of Canton. The fresh water reed is in some cases fertilized, as at Tung
Kun and Lintan, so as to produce size and sheen. The reed is split
when cut in the green and the sun rounds the strands. German aniline
dyes are used, which produce a sorry product as compared with the
famous natural dyes of old China. In producing red, however, the dye
is obtained by boiling a Philippine redwood. The looms are simple hand
looms, worked in the humble homes of the people. The mats are dried
and set over a charcoal fire. The shipping season is in the fall. Vast
quantities, baled in reeds, come by junk and steamer from the riverine
ports to Hongkong, where they are put in godowns until the arrival of
a trans-Pacific or Suez steamer, or a Standard Oil Company freighter
and sailing vessel. The very low rate is controlled by the sailing
ship, and quantity is of the first essence of importance in making
the business pay any one concerned, except the middleman in America
or Europe. Better dyes might be furnished to the reed farmers and
better looms and designs will now probably be distributed among them.
It is a floor covering which should grow more popular from an economic,
and especially a sanitary point of view, as it does not harbor moths
or germs, and is easy to handle; and from a conservation point of
view, its wider use would reserve carpet wool for clothing. The clean
Japanese despise us for our use of the fixed, unsanitary woolen carpet.
The seed of the reed is planted, just as rice is, in a sheltered spot
in the fall. Transplanting occurs early in the year and the fields are
irrigated. It takes two men or women four days to weave a roll on a
very crude loom.
The farmer is king. He has attacked the old magnificent roads, eight
feet wide, cut at great expense in the mountains, carried soil over
part of them and planted his corn. Marble-lined lotus gardens of
magnificent old estates he has filled up with his rice seed; and
the grain waves beneath the windows of deserted palaces, the owners
probably long ago, because of their opinions and not their crimes,
having, in Manchu days, dropped their heads beneath the blow of the
taifo swords while they bowed upon their knees in a line at far-away
Peking!
Ginger is grown extensively in China. It is used for cooking and as a
medicine. Preserved in sugar, it is known world-wide as a delicious
confection. The Chinese prefer it in a heavy syrup. This species of
lily grows about two feet high. The roots are very heavy and are kept
irrigated in mud. It is one of the few plants which leave their odor in
the air in the fields where they grow. The marmalade industry will have
a great future in the vast southern provinces. Java, the Philippines
and Formosa, are near with their sugar, and the provinces of Kwantung,
Kwangsi and Fukien have noble orchards of pumelo, lemon and orange
trees. As the family-village farms the apparently undivided fields as
a community, watchers have to be set in the fields and at the granary
floors, when harvest time approaches. A platform is built of bamboo,
and the watcher mounts it, carrying along his gong. As there are no
fences and few trees, the watcher commands a wide view, and deters
private bands and prowlers of other villages from making sudden raids.
Manchuria has been found to be an ideal ground for the sugar beet,
the black soil producing a higher percentage of sugar than anywhere
in the world. The sugar industry is a most important addition to the
agricultural wealth of those three extremely rich provinces, which are
destined to help in the feeding of industrial America. Returned Chinese
emigrants from Java and America started in 1911, in Fukien and Chekiang
provinces the cultivation of cotton on an extended scale, looking to
the new mills of Shanghai, Hangchow and Wuchang to buy the product,
which will be shipped by junks, steamer and the new coast railway. The
Chinese value their highly tilled lands near the large cities at a
price equal to forty-five dollars in gold for our acre.
British Hongkong set the example in reforestation. Germany followed at
Kiachou, Shangtung, with acacia, fir, ash, larch, walnut and oak trees
along the railway line. Japan followed in South Manchuria, and China
herself established a forestry school at Mukden in 1908, and in Kansu
later. It is absolutely essential to retard the snows and rainfalls
at the heads of the great rivers if the awful floods and consequent
famines are ever to be obviated in the valleys of the Hoangho, Han,
Yangtze and Hwei Rivers. The camphor is China’s own tree, especially in
Formosa, Fukien, and the southern provinces. Ceylon, California, Texas,
Florida, Jamaica, Malay, Italy and German East Africa have successfully
introduced the tree, and will in time help to supply the world’s
growing requirements for the arts and industries, which synthetic
camphor can not do, because of the deforestation of America’s southern
pine, which now supplies the necessary oil of turpentine. Camphor can
be distilled from any part of the tree, even the dead leaves, and some
conservation foresters, especially Americans and Germans, are urging
a world movement to use the leaves, dropped twigs and cuttings alone
for this purpose. Camphor formerly was made by cutting up the tree
and treating the chips with water in a closed vessel, the volatilized
camphor condensing on rice straw packed in the head of the still. The
deposit was purified by sublimation in glass retorts in the presence of
lime.
