Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology
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Title: Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology
Author: Arthur H. Smith
Release date: August 22, 2010 [eBook #33485]
Language: English
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Village Life in China
_TENTH THOUSAND Chinese Characteristics_
_BY Rev. ARTHUR H. SMITH, D.D._
For Twenty-six Years a Missionary of the American Board in China.
_With Sixteen Illustrations from Photographs, an index and a Glossary._
_800, decorated cloth, $1.25_
From The Independent.
There is no glamour thrown over the race, neither is there failure to
recognize those qualities that have made them so backward in civilization,
so hostile to foreigners, so repugnant to many in our land. Everyone
interested in China or the Chinese should read the book.
From The New York Times.
If we are not to accept the studies that missionaries have made of the
Chinese, whose are we to accept? We do not mean the accounts of the
seminary young man who, fresh from his studies, lives in China for a
six-month, and then writes of his experiences, but of the men like the
author of this volume, who has had a residence of twenty-two years in
China.
Mr. Smith's volume is a highly entertaining one, showing uncommon
shrewdness, with keen analysis of character.
From The Critic.
There is all the difference between an intaglio in onyx and a pencil
scrawl on paper to be discovered between Mr. Smith's book and the printed
prattle of the average globe-trotter. Our author's work has been done, as
it were, with a chisel and an emery wheel. He goes deeply beneath the
surface.
From The Standard.
It is much the most interesting book upon China which we have ever read,
and it is specially valuable as a practical commentary upon the national
and social institutions of the Chinese, the natural effect of their long
isolation, and the benumbing effect of such a religion as has in great
part made them what they are.
From The Living Church.
That this is the most valuable account of the Chinese ever written is, we
believe, generally acknowledged.
From The Missionary Review of the World.
Every chapter is a thesaurus of startling antithesis, humorous
portraitures, acute observation and marvelous sagacity.... The book is
most delightful reading, and will be found most fascinating. It is a
mirror of Chinese characteristics, as its name indicates. Within its pages
we have found a volume of aphorisms and sage sayings seldom embraced in
such a book.--_Rev. A. T. Pierson, D.D._
_FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 63 Washington Street
Toronto: 154 Yonge Street_
[Illustration: CHINESE VILLAGERS AT HOME]
Village Life in China
A STUDY IN SOCIOLOGY
BY ARTHUR H. SMITH, D.D.
AUTHOR OF
"Chinese Characteristics"
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
Publishers of Evangelical Literature
Copyright, 1899
by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
Foreword
These chapters are written from the standpoint of one who, by an extended
experience in China, has come to feel a profound respect for the numerous
admirable qualities of the Chinese, and to entertain for many of them a
high personal esteem. An unexampled past lies behind this great race, and
before it there may lie a wonderful future. Ere that can be realized,
however, there are many disabilities which must be removed. The longer one
is acquainted with China, the more deeply is this necessity felt.
Commerce, diplomacy, extension of political relations, and the growing
contact with Occidental civilization have, all combined, proved totally
inadequate to accomplish any such reformation as China needs.
The Chinese village is the empire in small, and when that has been
surveyed, we shall be in a better condition to suggest a remedy for
whatever needs amendment. It cannot be too often reiterated that the
variety in unity in China is such, that affirmations should always be
qualified with the implied limitation that they are true somewhere,
although few of them may hold good everywhere. On the other hand, the
unity in variety is such that a really typical Chinese fact, although of
restricted occurrence, may not on that account be the less valuable.
China was never so much in the world's thought as to-day, nor is there any
apparent likelihood that the position of this empire will be less
conspicuous at the opening of the twentieth century. Whatever helps to a
better understanding of the Chinese people, is an aid to a comprehension
of the Chinese problem. To that end this volume is intended as a humble
contribution.
Acknowledgment.
The author desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the Rev. Harlan P.
Beach for his invaluable criticisms and the kindly services rendered in
the proof-reading and piloting of this new voyager through the press.
For the use of original photographs from which engravings have been made,
and are here published for the first time, the author and the publishers
desire to acknowledge their obligations to Mr. Robert E. Speer, Mr.
William Henry Grant, Albert Peck, M.D., Rev. W. C. Longden, and Miss J. G.
Evans.
Contents
PART I.--THE VILLAGE, ITS INSTITUTIONS, USAGES, AND PUBLIC CHARACTERS
CHAPTER PAGE
GLOSSARY 11
I. THE CHINESE VILLAGE 15
II. CONSTRUCTION OF VILLAGES 20
III. VILLAGE NOMENCLATURE 30
IV. COUNTRY ROADS 35
V. THE VILLAGE FERRY 39
VI. VILLAGE WELLS 44
VII. THE VILLAGE SHOP 49
VIII. THE VILLAGE THEATRE 54
IX. VILLAGE SCHOOLS AND TRAVELLING SCHOLARS 70
X. CHINESE HIGHER EDUCATION--THE VILLAGE HIGH SCHOOL--
EXAMINATIONS--RECENT EDUCATIONAL EDICTS 111
XI. VILLAGE TEMPLES AND RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES 136
XII. COA-PERATION IN RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES 141
XIII. COA-PERATION IN MARKETS AND FAIRS 146
XIV. COA-PERATIVE LOAN SOCIETIES 152
XV. SOCIETIES FOR WATCHING THE CROPS 161
XVI. VILLAGE AND CITY RAIN-MAKING 169
XVII. THE VILLAGE HUNT 174
XVIII. VILLAGE WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS 179
XIX. NEW YEAR IN CHINESE VILLAGES 196
XX. THE VILLAGE BULLY 211
XXI. VILLAGE HEADMEN 226
PART II.--VILLAGE FAMILY LIFE
XXII. VILLAGE BOYS AND MEN 237
XXIII. CHINESE COUNTRY GIRLS AND WOMEN 258
XXIV. MONOTONY AND VACUITY OF VILLAGE LIFE 312
XXV. UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM OF THE CHINESE FAMILY 317
XXVI. INSTABILITY FROM FAMILY DISUNITY 324
PART III--REGENERATION OF THE CHINESE VILLAGE
XXVII. WHAT CAN CHRISTIANITY DO FOR CHINA? 341
INDEX 353
List of Illustrations
Chinese Villagers at Home _Frontispiece._
SOUTHERN VILLAGE SCENE } _Facing Page_ 16
A DETAIL--THE VILLAGE WELL }
SAWYERS PREPARING LUMBER } " " 24
ITINERANT BLACKSMITH'S EMPLOYED BY VILLAGERS }
THE VILLAGE COBBLER } " " 35
VILLAGE BROOM-MAKER }
WAITING FOR THE BOAT } " " 40
CROSSING THE FERRY }
STRINGS OF CHINESE CASH } " " 51
PREPARING THE STRINGS }
THRESHING } " " 77
AN AFTERNOON SIESTA }
THE WORLD'S OLDEST SACRED MOUNTAIN, T'AI SHAN } " " 141
SCENERY ALONG THE RIVER LIN }
GOING TO MARKET } " " 148
CHINESE MARKET SCENE }
CROP-WATCHER'S LODGE } " " 162
REAPING MILLET }
A BRIDAL PAIR } " " 188
TEMPORARY FUNERAL PAVILION }
ENTRANCE TO A YAMEN } " " 218
CHINESE COURT OF JUSTICE }
CHINESE PUNCH AND JUDY } " " 244
THE VILLAGE STORY-TELLER }
WOMEN PREPARING FOOD } " " 262
ON THE WAY TO THE FEAST }
ONE OF CHINA'S PARASITES--A BEGGAR } " " 310
ONE OF HER SOURCES OF STRENGTH--A CARPENTER }
LITTLE OLD PEOPLE } " " 342
GOING TO A CHRISTIAN SCHOOL }
Glossary
BOY, a term used by foreigners in China to denote the head-servant,
irrespective of his age.
CASH, Chinese copper coin with a square hole for stringing. The value of a
single cash may be taken as one-thousandth of a Mexican dollar. The cash
vary greatly in size. A "string" theoretically consists of a thousand
cash, but in many regions has but five hundred. The latter variety is at
present equal to one-third of a gold dollar.
CATTY, a Chinese pound, equal by treaty to one and one-third pounds
avoirdupois.
CHIN-SHIH, "Entered Scholar." The third literary degree; Doctor in
Literature.
CHOU, a Sub-prefecture, sometimes with Districts under it, and often
without them.
CHAoe-JASN, "Selected man." The second full literary degree; a Master of
Arts.
COMPOUND, an enclosure or yard, usually containing a number of buildings
belonging to a single family or establishment.
FASNG-SHUI, literally "wind and water." A complicated system of geomantic
superstition, by which the good luck of sites and buildings is determined.
FU, a Prefecture, governed by a Prefect, with several Districts under it.
HAN-LIN, "Forest of Pencils." The last literary degree, entitling to
office.
HSIEN, a District or Country, governed by the District Magistrate.
HSIU-TS'AI, "Flourishing Talent." The lowest of the several literary
degrees; a Bachelor of Arts.
K'ANG, a raised platform of adobe or of bricks, used as a bed and heated
by means of flues.
K'O-T'OU or KOTOW, the act of prostration and striking the head on the
ground in homage or worship.
LI, a Chinese measure of length, somewhat more than three of which equal
an English mile.
SQUEEZE, a forced contribution exacted by those through whose hands the
money of others passes.
TAL, a weight of money equivalent to a sixteenth of a Chinese pound; an
ounce.
TAO-T'AI, an officer of the third rank who is intendant of a circuit.
YA-MASN, the office and residence of a Chinese official.
PART I
The Village, Its Institutions, Usages and Public Characters
I
THE CHINESE VILLAGE
There are in India alone over half a million villages. In all Asia, not
improbably, there may be four times that number. By far the larger part of
the most numerous people on the globe live in villages. The traveller in
the Chinese Empire may start from some seaport, as Tientsin, and journey
for several months together in the same general direction, before reaching
its frontiers on the other side. In the course of such a tour, he will be
impressed as only one who has ocular evidence can be impressed with the
inconceivably great number of Chinese altogether outside of the great
centres of urban population. Contrary to the current notions of
Westerners, the number of great cities is not, relatively to the whole
population, anything like so large in China as in Western lands. Many of
the district cities, capitals of divisions analogous to what we call
counties, are merely large villages with a wall and with government
bureaus called yamAȘns. It is known that in India three-fourths of the
population are rural. In China there is perhaps no reason for thinking the
proportion to be less.
On such a journey as we have supposed, the traveller unacquainted with the
Chinese, finds himself perpetually inquiring of himself: What are these
incomputable millions of human beings thinking about? What is the quality
of the life which they live? What is its content and its scope?
Questions like these cannot be answered intelligently without much
explanation. The conditions and environment of Chinese life are so totally
unlike those to which we are accustomed, that it is unsafe to take
anything for granted. Amid certain fundamental unities the life of the
Chinese is full of bewildering and inexplicable variety. No matter how
long one may have lived in China, there is always just as much as ever
that he never before heard of, but which every one is supposed to have
known by intuition. The oldest resident is a student like the rest.
This state of things is the inevitable result of the antiquity of Chinese
civilization, as well as of the enormous scale upon which it has operated
to produce its effects. It is a sagacious remark of Mr. A. R. Colquhoun[1]
that "the product resulting from duration multiplied by numbers must be
immense, and if to this we add a third factor, isolation, we have no right
to be surprised either at the complex character of Chinese civilization,
or at its peculiarly conservative form." For this reason a connected and
orderly account of the phenomena of Chinese life we believe to be a
hopeless impossibility. It would require the combined information of all
the residents of China to make it complete, to coA¶rdinate it would be the
work of several life-times, and the resultant volumes would fill the
Bodleian library. The only practicable way to extend our knowledge of so
oceanic a subject, is to examine in more or less detail such phenomena as
happen to have come within our restricted horizon. No two persons will
have the same horizon, and no horizon will belt a sphere.
A good way to see what is happening in a building would be to take its
roof off, could that be done without disturbing its inmates. If we wish to
comprehend the Chinese, we must take the roof from their homes, in
order to learn what is going on within. This no foreigner can do. But he
can imitate the Chinese who apply a wet finger to a paper window, so that
when the digit is withdrawn there remains a tiny hole, through which an
observant eye may see at least something. The heterogeneous, somewhat
disconnected, very unequally elaborated chapters which comprise this book,
have this in common, that they are all studies of the phenomena seen at a
peep-hole into the actual life of the Chinese people. Any one who knows
enough about the subject to be entitled to have an opinion, cannot help
perceiving how imperfect and inadequate they are. Yet they represent,
nevertheless, realities which have a human interest of their own.
[Illustration: SOUTHERN VILLAGE SCENE.]
[Illustration: A DETAIL--THE VILLAGE WELL.]
The traveller in China, constantly surrounded by countless towns and
hamlets, naturally thirsts to know in a general way the population of the
region which he is traversing. Should he venture, however, to ask any one
the number of people in a city, or the district which it governs, he would
get no other information than that there are "not a few," or "who knows?"
Almost any intelligent person could tell approximately how many villages
there are in his own county, but as some of them are large and some small,
and as Chinese like other Orientals care absolutely nothing for statistics
and have the crudest notion of what we mean by an average, one is none the
wiser for their information.
It appears to be well settled that no real dependence can be placed upon
the Chinese official returns, yet that they are the only basis upon which
rational estimates can be based, and therefore have a certain value. So
far as we are aware, efforts to come at the real population per square
mile, have generally proceeded from such extensive units as provinces, or
at least prefectures, the foundation and superstructure being alike a mere
pagoda of guesses.
Some years ago an effort was made in a certain district to make a more
exact computation of the population of a very limited area, as a sort of
unit of measure. For this purpose a circle was taken, the radius of which
was twenty _li_, the foreign residence being at the centre. A list was
drawn up of every village having received famine relief in the year 1878,
so that it was not difficult to make a proximate guess at the average
number of families. The villages were 150 in number, and the average size
was taken as eighty families, which, reckoning five persons to the family,
gave a total of 60,000 persons. Allowing six miles to be the equivalent of
twenty _li_, the population of the square mile would be 531, about the
same as the average of the kingdom of Belgium (the most densely populated
country in Europe), which had in 1890 an average of only 534 to the square
mile.
At a distance of a few miles beyond this circle, there is a tract called
the "Thirteen Villages," because that is the number within a distance of
five _li_! This shows that the particular region in which this estimate
was made, happens to be an unfavourable one for the purpose, as a
considerable part of it is waste, owing to an old bed of the Yellow River
which has devastated a broad band of land, on which are no villages. There
is also a water-course leading from the Grand Canal to the sea, and a long
depression much below the general average, thinly occupied by villages,
because it is liable to serious inundation.
For these reasons it seemed desirable to make a new count in a better
spot, and for this purpose a district was chosen, situated about ninety
_li_ east of the sub-prefecture of Lin Ch'ing, to which it belongs. The
area taken was only half the size of the former, and instead of merely
estimating the average population of the villages, the actual number of
families in each was taken, so far as this number is known to the natives.
The man who prepared the village map of the area is a native of the
central village, and a person of excellent sense. He put the population in
every case somewhat below the popular estimate so as to be certainly
within bounds. The number of persons to a "family" was still taken at
five, though, as he pointed out, this is a totally inadequate allowance.
Many "families" live and have all things in common, and are therefore
counted as one, although as in the case of this particular individual, the
"family" may consist of some twenty persons. To the traveller in this
region, the villages appear to be both large and thickly clustered, and
the enumeration shows this to be the case. Within a radius of ten _li_
(three miles) there are sixty-four villages, the smallest having thirty
families and the largest more than 1,000, while the average is 188
families. The total number of families is 12,040, and the total number of
persons at five to the family, is 60,200, or more than double the estimate
for the region with twice the diameter. This gives a population of 2,129
to the square mile.
So far as appearances go, there are thousands of square miles in southern
and central Chih-li, western and southwestern Shan-tung, and northern
Ho-nan, where the villages are as thick as in this one tract, the contents
of which we are thus able proximately to compute. But for the plain of
North China as a whole, it is probable that it would be found more
reasonable to estimate 300 persons to the square mile for the more
sparsely settled districts, and from 1,000 to 1,500 for the more thickly
settled regions. In any case a vivid impression is thus gained of the
enormous number of human beings crowded into these fertile and historic
plains, and also of the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of an
exact knowledge of the facts of the true "census."
II
CONSTRUCTION OF VILLAGES
It is nearly 500 years since the great raid of the nephew of Hung Wu,
founder of the Ming Dynasty, from the southern capital of China, to what
is now known as Peking, then called the state of Yen. The celebrated
raider is popularly believed to have destroyed the lives of all those whom
he met, and to have reduced to an uninhabited desert the whole region from
the Yang-tzA- River to Peking. This is described as "Yen Wang's sweeping
the North." After this ambitious youth had dispossessed his nephew, who
was the rightful heir to the throne, he took the title of Yung Lo, which
became a famous name in Chinese history. To repair the ravages which he
had made, compulsory emigration was established from southern Shan-hsi and
from eastern Shan-tung. Tradition reports that vast masses of people were
collected in the city of Hung-tung Hsien in southern Shan-hsi, and thence
distributed over the uncultivated wastes made by war. Certain it is that
throughout great regions of the plain of northern China, the inhabitants
have no other knowledge of their origin than that they came from that
city.
It is a curious phenomenon that so practical a people as the Chinese, and
one having so instinctive a sense of the points of the compass that they
speak of a pain in "the east side" of the stomach, are indifferent to
regularity of form in their towns. Every Chinese city seems to lie four
square, but perhaps it is not too much to say that no Chinese city really
does so lie. On the contrary a city wall is always found to have certain
deliberate curves and irregularities which are designed for geomantic
purposes. In other words they bring good luck, or they keep off bad luck,
and are representations of the mysterious science of _fAȘng-shui_ or
geomancy. It is for this reason that city gates must either not be
opposite one another, or if they are so, some obstruction must intervene
to prevent evil spirits from making a clean sweep of everything.
