture to recommend as the type of that
collection which Columbia University should endeavour to place upon
her shelves.
The Chinese library at Cambridge consists of 4304 volumes, roughly
distributed under seven heads. These volumes, it should be stated, are
not the usual thin, paper-covered volumes of an ordinary Chinese work,
but they consist each of several of the original Chinese volumes bound
together in cloth or leather, lettered on the back, and standing on the
shelves, as our books do, instead of lying flat, as is the custom in
China.
Division A contains, first of all, the Confucian Canon, which now
consists of nine separate works.
There is the mystic _Book of Changes_, that is to say, the eight changes
or combinations which can be produced by a line and a broken line,
either one of which is repeated twice with the other, or three times by
itself.
--------- --- --- ---------
--------- --- --- --------- etc.
--- --- --------- ---------
These trigrams are said to have been copied from the back of a tortoise
by an ancient monarch, who doubled them into hexagrams, and so increased
the combinations to sixty-four, each one of which represents some active
or passive power in nature.
Confucius said that if he could devote fifty years to the study of this
work, he might come to be without great faults; but neither native nor
foreign scholars can really make anything out of it. Some regard it as a
Book of Fate. One erratic genius of the West has gone so far as to say
that it is only a vocabulary of the language of some old Central Asian
tribe.
We are on somewhat firmer ground with the _Book of History_, which is
a collection of very ancient historical documents, going back twenty
centuries B.C., arranged and edited by Confucius. These documents, mere
fragments as they are, give us glimpses of China's early civilisation,
centuries before the historical period, to which we shall come later on,
can fairly be said to begin.
Then we have the _Book of Odes_, consisting of some three hundred
ballads, also rescued by Confucius from oblivion, on which as a basis
the great superstructure of modern Chinese poetry has been raised.
Next comes an historical work by Confucius, known as the _Spring and
Autumn_: it should be Springs and Autumns, for the title refers to the
yearly records, to the annals, in fact, of the native State of Confucius
himself.
The fifth in the series is the _Book of Rites_. This deals, as its title
indicates, with ceremonial, and contains an infinite number of rules for
the guidance of personal conduct under a variety of conditions and
circumstances. It was compiled at a comparatively late date, the close
of the second century B.C., and scarcely ranks in authority with the
other four.
The above are called the Five Classics; they were for many centuries six
in number, a _Book of Music_ being included, and they were engraved on
forty-six huge stone tablets about the year 170 A.D. Only mutilated
portions of these tablets still remain.
The other four works which make up the Confucian Canon are known as the
Four Books. They consist of a short moral treatise entitled the _Great
Learning_, or Learning for Adults; the _Doctrine of the Mean_, another
short philosophical treatise; the _Analects_, or conversations of
Confucius with his disciples, and other details of the sage's daily
life; and lastly, similar conversations of Mencius with his disciples
and with various feudal nobles who sought his advice.
These nine works are practically learned by heart by the Chinese
undergraduate. But there are in addition many commentaries and
exegetical works--the best of which stand in the Cambridge
Library--designed to elucidate the true purport of the Canon; and these
must also be studied. They range from the commentary of K'ung An-kuo of
the second century B.C., a descendant of Confucius in the twelfth
degree, down to that of Yuean Yuean, a well-known scholar who only died so
recently as 1849. These commentaries include both of the two great
schools of interpretation, the earlier of which was accepted until the
twelfth century A.D., when it was set aside by China's most brilliant
scholar, Chu Hsi, who substituted the interpretation still in vogue, and
obligatory at the public competitive examinations which admit to an
official career.
Archaeological works referring to the Canon have been published in great
numbers. The very first book in our Catalogue is an account of every
article mentioned in these old records, accompanied in all cases by
woodcuts. Thus the foreign student may see not only the robes and caps
in which ancient worthies of the Confucian epoch appeared, but their
chariots, their banners, their weapons, and general paraphernalia of
everyday life.
Side by side with the sacred books of Confucianism stand the heterodox
writings of the Taoist philosophers, the nominal founder of which
school, known as Lao Tzu, flourished at an unknown date before
Confucius. Some of these are deeply interesting; others have not escaped
the suspicion of forgery--a suspicion which attaches more or less to any
works produced before the famous Burning of the Books, in B.C. 211, from
which the Confucian Canon was preserved almost by a miracle. An Emperor
at that date made an attempt to destroy all literature, so that a fresh
start might be made from himself.
But I do not intend to detain you at present over Taoism, about which I
hope to say more on a subsequent occasion. Still less shall I have
anything to say on the few Buddhist works which are also to be found in
the Cambridge collection. It is rather along less well-beaten paths that
I shall ask you to accompany me now.
In Division B, the first thing which catches the eye is a long line of
217 thick volumes, about a foot in height. These are the dynastic
histories of China, in a uniform edition published in the year 1747,
under the auspices of the famous Emperor Ch'ien Lung, who himself
contributed a Preface.
The first of this series, known as _The Historical Record_, was produced
by a very remarkable man, named Ssu-ma Ch'ien, sometimes called the
Father of History, the Herodotus of China, who died nearly one hundred
years B.C.; and over his most notable work it may not be unprofitable to
linger awhile.
Starting with the five legendary Emperors, some 2700 years B.C., the
historian begins by giving the annals of each reign under the various
more or less legendary dynasties which succeeded, and thence onward
right down to his own times, the last five or six hundred years, _i.e._
from about 700 B.C., belonging to a genuinely historical period. These
annals form Part I of the five parts into which the historian divides
his scheme.
Part II is occupied by chronological tables of the Emperors and their
reigns, of the suzerains and vassal nobles under the feudal system which
was introduced about 1100 B.C., and also of the nobles created to form
an aristocracy after the feudal system had been swept away and replaced
by the old Imperial rule, about 200 B.C.