I have for years been writing that the Chinese is a born humorist. The
humor of their arboriculturists is well known in their stunting and
twisting of trees and bamboos. The matched curved bamboos of the Fati
and other gardens of Canton are famous. Another quaint form is the
splitting of a tree trunk so as to form a living arch. When the tree is
young, it is uprooted and split up the trunk and replanted in the road
leading to a shrine or temple. As the trunk grows apart, the road leads
under the arch. Under the shelter of the north wall of the imperial
section of the city of Peking, there are famous old cryptomeria
cypresses split in this way. The humorist is saying: “See Nature’s god
with his grotesque products laughing at man’s idea of religion!” The
farmer and his boy are humorists. They meet you on the highroad and
laugh because the pigs and geese which they are driving to market all
have tiny straw sandals on their feet, and the water buffalo which they
are riding to the exchange has sandals, but they themselves are in
their bare feet, and they point out to you the humorous incongruity!
The very handsome Hagenbeck pheasant from the Kobdo valley of
Manchuria, fiftieth parallel, can live farthest north of any pheasant,
and can therefore withstand our winters. It is large and edible. The
Mongolian pheasant has been acclimated on the Rothschild estate in
Herts, England. The Manchurian eared pheasant is heavy and edible, but
unlike the others is not wild and active enough for the game fields.
Accordingly it best suits the poulterer of China. The pheasant is
a fairly cheap dish at all the clubs and hotels of China, and the
indentured clerk of Hongkong is therefore to his surprise dining like
a king daily on the game which the owner of his concern would consider
at home a luxury reserved for the Christmas dinner! Some of the native
proverbs are:
“No matter where the stream is, the sea is calling it.”
“Frost and ice are made of water, but they don’t grow things like rain
and dew.”
“A spark is small, but it can burn a thousand farms.”
“Don’t try to put out the burning field with tears; run for water.”
“One bad bean makes the whole basket rot.”
“Rain on a summer’s dawn means a clear day, but a rain at noon will
last.”
XXIX
CHINESE ARCHITECTURE AND ART
“The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” are
unearthed a foot at a time to the wondering eyes of the world by the
tireless antiquarian-architect. China has some extensive ruins that
show the death struggle of a dynasty with the tooth of the destroyer,
Time. Near Singan, in Shensi province, are the ruins of the tombs,
arches and palaces of the builder of the Great Wall. On the left bank
of the Orkhon River in Mongolia, southwest of Kuren, are the ruins of
the Uigur empire, seventh to ninth centuries, A. D. These Mongols were
first Buddhist, then Nestorian Christian, and afterward Mohammedan
in faith, and their fathers took part in the terrific invasions of
Europe that have made Russia one quarter Asiatic. Ujfalvy, Schott and
Professor Thomsen have written books on the race, and Heikel and Radlov
explored the ruins in 1890–1. On the right bank of the same river,
fifteen miles southeast, at the edge of the Gobi Desert, are the ruins
of the Mongol empire of the thirteenth century, founded by Ogodai Khan
in 1234 A. D., and whose greatest conqueror, Kublai Khan, of whom Marco
Polo wrote, overran all China and Turkestan. Had it not been for a
lucky storm that destroyed his armada, he would have overrun Japan also.
One hundred and fifty miles northwest of Pnom Penh, in a deserted
tropical jungle, are the ruins of the Khmer dynasty which ruled
Cambodia from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. These gorgeous
palaces were built for luxurious Oriental kings when the early Mercian,
Northumbrian and Wessex chiefs were shivering in wooden huts in our
primeval England. The ruins are at Angkor on the north of the Great
Summer Lake. The main temple of the Angkor Wat, in a walled enclosure,
is in splendid preservation, and is one pf the world’s most wonderful
architectural curiosities. It is shaped like a wide Chinese temple, but
has in addition splendid pagodas one hundred and eighty feet high over
the entrances. The architecture is Indo-Chinese. There is much carving
and sculpture, fine corridors and columns that were colored. Five
miles north is another walled ruin, thirty feet in height, enclosing
an area of two miles square, the walls pierced by five gorgeous gates.