It is customary in Western lands to speak of "laying out" a city or a
town. As applied to a Chinese village, such an expression would be most
inappropriate, for it would imply that there has been some trace of design
in the arrangement of the parts, whereas the reverse is the truth. A
Chinese village, like Topsy, "just growed," how, or why, no one knows or
cares. At some remote and generally unascertainable time in the dim past
some families arrived from somewhere else, camped down, made themselves a
"local habitation," (their name they probably brought with them), and that
was the village. It has a street, and perhaps a network of them, but no
two are parallel, except by accident, and no one of them is straight. The
street is the path which has been found by long experience to be a
necessary factor in promoting communication between the parts of the
village and the outside world. It is not only liable to take sudden and
inexplicable turns, but it varies in width at different points. Sometimes
in a village a quarter of a mile long, there may not be a single crossroad
enabling a vehicle to get from the front street to the back one, simply
because the town grew up in that way, and no one either could or would
remedy it, even if any one desired it otherwise. At right angles to the
main street or streets, run narrow alleys, upon which open the yards or
courts in which the houses are situated. Even the buildings which happen
to stand contiguous to the main street offer nothing to the gaze but an
expanse of dead wall. If any doorway opens on the highway, it is protected
from the evil influences which might else result, by a screen wall,
preventing any observation of what goes on within. A village is thus a
city in miniature, having all the evils of over-crowding, though it may be
situated in the midst of a wide and comparatively uninhabited plain.
Whether land is dear or cheap, a village always has the same crowded
appearance, and there is in either case the same indifference to the
requirements of future growth.
The mountains furnish an abundance of stone, from which dwellings situated
in such districts are built--dark, damp, and unwholesome at all seasons of
the year, but especially so in the time of heavy rains. Even more
unpleasant are the cave dwellings found in the loamy soil of loess
regions, lighted only from the front, and quite free from any form of
ventilation, a luxury for which no provision is made in the construction
of a Chinese dwelling.
By far the most common material of which the Chinese build their houses is
that which happens to be nearest at hand. Bricks are everywhere made in
great quantities, almost always of the same colour as the clothes of the
people, a bluish gray. This tint is secured by sealing up the brick-kiln
perfectly tight, when the burning of the bricks is finished, and pouring
upon the concave top several hundred buckets of water, which, filtering
through the soil of which the top is composed, is instantly converted into
steam when it reaches the bricks, and alters their hue. The scarcity of
fuel, and an unwillingness to employ it where it seems like a waste leads
to the almost universal practice of burning the bricks too little to make
them valuable as a building material. Instead of becoming hard like stones
as do foreign bricks, and coated with a thick glazing, a large percentage
of Chinese bricks break merely by being handled, and when examined, they
are found to be like well-made bread, full of air-holes. Each of these
openings becomes a tube by which the bibulous bricks suck up moisture from
below, to the great detriment of the building of which they generally form
merely the foundations, or perhaps, the facings.
The vast majority of country dwellings are made simply of the soil,
moulded into adobe bricks, dried till they cease to shrink. The largest
of these bricks are two or three inches thick, and a foot wide, and
perhaps twenty inches in length, weighing even when thoroughly dried more
than forty pounds. The cost of making those which are only dried in a
mould is not more than a cash a piece; those which are stamped while in
the mould with a heavy stone rammer, are worth three or four times as
much. If experts are employed to do this work, the outlay is greater as
the owner of the earth not only provides a man to carry the necessary
water, but he must furnish tea and tobacco for the workmen.
The foundations of adobe houses, like those of all others, must be of
brick, and at the height of a foot or two above the ground will have a
layer of reeds or some other substance, designed to prevent the dampness
from rising into the walls, which crumble in such a case like candy houses
in a rain. There is so much soda in the soil of all parts of the Great
Plain of northern China, that unless extreme care is taken the best built
structures will, in a very few years, show signs of decay.
The roof is meant to be supported by posts, no matter of what material the
house is built, and this material is regarded as only the filling between
them, but in the cheaper houses, the posts are often omitted to save
expense. As a result, in a rainy year thousands of houses are literally
soaked down whenever the moisture has sufficiently weakened the
foundations. In this way many persons are killed and many more injured. In
some districts one sees roofs made with the frame resembling that of a
foreign house, but the ordinary form is with king and queen posts. In
either case the timbers running lengthwise of the building support small
purlines upon which rest thin bricks, or more frequently reeds, mats, or
sorghum stalks, over which is spread the earth which forms the greater
part of all roofs. Their enormous weight when well soaked make them highly
dangerous after the timbers have become old and rotten. Where the roofs
are flat, they serve as depositories for the crops, and for fuel.
If the village is situated in a low spot, the precaution is taken to throw
up a mound of earth on which to build. But whatever the nature of the
country, the removal of so much earth leaves a series of gigantic pits
around every village, which catch the drainage of the surrounding region
and the possession of which is disputed by ducks, geese, pigs and in
summer by small children clad only in the skin garments furnished by
nature.
The abundant moisture is an inducement to the growth of luxuriant groves
of trees, which, seen at a distance, produce a charming effect. But on a
nearer approach it is seen that the fine old trees are employed
exclusively in shading the mud-holes, while the houses of the village are
exposed to the fiercest rays of the summer sun. Trees are indeed to be met
with in the village street, but they are not designed to shade a
courtyard, which is almost invariably utterly destitute of trees of any
sort. Even grapevines which would seem a natural and beautiful relief from
the hideous bareness of the prevalent earth colour, are, in some regions
at least, wholly tabooed. And why? Because, forsooth, the branches of the
grape point down, while those of other trees point up, hence it would be
"unlucky" to have grapevines, though not at all "unlucky" to roast all
through the broiling summer for the lack of their grateful shade.
A man whose grandfather had been rich, and who was distinguished from his
neighbours by owning a two-story dwelling, informed the writer that he
could remember that his grandmother, who lived in the rear court, was
constantly fretting at the lofty buildings in front, and at the
magnificent elms which shaded the compound and left no place to dry
clothes! In course of time the family was reduced to poverty, the
two-story building was demolished, and the trees felled, so that the
present generation, like other families, swelters in a narrow courtyard,
with an unlimited opportunity (very little used) to dry their clothes.
Luxuries which are denied to dwelling-houses, are cheerfully accorded
to the gods, who have no clothes to dry, and a very small temple may have
in front of it a grove of very old trees.
[Illustration: SAWYERS PREPARING LUMBER.]
[Illustration: ITINERANT BLACKSMITHS EMPLOYED BY VILLAGERS.]
The architecture of the Chinese has been compendiously and perhaps not
inaccurately described as consisting essentially of two sticks placed
upright, with a third laid across them at the top. The shape of some
Chinese roofs, however they may vary among themselves, suggests the tent
as the prime model; though, as Dr. Williams and others have remarked,
there is no proof of any connection between the Chinese roof and the tent.
Owing to the national reluctance to erect lofty buildings, almost all
Chinese cities present an appearance of monotonous uniformity, greatly in
contrast with the views of large cities to be had in other lands.
If Chinese cities are thus uninviting in their aspect, the traveller must
not expect to find anything in the country village to gratify his A|sthetic
sense. There is no such word as "A|sthetic" in Chinese, and, if there were,
it is not one in which villagers would take any interest. The houses are
generally built on the north end of the space reserved as a courtyard, so
as to face the south, and if additional structures are needed they are
placed at right angles to the main one, facing east and west. If the
premises are large, the front wall of the yard is formed by another house,
similar to the one in the rear, and like it having side buildings. However
numerous or however wealthy the family, this is the normal type of its
dwelling. In cities this type is greatly modified by the exigencies of the
contracted space at disposal, but in the country it rules supreme.
The numerative of Chinese houses is a word which denotes division,
signifying not a room, but rather such a part of a dwelling as can
conveniently be covered by timbers of one length. As these timbers are
seldom very large or very long, one division of a house will not often
exceed ten or twelve feet in length, by a little less in width from front
to back. An ordinary house will comprise three of these divisions, though
there may be but one partition, forming one double and one single room.
There is no ceiling, and the roof, which is usually not lofty, is in full
view. Most doors are made with two leaves, projections above and below,
like pins, serving as the hinges. There is a movable doorsill, out of
which a small hole is often cut to admit of entrance and exit for the dogs
and cats. Such doors cannot be tightly closed, for the rude workmanship
and the unequal shrinkage of the wood always render it easy to see through
the many cracks.
Almost all parts of the eighteen provinces are very hot in summer, but it
is only in some regions that a back door will be found opening opposite
the front one. The wooden grating, which does duty as a window, is built
into the wall, for security against thieves, and is often covered, even in
the heat of summer, with oiled paper. Doors do not open directly from
dwelling-houses to the street, and if there are any windows on the street
side of the house, they are very small and very high.
Just inside the door is built the adobe support for the cooking-boiler,
the latter shaped like a saucer and made very thin in order to economize
fuel to the utmost. In all districts where provision is to be made for
heating the room, it is done by conducting the smoke from this primitive
range through a complicated set of flues, under the divan called a _k'ang_
which serves as a bed, and which is merely an arrangement of adobe bricks.
If the houses are thatched with straw the opening for smoke must be near
the ground, as a precaution against fire.
On the end of the _k'ang_ are piled the bed-quilts of the household and
whatever trunks or boxes they may be able to boast, for this is the only
part of the dwelling which is not likely to be damp. As the fire is so
near to the outer door where drafts are strong, as the flues are very
likely to get out of order, and as there are no chimneys worthy of the
name, it is inevitable that the smoke should be distributed throughout the
building with the greatest impartiality, often forming a coating of
creosote an inch or more in thickness.
Above the cooking-range is fastened the image of the kitchen-god,
popularly supposed to be a deification of Chang Kung, a worthy who lived
in the eighth century of our era, and was able to live in perfect peace,
although nine generations simultaneously inhabited the same yard. Even his
hundred dogs were so polite as to wait for another, if any one of them was
late at a meal.
The reigning emperor of the Tang Dynasty sent for Chang Kung, to inquire
the secret of such wonderful harmony, and calling for a pen, he is said to
have written the character denoting "Forbearance" a great number of times.
According to tradition the picture of this patriarch was placed in every
dwelling as a stimulus to the imitation of his example, a purpose for
which it unfortunately proves quite inert.
That the dwellings of the Chinese are cold in winter, hot in summer, and
smoky all the year round is inevitable. Even in the coldest weather there
is no escape from the bitter cold, except as it may be got by curling upon
the _k'ang_. For this reason Chinese women often speak of the _k'ang_ as
like an "own mother." A room in which there is none is considered almost
uninhabitable. But from an Occidental point of view they are models of
discomfort. The heat is but slowly diffused, and during a long night one
may be alternately drenched with perspiration, and then chilled to the
bone as the heat diminishes. The adobe bricks of which the _k'ang_ is
composed crumble if an uneven pressure is made upon them, so that one
often finds the _k'angs_ in an inn full of pitfalls. They are always the
lodging places of a multitude of tiny monsters to which the Chinese are
too much accustomed to complain. Even when the adobe bricks are broken up
in the spring to be pulverized as manure--on account of the creosote--the
animal life lodged in the walls is apparently sufficient to restock the
universe.
It is not surprising that the title-deeds to land are in course of years
destroyed or lost, for there is in a Chinese house no proper place in
which they may be kept. The only closets are made by leaving out a few
bricks from the wall. A small board, resting on two pegs often forms the
only book-shelf to be found in the apartments even of men of letters.
Doors are locked by passing the link of a chain over a staple in the
door-frame above; but Chinese padlocks can generally be picked with a
wire, a chop-stick, or even with a dry weed, and afford no real
protection. Thieves are always provided with an assortment of keys, and
often get in by lifting the doors off the pins which serve as hinges.
Nothing is easier than to dig through adobe walls. In some of the rich
villages of Shan-hsi house-walls are built quite six feet thick to
discourage such penetration.
The floor of all common dwellings is merely the earth, not smoothed but
beaten into fixed inequalities; this we are assured (in reply to a
question why smoothness is not cultivated) is much the best way, as by
this means every fluid spilled will run out of itself! In the corners of
the dwelling stand, lie, or hang, the numerous household articles for
which there is no other place. Jars of grain, agricultural implements,
clumsy looms for weaving cotton, spinning wheels, baskets of all sizes and
shapes, one or two benches, and possibly a chair, all seem to occupy such
space as is to be had, while from the sooty roof depend all manner of
articles, hung up so as to be out of the way--some of which when wanted
must be hooked down with a pole. The maxim "a place for everything, and
everything in its place" is inappropriate to a Chinese dwelling, where
there is very little place for anything.
The small yard is in as great confusion as the house, and for the same
reason. Dogs, cats, chickens and babies enjoy a very limited sphere of
action, and generally take to the street, which is but an extension of the
court. If the family owns animals, some place must be found for them in
the yard, though when not in use they spend their time anchored by a very
short rope, attached to pegs sunk deep in the ground, in front of the
owner's dwelling. Pigs are kept in a kind of well, with a brick wall to
prevent its caving in, and by climbing a very steep flight of brick
stairs they can ascend to a little kennel provided for them at the edge of
their pits--in many regions the only two-story domiciles to be found!
The Chinese village is always a miniature city, not only by reason of its
internal arrangements--or lack of it--but often also in the virtue of the
fact that it is surrounded by a wall.
Not many years ago several regiments stationed near the Yellow River, in
Shan-tung, mutinied, killed an officer and marched off to their homes. The
intelligence of this event spread throughout the province, and each region
feared to be visited by the soldiers who were sure to plunder and perhaps
to kill. So great was the panic that cities hundreds of miles from the
seat of the disturbance were packed with a multitude of farm-carts loaded
with villagers who had left their homes and abandoned their crops at the
beginning of the wheat harvest, trusting to find safety within city walls.
The losses sustained in consequence were immense.
Events like this may occur at any time, and the great T'ai P'ing Rebellion
of half a century ago, together with its resultant disorders, left an
ineffaceable impression of the insecurity of an unwalled village. Although
the walls are seldom more than fifteen or twenty feet in height, whenever
a year of bad harvests occurs, and bands of plunderers roam about, the use
of even such defences is made obvious. Slight as is their value against an
organized, well-directed attack, experience shows that they are often
sufficient to accomplish the object intended, by diverting the stream of
invaders to other villages where they meet with no resistance. The least
rumour of an uprising in any quarter is often sufficient to stimulate the
villagers to levy a tax upon the land in order to repair their earthen
ramparts, in which, not without good reason, they place much more
dependence than in the cautious and dilatory movements of the local
authorities who are generally in no condition to cope with an organized
and resolute force, especially with those rebels who have a real
grievance.
III
VILLAGE NOMENCLATURE
The Chinese is justly termed a poetical language. The titles of emperors,
the names of men, the signs of shops, all have some felicitous meaning. It
is therefore somewhat of a disappointment to discover that the names of
Chinese villages, unlike those of cities, are not as a rule either
poetical or significant. The drafts upon the language by the incessant
multiplication of hamlets are too great to be successfully met. Nearly all
Chinese surnames serve as the designation of villages, as in other lands
the names of families are attached to the settlements which they make.
Sometimes two or more surnames are linked together to denote the village,
as Chang-Wang Chuang, the village of the Chang and the Wang families. It
often happens that in the changes, wrought by time, of the families for
whom the place was named not a single representative remains. In such
cases the name may be retained or it may be altered, though all
recollection of the circumstances of the change may be lost.
The most conspicuous object in a Chinese village is generally a temple,
and this building often gives its name to the hamlet. Thus the wall
surrounding a temple is covered with red plaster, and the village is
dubbed Red Temple. In a few years the plaster falls off, but the name
sticks. Temples are frequently associated with the families which were
prominent in their construction, and the name of the village is very
likely to be derived from this source, as Wang Chia Miao, the Temple of
the Wang Family; the Hua Chia SsA-, the monastery of the Hua Family. If
there happen to be two temples of a similar appearance, the village may
get the title of Double Temple, and in general any peculiarity in
edifices of this sort is likely to be stereotyped in the village name.
The habit of using the names of families and temples to indicate the
villages is a fertile source of confusion through the indefinite
multiplication of the same name. There is no postal system in China
compelling each post office to have a designation which shall not be
confounded with others in the same province. Hence the more common names
are so exceedingly common that they lose all value as distinctive
designations. "Chang, Wang, Li, and Chao," are the four surnames which the
Chinese regard as the most prevalent, the first two of them far
out-distancing all their competitors. The number of places in a given
district bearing the same, or similar names, is past all ascertaining; as,
say eight or ten Wang Family villages, the Larger Wang Village, the
Smaller Wang Village, the Front Wang Village, the Rear Wang Village, the
Wang Village Under-the-bank, and so forth. Even with this complexity,
distinction would be a much easier matter if the same name were always
used, but anything which has a Wang about it is like to be called simply
Wang Village, and only on inquiry is it to be learned which of all these
Wangs is the one intended.
A similar ambiguity is introduced along the line of imperial highways,
where the hamlets at which food is sold, and where accommodations are
offered to travellers, are called "shops," taking their distinctive title
from the distance to the district city,--as Five Mile Shop, Ten Mile,
Fifteen, Twenty, Thirty, and Forty Mile Shop. Each district city may have
"shops" of this kind on each side of it, and while the one twenty miles
(or li) north is Twenty Li Shop, so is the one twenty li south, to the
great confusion of the traveller, who after all is not sure where he is.
In addition to this ambiguity, the Thirty Li Shop of one city is liable to
be confounded with the Thirty Li Shop of the next city. It is a common
circumstance to find an insignificant hamlet with a name comprising four
or five characters, the local pronunciation of which is generally
difficult to catch, as the words are spoken as one prolonged,
many-syllabled sound. This leads to abbreviations, the same long title
having perhaps two or three different modes of utterance, to the
bewilderment of strangers, and to the intense amusement of the rustic born
on the spot, who cannot conceive what there can be so hard to understand
about a name which is to him as familiar as his own.
