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pubOne.info present you this new edition. The aim of this work is to suggest a rough outline of Chinese civilization from the earliest times down to the present period of rapid and startling transition.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819937449
Langue	English

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THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA
by HERBERT A. GILES
Professor of Chinese in the University ofCambridge,
And sometime H. B. M. Consul at Ningpo
PREFACE
The aim of this work is to suggest a rough outlineof Chinese civilization from the earliest times down to the presentperiod of rapid and startling transition.
It has been written, primarily, for readers who knowlittle or nothing of China, in the hope that it may succeed inalluring them to a wider and more methodical survey.
H. A. G. Cambridge, May 12, 1911.
THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA
CHAPTER I—THE FEUDAL AGE
It is a very common thing now-a-days to meet peoplewho are going to “China, ” which can be reached by the Siberianrailway in fourteen or fifteen days. This brings us at once to thequestion— What is meant by the term China?
Taken in its widest sense, the term includesMongolia, Manchuria, Eastern Turkestan, Tibet, and the EighteenProvinces, the whole being equivalent to an area of some fivemillion square miles, that is, considerably more than twice thesize of the United States of America. But for a study of mannersand customs and modes of thought of the Chinese people, we mustconfine ourselves to that portion of the whole which is known tothe Chinese as the “Eighteen Provinces, ” and to us as ChinaProper. This portion of the empire occupies not quite two-fifths ofthe whole, covering an area of somewhat more than a million and ahalf square miles. Its chief landmarks may be roughly stated asPeking, the capital, in the north; Canton, the great commercialcentre, in the south; Shanghai, on the east; and the Tibetanfrontier on the west.
Any one who will take the trouble to look up thesefour points on a map, representing as they do central points on thefour sides of a rough square, will soon realize the absurdity ofasking a returning traveller the very much asked question, How doyou like China? Fancy asking a Chinaman, who had spent a year ortwo in England, how he liked Europe! Peking, for instance, standson the same parallel of latitude as Madrid; whereas Cantoncoincides similarly with Calcutta. Within the square indicated bythe four points enumerated above will be found variations ofclimate, flowers, fruit, vegetables and animals— not to mentionhuman beings— distributed in very much the same way as in Europe.The climate of Peking is exceedingly dry and bracing; no rain, andhardly any snow, falling between October and April. The really hotweather lasts only for six or eight weeks, about July and August—and even then the nights are always cool; while for six or eightweeks between December and February there may be a couple of feetof ice on the river. Canton, on the other hand, has a tropicalclimate, with a long damp enervating summer and a short bleakwinter. The old story runs that snow has only been seen once inCanton, and then it was thought by the people to be fallingcotton-wool.
The northern provinces are remarkable for vast levelplains, dotted with villages, the houses of which are built of mud.In the southern provinces will be found long stretches of mountainscenery, vying in loveliness with anything to be seen elsewhere.Monasteries are built high up on the hills, often on almostinaccessible crags; and there the well-to-do Chinaman is wont toescape from the fierce heat of the southern summer. On oneparticular mountain near Canton, there are said to be no fewer thanone hundred of such monasteries, all of which reserve apartmentsfor guests, and are glad to be able to add to their funds by sodoing.
In the north of China, Mongolian ponies, splendidmules, and donkeys are seen in large quantities; also thetwo-humped camel, which carries heavy loads across the plains ofMongolia. In the south, until the advent of the railway, travellershad to choose between the sedan-chair carried on the shoulders ofstalwart coolies, or the slower but more comfortable house-boat.Before steamers began to ply on the coast, a candidate for thedoctor's degree at the great triennial examination would take threemonths to travel from Canton to Peking. Urgent dispatches, however,were often forwarded by relays of riders at the rate of two hundredmiles a day.
The market in Peking is supplied, among otherthings, with excellent mutton from a fat-tailed breed of sheep,chiefly for the largely Mohammedan population; but the sheep willnot live in southern China, where the goat takes its place. The pigis found everywhere, and represents beef in our market, the latterbeing extremely unpalatable to the ordinary Chinaman, partlyperhaps because Confucius forbade men to slaughter the animal whichdraws the plough and contributes so much to the welfare of mankind.The staple food, the “bread” of the people in the Chinese Empire,is nominally rice; but this is too costly for the peasant ofnorthern China to import, and he falls back on millet as itssubstitute. Apples, pears, grapes, melons, and walnuts growabundantly in the north; the southern fruits are the banana, theorange, the pineapple, the mango, the pomelo, the lichee, andsimilar fruits of a more tropical character.