The ruins stand alone in the moonlight, unclaimed and untenanted.
What few Siamese, Shans or Annamese may wander here, fall down in
speechless worship. The dense jungle is filled with insects, reptiles,
wild animals, and but for them the silence is primeval. Pierre Loti
recently visited the ruins by sailing up the Mekong River from Saigon
to Pnom Penh. There he took elephants and oxen one hundred and fifty
miles for the Great Summer Lake, across which he paddled. His book,
_Un Pelerin d’Angkor_, not yet translated, was issued in French by
Calmann-Levy, Paris, in 1912. Other French authors on this subject are
Delaporte (_Voyage au Camboge_); Fournereau (_Les Ruins d’Angkor_), and
Tissandier (_Cambodje-Java_).
Two hundreds miles north of Angkor, at Korat, are further Khmer ruins.
The other ruins and tombs of old China are those of the Ming dynasty at
Nankou pass, north of Peking, and Nanking; the Manchu dynasty at Mukden
and northwest of Peking; and the Sung dynasty at Hangchow. The tomb of
Prince Ki Chah of the then Wu principality, who died B. C. 530, and
which bears an inscription prepared by Confucius, can be seen to-day
lying between the new British-built railway and the Grand Canal, twenty
miles east of Changchow in the south of Kiangsu province. The laws of
the Tsin principality, 513 B. C., were engraved on iron, but have not
been recovered in any tomb or on any wall. Individual pagoda ruins
and ancient walls cover the land, as does star-dust the sky. Laws,
customs, history and a relation of the Rites, were engraved on metal
bowls, which stood on three legs. These bowls were handed down through
the dynasties to the princes, together with the ancestral tablets, as
a sign of royal authority. There exists to-day in a temple on Silver
Island, near Chinkiang in Kiangsu province, such a tripod bowl of the
Chow princely dynasty, date 812 B. C. This was about the date when
Jeroboam recovered Damascus from Israel. When Confucius was a boy of
twelve, and already deep in his study of history, Cyrus the Elder had
captured ancient Babylon and founded the Persian empire. It is quite
probable that the old Hia, Shang and Chou kings (2200 B. C. onward)
left their records, as the contemporary Egyptians and Babylonians
did, in brick tablets, but those tablets, being made of non-adhesive,
fibrous loess mud of the present Shensi and Shansi provinces, soon
crumbled. It was a different thing when centuries later, the Chinese
kings, having traveled farther south, employed better potters to use
the more adhesive clays of the present Kiangsi province. The Hia kings
of what is now Shensi province reigned when the giant sequoia evergreen
trees of California were seedlings 4010 years ago.
Chinese bronzes date back as far as the imperial Chou dynasty (1120
B. C.) which instituted the sacrifices and ancestor worship, and a few
majestically simple bronze tripods, elemental monsters and sacrificial
vessels date back to the Shang dynasty 1800 B. C. These tripods are
similar to those that Homer describes in the ninth book of _The Iliad_,
2500 B. C. The oldest bronzes are, of course, noble and plain in
design, the warmer, richer art of Buddhism coming in at a far later
date, and bringing in the innovation of the human figure, flowers and
incense burners. The Natural History Museum at New York has precious
collections of the old mortuary bronzes of the Chou dynasty referred
to in Professor Parker’s illuminating work on the days of Confucius.
Bronze vases, goblets, censers, mirrors, tablets, baskets, bells, some
of them studded, are in the collection which dates as far back as 1800
B. C. Chinese form has been persistent, its ornamentation progressive.
When we are looking at these bronzes, we should realize that they
were fashioned by men contemporary with Homer. The oldest tombs were
in Turkestan, Kansu and Shensi provinces, lying alongside the path of
the primeval emigration along the Tarim’s banks from Eden. In various
articles I have instanced the similarity between old Greek and old
Chinese designs. The dragon was used in art designs and considered a
sacred Jovian portent by the Homerian Greeks who were camped before
Troy, B. C. 2500. In anthropological customs, Pope relates that the
Homerian Greeks of the Euboea tribe, drawn up before Troy’s walls, 2500
B. C., shaved their foreheads but left the hair on the back of their
heads to grow long, like the present Manchus.