Another source of confusion in the nomenclature of Chinese villages, is
the almost universal habit of varying one or more characters of a name
without any apparent reason. The alteration has no connection with
euphony, ease of pronunciation, or with any known cause whatever, but
seems to be due to an irresistible instinct for variety, and to an
antipathy to a too simple uniformity. Thus a village the proper title of
which is the Ancient Monastery of the Li Family, (Li Ku SsA-) is
generally called Li Kuang SsA-; a village known as that of Benevolence
and Virtue (JAȘn TAȘ Chuang), is ordinarily styled JAȘn Wang Chuang.
Analogous to this habit, is that of affixing two entirely distinct names
to the same little hamlet, neither name suggesting the other, and the
duplication merely serving to confound confusion. Thus a village which has
a name derived from a temple, like HsA1/4an Ti Miao (the temple to HsA1/4an Ti)
is also known as Chang Chuang (the village of the Chang Family), but as
there are many other villages of Chang families near by this, one will be
known by way of distinction, as the "Chang Family village which has a
temple to HsA1/4an Ti"! Many persons have occasion to write the names of
villages, who have but the scantiest knowledge of Chinese characters, and
they are as likely to indite a false character having the same sound as a
right one--nay, far more so--and thus it happens that there is a perpetual
uncertainty, never set at rest in any manner whatsoever, as to what the
real name of a place ought to be, for to all Chinese one name is as good
as another, and in such matters, as in many others, there appears to be no
intuition of right and wrong.
Chinese villages are only individual Chinese amplified, and, like
individuals, they are liable to be nicknamed; and, as often happens with
human beings, the nickname frequently supplants the original, of which no
trace may remain in memory. This helps to account for the singular
appellations of many villages. A market-town on the highway, the wells of
which afford only brackish water, was called "Bitter Water Shop," but as
this name was not pleasing to the ear, it was changed on the tax lists to
"Sweet Water Shop." If any one inquires how it is that the same fountain
can send forth at the same time waters both bitter and sweet, he is
answered with conclusive simplicity, "Sweet Water Shop is the same as
Bitter Water Shop!" A village situated on the edge of a river was named
after the two leading families, but when the river rose to a great height
this name sunk out of sight, and there emerged the title, "Look at the
Water;" but even this alteration not being sufficient to satisfy the
thirst for variety, the name is written and pronounced as if it meant,
"Look at the Grave!" A hamlet named for the Liu Family had in it a bully
who appeared in a lawsuit with a black eye, and hence was called the
Village of Liu with the Black Eye. In another instance a town had the name
of Dropped Tooth, merely because the local constable lost a central
incisor (Lao Ya ChAȘn); but in course of time this fact was forgotten, and
the name altered into "Market-town of the Crows," (Lao Kua ChAȘn) which it
still retains.
A village in which most of the families joined the Roman Catholics and
pulled down all their temples, gained from this circumstance the
soubriquet of "No Gods Village" (Wu ShAȘn Chuang). The following specimens
of singular village names are all taken from an area but a few miles
square, and could doubtless be paralleled in almost any other region. "The
Imperial Horse Yard" (YA1/4 Ma YA1/4an). This title is said to have been
inherited from the times of the founder of the Sung Dynasty. It is
generally corrupted into "Sesame Garden," (Chih Ma YA1/4an). "End of the
Cave," a village situated on a great plain, with vague traditions of an
underground passage. "Seeing the Horse"; "Horse Words Village," from a
tradition of a speaking animal; "Sun Family Bull Village"; "Female Dog
Village"; "Wang Family Great Melon Village"; "Separating from the King
Village"; "Basket Village of the Liu Village"; "Tiger-catching Village,"
and "Tiger-striking Fair"; "Duck's Nest of the Chou Family"; "Horse
Without a Hoof"; "Village of Chang of the Iron Mouth"; "Ts'ui Family Wild
Pheasant Village"; "Wang Family Dog's Tooth"; "Village of the Benevolent
and Loving Magistrate"; "Village of the Makers of Fine-tooth Combs,"
(Pi-tzA--chiang Chuang), which is now corrupted into "The Village Where
They Wear Pug-noses"!
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE COBBLER.]
[Illustration: VILLAGE BROOM-MAKER.]
IV
COUNTRY ROADS
The contracted quarters in which the Chinese live compel them to do most
of their work in the street. Even in those cities which are provided with
but the narrowest passages, these slender avenues are perpetually choked
by the presence of peripatetic vendors of every article that is sold, and
by peripatetic craftsmen, who have no other shop than the street. The
butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, and hundreds of other workmen
as well, have their representatives in perpetual motion, to the great
impediment of travel. The wider the street, the more the uses to which it
can be put, so that travel in the broad streets of Peking is often as
difficult as that in the narrow alleys of Canton. An "imperial highway" in
China is not one which is kept in order by the emperor, but rather one
which may have to be put in order for the emperor. All such highways might
rather be called low-ways; for, as they are never repaired, they soon
become incomparably worse than no road at all.
If this is true of the great tines of travel over the empire, we must not
expect to find the village road an illustration of any doctrine of
political economy. Each of them is simply a forced contribution on the
part of the owner of the land to the general welfare. It is so much soil
on which he is compelled to pay taxes, and from which he gets no more good
than any one else. Each land-owner will, therefore, throw the road on the
edge of his land, so that he may not be obliged to furnish more than half
the way. But as the pieces of land which he happens to own may be, and
generally are, of miscellaneous lengths, the road will wind around so as
to accommodate the prejudices of the owner in this particular, which
explains the fact that in travelling on village roads it is often
necessary to go a great distance to reach a place not far off.
An ordinary road is only wide enough for one vehicle, but as it is often
necessary for carts to pass one another, this can only be done by
trespassing on the crops. To prevent this the farmer digs deep ditches
along his land, resembling gas-mains. Each farmer struggles to protect his
own land, but when he drives his own cart, he too becomes a "trespasser";
thus a state of chronic and immitigable warfare is established, for which
there is absolutely no remedy. The Occidental plan of setting apart a
strip of land of uniform width, free from taxes and owned by the state,
the grade of which shall be definite, is utterly beyond the comprehension
of any Chinese. Where land is valuable and is all private property, road
repairs are out of the question. There is no earth to repair with, and
without repair, the roads soon reach a condition beyond the possibility of
any repairs. Constant travel compresses and hardens the soil, making it
lower than the adjacent fields; perpetual attrition grinds the earth into
banks, which by heavy gales are blown in the form of thick dust on the
fields.
In the rainy season the fields are drained into the road, which at such
times is constantly under water. A slight change of level allows the water
to escape into some still lower road, and thus a current is set up, which
becomes first a brook, and then a rushing torrent, constantly wearing out
its bed. This process repeated for decades and for centuries turns the
road into a canal, several feet below the level of the fields. It is a
proverb that a road 1,000 years old becomes a river, just as a
daughter-in-law of many years' standing gradually "summers into a
mother-in-law."
By the time the road has sunk to the level of a few feet below the
adjacent land, it is liable to be wholly useless as a thoroughfare. It is
a canal, but it can neither be navigated nor crossed. Intercourse between
contiguous villages lying along a common "highway," is often for weeks
together entirely interrupted. The water drained from the land often
carries with it large areas of valuable soil, leaving in its place a
yawning chasm. When the water subsides, the owner of the land sallies out
to see what has become of this section of his farm. It has been dissolved
in the canal, but if the owner cannot find that particular earth he can
find other earth just as good. Wherever the light soil called loam, or
"loess," is found, it splits with a vertical cleavage, leaving high banks
on each side of a rent in the earth. To repair these, the owner takes the
soil which he needs from a pit excavated by the side of the road, or more
probably from the road itself, which may thus in a single season be
lowered a foot or more in depth. All of it is his land, and why should he
not take it? If the public wish to use a road, and do not find this one
satisfactory, then let the public go somewhere else.
If a road becomes so bad as to necessitate its abandonment, a new one must
be opened, or some old one adapted to the altered circumstances. The
latter is almost sure to be the alternative; for who is willing to
surrender a part of his scanty farm, to accommodate so impersonal a being
as the public? In case of floods, either from heavy rains or a break in
some stream, the only feasible method is thought to be to sit still and
await the gradual retirement of the water. A raised road through the
inundated district, which could be used at all seasons, is a triple
impossibility. The persons whose land must be disturbed would not suffer
it, no one would lift a finger to do the work--except those who happened
to own land along the line of the route--and no one, no matter where he
lived, would furnish any of the materials which would be necessary to
render the road permanent.
An illustration of this state of things is found in a small village in
central Chih-li, where lives an elderly lady, in good circumstances, a
part of whose land is annually subject to flood from the drainage of the
surrounding region. The evil was so serious that it was frequently
impossible to haul the crops home on carts, but they had either to be
brought on the backs of men wading, or, if there were water enough,
toilfully dragged along on stalk rafts. To this comparatively enlightened
woman occurred the idea of having her men and teams dig trenches along the
roadside, raise the road to a level above possible flooding, and thus
remedy the trouble permanently. This she did wholly at her own expense,
the emerging road being a benefit to the whole country-side. The following
winter, during which the contagious influenza was world-prevalent, there
were several cases in the village terminating fatally. After five or six
persons had died, the villagers became excited to discover the latent
cause of the calamity, which was traced to the new highway. Had another
death occurred they would have assembled with spades and reduced it to its
previous level, thus raising a radical barrier against the grippe!
The great lines of Chinese travel might be made permanently passable,
instead of being, as now, interrupted several months of the year, if the
Governor of a Province chose to compel the several District Magistrates
along the line to see that these important arteries are kept free from
standing water, with ditches in good order at all seasons. But for the
village road there is absolutely no hope until such time as the Chinese
villager may come dimly to the apprehension that what is for the advantage
of one is for the advantage of all, and that wise expenditure is the
truest economy--an idea of which at present he has as little conception as
of the binomial theorem.
V
THE VILLAGE FERRY
In the northern part of China, although the streams are not so numerous as
at the south, they form more of an obstruction to travel, on account of
the much greater use made of animals and of wheeled vehicles. The Chinese
cart is a peculiarly northern affair, and appears to be of much the same
type as in ancient days. The ordinary passenger cart is dragged by one
animal in the cities, and by two in the country. The country cart,
employed for the hauling of produce and also for all domestic purposes by
the great bulk of the population, is a machine of untold weight. We once
put the wheel of one of these carts on a platform-scale and ascertained
that it weighed 177 pounds, and the axle fifty-seven pounds in addition,
giving a total of 411 pounds for this portion of the vehicle. The shafts
are stout as they have need to be, and when the cart upsets--a not
infrequent occurrence--they pin the shaft animal to the earth, effectually
preventing his running away. Mules, horses, cows, and donkeys, are all
hitched to these farm carts, each pulling by means of loose ropes anchored
to the axle. To make these beasts pull simultaneously is a task to which
no Occidental would ever aspire, nor would he succeed if he did aspire.
General Wolseley mentions in his volume describing the campaign in 1860,
when the army marched on Peking, that at Ho Hsi Wu all the Chinese carters
deserted, and the British troops were totally unable to do anything
whatever with the teams.
Under these conditions of travel, a Chinese ferry is one of the most
characteristic specimens of the national genius with which we are
acquainted. Ferries are numerous, and so are carts to be ferried. The
interesting thing is to watch the process, and it is a spectacle full of
delightful surprises.
At a low stage of water the ferry-boat is at the base of a sloping bank,
down which in a diagonal line runs the track, never wide enough for two
carts to pass each other. To get one of these large carts down this steep
and shelving incline requires considerable engineering skill, and here
accidents are not infrequent. When the edge of the ferry is reached the
whole team must be unhitched, and each animal got on the boat as best may
be. Some animals make no trouble and will give a mighty bound, landing
somewhere or everywhere to the imminent peril of any passengers that may
be already on board. None of the animals have any confidence in the
narrow, crooked, and irregular gang planks which alone are to be found.
The more crooked these planks the better, for a reason which the traveller
is not long in discovering. The object is by no means to get the cart and
animals on with the minimum of trouble, but with the maximum of
difficulty, for this is the way by which hordes of impecunious rascals get
such an exiguous living as they have. When an animal absolutely refuses to
budge--an occurrence at almost every crossing--its head is bandaged with
somebody's girdle, and then it is led around and around for a long time so
as to induce it to forget all about the ferryboat. At last it is led to
the edge and urged to jump, which it will by no means do. Then they twist
its tail--unless it happens to be a mule--put a stick behind it as a lever
and get six men at each end of the stick, while six more tug at a series
of ropes attached to the horns. After a struggle lasting in many cases
half an hour, often after prolonged and cruel beatings, the poor beasts
are all on board, where the more active of them employ their time in
prancing about among and over the human passengers, to their evident
danger.
Sometimes the animals become excited and break away, plunging over the
edge of the ferry, which has no guards of any kind, and in such cases it
is not uncommon for them to be floated away, or even lost. The writer
is cognizant of a case in which the driver was himself pulled into a swift
and swollen stream while struggling to restrain his mules, and was
drowned, a circumstance which probably caused his "fare"--a scholar on his
way to or from a summer examination--endless delay, as he would be
detained at the district yamAȘn for a witness.
[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE BOAT.]
[Illustration: CROSSING THE FERRY.]
But while we have been busy with the animals, we have neglected the cart,
which must be dragged upon the ferryboat by the strength of a small army
of men. There may be only one man or a man and a boy on a ferry, but to
pull a loaded cart over the rugged edges of the planks, up the steep
incline, requires perhaps ten or fifteen men. This is accomplished by the
process so familiar at Chinese funerals, the wild yelling of large bands
of men as they are directed by the leader.
Every individual who so much as lays a hand upon the cart must be paid,
and the only limit is the number who can cluster around it. As in all
other Chinese affairs there is no regular tariff of charges, but the rule
is that adopted by some Occidental railway managers to "put on all the
traffic will bear." Suppose for example that the passenger cart only pays
a hundred cash for its transport across the stream; this sum must be
divided into three parts, of which the ferry gets but one and the bands of
volunteer pullers and pushers on the two banks the other two-thirds. In
this way it often happens that all that one of these loafing labourers has
to show for his spasmodic toil may be four cash, or in extreme cases only
two, or even one.
On the farther bank the scene just described is reversed, but occupies a
much shorter time, as almost any animal is glad enough to escape from a
ferry. The exit of the carts and animals is impeded by the struggles of
those who want to get a passage the other way, and who cannot be content
to wait till the boat is unloaded. There is never any superintendent of
the boat, any more than of anything else in China, and all is left to
chance or fate. That people are not killed in the tumultuous crossings is
a constant wonder.
It is not unnatural for the Occidental whose head is always full of ideas
as to how things _ought_ to be done in the East, to devise a plan by which
all this wild welter should be reduced to order. He would, to begin with,
have a fixed tariff, and he would have a wide and gently sloping path to
the water's edge. He would have a broad and smooth gang-plank, over which
both animals and carts could pass with no delay and no inconvenience. He
would have a separate place for human passengers and for beasts, and in
general shorten the time, diminish the discomforts and occidentalize the
whole proceedings.
Now stop for a moment and reflect _how_ any one of these several "reforms"
is to be made a fact accomplished. The gently sloping banks will wash away
with the first rise of the river; who is to repair them? Not the boatman,
for "it is not the business of the corn-cutter to pull off the stockings
of his customers." If the ferry is an "official" one, that only means that
the local magistrate has a "squeeze" on the receipts, not that there are
any corresponding obligations toward facilitating travel. Who is to
provide those wide gang-planks over which the passage is to be so easy?
Not the boatman. Not the passenger, whose only wish is to get safely over
for that single time. Not the swarm of loafers whose interest it is not to
have any gang-planks at all, or as nearly as possible none.
And even if the roads were made, and the gang-planks all provided by some
benevolent despot, it would not be a week before the planks would be
missing, and all things going on as they have been since the foundation of
the Chinese world. The appointment of inspectors, police, etc., etc.,
would do no manner of good, unless it should be to their interest to
further the reform, which would obviously never be the case.
Imagine an Anglo-Indian official, whose knowledge of Oriental races and
traits is profound, in charge of the ferries for a single stretch, say of
the Grand Canal. What would he do?--what could he do, even if backed up by
a force theoretically irresistible? Nothing whatever to any lasting or
good purpose until the need of some alteration in their system, or rather
lack of system, forces itself upon the Chinese mind. How long in the
ordinary process of human evolution it would take to bring this about, it
is easy to conjecture. Think for an instant of the objections which would
be made on every hand to the innovations. Who are these fellows? What are
their motives? No Chinese can for a moment comprehend such a conception as
is embodied in the phrase _Pro bono publico_. He never heard of such a
thing, and what is more he never wants to hear of it.
We have wasted an undue amount of time in crossing a Chinese river, for it
is a typical instance of flagrant abuses which the Chinese themselves do
not mind, which would drive Occidentals to the verge of insanity--if not
over the brink--and which it seems easy, but is really impossible to
remedy. _Mutatis mutandis_, these things are a parable of the empire. The
reform must come. It must be done from within. But the impulse can come
only from without.
VI
VILLAGE WELLS
On the Great Plain of North China the wells are generally shallow, ranging
from ten to thirty feet in depth; one of fifty feet would be unusual,
though they are occasionally much deeper. The well is a very important
feature of the outfit of a Chinese village, though never the scene of
ablutions as in India. To save the labour of carrying water, all the
animals are led to the well to drink, and the resultant mud makes the
neighbourhood, especially in winter, very disagreeable. Rarely have they a
cover of any sort, and the opening being level with the surface of the
ground, it would seem inevitable that animals, children and blind persons,
should be constantly falling in,--as indeed, occasionally, but seldom
happens. Even the smallest bairns learn to have a wholesome fear of the
opening, and ages of use have accustomed all Chinese to view such dangers
with calm philosophy.