Cold storage has been practised by the Chinese forcenturies. Blocks of ice are cut from the river for that purpose;and on a hot summer's day a Peking coolie can obtain an iced drinkat an almost infinitesimal cost. Grapes are preserved from autumnuntil the following May and June by the simple process of stickingthe stalk of the bunch into a large hard pear, and putting it awaycarefully in the ice-house. Even at Ningpo, close to our centralpoint on the eastern coast of China, thin layers of ice arecollected from pools and ditches, and successfully stored for usein the following summer.
The inhabitants of the coast provinces aredistinguished from the dwellers in the north and in the farinterior by a marked alertness of mind and general temperament. TheChinese themselves declare that virtue is associated withmountains, wisdom with water, cynically implying that no one isboth virtuous and wise. Between the inhabitants of the variousprovinces there is little love lost. Northerners fear and hatesoutherners, and the latter hold the former in infinite scorn andcontempt. Thus, when in 1860 the Franco-British force made forPeking, it was easy enough to secure the services of any number ofCantonese, who remained as faithful as though the attack had beendirected against some third nationality.
The population of China has never been exactlyascertained. It has been variously estimated by foreign travellers,Sacharoff, in 1842, placing the figure at over four hundredmillions. The latest census, taken in 1902, is said to yield atotal of four hundred and ten millions. Perhaps three hundredmillions would be a juster estimate; even that would absorb no lessthan one-fifth of the human race. From this total it is easy tocalculate that if the Chinese people were to walk past a givenpoint in single file, the procession would never end; long beforethe last of the three hundred millions had passed by, a newgeneration would have sprung up to continue the neverending line.The census, however, is a very old institution with the Chinese;and we learn that in A. D. 156 the total population of the China ofthose days was returned as a little over fifty millions. In moremodern times, the process of taking the census consists in servingout house-tickets to the head of every household, who isresponsible for a proper return of all the inmates; but as there isno fixed day for which these tickets are returnable, the resultsare approximate rather than exact.
Again, it is not uncommon to hear people talking ofthe Chinese language as if it were a single tongue spoken all overChina after a more or less uniform standard. But the fact is thatthe colloquial is broken up into at least eight dialects, each sostrongly marked as to constitute eight languages as different tothe ear, one from another, as English, Dutch and German, or French,Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. A Shanghai man, for instance, isunintelligible to a Cantonese, and so on. All officials areobliged, and all of the better educated merchants and othersendeavour, if only for business purposes, to learn something of thedialect spoken at the court of Peking; and this is what ispopularly known as “Mandarin. ” The written language remains thesame for the whole empire; which merely means that ideas set downon paper after a uniform system are spoken with different sounds,just as the Arabic numerals are written uniformly in England,France and Germany, but are pronounced in a totally differentmanner.
The only difficulty of the spoken language, of nomatter what dialect, lies in the “tones, ” which simply means thedifferent intonations which may be given to one and the same sound,thus producing so many entirely different meanings. But for thesetones, the colloquial of China would be absurdly easy, inasmuch asthere is no such thing as grammar, in the sense of gender, number,case, mood, tense, or any of the variations we understand by thatterm. Many amusing examples are current of blunders committed byfaulty speakers, such as that of the student who told his servantto bring him a goose, when what he really wanted was some salt,both goose and salt having the same sound, yen , but quitedifferent intonations. The following specimen has the advantage ofbeing true. A British official reported to the Foreign Office thatthe people of Tientsin were in the habit of shouting afterforeigners, “Mao-tsu, mao-tsu” (pronounced mowdza , ow as in how ), from which he gathered that they were muchstruck by the head-gear of the barbarian. Now, it is a fact that mao-tsu , uttered with a certain intonation, means a hat; butwith another intonation, it means “hairy one, ” and the latter,referring to the big beards of foreigners, was the meaning intendedto be conveyed. This epithet is still to be heard, and is oftenpreceded by the adjective “red. ”
The written characters, known to have been in usefor the past three thousand years, were