The new bronze portrait statue of Li Hung Chang at the Sicawei Gardens,
Shanghai, is unusual, and marks a new era in memorials in China, pailoo
arches and tablets having formerly been erected. True, there are many
fanciful statues to Buddha and Confucius, and one to Marco Polo in the
Temple of the Five Hundred Genii at Canton, but they are rather to be
considered as effigies. In Tibet, they erect engraved, square stone
monuments, a figure of Buddha being cut into three of the top panels,
representing the past, present and future Buddha. A horned roof, with a
little central pagoda covers the monument. These strikingly symmetrical
monuments are erected on high places along the mountain passes. The
Buddhists cut gigantic figures of the god into cliffs, bushes serving
as hair, and grass as eyebrows. Notable among these are the colossal
cliff Buddhas at Kiating and Yung Hsien in Szechuen province. Old caves
and cave-temples are generally in proximity with these images.
In Szechuen province, the piers of bridges have a stone dragon as a
terminal, the head looking up-stream, and across the bridge, the tail
pointing down-stream. The proportions are beautiful and the effect
delightful. The best known and most beautiful camel’s back bridge in
the empire is at Wan Hsien at the head of the Yangtze gorges. Stone
steps mount up the arch, which is crowned with a beautiful house of
blue stucco. The house is used as a rest place, and a restaurant
These bridges show how much the Chinese understood of engineering and
also that they were good masons. In the caves along the Min River
in Szechuen province, pottery coffins have been found, dating back
previous to the Christian era, and showing that the early Chinese of
the Chou dynasty did not bring all the civilization of China with
them, but found many arts among the aborigines. At Ning Hsia, an oasis
city in the horn of Kansu province, is a peculiar pagoda where the
joylessness of the north has cut the curling ten galleries down to mere
ridges, and roofed the eleven stories with a mere turban roof. Each
story has Roman windows, except the top, which has circular windows.
The architecture shows Mohammedan influence over these Buddhists,
and the structure, with that at Liangchow in the same province, is
exceedingly unique in so ornate a land of up-curling roofs, carved
screens, and overhanging galleries. While the Chinese never build
fences, the Manchus, of Manchuria, construct a curious palisade
composed of crosses, one end of which is stuck in the ground. The
whole of the Grand Canal was crossed by many thousands of beautiful
marble bridges, erected during the Sung dynasty. Many of them still
remain, with their great beauty of aspiring arch, balustrade, carving
and anchorage. At Sui Fu, on the upper Yangtze, is a temple remarkable
not for its size, but for the proportion of its galleries and roof,
the cornices of which curl upward violently at great width from the
walls. The temple is met by steps that climb up the mountain side
from the great river. The walls too, with their panels, frieze and
balustrade, are interesting, but the design of the roof is an artistic
triumph, equaled only by the Loong Wah Temple which is photographed as
a frontispiece in my book, _The Chinese_. It is this sweeping boldness
and generosity of curve which should be copied in roofs and galleries
in the new Chinese architecture, which lovers of the old China
earnestly recommend.
Many of the poorer huts of Pechili province are built of clay poured
around a reinforcing of kaoliang stalks. Sometimes tiles are set in
the clay roof, which is very heavy, and in the rainy season, it often
falls in on the tenant. In Kiangsu province the thatching is made of
reeds. Of course improvements are often designed, and they attempt to
make a cement or chunam by mixing burnt lime and stone in the clay. The
very poor, however, really live in mud burrows like the fox, whether
the mud is made into a hut, or the dwelling is cut as a cave in the
loess hills of Shensi and Shansi provinces. The Manchurian and northern
Pechili style of architecture is severe and strong, but it has its
simple beauties. A Buddhist temple not far from Shan Hai Kwan is a
good example. A plain brick and stucco wall, the height of the eaves
of the buildings, surrounds the compound. It is broken by a fort-gate,
with a Roman arched doorway. The tiled roofs of the fort and temple
curl up only slightly. A few high pine trees, branching out only near
the top, tower like nature’s banners over the temple, which is matched
to the austere lives and buildings of the dwellers in the north. The
proportions throughout are nobly and chastely balanced in accord with
the architectural influence of the stern Great Wall throughout this
region.