The business of sinking wells is an art by itself, and in regions where
they are commonly used for irrigation, the villagers acquire a great
reputation for expertness in the process. A village which desires a new
well sends an invitation to the experts, and a party of men, numbering
perhaps fifteen or twenty, responds. Though the work is fatiguing,
difficult, and often dangerous, no money payment is generally offered or
desired, but only a feast to all the workers, of the best food to be had.
If the well is to be anything more than a water-pit, it is dug as deep as
can be done without danger of caving in, and then the brick lining is let
down from above. The basis of this is a strong board frame of the exact
size of the opening, and wide enough to place the walling upon. A section
of the wall is built upon this base, and the whole is firmly bound to the
baseboard within and without by ropes or reed withes. The lining then
resembles a barrel without the heads, and when completed is so strong
that, though it be subjected to considerable and unequal strains, it will
neither give nor fall apart.
Several feet of the lining are lowered into the cavity, and as the digging
proceeds the lining sinks, and the upper wall is built upon it. If it is
desired to strike a permanent spring, this is accomplished by means of a
large bamboo tube to which an iron-pointed head is fixed. The tube is
driven down as far as it will go, the earth and sand being removed from
within, and when a good supply of water is reached the opening is bricked
up as usual. Such wells are comparatively rare, and proportionately
valuable.
Wherever the soil and water are favourable for market-gardens, the
country-side abounds in irrigation wells, often only six feet in width,
and provided with a double windlass or sweep. One may meet the gardeners
carrying home the ropes, buckets, and the windlass itself, none of which
can safely be left out over night. Village wells are often sunk on ground
which is conjointly owned by several families. Like everything else
Oriental, they furnish frequent occasions now, as in patriarchal times,
for bitter feuds. Whenever one is especially unpopular in his village, the
first threat is to cut off his water supply, though this is not often
done.
In some districts quicksands prevent the sinking of any permanent wells.
The villagers are obliged to be up all night in order to take their turn
at the scanty water supply, and fights are not infrequent. In a dry year
the suffering is serious. For evils of this sort tube-wells would seem to
provide a remedy, but thus far there has been great difficulty in getting
down to such a depth as to strike good water. The nature of the trouble
was aptly described by a coolie employed by a foreigner on a work of this
kind, who was asked why the pipe was not driven deeper. He replied that it
was, but "the deeper they went the more there wasn't any water" It would
appear that in the direction of a good water supply, Western knowledge
might be applied for the benefit of great numbers of Chinese and on a
large scale, or if not on a large scale, then on a small one.
As an illustration of the process by which this may be done, an experience
of many years ago in a Shan-tung village is worthy of mention. One of the
missionaries had the happiness of welcoming a second son to his household,
an event which seemed to the Chinese of such happy omen that they were
moved to unite in subscribing a fixed sum from each family in the village,
to purchase a silver neck ornament for the infant. As the suggestion was
not absolutely and peremptorily vetoed, the committee in charge went on
and ordered the silver chain and padlock, after which the delicate
question arose by what means this gift should be acknowledged. After
canvassing many plans, one was at length hit upon which appeared to
satisfy the requisite conditions, which were in brief that the thing
bestowed should be a distinct benefit to all the people, and one which
they could all appreciate. It was proposed to put a force-pump in a
village well not far from the mission premises, where much water was daily
drawn by a great many people with a great deal of labour. The force-pump
would make this toil mere child's play. The plan was so plainly
fore-ordained to success, that one of the missionaries--although not
having the felicity of two sons--was moved to promise also a stone
watering trough, which in Chinese phrase, would be a "Joy to Ten Thousand
Generations." The village committee listened gravely to these proposals
without manifesting that exhilaration which the obviously successful
nature of the innovation seemed to warrant, but promised to consider and
report later. When the next meeting of this committee with the
missionaries took place, the former expressed a wish to ask a few
questions. They pointed out that there were four or five wells in the
village. "Was it the intention of the Western foreign 'shepherds' to put
a 'water-sucker' into _each_ of these wells?" No, of course not; it was
meant for the one nearest the mission premises. To this it was replied
that the trinket for the shepherd's child had been purchased by uniform
contributions from each family in the village. Some of these families
lived on the front street and some on the back one, some at the east end
and some at the west end. "Would it be consistent with the ideal
impartiality of Christianity to put a 'water-sucker' where it could only
benefit a part of those for whom it was designed?"
After an impressive silence the committee remarked that there was a
further question which had occurred to them. This village, though better
off than most of those about, had some families which owned not a foot of
land. These landless persons had to pick up a living as they could. One
way was by carrying and selling water from house to house in buckets.
According to the account of the shepherds the new "water-sucker" would
render it so easy to get water that any one could do it, and the
occupation of drawers of water would be largely gone. It could not be the
intention of the benevolent shepherds to throw a class of workmen out of
work. What form of industry did the shepherds propose to furnish to the
landless class, to compensate them for the loss of their livelihood? At
this point the silence was even more impressive than before. After another
pause the village committee returned to their questions. They said that
Western inventions are very ingenious, but that Chinese villagers "attain
unto stupidity." As long as the Western shepherds were at hand to explain
and to direct the use of the "water-suckers," all would doubtless go well;
but they had noticed that Western inventions sometimes had a way of
becoming injured by the tooth of time, or by bad management. Suppose that
something of this sort took place with the "water-sucker," and suppose
that no shepherd was at hand to repair or replace it, what should then be
done after the villagers had come to depend upon it? This recalled the
fact that a force-pump had been tried several years before in Peking, in
the deep wells of that city, but the fine sand clogged the valves, and it
had to be pulled up again! In view of these various considerations, is it
surprising that the somewhat discouraged shepherds gave up the plan of
interfering with Oriental industries, or that the obligation to the
village was finally acknowledged by the payment of a sum of money which
they used ostensibly for the repair of the rampart around the village, but
which really went nobody knows where or to whom?
VII
THE VILLAGE SHOP
The Chinese have always divided themselves into the four classes of
scholars, farmers, workmen, and merchants. Considering their singular
penchant for trade, it is a surprise to find them putting traders at the
foot of the list.
If any one has an idea that the life of a Chinese dealer is an easy one,
he has a very inaccurate idea indeed, and the smallest investigation of
any specific case will be sufficient to disabuse him of it. Indeed there
are not many people in China whose life is an easy one, certainly not the
officials and the rich, who are at once the most envied and the most
misunderstood persons in the empire.
In Shan-tung, every village of any size has its little "tsa-huo-p'u," or
shop of miscellaneous goods. It is not at all like a huckster's shop at
home, for the goods kept are not intended to be disposed of at once. Many
of them may remain in stock for many years, but they will probably all be
worked off at last. Occidentals often suppose that the Chinese live on
"curry and rice." Very few people in Shan-tung ever tasted rice in their
lives, but there is generally a small quantity kept at the "tsa-huo-p'u"
in case there should be a call for use at feasts, or for the sick. There
is a good supply of red paper used for cards of invitation, and white
paper for funeral announcements, the need for which must be met promptly,
without waiting for a trip to a distant market-town. Besides this there is
a large stock of fire-crackers which are wanted whenever there is a
feast-day, a wedding or a funeral, and also paper money and other
materials for the idolatrous ceremonies which these occasions involve.
There are many other kinds of wares, for there is almost nothing for which
a demand may not be made; but the greatest profit is derived from the
articles last named.
Let not the reader, inexpert in Chinese affairs, suppose that the keeper
of the "tsa-huo-p'u" sits all day in a chair awaiting customers, or spends
the intervals between their infrequent arrivals in playing Chinese fox and
geese or chess. He does nothing of the kind. If his shop is a very small
one it is not tended at all, but simply open when occasion serves. If it
is a larger affair, it requires the time of more than one person, not to
tend it but to carry on the rural trade. For the larger part of the
business of the "tsa-huo-p'u" is not at home, but at five-day markets all
about. The proprietors of some shops take their wares to a fair every day
in the month, on the first and sixth to one place, on the second and
seventh to another, on the third and eighth to another, and on the fifth
and tenth to still another, by which time the circle is completed.
Going to one of these markets is no holiday work. It is necessary to rise
either at daylight or before, select the goods to be taken, pack them
carefully, make an accurate list of them, and then wheel the barrow to the
fair, sometimes over very bad roads in very bad weather. Arrived at the
market-town there are no stalls or booths for the dealers to occupy, but
each plants himself in a spot for which he has to pay a small ground-rent
to the owner, who is always on hand to collect this rent. All day long the
barrow must be tended assiduously, bickering with all sorts and conditions
of men and women, and when the people have begun to scatter, the articles
must be packed up again, and the barrow wheeled home.
Then comes the wearisome taking account of stock, in regard to which the
proprietor is exceedingly particular. In China nobody trusts anybody else,
for the excellent reason that he is aware that in similar circumstances it
might not be safe to trust himself. Hence the owner of the little shop, or
some one who represents him, looks carefully over the goods brought
home and compares them with the invoice made out in the morning. This
is a check upon the temptation to sell some things without giving an
account of them. The sales which have been made during the day are for
small sums only, and as all the cash has to be counted and strung on hemp
cords so as to make the full string of 1,000 cash (or 500 in some parts of
the country), this counting and stringing of the money takes a great deal
of time, and is very tiresome work when done by the quantity--though this
remark is applicable to most Chinese occupations viewed from an Occidental
point of view.
[Illustration: STRINGS OF CHINESE CASH.]
[Illustration: PREPARING THE STRINGS.]
The employee of the "tsa-huo-p'u" gets his meals when he can, which is
after he has finished everything which his employer wants him to do. It is
necessary for him to be a rare hand if he is to be so useful that he will
not be sent away if business is slack when the year closes, or if the
proprietor gets better service from some one else. The supply of labour of
every description, is so excessive, that it is very hard to get a place,
and harder still to keep it.
A country villager with whom the writer is well acquainted had too little
land to support his family, so he accepted the offer of a neighbour to
help him with the business which he had lately undertaken. This consisted
of sending four wheel-barrows daily to different villages to sell meat at
the markets. The men who did this had to rise long before daylight in
order to get the meat ready, that is to cut it from the bones, which are
disposed of at a separate rate. The weight of meat on each barrow had to
be entered and also the weight of the bones. On the return of the barrows
at night it was necessary to weigh what was left from the sales and
compare it with the returns of cash. This must be gone through with for
each barrow. The assistant to the meat-dealer had to keep in all _fourteen
different account books_. "But," we said to him, "after the barrows are
gone, and before they come back, there must be a little interval of
comparative peace in which you can do what you like?" "Alas, no," was the
reply, "it takes all of that time to balance up the fourteen entries of
the day before;" and judging from what one knows of Chinese bookkeeping
the time allowed would not be at all too much. Entries in Chinese
account-books are not set down in columns, so as to be conveniently added,
but strung along a page like stockings on a clothes-line. Each entry must
be treated by itself on the _suan-pan_ or reckoning-board, and there is no
check against errors. Our informant was so tired of his contract that he
seized the occasion of a funeral in a family with which he was connected,
and which he was in theory bound to attend, to break away and make a brief
call on the foreign friend who had generally been able to sympathize with
certain of his previous woes.
A year later the writer met him again, ascertained that he had abandoned
the intricate bookkeeping which selling meat appeared to involve, for
another kind of account-keeping in a well-to-do family, where there is a
good deal of land and much resulting activity. He was asked if he had any
time to read his book--of which he seemed to be fond--and he replied with
a decisive negative. Not if he got up early? No, indeed, he had to begin
work the minute he was dressed. Not if he went to bed a little later?
Certainly not; he had to go to bed late as it was--no time then. But he
might at least snatch a little leisure while he was eating. "Far from it,"
was the response, "the woman who is at the head of affairs takes that
opportunity to consult about the work."
In the case of firms having any considerable business, after the day's
work is all over, the clerks are liable to be required to spend the
evening in untying all the numerous strings of cash that have come in,
with a view to the discovery of any rare coins that might be sold at a
special price. All is fish that comes to a Chinese net, and sooner or
later there is very little that does not find its way there to the profit
of its owner. If the time should ever come, as come it may, when the
far-distant West comes into close and practical competition with the
patient Chinese for the right to exist, one or the other will be
behind-hand in the race and it is safe to venture the prediction that it
will _not_ be the Chinese!
The village shop keeps different kinds of weighing poles for buying and
for selling, works off all its uncurrent cash and bad bills on any one
upon whom it can impose, and generally drives a hard bargain with those
who deal with it, who retaliate in kind as opportunity offers. But as
elsewhere in this mixed world, much depends upon the individuality of its
head manager.
VIII
THE VILLAGE THEATRE
That the Chinese are extravagantly fond of theatrical representations, is
well known to all who live in China. The Chinese trace the origin of the
stage to the times of the Emperor Ming Huang, of the T'ang Dynasty (died
762) who, under an alias, is supposed to be worshipped as the god of
play-actors. It is a popular saying that if the players neglect to do
homage to this patron, they will altogether fail in their representations,
whatever these may be.
With the history of the Chinese stage, we have in this connection no
concern. According to the Chinese themselves, it has degenerated from its
ancient function of a censor in morals, and has become merely a device for
the amusement of the people. It is a remarkable circumstance that while
the Chinese as a people are extravagantly fond of theatrical exhibitions
of all sorts, the profession of play-actor is one of the few which debars
from the privileges of the literary examinations. The reason for this
anomaly is said to be the degradation of the theatre by pandering to
vitiated or even licentious tastes. To what extent the plays ordinarily
acted are of this sort, it is impossible for a foreigner to decide. The
truth seems to be that the general (theoretical) contempt for the stage
and its actors in China, is a product of the moral teachings of
Confucianism, which uncompromisingly condemn the perversion of the right
uses of dramatic representation. But while this (theoretical) view is the
one which is constantly met, it is like many other Confucian doctrines,
chiefly remarkable for the unanimity with which it is disregarded in
practice.
In what we have to say of Chinese theatres, we must disclaim any
knowledge of them at first hand, that is to say, by listening to acted
plays. There are several obstacles to the acquisition of such knowledge by
this method, even were other difficulties lacking. Most Chinese plays are
laid out upon so extravagant a scale, as regards time, that they may be
spread over many hours, or possibly several days. The most indefatigable
European could not listen to the entire performance of any one of them,
without becoming utterly exhausted. The dialect in which the actors speak
is so different from the spoken language, that it is hard to form an idea
of what they are saying. The tone adopted is that shrill falsetto, which
is not only fatiguing to an Occidental hearer, but almost of necessity
unintelligible.
When to these embarrassments are added the excruciating music, the
discomfort attending the dense crowds, and the universal confusion which
is an invariable concomitant of a Chinese theatre, it is not strange that
these representations have for Westerners very few attractions, after the
first glance has satisfied curiosity. This indifference on our part is
almost unintelligible to the Chinese. That a foreign traveller, who is
told of a theatre in full blast at the town at which he expects to spend
the night, should feel no joy, but should deliberately push on so as to
avoid spending the night at that place--this is to the Chinese profoundly
incomprehensible.
Except in a few large cities, the Chinese have no theatres in our sense of
the term, provided with seats and enclosed by walls and roof. The stage is
a very simple affair, and is entirely open to inspection. Sometimes it is
built like a temple with an open front. But by far the larger part of the
rural representations of theatrical companies take place on a temporary
scaffolding which is put up for the purpose the night before the plays
begin, and is taken down the moment the last play closes. The players
resemble their ancient Grecian prototypes in that they are a migratory
band, going wherever they are able to find an engagement.
The stage equipments, like the stage itself, are of the simplest order,
the spectator being required to supply by his imagination most of those
adjuncts in the way of scenery, which in our days, are carried to such
perfection in the theatres of the West. There is no division of a play
into separate acts or scenes, and what cannot be inferred from the dress,
or the pantomime of the actors, they must expressly tell to the audience,
as for example who they are, what they have been doing, and the like. The
orchestra is an indispensable accompaniment of a theatrical
representation, and not only bursts into every interval of the acting, but
also clangs with ferocity at such stirring scenes as a battle attack, or
to add energy to any ordinary event.
Apropos of this resemblance between the Greek stage and the Chinese, which
must have struck many observers, Mr. H. E. Krehbiel (in an article
published in the _Century_ for January, 1891) has declared that "the
Chinese drama is to-day in principle a lyric drama, as much so as the
Greek tragedy was. The moments of intense feeling are accentuated, not
merely by accompanying music, as in our melodrama, but by the actor
breaking out into song. The crudeness and impotency of the song in our
ears has nothing to do with the argument. It is a matter of heredity in
taste."
The village theatrical company owes its existence to some rich man, who
selects this as a form of investment. As all the available land in the
greater portion of China is wholly out of the market, it is not easy for
one who has more money than he can conveniently use to decide what to do
with it. If he should go into the theatrical business, it is not
necessarily with the expectation that the money will yield him a large
return, but in order to provide a popular amusement for a great number of
people, and at the same time receive a larger or smaller interest on the
amount invested.
The person whose capital is used in the costumes, which are the main part
of the outfit of a Chinese theatre, is called the "Master of the chest."
The whole outfit may be leased of him by an association of persons, who
pay a fixed sum for the use of the costumes, which must be kept in good
condition. In a first-class theatre, these costumes are very costly, and
include what are called "dragon robes," and "python robes," each with
double sets of inner garments, of fine quality, and handsomely
embroidered. Of these there are at least two suits, five suits of armour,
and numberless other articles of clothing, such as trousers, skirts,
boots, buskins, etc. Another "chest" contains the accoutrements of the
players, as swords, spears, and the like, made of gilded wood.
The value of all these various equipments, in a well-furnished theatre, is
said to be fully $5,000, and in those of the cheaper sorts, two-thirds or
half as much. Each of the three "chests" in which the stage accoutrements
are stored, is in charge of three men, who are responsible for the
security and the care of the contents of the cases.
The players are divided into classes which are called by different names,
the members of each class receiving pay according to the dignity of their
position. There are, for example, two individuals, one civil and one
military, who represent high-class historical characters, like Chiang
T'ai-kung, etc. These actors are called _lao-shAȘng_. Another class styled
_hu-shAȘng_, represent personages like WAȘn Wang, or Chao K'uang-yin. A
third class are assigned to characters like LA1/4 Pu, etc., and these players
are called _hsiao-shAȘng_. In addition to these are persons of less
importance, who represent ladies, officials' wives, young girls, or
others. After these come what may be called clowns, who are termed
"flowery-faced," (_hua-lien_) subdivided into first, second and third.
These represent the bad characters, such as Chou Wang, Ts'ao Ts'ao, and
the like, down to the lowest class who take the most despised and hateful
parts of all. In addition to these main characters, there is a
considerable force detailed as soldiers, servants, messengers, or to
personify boatmen, innkeepers, and the like. The rear is brought up with
a large staff of cooks, water-carriers, etc., whose duty it is to provide
for the material comfort of the players in their vagrant life.
Aside from the regular theatrical companies one frequently meets with
companies of amateurs who have inherited the art of giving performances on
a small scale called "a little theatre." They are young farmers who
delight in the change and excitement of stage life, and who after the
crops are harvested are open to engagements until the spring work begins.
There may be only fifteen or twenty in the band, but the terms are low,
and the food furnished them much better than they would have had at home,
and when the season is over they may be able to divide a snug little sum
to each performer.
The manager, or lessee of the theatrical equipment, is called a
_chang-pan_, and engages the players for a term of about ten months,
beginning early in the spring, and ending before the close of the year.
The whole company may number between fifty and a hundred men, and the best
actors may be engaged for sums ranging from the equivalent of a hundred
dollars for the most skilled, down to a few tens of dollars for the
inferior actors, their food in each case being furnished. It is thus easy
to see that the expense of maintaining a theatre is a vast drain upon the
resources of the lessee, and presupposes a constant succession of
profitable engagements, which is a presupposition not infrequently at a
great remove from the facts of experience.
The lessee of the theatre supplies himself with the material for the
development of actors, by taking children on contract, or apprenticeship,
for a fixed period (often three years) according to a written agreement.
At the end of their apprenticeship, these pupils are at liberty to engage
in any company which they may elect, for whatever they can get, but during
their term of indenture, their time belongs to the man who has leased them
of their parents. The motive for such a contract on the part of the
parents, is to secure a support for the children. Sometimes children run
away from home and make engagements on their own account, attracted by the
supposed freedom of the player's life.
The amount which each child receives during the time of his
apprenticeship, is the merest pittance, and it is said that in three
months at most he can learn all that it is necessary for him to know. A
large part of his duties will be to strut about on the stage, and mouth
more or less unintelligible sentences in a grandiloquent tone. If the
number of plays in which he appears is large, the tax upon the memory may
be considerable, but Chinese children can learn by rote with amazing
facility, and constant practice must in a short time fix in his memory
everything which the young actor requires to remember.
From an Occidental point of view, it would be hard to imagine anything
more remote from a life of pleasure, than the constant locomotion, routine
drudgery, uncertain and inadequate remuneration of the average Chinese
actor. We have never met one who did not admit that it was a bad life. A
leading Japanese actor is quoted as saying that the popular notions in
regard to the theatre of that country--which is probably in many respects
analogous to that of China--are as different from the reality, as clouds
from mud. "The hardships endured are as the suffering of Hades, and the
world is not benefited a fraction by the actors' exertion, so they are not
useful to society. It is a life to fear and to dread." There are probably
very few Chinese actors who have progressed so far as to entertain, even
for a moment, the thought whether their work is a good or an evil to
"society."
It is not uncommon to hear of an exceptionally intelligent District
Magistrate who issues proclamations strictly forbidding theatrical
performances within his jurisdiction, exhorting the people to save their
funds to buy grain and relieve the poor, or to set up public schools. But
the only way to enforce these sensible orders of an unusually paternal
official, is for him to make constant personal inspection, and see that
his commands are heeded. Otherwise, a sum of money judiciously spent at
the _yamAȘn_, will buy complete immunity from punishment. Free schools and
charity are too tame for the taste of the people, who demand something
"hot-and-bustling," which a theatrical performance most decidedly is.
It is one of the contradictions which abound in the Chinese social life,
that while play-actors are theoretically held in very light esteem, the
representation of a play is considered as a great honour to the person on
whose behalf it is furnished. Instances have occurred in China, in which
such a representation has been offered by the Chinese to foreigners, as an
expression of gratitude for help received in time of famine. The motives
in such cases, however were probably very mixed, being composed largely of
a desire on the part of the proposers to gratify their own tastes, while
at the same time paying off in a public manner a technical debt of
gratitude.
To suggest under such circumstances that the money which would have been
absorbed in the expenses of the theatre, should rather be appropriated to
the purposes of some public benefit, such as a free-school, would not
commend itself to one Chinese in a thousand. Only a limited number of
scholars could receive the benefit of a free-school, whereas a theatre is
emphatically for everybody. Moreover, a theatre is demonstrative and
obtrusively thrusts itself upon the attention of the general public in a
manner which to the Oriental is exceedingly precious, while to set up a
free-school would be "to wear a fine garment in the dark," when no one
would know the difference.
The occasion for the performance of a play is sometimes a vow, which may
have been made by an individual in time of sickness, the theatricals to be
the expression of gratitude for recovery. In the case of an entire
village, it is often the returning of thanks to some divinity for a good
harvest, or for a timely rain. A quarrel between individuals is frequently
composed by the adjudication of "peace-talkers" that one of the parties
shall give a theatrical exhibition by way of a fine, in the benefits of
which the whole community may thus partake. In view of the well-known
propensities of the Chinese, it is not strange that this method of
adjusting disputes is very popular. We have known it to be adopted by a
District Magistrate in settling a lawsuit between two villages, and such
cases are probably not uncommon.
Sometimes there is no better reason for holding a theatre than that a sum
of public money has accumulated, which there is no other way to spend. A
foreigner could easily propose fifty purposes to which the funds could be
appropriated to much better advantage, but to the Chinese these
suggestions always appear untimely, not to say preposterous.
When it has been determined to engage a theatre, the first step is to draw
up a written agreement with the manager, specifying the price. This will
vary from a sum equivalent to twenty-five dollars, up to several hundred
dollars. The former amount is, indeed, a bottom price, and would be
offered only to a very inferior company, which might be forced to accept
it, or even a less sum, as better in a slack season than no engagement at
all. During the time of the year, on the contrary, in which the demand for
theatricals is at the maximum, a company may have offers from several
villages at once. Rather than lose the double profit to be made, the
troupe is often divided, and a number of amateurs engaged to take the
vacant places, thus enabling the company to be in two places at the same
date.
It is a common proverb that the country villager who witnesses a theatre,
sees only a great hubbub, a generalisation strictly within the truth. It
is upon this ignorance of the villager that the theatrical manager
presumes when he furnishes an inferior representation, instead of the one
for which his contract calls. But if the villager ascertains the fraud,
consisting either in deficiency of players or inferior acting, he rises in
democratic majesty, and "fines" the company an extra day or two, or even
three days, of playing as a penalty, and from this decision it would be
vain to appeal.
The individual who communicates with the village which hires the
theatrical company, and who receives the money, is called the program
bearer ("_pao-tan ti_"). The scorn in which theatrical folk are supposed
to be held, appears to be reserved for this one individual alone. He makes
arrangements for the conveyance of all the trunks containing the equipment
from the previous place of playing, to the next one, and especially for
the transportation of the staging.
In inland regions, where it is necessary to use animals, it requires a
great many carts to move about so much lumber, which must be done with
great expedition in order not to waste a day, at a time when engagements
are numerous; and, even to a Chinese, time is precious, because the food
and pay of so many persons have to be taken into the account. The carts
for this hauling are provided by the village which is to enjoy the
exhibition, being often selected by lot. Sometimes, however, a small tax
is levied on all the land in the village, and the carts are hired.
The day previous to a theatre in any village is a busy one. Great
quantities of mats are provided, and in a short time some barren spot on
the outskirts of the hamlet begins to assume the appearance of an
impromptu settlement; for aside from the theatre itself, great numbers of
small mat-sheds are put up to be used for cook-shops, tea-shops,
gambling-booths, and the like. During the day, even if the village is but
a small one, the appearance is that of the scene of a very large fair.
In the larger towns, where fairs are held at more or less regular
intervals, it is usual, as already mentioned, to begin them with a
theatrical exhibition, on the first day of which hardly any business will
be done, the attendants being mainly occupied in gazing at or listening to
the play. In such cases the attendants can frequently be safely estimated
at more than 10,000 persons. In large fairs there is generally a
performance every day as long as the fair holds, an arrangement which is
found to be very remunerative from a financial point of view in attracting
attendance, and therefore customers.
From a social point of view, the most interesting aspect of Chinese
village theatricals is the impression which is produced upon the people as
a whole. This impression may be feebly likened to that which is made upon
children in Western lands, by the immediate imminence of Christmas, or in
the United States by the advent of a Fourth of July. To theatrical
holidays in China every other mundane interest must give way.
As soon as it is certain that a particular village is to have a theatre,
the whole surrounding country is thrown into a quiver of excitement.
Visits by young married women to their mothers' homes, always occasions to
both mothers and daughters of special importance, are for a long time
beforehand arranged with sole reference to the coming great event. All the
schools in all the neighbouring villages expect at such times a holiday
during the whole continuance of the theatricals. Should the teacher be so
obstinate as to refuse it (which would never be the case, as he himself
wishes to see the play) that circumstance would make no difference, for he
would find himself wholly deserted by all his pupils.
It is not only brides who take advantage of this occasion to visit their
relatives, but in general it may be said that when a village gives a
theatrical representation, it must count upon being visited, during the
continuance of the same, by every man, woman and child, who is related to
any inhabitant of the village and who can possibly be present. Every
Chinese family has a perfect swarm of relatives of all degrees, and the
time of a theatrical performance is an excellent opportunity to look in
upon one's friends. Whether these friends and relatives have been invited
or not, will make no difference. In the case of ordinary villagers, the
visitors would come even if they knew for certain that they were not
wanted.
It has frequently been remarked that hospitality as such cannot be said
to be a characteristic Chinese virtue, although there is at all times such
a parade of it. But whatever one's feelings may be, it is necessary to
keep up the pretence of overflowing hospitality, so that whoever comes to
the yard must be pressed to stay to a meal and to spend the night, however
anxious the host may be to get rid of him. On ordinary occasions, guests
will not stay without such an amount of urging as may suffice to show that
the invitation is _bonAc fide_, but during the continuance of a theatre it
often makes very little difference how lacking the host may be in
cordiality, the guests will probably decide to stay, as the play _must be
seen_.
It is by no means an uncommon thing to find that in a village which has
engaged a theatrical troupe, every family is overrun with such visitors,
to such a degree that there is not space enough for them to lie down at
night, so that they are forced to spend it in sitting up and talking,
which may be easily conceived to be an excellent preparation for the
fatiguing duties of the morrow. As a theatre seldom lasts less than three
days, and sometimes more than four, it can be imagined what a tax is laid
upon the village which is overrun. When it is considered that every
married woman who returns to her home, as well as every woman who visits
any relative, always brings all of her young children, and that the latter
consider it their privilege to scramble for all that they can get of
whatever is to be had in the way of food, it is obvious that the poor
housekeeper is subjected to a tremendous strain, to which the severest
exigencies of Western life afford very few analogies.
The cost of feeding such an army of visitors is a very serious one, and to
the thrifty Chinese it seems hard that fuel which would ordinarily last
his family for six months, must be burnt up in a week, to "roast" water,
and cook food for people whom he never invited, and most of whom he never
wished to see. It is a moderate estimate that the expense of entertainment
is ten times the cost of the theatre itself, realizing the familiar saying
that it is not the horse which costs but the saddle.
The vast horde of persons who are attracted to the village which has a
theatre, has among its numbers many disreputable characters, against whom
it is necessary for the villagers to be constantly upon their guard. For
this reason, as well as on account of the necessity for being on hand to
look after the swarms of guests, the people of the village have little or
no opportunity to see the play themselves. Guests and thieves occupy all
their time! Eternal vigilance is the price at which one's property is to
be protected, and the more one has to lose, the less he will be able to
enjoy himself, until the danger is over. It is a common observation that,
after a theatrical performance, there is not likely to be a single chicken
left in a village. To prevent them from being stolen by the expert
chicken-thieves, the villagers must dispose of their fowls in advance.
Such being the conditions under which the Chinese village theatre is held,
it is surprising that so great a number of theatrical troupes contrive to
make a living--such as it is--out of so precarious an occupation, which is
likely to fail altogether during years of famine or flood (never few in
number), and also during the whole of each period of imperial mourning,
when actors are often reduced to extreme misery. One reason for their
passionate attachment to the theatre, must be found in the fact that for
the Chinese people there are very few available amusements, and for the
mass of the country people there is literally nothing to which they can
look forward as a public recreation, except a few feast days (often only
two or three in the year), the large fairs with accompanying theatricals,
or theatricals without fairs.
It is evident that a form of exhibition which is so much valued by the
Chinese, may become an important agency in inflaming the minds of the
people. This is at times undoubtedly the case. Many instances have come to
the knowledge of foreigners, in which theatricals representing the
Tientsin massacre or some similar event, have been acted in the interior
of China. In some cases this is doubtless done with the connivance of the
magistrates, and it is easy to see that the effect upon the minds of the
people must be very unfavourable, if it is held to be desirable to
maintain among the Chinese respect for foreigners.
In China, as in other lands, it is easy for theatrical representations to
deal with current events which have a general interest. In a certain case
of warfare involving two different Counties, as to the right to make a
bank to prevent inundation, several lives were lost and a formidable
lawsuit resulted. The occurrences were of such a dramatic character that
they were woven into a play, which was very popular at a little distance
from the scene of the original occurrence.
The representation of historical events, by Chinese theatres, may be said
to be one of the greatest obstacles to the acquisition of historical
knowledge by the people. Few persons read histories, while every one hears
plays, and while the history is forgotten because it is dull, the play is
remembered because it is amusing. Theatricals, it is scarcely necessary to
remark, do not deal with historical events from the standpoint of
accuracy, but from that of adaptation to dramatic effect. The result is
the greatest confusion in the minds of the common people, both as to what
has really happened in the past, and as to when it took place, and for all
practical purposes, fact and fiction are indistinguishable.
Among the most popular Chinese plays, are those which deal with everyday
life, in its practical forms. Cheap and badly printed books, in the forms
of tracts, containing the substance of these plays, are everywhere sold in
great numbers, and aid in familiarizing the people with the plots.
Our notice of the Chinese drama may fitly conclude with a synopsis of one
of these librettos, which contains a play of general celebrity, to which
references are constantly made in popular speech. It is said to have been
composed by a native of Shan-hsi, and is designed as a satire upon the
condition of society in which, as so often in China at the present day,
it is almost impossible for a teacher, theoretically the most honoured of
beings, to keep himself from starvation.
It is a current proverb that in the province of Shan-tung, the number of
those who wish to teach school is in excess of those who can read! The
scene of this play is therefore appropriately laid in the land of the
sages Confucius and Mencius, and in a district within the jurisdiction of
the capital, Chi-nan Fu.
The characters are only two in number, a teacher called Ho Hsien-shAȘng who
is out of employment, and reduced to extreme distress, and a patron named
Li, who wishes to engage a master for his boys, aged nine and eleven. The
teacher's remarks are mixed with extensive quotations from the Classics,
as is the manner of Chinese schoolmasters, who wish to convey an
impression of their great learning. He affirms that his success in
instruction is such that he will guarantee that his pupils shall reach the
first degree of _hsiu-ts'ai_, or Bachelor, in three years, the second of
_chA1/4-jAȘn_, or Master, in six, and attain to the eminence of _chin-shih_,
or Doctor, in twelve.
The teacher begins by a poetical lament that he had lost his place as a
teacher, and that a scholar so situated is far worse off than a
handicraftsman, who, he says, has always enough to eat. After this, the
teacher comes on the stage, crying out like a peddler, "Teach School!
Teach School!" Upon this Li comes forward, suggests that a man who offers
to teach probably knows at least how to read, and explains that he feels
the need of some one in the family who can decipher the tax bills, etc.,
but that he really cannot afford the expense of a teacher for his
children.
He explains that his boys are dull, that the food of the teacher--the bill
of fare of which he details--will be poor and coarse. There will be only
two meals a day, to save expense, and at night there will be no fire. The
coverlet is a torn dogskin, no mat on the bed, only a little straw, and no
pillow. The salary is to be but 8,000 cash a year, but this is subject to
a discount, 800 counting for 1000. The teacher is never to leave the
schoolyard while school is in session.
The school will be held in a temple, hitherto occupied by nuns. These will
be removed to a side room, and the teacher will be required to strike the
bell, sweep out the building, and perform the other necessary services on
the first and fifteenth of each month, and these duties must be executed
with punctilious care. He is also cautioned not to allow his morals to be
contaminated by the nuns whose reputation is so proverbially bad. None of
his salary will be paid in advance, and a _pro rata_ deduction will be
made for every day of absence. During the summer rains the teacher must
carry the children to school upon his back, that they may not spoil their
clothes and make their mother trouble. Whenever school has been dismissed,
the teacher is to carry water, work on the threshing floor, take care of
the children, grind in the mill, and do all and everything which may be
required of him. To all the foregoing conditions, the teacher cheerfully
assents, and declares himself ready to sign an agreement upon these terms
for the period of ten years!
Perhaps the most instructive aspect of Chinese theatricals, is that which
takes account of them as _indices_ to the theory of life which they best
express, a theory in which most Chinese are firm, albeit unconscious,
believers. It is a popular saying that "The whole world is only a
stageplay; why then should men take life as real?" It is in strict
accordance with this view, that the Chinese frequently appear as if
psychologically incapable of discriminating between practical realities
which are known to be such, and theoretical "realities" which, if matters
are pushed to extremities, are admitted to be fictitious.