At the Edinburgh Mission Conference of the nations in 1908, the Chinese
pleaded for the preservation of their architecture. Too great praise
can not be given the British for their taste in occupying a Chinese
palace as legation headquarters at Peking. Many missions, every foreign
business house, nearly every foreign college, the government itself
in its new buildings, even the kindred Japanese, and nearly every
foreign legation, are all housed in an ugly adaptation of a Renaissance
building with verandas. The fashion came from Singapore and Hongkong,
but Hongkong gets some picturesqueness out of the style because that
colonial city has a mountain to terrace it on. The ventilation and
light are poor; the roof is hideous. There is one foreign architect
whose soul will never escape from the purgatory of bad architects. He
designed for the Honan Assembly a hall at Kaifong which is Moorish
in general design; the roof is a Roman dome; the arches are Gothic;
and the screens are Chinese. The Japanese do not bring their own
beautiful buildings, like those gems, the incomparable Horiuji pagoda
and monastery, Yakushiji pagoda; and the shrine of Ieasu at Nikko, to
China, and they do not copy or adapt any of the tens of thousands of
Chinese gems. They often build a ponderous, ugly, dark, Renaissance
building like the Japanese consulate at Shanghai, costly enough but
unrepresentative.
St. John’s University (American Episcopal), of Shanghai, has made the
laudable concession of putting a Chinese roof on its valuable foreign
buildings. The eaves have a slight Chinese up-turn, but there is little
of Chinese ornament in apron, ridge, column, double roof, or pagoda
spire here and there. However, America, nearly always the leader in
sympathy with the Chinese, has here made a beginning in saving China’s
peerless architecture and art. At Kweiyang, the capital of Kweichou,
the French have erected a notable pagoda church, which concedes to
Chinese canons a five-story pagoda entrance, and the rear façade is
formed as a pailoo with five roofs. With the same idea the British
architect has placed on the costly Renaissance “Audience Hall”, of
Bangkok, three ornate Burmese pagoda spires. As Greece stands for
simplicity and line, China stands for richness, curve and color. She
should not die, if according to Keats, “a thing of beauty is a joy
forever.” Ruskin insisted in his famous lectures to artistic Edinburgh
that the salient feature of a building was the _roof_, and that there
adornment should be rich, like a woman’s hair, or hat, her “crown of
glory”. This rule, perhaps indirectly, he took from the Chinese, who
from the buried centuries have undeviatingly been faithful to it. The
_Assembly Herald_ of the American Presbyterian Church, January, 1912,
page twenty-seven, illustrates a gem of modern Chinese architecture. It
is a chapel built by a native elder in his simple but beautiful faith.
On each side of the entrance there is a rich tile grille that relieves
the plain façade. Under the eaves is another beautiful grille that
relieves the plain surface. Over the door is a heavy tile canopy with
characteristic up-curling points. The tile roof is peaked and might
have been more up-curling at the eaves in the beautiful, characteristic
Chinese style. The apron under the eaves is richly carved. The Chinese
still have a strong rich grasp of beauty, when they are encouraged to
develop their architecture.
It is not the custom in stores, temples or homes to keep curios, silks,
etc., on view. They are all wrapped in paper, and kept in boxes or
cupboards. When a trusted guest arrives, there is an exciting scene as
the treasures are unpacked and revealed to admiring eyes. China has
always had court painters, a notable one in the reign of the Empress
Dowager Tse Hsi being Li Shih Chuan. He was a believer in joy, and
developed the more human aspects of the countenance. He was a master in
painting fine gowns, dainty embroideries and rich furniture. Portrait
paintings are not common, but in the Yangtze provinces some are to be
seen. They are in water color and painted on screens. Actors carry an
enormous bamboo or ivory tusk, on which is engraved or painted their
repertoire. The giver of a feast selects from this the plays which he
wishes to have performed for his guests. The Chinese manufacture a hard
wall-paper, similar to what we call Lincrusta Walton and use on the
walls of our parlor cars and saloons of steamships. The mold is of hard
wood, on which the sharp design is carefully chiseled _en relievo_. The
blotter-like bamboo paper composition is hammered on this mold, then
taken off and sun-dried. Sizing is applied. Afterward the design and
final Ningpo or Szechuen rhus-nut varnishing is added. This paper is
damp proof, which is an important quality in so humid a climate.