The spectacular theory of life is never for a moment lost sight of in
China, and it demands a tribute which is freely, unconsciously,
continually, and universally paid. It is upon this theory that a large
proportion of Chinese revelling is based, the real meaning being, "You
have wronged me, but I am not afraid of you, and I call upon all men to
witness that I defy you." It is this theory upon which are grounded
nine-tenths of the acts which the Chinese describe as being done "to save
face," that is, to put the actor right with the spectators, and to prove
to them that he is able to play his part and that he knows well what that
part is. Never, surely, was it more true of any land than of China, that
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players."
IX
VILLAGE SCHOOLS AND TRAVELLING SCHOLARS
The prominent place given to education in China renders the Chinese
village school an object of more than common interest, for it is here that
by far the greater number of the educated men of the empire receive their
first intellectual training. While the schools of one district may be a
little better or worse than those of another, there is probably no country
in the world where there is so much uniformity in the standards of
instruction, and in all its details, as in China.
There are in the Chinese Classics several passages which throw an
interesting light upon the views which have been handed down from
antiquity in regard to the education of children. One of these is found in
the writings of Mencius. Upon one occasion he was asked why the superior
man does not teach his own son. To this Mencius replied that the
circumstances of the case forbid it. The teacher should inculcate what is
correct. When he does so, and his lessons are not practiced, he follows it
up by being angry. Thus he is alienated from his son who complains to
himself that his father teaches one thing and practices another. As a
result the estrangement becomes mutual and deepens. Between father and
son, said Mencius, there should be no reproving admonitions to what is
good, because these lead to such alienations. The ancients, he declared,
exchanged sons, and one taught the son of another.
Another significant passage is found in the Confucian Analects, and is as
follows, quoting, as before, Dr. Legge's translation, "Ch'AȘn K'ang asked
Po YA1/4, the son of Confucius, saying, 'Have you heard any lessons from your
father, different from what we have all heard?' Po YA1/4 replied, 'No; he
was once standing alone when I hurriedly passed below the hall, and he
said to me, "Have you learned the Odes?" on my replying, "not yet," he
added, "If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to converse
with." I retired and studied the Odes. Another day he was in the same way
standing alone, when I hastily passed below the hall, and he said to me,
"Have you learned the Rules of Propriety?" on my replying, "not yet," he
added, "If you do not learn the Rules of Propriety, your character cannot
be established." I then retired and studied the Rules of Propriety. I have
heard only these two things from him.' Ch'AȘn K'ang retired, delighted,
saying, 'I asked about one thing, and I have got three things. I have
heard about the Odes, I have heard about the Rules of Propriety, and I
have heard that the superior man maintains a distant reserve toward his
son.'"
Confucius was a master who felt himself to be in possession of great
truths of which his age was in deep need, and he offered his instructions
to rich and poor alike, upon the sole condition of receptivity. "I do not
open up the truth," he said, "to one who is not eager to get knowledge,
nor help out any one who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have
presented one corner of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it learn
the other three, I do not repeat the lesson." For aught that appears, the
son of Confucius was wholly dependent for whatever he knew or received,
upon his father. According to Confucius, an acquaintance with the Odes,
and with the Rules of Propriety, form a very considerable part of the
equipment of a scholar. They embrace such subjects as could be
comprehended and assimilated, one would suppose, only by the assistance of
a competent teacher. That in the education of his own son, Confucius
should have contented himself with a casual question, and a single hint,
as to the pursuit of those branches which were in his eyes of preA"minent
importance, is a circumstance so singular that if it were not handed down
upon the same authority as the other facts in the life of the sage, we
might be disposed to doubt its credibility.
The theory upon which the master acted is happily epitomized by Ch'AȘn
K'ang--"distant reserve." Even to his own son the superior man is a higher
grade of being, whose slightest word contains fruitful seeds of
instruction. He expects his pupil to act upon a hint as if it were the
formal announcement of a law of nature. He is the sun around whom his
planets revolve, in orbits proportioned to the force of the central
attraction--an attraction which varies with the capacity to be attracted.
Yet in every case there is a point beyond which no pupil can go, he must
not come too near his sun.
According to Occidental thought, the ideal of teaching is exemplified in
the methods of such educators as Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, whose stimulating
influence was felt over an entire generation. Upon the plan of Confucius
it is difficult to see, not how he could have won the love of his
pupils--which was probably remote from his thought and from theirs--but
how he could have permanently impressed himself upon any except the very
apt. Few are the pupils, we may be sure, who after a chance question and a
remark will retire and study unaided a branch of learning which, they are
told, will enable them to converse, or to "establish" their characters.
Contrast with this method of Confucius that of James Mill, as detailed in
the autobiography of his son, John Stuart Mill. Here was a father, not a
professional philosopher, but a man of business, who amid the composition
of historical and other works, found time to superintend the education of
his son from the days of earliest infancy until mature manhood, not in the
ancient language only, but in history, philosophy, political economy,
composition, and even in elocution, and all with comprehensiveness of
plan, a labourious and unwearying persistence in teaching principles and
not rules, combined with scrupulous fidelity in minutest details. By this
patient assiduity and his father's skillful direction, Mill was given a
start over his contemporaries, as he himself remarks, of at least a
quarter of a century, and became one of the most remarkably educated men
of whom we have any record. One could wish that to his "imaginary
conversations of literary men and statesmen," Walter Savage Landor had
added a chapter giving a dialogue between Confucius and James Mill, "on
distant reserve as a factor in the education of sons."
It is far from being the fact that every Chinese village has its school,
but it is doubtless true that every village would like to have one, for
there is everywhere the most profound reverence for "instruction." The
reasons given for the absence of a school are always that the village is
too poor, or too small, or both.
In China every educated man is a potential schoolmaster, and most of those
who have the opportunity to do so take a school. It is one of the
allegorical sayings of the flowery land that "in the ink-slab fields there
are no bad crops," which signifies that literature is a vocation standing
upon a firmer basis than any other. This is the theory. As a matter of
fact the Chinese teacher is often barely able to keep soul and body
together, and is frequently obliged to borrow garments in which to appear
before his patrons. His learning may have fitted him to teach a school, or
it may not. It has completely unfitted him to do anything else. It is
therefore a period of great anxiety to the would-be pedagogue when the
school cards are in preparation.
"When the ground is clean, and the threshing-floor bare,
The teacher's heart is filled with care,"
says the proverb, and another adage is current, to the effect that if one
has a few bags of grain on hand, he is not obliged to be king over
children.
To the enormous oversupply of school-teachers, it is due that one of the
most honourable of callings is at the same time one of the most ill-paid.
Teachers of real ability, or who have in some way secured a great
reputation, are able to command salaries in proportion; but the country
schoolmaster, who can compete for a situation within a very small area
only, is often remunerated with but a mere pittance--an allowance of grain
supposed to be adequate for his food, a supply of dried stalks for fuel,
and a sum in money, frequently not exceeding ten Mexican dollars for the
year. It is not very uncommon to meet teachers who have but one or two
pupils, and who receive for their services little or nothing more than
their food. To the natural inquiry whether it was worth his while to teach
for such a slender compensation, a schoolmaster of this class replied,
that it was better than staying at home with nothing to eat. It is a
current saying that the rich never teach school, and the poor never attend
one--though to this there are exceptions. It is a strange fact that one
occasionally meets schoolmasters who have never studied anything beyond
the Four Books, and who therefore know nothing of the Five Classics, an
outfit comparable to that of a Western teacher who should only have
perused his arithmetic as far as simple division!
The proposition to have a school is made by the parents of the children,
and when it is ascertained that a sufficient number of names can be
secured, these are entered on a red card, called a school list
(_kuan-tan_). This is generally prepared by the time of the winter
solstice (December 21st), though sometimes the matter is left in abeyance
until the very end of the year, some six weeks later. On the other hand,
in some regions, it is customary to have the school card ready by the 15th
of the eighth moon, some time in August or September. The choice of a
teacher, like many other things Chinese, is very much a matter of chance.
It seems to be rather uncommon that a scholar should teach in his own
village, though this does often happen. The reason generally given for
this is that it is inconvenient for the pupils to be too near an
ex-preceptor who may make demands upon them in later years. Sometimes the
same teacher is engaged for a long series of years, while in other places
there is an annual change.
Once the pupil's name has been regularly entered upon the school list, he
must pay the tuition agreed upon, whether he ever attends the school or
not, no matter what the reason for his absence.
Should serious illness prevent the teacher from beginning his duties at
all, the engagement is cancelled; but if he enters upon them, and is then
disabled, the full tuition is exacted from every scholar, just as if the
engagement had been completed.
The wish of the school patron is to get as much work as he can out of the
teacher for the money paid him. The endeavour of the teacher is to get as
much money as he can, and to do as little work as he must. For this reason
he is always glad to have the names added after the school list has been
made out, because that will increase his receipts. The patrons frequently
object to this, because they think their own children will be neglected,
and unless all the patrons consent the addition cannot be made. They also
dislike to have the teacher bring a son or a nephew with him, lest the
slender salary should be insufficient for the food of both. In that event
the master might abandon the school before the year is over, as sometimes
occurs, but such teachers find it difficult to secure another school the
following year.
The schoolhouse is an unoccupied room in a private house, an ancestral, or
other temple, or any other available place borrowed for the purpose.
Renting a place for a school seems to be almost or quite unknown. The
teacher does his own cooking, or if he is unequal to this task, he is
assisted by one of his pupils, perhaps his own son, whom he often brings
with him, albeit, as already mentioned, there is classical authority
against having a son taught by a father.
The furniture required for each pupil is provided by his parents, and
consists simply of a table and a stool or bench. The four "precious
articles" required in literature are the ink-slab with a little well to
hold the water required to rub up the ink, the ink-cake, the brush for
writing, and paper.
The Chinese school year is coincident with the calendar year, though the
school does not begin until after the middle of the first moon, some time
in February. There is a vacation at the wheat harvest in June, and another
and longer one at the autumnal harvest in September and October. The
school is furthermore dismissed ten or twenty days before the new year.
Should the master not have been reA"ngaged he is likely to do very little
teaching during the last moon of the year, as he is much more interested
in arranging for the future than in piecing out the almost dead present.
The attendance of the scholars, too, is in any case irregular and
capricious, amply justifying the saying:
"Once entered at the twelfth month's door,
The teacher rules his boys no more."
Chinese education is based upon the wisdom of the ancients, and of those
ancients Confucius is held to be the chief. It is natural, therefore, that
upon the beginning of a school there should be special respect paid to the
Great Sage who is regarded as the patron of learning. Usages vary so much
that no generalizations are ever safe in China, but it is a singular fact
that instead of the altar, incense, candles, and formal prayers to
Confucius, which in some parts of the empire are in use at the beginning
of a year's school, in the province of Confucius himself the ceremonies
are for the most part much simpler. At the feast to the teacher by the
patrons, the scholars are introduced and make two obeisances, one meant
for Confucius, and the other for the present preceptor. In this case there
is not only no image of the Sage, but no written character to represent
him. And even this modest ceremony is far from universal. A teacher of
twenty-five or thirty years' experience declared that he had never seen
this performed but once.
[Illustration: THRESHING.]
[Illustration: AN AFTERNOON SIESTA.]
The scholars in a Chinese school are expected to be on hand at an early
hour, and by sunrise they are, perhaps, howling vigourously away. When it
is time for the morning meal they return to their homes, and as soon as it
is finished, again return. About noon they are released for dinner, after
which they go back as before to school. If the weather is hot, every one
else--men, women, and children--is indulging in the afternoon siesta, but
the scholars are in their places as usual, although they may be suffered
to doze at their desks as well as they can, for half the rest of the day.
In this way the discipline of the school is supposed to be maintained, and
some allowance made at the same time for poor human nature. Were they
allowed to take a regular nap at home, the teacher fears with excellent
reason that he would see no more of them for the day.
If Chinese pupils are to be pitied in the dog-days, the same is even more
true of the dead of winter, when the thermometer hovers between the
freezing-point and zero. The village school will very likely have either
no fire at all, or only such as is made by a pile of kindling or a bundle
of stalks lit on the earth floor, modifying the temperature but for a few
moments, and filling the room with acrid smoke for an hour. Even should
there be a little brazier with a rudimentary charcoal fire, it is next to
useless, and is mainly for the behoof of the master. The pupils will be
found (if they can afford such luxuries) enveloped in long winter hoods,
sitting all day in a state of semi-congelation.
They generally do not leave the schoolhouse until it is too dark to
distinguish one character from another. When at length the scholars are
released, it is not for a healthful walk, much less for a romp, but to
return to their homes in an orderly and becoming manner, like so many
grown Confucianists. In some schools the scholars are expected to come
back in the evening to their tasks, as if the long and wearisome day were
not sufficient for them, and this is, perhaps, universally the case in the
advanced schools where composition is studied.
According to the Chinese theory, the employment of teacher is the most
honourable possible. Confucius and Mencius, the great sages of antiquity,
were only teachers. To invite a teacher, is compared to the investiture of
a general by the emperor with supreme command. In consequence of this
theory, springing directly from the exalted respect for learning
entertained by the Chinese, a master is allowed almost unlimited control.
According to a current proverb, the relation of teacher and pupil
resembles that of father and son, but the simile of a general would be a
more correct expression of a teacher's powers. He is able to declare a
sort of martial law, and to punish with the greatest rigour.
One of the earliest lines in the Trimetrical Classic declares that "to
rear without instruction, is a father's fault"; "to teach without
severity, shows a teacher's indolence." It is common for boys to run away,
sometimes to great distances, because they have been punished at school.
The writer was told by a man in middle life that when he was a lad he had
been beaten by a preceptor of the same surname, because that teacher had
himself been beaten as a child by the pupil's grandfather, the grudge
being thus carried on to the third generation! The ferule always lies upon
the teacher's desk, and serves also as a tally. Whenever a scholar goes
out, he takes this with him, and is supposed to be influenced by the
legend upon one side, "go out reverentially," and upon the other, "enter
respectfully." Two pupils are not allowed to go out at the same time.
The most flagrant offence which a pupil can commit is the persistent
failure to learn his task within the allotted time. For this misdemeanour
he is constantly punished, and often to the extent of hundreds of blows.
Considering how little correction is ever administered to Chinese children
at home, and how slight are the attempts at anything resembling family
government, it is surprising to what extreme lengths teachers are allowed
to carry discipline. Bad scholars, and stupid ones--for a stupid scholar
is always considered as a bad one--are not infrequently punished every
day, and are sometimes covered with the marks of their beatings, to an
extent which suggests rather a runaway slave than a scholar. As the pupil
dodges about, with the hope of escaping some of the blows, he is not
unlikely to receive them upon his head, even if they were not intended for
it. In a case of this sort, a pupil was so much injured as to be thrown
into fits, and such instances can scarcely be uncommon. As a general
thing, no further notice appears to be taken of the matter by the parent
than to see the master and ascertain the special occasion of his severity.
The family of the pupil is naturally anxious that the pupil shall come to
something, and is ready to assume as an axiomatic truth that the only road
to any form of success in life is by the acquisition of an education. This
can be accomplished only by the aid of the teacher, and therefore the
rules laid down by him are to be implicitly followed, at whatever expense
to the feelings of either father or son.
In one case within the writer's knowledge, a father was determined that
his son should obtain sufficient education to fit him to take charge of a
small business. The son, on the other hand, was resolved to return to his
fork and manure basket, and the teacher was invited to further the plans
of the boy's father. When the time came to begin his education at school,
the lad absolutely declined to go, and like most Chinese parents in
similar circumstances, the father was perfectly unable to force him to do
what he did not wish to do. The only available plan was to have the boy
tied hand and foot, placed in a basket slung to a pole, and carried by two
men, like a pig. In this condition he was deposited at the schoolhouse,
where he was chained to two chairs, and not allowed to leave the building.
He was set the usual task in the Trimetrical Classic, to which, however,
he paid no attention whatever, although beaten as often as the teacher
could spare the time. The boy not only did not study, but he employed all
his strength in wailing over his hard lot. This state of things continued
for several days, at the end of which time it was apparent, even to the
boy's father, that, as the proverb says: "You cannot help a dead dog over
a wall;" and the lad was henceforth suffered to betake himself to those
agricultural operations for which alone he was fitted.
Different teachers of course differ greatly in their use of punishment,
but whatever the nature of the severities employed, a genuine Confucianist
would much rather increase the rigour of discipline than relax it. To his
mind the method which he employs appears to be the only one which is
fitted to accomplish the end in view. The course of study, the method of
study, and the capacity of the pupil, are all fixed quantities; the only
variable one is the amount of diligence which the scholar can be persuaded
or driven to put forth. Hence the ideal Chinese teacher is sometimes a
perfect literary Pharaoh.
When the little pupil at the age of perhaps seven or eight takes his seat
in the school for the first time, neither the sound nor the meaning of a
single character is known to him. The teacher reads over the line, and the
lad repeats the sounds, constantly corrected until he can pronounce them
properly. He thus learns to associate a particular sound with a certain
shape. A line or two is assigned to each scholar, and after the
pronunciation of the characters has been ascertained, his "study" consists
in bellowing the words in as high a key as possible. Every Chinese regards
this shouting as an indispensable part of the child's education. If he is
not shouting how can the teacher be sure that he is studying? and as
studying and shouting are the same thing, when he is shouting there is
nothing more to be desired. Moreover, by this means the master, who is
supposed to keep track of the babel of sound, is instantly able to detect
any mispronunciation and correct it in the bud. When the scholar can
repeat the whole of his task without missing a single character, his
lesson is "learned," and he then stands with his back to the teacher--to
make sure that he does not see the book--and recites, or "backs," it at
railway speed.
Every educator is aware of the extreme difficulty of preventing children
from reading the English language with an unnatural tone. To prevent the
formation of a vicious habit of this sort is as difficult as to prevent
the growth of weeds, and to eradicate such habits once formed is often
next to impossible. In the case of Chinese pupils, these vices in their
most extreme form are well-nigh inevitable. The attention of the scholar
is fixed exclusively upon two things,--the repetition of the characters in
the same order as they occur in the book, and the repetition of them at
the highest attainable rate of speed. Sense and expression are not merely
ignored, for the words represent ideas which have never once dawned upon
the Chinese pupil's mind. His sole thought is to make a recitation. If he
is really master of the passage which he recites, he falls at once into a
loud hum, like that of a peg-top or a buzz, like that of a circular saw,
and to extract either from the buzz or from the hum any sound as of human
speech--no matter how familiar the auditor may be with the passage
recited--is extremely difficult and frequently impossible.
But if the passage has been only imperfectly committed, and the pupil is
brought to a standstill for the lack of characters to repeat, he does not
pause to collect his thoughts, for he has no thoughts to collect--has in
fact no thoughts to speak of. What he has, is a dim recollection of
certain sounds, and in order to recall those which he has forgotten, he
keeps on repeating the last word, or phrase, or sentence, or page, until
association regains the missing link. Then he plunges forward again, as
before.
Let us suppose, for example, that the words to be recited are the
following, from the Confucian Analects, relating to the habits of the
master: "He did not partake of wine and dried meat bought in the market.
He was never without ginger when he ate. He did not eat much." The young
scholar, whose acquaintance with this chapter is imperfect, nevertheless
dashes on somewhat as follows: "He did not partake--he did not
partake--partake--partake--partake--partake of wine and dried meat bought
in--bought in--bought in the market--market--the market--the market. He
was never without ginger--when--ginger--when-ginger--when he ate-he ate-he
ate-he-ate-ate-he did not eat-eat-eat-eat-eat without ginger when he
ate-he did not eat-did not eat much."
This is the method of all Chinese instruction. The consequence of so much
roaring on the part of the scholars is that every Chinese school seems to
an inexperienced foreigner like a bedlam. No foreign child could learn,
and no foreign teacher could teach, amid such a babel of sound, in which
it is impossible for the instructor to know whether the pupils are
repeating the sounds which are given to them, or not. As the effect of the
unnatural and irrational strain of such incessant screaming upon their
voices, it is not uncommon to find Chinese scholars who are so hoarse that
they cannot pronounce a loud word.
The first little book which the scholar has put into his hands, is
probably the "Trimetrical Classic," (already mentioned) so called from its
arrangement in double lines of three characters above and three below, to
a total number of more than 1,000. It was composed eight centuries and a
half ago by a preceptor for his private school, and perhaps there are few
compositions which have ever been so thoroughly ground into the memory of
so many millions of the human race as this. Yet of the inconceivable
myriads who have studied it, few have had the smallest idea by whom it has
written, or when. Dr. Williams has called attention to the remarkable fact
that the very opening sentence of this initial text-book in Chinese
education, contains one of the most disputed doctrines in the ancient
heathen world: "Men at their birth, are by nature radically good; in their
natures they approximate, but in practice differ widely." After two lines
showing the modifying effects of instruction, and the importance of
attention, the mother of Mencius is cited as an expert in object lessons
for her famous son. The student is next reminded that "just was the life
of Tou, of Yen; five sons he reared, all famous men."
The author then reverts to his main theme, and devotes several strenuous
sentences to emphasizing the necessity for instruction in youth, "since
gems unwrought can never be useful, and untaught persons will never know
the proprieties." After a further citation of wonderful examples in
Chinese history, accompanied with due moralizing, there follow more than
sixty lines of a characteristically Chinese mosaic. The little pupil is
enlightened on the progressive nature of numbers; the designations of the
heavenly bodies; the "three relations" between prince and minister, father
and son, man and wife; the four seasons; the four directions; the five
elements; the five cardinal virtues; the six kinds of grain; the six
domestic animals; the seven passions; the eight kinds of music; the nine
degrees of relationship and the ten moral duties.
Having swallowed this formidable list of categories, the scholar is
treated to a general summary of the classical books which he is to study
as he advances. When he has mastered all the works adjudged "Classic," he
is told that he must go on to those of philosophers and sages, as in the
bill of particulars contained in the Trimetrical Classic. His special
attention is invited to history, which suggests a catalogue of the
numerous Chinese dynastic periods with the names, or rather the styles, of
a few of the important founders of dynasties. The list is brought down to
the first emperor of the present dynasty, where it abruptly stops at the
year 1644. A pupil who wishes to know the titles of the later emperors of
the Ch'ing Dynasty can be accommodated when the same shall have been
overthrown, and therefore has become a suitable object of historical
study. The pupil is urged to ponder these records of history till he
understands things ancient and modern as if they were before his eyes,
and to make them his morning study and his evening task.
The concluding section contains more of human interest than any of the
preceding parts, since we are told that the great Confucius once learned
something from a mere child; that the ancient students had no books, but
copied their lessons on reeds and slips of bamboo; that to vanquish the
body they hung themselves by the hair from a beam, or drove an awl into
the thigh; that one read by the light of glow-worms, and that another tied
his book to a cow's horn. Among the prodigies of diligence were two, who,
"though girls, were intelligent and well informed." The closing lines
strive to stimulate the ambition of the beginner, not only by the tales of
antiquity, but by the faithfulness of the dog at night, and the diligence
of the silk-worm and the bee. "If men neglect to learn, they are inferior
to insects." But "he who learns in youth, and acts when of mature age,
extends his influence to the prince, benefits the people, makes his name
renowned, renders illustrious his parents, reflects glory upon his
ancestors and enriches his posterity." If every Chinese lad does not
eventually become a prodigy of learning, it is certainly not the fault of
the author of this remarkable compendium, the incalculable influence of
which must be the justification of so extended a synopsis.
Another little book, to which the Chinese pupil is early introduced, is
the list of Chinese surnames, more than 400 in number, and all to be
learned by a dead lift of memory. The characters are arranged in
quartettes, and when a Chinese tells another his own surname, it is common
to repeat all four, whereupon his auditor recalls which of the several
names having the same sound it may be. In some parts of the empire the
"Thousand Character Classic" follows the Trimetrical Classic, while in
other parts its use seems to be quite unknown. It comprises, as the name
implies, a thousand characters, not one of which is repeated. It is common
to use these characters instead of ordinal numbers to designate seats in
the examination halls, so that it is desirable that scholars should be
familiar with the book.
After the scholar has mastered the smaller ones, he passes on to the "Four
Books," the Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the
Mean, and the works of Mencius. The order in which these books are taken
up varies in different places, but, as already observed, the method of
study is as nearly as possible invariable. Book after book is stored away
in the abdomen (in which the intellectual faculties are supposed to be
situated), and if the pupil is furnished with the clew of half a sentence,
he can unravel from memory, as required, yards, rods, furlongs or miles of
learning.
After the Four Books, follow in varying order the Poetical Classic, the
Book of History, the Book of Changes, and the historical work of
Confucius, known as the Spring and Autumn Annals. To commit to memory all
these volumes, must in any case be the labour of many years. Usage varies
in different localities, but it is very common to find scholars who have
memorized the whole of the Four Books, and perhaps two of the later
Classics--the Odes and the History--before they have heard any
explanations even of the Trimetrical Classic, with which their education
began. During all these years, the pupil has been in a condition of mental
daze, which is denoted by a Chinese character, the component parts of
which signify a pig in the weeds (mAȘng). His entrance upon study is called
"lifting the darkness" (ch'i mAȘng), and to teach the beginner is to
"instruct darkness." These expressive phrases correspond to a fixed
reality. Of those who have committed to memory all the books named, some
of the brightest have no doubt picked up here and there, and as it were by
accident, an idea.
Thoughtful Chinese teachers, familiar with the capacity of their pupils,
estimate that the most intelligent among them can not be expected to
understand a hundredth part of what they have memorized. The great
majority of them have about as accurate a conception of the territory
traversed, as a boy might entertain of a mountainous district through
which he had been compelled to run barefooted and blindfolded in a dense
fog, chased for vast distances by a man cracking over his head a long
ox-whip. How very little many scholars do grasp of the real meaning, even
after explanations which the teacher regards as abundantly full, is
demonstrated by a test to which here and there a master subjects his
scholars, that of requiring them to write down a passage. The result is
frequently the notation of so many false characters as to render it
evident, not only that the explanations have not been apprehended, but
that notwithstanding such a multitude of perusals, the text itself has
been taken only into the ear as so many sounds, and has not entered the
mind at all.
The system of explanations adopted by Chinese teachers, as a rule, is
almost the exact opposite of that which, to an Occidental, would seem
rational. "In speech," said Confucius, "one should be intelligible, and
that is the end of it." The Confucian teacher, however, is often very far
indeed from feeling that it is necessary to be intelligible--that is to
say, to make it absolutely certain that his pupils have fully comprehended
his meaning. He is very apt to deliver his explanations--when a sufficient
number of years has elapsed to make it seem worth while to begin them at
all--_ex cathedra_, and in a stately, formal manner, his attention being
much more fixed upon the exhibition of his own skill in displaying his own
knowledge, than upon imparting that knowledge to his scholars. It is
common to hear it said of a teacher who has attained distinction, that
when he opens his mouth to explain the Classics, "every sentence is fit
for an examination essay." This is considered to be the acme of praise.
Sentences which are suited to be constituent parts of examination essays,
are not, it is superfluous to remark, particularly adapted to the
comprehension of young schoolboys, who know nothing about examination
essays, the style of which is utterly beyond their powers.
The commentary upon the Classics written by Chu Hsi, in the twelfth
century, A. D., has come to have an authority second only to that of the
text itself. That no Chinese school-teacher leads his pupils to question
for an instant whether the explanation is accurate and adequate, is a
matter of course. The whole object of a teacher's work is to fit his
pupils to compete at the examinations, and to prepare essays which shall
win the approval of the examiners, thus leading to the rank of literary
graduate. This result would be possible only to those who accept the
orthodox interpretation of the Classics, and hence it is easy to see that
Chinese schools are not likely to become nurseries of heresy. The very
idea of discussing with his pupils either text or commentary, does not so
much as enter the mind of a Chinese schoolmaster. He could not do so if he
would, and he would not if he could.
The task of learning to write Chinese characters is a very serious one, in
comparison with which it is scarcely unfair to characterize the mastery of
the art of writing any European language, as a mere pastime. The correct
notation of characters is, moreover, not less important than the correct
recognition of them, for success in some of the examinations is made to
depend as much upon caligraphy as upon style.
The characters which the teacher selects for the writing exercises of his
pupils, have no relation, strange as it may seem, to anything which he is
studying. These characters may at first be taken from little books of
rhymes arranged for the purpose, containing characters at once simple and
common.
The next step is to change to books containing selections from the T'ang
Dynasty poets, an appreciation of which involves acquaintance with tones
and rhyme, of which the pupil, as yet, knows nothing. The characters which
he now learns to write he has very likely never seen before, and they do
not at all assist his other studies. The only item of which notice is
taken, is whether the characters are well or ill-formed. Review there is
none.
The reason for choosing T'ang Dynasty poetry for writing lessons, instead
of characters or sentences which are a part of the current lesson, is that
it is customary to use the poetry, and is _not_ customary to use anything
else, and that to do so would expose himself to ridicule. Besides this,
poetry makes complete sense by itself (if the pupil could only comprehend
it) while isolated characters do not. The consequence of this method of
instruction is that hundreds of thousands of pupils leave school knowing
very little about characters, and much of what they do know is wrong. The
method of teaching characters explains in part what seems at first almost
unaccountable, that so few ordinary persons know characters accurately. It
is an inevitable incident of the system, that to write some of the
commonest characters, referring to objects used in daily life, is quite
beyond the power of a man who has been for years at school, for he has
never seen them either written or printed. Thus in taking an inventory of
household property, there is not one chance in ten that the characters
will be written correctly, for they do not occur in the Classics, nor in
T'ang Dynasty poetry. Not only so, but it is altogether probable that an
average graduate of the village school cannot indite a common letter, or
set down a page of any miscellaneous characters, without writing something
wrong.
If the teacher is a man of any reputation, he has a multitude of
acquaintances, fellow students, any of whom may happen to call upon him at
the schoolhouse, where he lives. Chinese etiquette requires that certain
attentions should be paid to visitors of this sort, and while it is
perfectly understood that school routine ought not to be broken in upon by
unnecessary interruptions, as a matter of fact in most schools these
interruptions are a serious nuisance, to which the teacher often cannot
and oftener will not put a stop.
The system here described, by which the whole time of the master is
supposed to be devoted to instructing his pupils, makes no allowances for
any absences whatever. Yet there are few human beings blessed with such
perfect health, and having such an entire freedom from all relations to
the external world, as to be able to conduct a school of this kind month
after month, with no interruptions.
It frequently happens that the teacher is himself one of the literary army
who attends the examinations in hope of a degree. If this is the case, his
absences for this purpose will often prove a serious interruption to the
routine of the school. Some patrons appear to consider that this
disadvantage is balanced by the glory which would accrue to their school
in case its master were to take his degree while in their service.
Moreover, aside from the regular vacations at the feast times and
harvests, every teacher is sure to be called home from time to time by
some emergency in his own family, or in his village, or among his numerous
friends. Under these circumstances he provides a substitute if he happens
to find it convenient to do so. Such are nicknamed
"remote-cousin-preceptors" (_su-pai lao-shih_), and are not likely to be
treated with much respect. When the teacher is absent for a day, instead
of dismissing the school, he perhaps leaves it theoretically in the charge
of one of the older scholars. The inevitable consequence is, that at such
times the work of the school is reduced not merely to zero, but to forty
degrees below zero. The scholars simply bar the front door, and amuse
themselves in using the teacher's ferule for a bat, and the Trimetrical
Classic, or the Confucian Analects, for a ball. The demoralization
attending such lawlessness is evidently most injurious to the efficiency
of the school.
The irregularities of the master's attendance are more than matched by
those of his scholars. The pressure of domestic duties is such that many
poorer families on one pretence or another are constantly taking their
children out of school. To-day the pupil must rake up fuel, next week he
must lead the animal that draws the seed drill, a month later he is taken
for two or three days to visit some relatives. Not long after there is in
the village, or perhaps in some neighbouring village, a theatrical
entertainment, but in either case the whole school expects a vacation to
go and see the sport. As already remarked when describing theatricals, if
this vacation were denied they would take it themselves. Besides
interruptions of this sort, there are the spring and autumn harvests, when
the school is dismissed for two months and perhaps for three, and the New
Year vacation, which lasts from the middle of the twelfth moon to the
latter part of the first moon. But, extensive as are these intermissions
of study, the dog-days are not among them, and the poor pupils go droning
on through all the heat of summer.
As the Chinese child has no Saturdays, no Sundays, no recesses, no variety
of study, and no promotion from grade to grade, nor from one school to
another, it is probable that he has enough schooling such as it is. As
every scholar is a class by himself, the absence of one does not interfere
with the study of another. Even if two lads happen to be reciting in the
same place, they have no more connection with each other than any other
two pupils. Of such a thing as classification the teacher has never heard,
and the irregular attendance of the scholars would, he tells you, prevent
it, even were it otherwise possible. Owing to the time required to hear so
many recitations, an ordinary school does not contain more than eight or
ten pupils, and twenty are regarded as beyond one teacher's capacity.
There is very little which is really intellectual in any part of the early
schooling of an ordinary Chinese boy. As a rule, the teacher does not
concern himself with his pupils further than to drag them over a specified
course, or at least to attempt to do so. The parents of the lad are
equally indifferent, or even more so. If the father himself can read, he
remembers that he learned to do so by a long and thorny road, and he
thinks it proper that his son should traverse it likewise. If the father
can not read, he at least recognizes the fact that he knows nothing at all
about the matter, and that it is not _his_ business to interfere. The
teacher is hired to teach--let him do it. As for visiting the school to
see what progress his son is making, he never heard of such a thing, and
he would not do it if he had heard of it. The teacher would say in his
manner if not in his words, "_What business have you here?_"
A sufficient reason for spending all his time in the schoolroom is the
fact that it is practically impossible for a Chinese child to do any
studying amid the distractions of a Chinese household. Even for adult
scholars it is almost always difficult to do so. At his home the pupil has
no mental stimulus of any sort, no books, magazines or papers, and even if
he had them, his barren studies at school would not have fitted him to
comprehend such literature.
The object of Chinese education is to pump up the wisdom of the ancients
into the minds of the moderns. In order to do this, however, it is
necessary to keep the stream in a constant flow, at whatever cost, else
much of the preceding labour is lost. According to Chinese theory, or
practice, a school which should only be in session for six months of the
year, would be a gross absurdity. The moment a child fails to attend
school, he is supposed (and with reason) to become "wild."
The territory to be traversed is so vast that the most unremitting
diligence is absolutely indispensable. This continues true, however
advanced the pupil may be; as witness the popular saying, "Ten years a
graduate (without studying), and one is a nobody." The same saying is
current in regard to the second degree, and with not less reason.
The necessity of confining one's attention to study alone, leads to the
selection of one or more of the sons of a family as the recipient of an
education. The one who is chosen is clothed in the best style which his
family circumstances will allow, his little cue neatly tied with a red
string, and he is provided, as we have seen, with a copy of the Hundred
Surnames and of the Trimetrical Classic. This young Confucianist is the
bud and prototype of the adult scholar. His twin brother, who has not
been chosen to this high calling, roams about the village all summer in
the costume of the garden of Eden, gathering fuel, swimming in the village
mud-hole, busy when he must be busy, idle when he can be idle. He may be
incomparably more useful to his family than the other, but so far as
education goes he is only a "wild" lad.
If the student is quick and bright, and gives good promise of
distinguishing himself, he stands an excellent chance of being spoiled by
thoughtless praises. "That boy," remarks a bystander to a stranger, and in
the lad's hearing, "is only thirteen years old, but he has read all the
Four Books, and all of the Book of Poetry, etc. By the time he is twenty,
he is sure to become a graduate." When questioned as to his attainments,
the lad replies without any of that pertness and forwardness which too
often characterize Western youth, but, as he has been taught to do, in a
bashful and modest manner, and in a way to win at once the good opinion of
the stranger. His manner leaves nothing to be desired, but in reality he
is the victim of the most dangerous of all flatteries, the inferiority of
what is around him. In order to hold his relative position, it is
necessary, as already pointed out, to bestow the most unwearied attention
on his books. His brothers are all day in the fields, or learning a trade,
or are assistants to some one engaged in business, as the case may be, but
_he_ is doing nothing, absolutely and literally nothing, but study.
So much confinement, and such close application from the very earliest
years, can scarcely fail to show their effects in his physical
constitution. His brother hoes the ground, bare-headed throughout the
blistering heats of July, but such exposure to the sun would soon give him
the headache. His brother works with more or less energy all day long
(with intermittent sequence), but were _he_ compelled to do the same the
result would not improbably be that he would soon begin to spit blood.
That he is physically by no means so strong as he once was, is undeniable.
He has very little opportunity to learn anything of practical affairs,
and still less disposition. The fact that a student has no time to devote
to ordinary affairs is not so much the reason of his ignorance, as is the
fact that for him to do common things is not respectable. Among the four
classes of mankind, scholars rank first, farmers, labourers, and merchants
being at a great remove.
The two things that a pupil is sure to learn in a Chinese school are
obedience, and the habit of concentrating his attention upon whatever he
is reading, to the entire disregard of surrounding distractions. So far as
they go these are valuable acquirements, although they can scarcely be
termed an education.
Every pupil is naturally anxious to get into the class of scholars, and
this he does as soon as he gives all his time to study; for whether he is
a real scholar or not, he plainly belongs to neither of the other classes.
We are told in the Confucian Analects that the master said, "The
accomplished scholar is not a utensil." The commentators tell us that this
means that whereas a utensil can only be put to one use, the accomplished
scholar can be used in all varieties of ways, _ad omnia paratus_, as Dr.
Legge paraphrases it. This expression is sometimes quoted in banter, as if
in excuse for the general incapacity of the Chinese literary man--_he_ is
not a utensil. The scholar, even the village scholar, not only does not
plow and reap, but he does not in any way assist those who perform these
necessary acts. He does not harness an animal, nor feed him, nor drive a
cart, nor light a fire, nor bring water--in short, so far as physical
exertion goes, he does as nearly as possible nothing at all. "The scholar
is not a utensil," he seems to be thinking all day long, and every day of
his life, until one wishes that at times he would be a utensil, that he
might sometimes be of use. He will not even move a bench, nor make any
motion that looks like labour. Almost the only exception to this general
incapacity, is an exception for which we should hardly be prepared; it is
a knowledge, in many cases of the art of cooking, in so far as it is
necessary for the practice of the scholar, who often teaches in a village
other than his home, where he generally lives by himself in the
schoolhouse.
We have already alluded to the great oversupply of teachers of schools.
Many of them, owing to their lack of adaptation to their environment, are
chronically on the verge of starvation. It is a venerable maxim that
poverty and pride go side by side, and nowhere does this saying find more
forcible exemplification than in the case of a poor Chinese scholar. He
has nothing, he can do nothing, and in most cases he is unwilling to do
anything. In short, viewed from the standpoint of political economy, he is
good for nothing.
One specimen of this class the writer once saw, who had been set at work
by a benevolent foreigner molding coal balls, an employment which
doubtless appeared to him and to the spectators as the substantial
equivalent of the chain-gang, and yet, to the surprise of his employer, he
accepted it rather than starve. A certain scholar of this description was
so poor that he was obliged to send his family back to her mother's house,
to save them from starvation. The wife, being a skillful needle-woman, was
employed at good wages in a foreign family, but when her husband heard of
it he was very angry, not because he was unwilling to have her associate
with foreigners, who he was kind enough to say were very respectable, but
because it was very unsuitable that she, the wife of a scholar, should
work for hire! The wife had the sense and spirit to reply that, if these
were his views, it might be well for him to provide his family with
something to eat, to which he replied with the characteristic and ultimate
argument for refractory wives, namely, a sound beating!
When one of these helpless and impecunious scholars calls upon a foreigner
whom he has met only once, or perhaps never even seen, he will not
improbably begin by quoting a wilderness of classical learning to display
his great--albeit unrecognized--abilities. He tells you that among the
five relations of prince and minister, husband and wife, father and son,
brother to brother, and friend to friend, his relationship to you is of
the latter type. That it would do violence to his conception of the duties
of this relation, if he did not let you know of his exigencies. He shows
you his thin trousers and other garments concealed under his scholar's
long gown, and frankly volunteers that _any_ contribution, large or small,
prompted by such friendship as ours to him will be most acceptable.
While the conditions of the life of the village scholar are thus
unfavourable for his success in earning a living, they are not more
favourable to his own intellectual development. The chief, if not the
exclusive sources of his mental alimentation have been the Chinese
Classics. These are in many respects remarkable products of the human
mind. Their negative excellencies, in the absence of anything calculated
to corrupt the morals, are great. To the lofty standard of morality which
they fix, may be ascribed in great measure their unbounded and perennial
influence, an influence which has no doubt powerfully tended to the
preservation of the empire. Apart from the incalculable influence which
they have exerted on the countless millions of China for many ages, there
are many passages which in and of themselves are remarkable.
But taken as a whole, the most friendly critic finds it impossible to
avoid the conviction, which forces itself upon him at every page, that
regarded as the sole text-books for a great nation they are fatally
defective. They are too desultory, and too limited in their range.
Epigrammatic moral maxims, scraps of biography, nodules of a sort of
political economy, bits of history, rules of etiquette, and a great
variety of other subjects, are commingled without plan, symmetry, or
progress of thought. The chief defects, as already suggested, are the
triviality of many of the subjects, the limitation in range, and the
inadequacy of treatment. When the Confucian Analects are compared, for
example, with the Memorabilia of Xenephon, when the Doctrine of the Mean
is placed by the side of the writings of Aristotle and Plato, and the
bald notation of the Spring and Autumn Annals by the side of the history
of Thucydides, when the Book of Odes is contrasted with the Iliad, the
Odyssey, or even the Aneid, it is impossible not to marvel at the measure
of success which has attended the use of such materials in China.
Considering what, in spite of their defects, the Classics have done for
China, it is not surprising that they have come to be regarded with a
bibliolatry to which the history of mankind affords few parallels. It is
extremely difficult for us to comprehend the effect of a narrow range of
studies on the mind, because our experience furnishes no instance to which
the case of the Chinese can be compared. Let us for a moment imagine a
Western scholar, who had enjoyed a profound mathematical education, and no
other education whatever. Every one would consider such a mind
ill-balanced. Yet much of the ill effect of such a narrow education would
be counteracted. Mathematical certainty is infallible certainty;
mathematics leads up to astronomy, and a thorough acquaintance with
astronomy is of itself a liberal education. Besides this, no man in
Western lands can fail to come into vital contact with other minds. And
there is what Goethe called the Zeit-geist, or Spirit of the Age, which
exerts a powerful influence upon him. But in China, a man who is educated
in a narrow line, is likely, though by no means certain, to remain narrow,
and there is no Chinese Zeit-geist, or if there is, like other ghosts, it
seldom interposes in human affairs.
The average Chinese scholar is at a great disadvantage in the lack of the
apparatus for study. In a Western land, any man with the slightest claim
to be called a scholar, would be able to answer in a short time, a vast
range of questions, with intelligent accuracy. This he would do, not so
much by means of his own miscellaneous information, as by his books of
reference. The various theories as to the location of the Garden of Eden,
the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, the probable authorship of the
Junius Letters, the highest latitude reached in polar exploration, the
names of the generals who conducted the fourth Peloponnesian war--all
these, and thousands of similar matters, could be at once elucidated by
means of a dictionary of antiquities, a manual of ancient or modern
history, a biographical dictionary, and an encyclopedia. To the ordinary
Chinese scholar, such helps as these are entirely wanting. He owns very
few books; for in the country where printing was invented, books are the
luxury of the rich.
The standard dictionary of Chinese, is that compiled two centuries ago in
the K'ang Hsi period, and is alleged to contain 44,449 characters, but of
these an immense number are obsolete and synonomous, and only serve the
purpose of bewildering the student. Within the past two generations the
Chinese language has undergone a remarkable development, owing to the
contact of China with her neighbours. All the modern sciences have
obtruded themselves, but there is no interest in the coA¶rdination of these
new increments to their language on the part of Chinese scholars, to whom
K'ang Hsi's lexicon is amply sufficient.
In order to attain success in Chinese composition, it is necessary to be
acquainted with the force of every character, as a means to which, access
to this standard dictionary, would seem to be indispensable. Yet, though
invaluable, it is not in the possession of one scholar in fifty. Its place
is generally taken by a small compendium, analogous to what we should call
a pocket-manual, in which the characters are arranged according to the
sound, and not according to the radicals, as in K'ang Hsi.
Pupils are seldom taught the 214 radicals, and many persons who have spent
years at school have no idea how to use K'ang Hsi's dictionary, when it is
put into their hands. Within a circle of eight or ten villages, there may
be only a single copy, and if it is necessary to obtain more accurate
information than is to be had in the pocket-dictionary, the inquirer must
go to the village where there is a copy of K'ang Hsi, and "borrow light"
there.
But such an extreme measure is seldom considered necessary. The incessant
study of the Classics has made all the characters in them familiar. Those
who write essays can compose them with the aid of these characters only,
and as for miscellaneous characters--that is, those not found in the
Classics--why should one care for _them_? A good edition of K'ang Hsi,
with clear type and no false characters, might cost, if new, as much as
the village schoolmaster would receive for his whole year's work.
At examinations below that for the second degree, a knowledge of history
is said to be as superfluous as an acquaintance with the dictionary. Nine
out of ten candidates at the lower examinations know little of the history
of China, except what they have learned from the Trimetrical Classic, or
picked up from the classics. The perusal of compendiums of history, even
if such are available, is the employment of leisure, and the composition
of essays as a business once entered upon, there is no leisure.
One occasionally meets a teacher who has made a specialty of history, but
these men are rare. Historical allusions often lie afloat in the minds of
Chinese scholars, like snatches of poetry, the origin and connection of
which are unknown. Many scholars who have the knack of picking up and
appropriating such spiculA| of knowledge, acquire the art of dextrously
weaving them into examination essays and owe their success to this
circumstance alone, whereas if they were examined upon the historical
connection of the incidents which they have thus cited, they would be
unable to reply. But as long as the use of such allusions in essays is
felicitous, no questions are asked, and the desired end is attained. "The
Cat that catches the Rat is a good Cat," says the adage, and it is no
matter if the Cat is blind, and the Rat is a dead one!
The _Peking Gazette_ occasionally contains memorials from officers asking
that certain sums be set apart for the maintenance of a library in some
central city, to aid poor students in the prosecution of their studies. If
there were libraries on a large scale in every district city, they would
be valuable and much-needed helps. But so far as appears, for all
practical purposes, they scarcely exist at all.
The Chinese method of writing history, is what Sydney Smith called the
antediluvian, that, namely, in which the writer proceeds upon the
hypothesis that the life of the reader is to be as long as that of
Methuselah. Projected upon this tremendous plan, the standard histories
are not only libraries in size, but are enormously expensive in price. In
a certain District (or County) it is a well-known fact that there is only
one such history, which belongs to a wealthy family, and which one could
no more "borrow," than he could borrow the family graveyard, and which
even if it could be borrowed would prove to be a wilderness of learning.
It is indeed a proverb, that "He that would know things ancient and
modern, must peruse five cartloads of books."
But even after this labour, his range of learning, gauged by Occidental
standards, would be found singularly inadequate. According to Chinese
ideas, the history of the reigning dynasty is not a proper object of
knowledge, and histories generally end at the close of the Ming Dynasty,
about 250 years ago. If any one has a curiosity to learn of what has
happened since that time, he can be gratified by waiting a few decades or
centuries, when the dynasty shall have changed, and the records of the
Great Pure Dynasty can be impartially written. Imagine a History of
England which should call a halt at the House of Hanover!
The result of the various causes here indicated, combined with the grave
defects in the system of education, is that multitudes of Chinese scholars
know next to nothing about matters directly in the line of their studies,
and in regard to which we should consider ignorance positively
disgraceful. A venerable teacher remarked to the writer with a charming
naA-vetA(C) that he had never understood the allusions in the Trimetrical
Classic (which stands at the very threshold of Chinese study), until at
the age of sixty he had an opportunity to read a Universal History,
prepared by a missionary, in which for the first time Chinese history was
made accessible to him.
The encyclopedias and works of reference, which the Chinese have compiled
in overwhelming abundance, are as useless to the common scholar as the
hieroglyphics of Egypt. He never saw these works, and he has never heard
of them. The information condensed into a small volume like Mayers'
Chinese Reader's Manual, could not be drawn from a whole platoon of
ordinary scholars. Knowledge of this sort the scholar must pick up as he
goes along, remembering everything that he reads or hears; and much of it
will be derived from cheap little books, badly printed, and full of false
characters, prepared on no assignable plan, and covering no definite
ground.
The cost of Chinese books being practically prohibitory to teachers who
are poor, they are sometimes driven to copy them, as was the habit of the
monks in the middle ages. The writer is well acquainted with a
schoolmaster who spent the spare time of several years in copying a work
in eight octavo volumes, involving the notation of somewhere between
50,000 and 100,000 characters, to the great injury of his health and of
his eyesight.
The whole plan of Chinese study has been aptly called intellectual
infanticide. The outcome of it is that it is quite possible that the
village scholar who has the entire Classics at his tongue's end, who has
been examined before the Literary Chancellor more times than he can
remember, may not know fact from fiction, nor history from mythology. He
is, perhaps, not certain whether a particular historical character lived
in the Han Dynasty or in the Ming Dynasty, though the discrepancy involves
a matter of 1,000 or 1,200 years. He does not profess to be positive
whether a given name represents a real person, or whether it may not
perhaps have been merely one of the dramatis personA| of a theatrical play.
He cannot name the governors or governors-general of three out of the
eighteen provinces, nor does he know the capitals of a third of those
provinces. It is enough for him that any particular place in China, the
location of which he is ignorant of, is "south-side." He never studied any
geography ancient or modern, he never saw an ancient atlas nor a modern
map of China--never in fact heard of one.
An acquaintance of the writer's, who was a pupil in a mission school, sent
to a reading man of his village a copy of a Universal Geography in the
Mandarin Colloquial, the explanations of which would seem to render
mistake as to its purport almost impossible. Yet the recipient of the
work, after protracted study of it, could make nothing whatever of the
volume, and called to his aid two friends, one of whom was a literary
graduate, and all three of them puzzled over the maps and text for three
days, at the end of which time they all gave the matter up as an insoluble
riddle, and determined in despair to await the return of the donor of the
book, to explain what it was about!
This trait of intellectual obtuseness, is far enough from being
exceptional in Chinese scholars. With a certain class of them, a class
easily recognized, it is the rule, and it is a natural outcome of the mode
and process of their education. Although the education of a Chinese
scholar is almost exclusively devoted to acquiring facility of
composition, it is composition of one variety only, the examination essay.
Outside of examination halls, however, the examination essay, even in
China, plays a comparatively small part, and a person whose sole forte is
the production of such essays often shows to very little advantage in any
other line of business. He cannot write a letter without allowing the
"seven empty particles" to tyrannize over his pen. He employs a variety of
set forms, such as that he has received your epistle and respectfully
bathed himself before he ventured to open it (a very exaggerated instance
of hyperbole), but he very likely neglects to inform you from what place
he is writing and if he is reporting, for example, a lawsuit, he probably
omits altogether several items of vital importance to a correct
comprehension of the case. In a majority of instances he is miserably
poor, often has no employment whatever, and no prospect of obtaining any.
If he becomes acquainted with a foreigner, you are aware, before he has
made three calls, that he is in quest of a situation. You inquire what he
can do, and with a pathetic simplicity he assures you that he _can_ do
some things, and is really not a useless person. He can indeed, write from
a copy, or from dictation if an eye be constantly kept upon him to prevent
the notation of wrong characters. But it will not be surprising if his
employer finds that at whatever task he is set, he either does it ill, or
cannot do it at all.
There are several criticisms which the average Occidental is sure to make
on the average Chinese schoolmaster. He always lacks initiative and will
seldom do anything without explicit directions. He is also painfully
deficient in finality, especially in the statement of his own affairs,
often consuming an hour wheeling in concentric circles about a point to
which he should have come in three minutes--that is, had he been
constructed intellectually as most Westerners are. Yet he has undoubted
intellectual abilities, not frequently surprising one by the keenness and
justice of his criticisms and comments. But his mind has been trained for
one line of work, and often for that alone. Every one knows that the minds
of the Chinese are not by nature analytic; neither are they synthetic.
They may suppose themselves to have the clearest perception of the way in
which a statement ought to be made, but a whole platoon of teachers will
not seldom spend several days in working over and over an epitome of some
matter of business which happens to be somewhat complicated, and after all
with results unsatisfactory to themselves, and still more so to the
Occidental who fails to understand why it could not have been finished in
two hours. The same phenomenon is often witnessed in their efforts to
assimilate unfamiliar works which are _not_ geographical. If a reading man
is invited to peruse one and make an abstract of it, he generally
declines, remarking that he does not know how, a proposition which he can
speedily prove with a certainty equal to any demonstration in Euclid.
The inborn conservatism of the Chinese race is exhibited in the average
literary man, whatever the degree of his attainments. To change his
accustomed way of doing anything is to give his intellectual faculties a
wrench akin to physical dislocation of a hip-bone. Chinese writing is in
perpendicular columns, and if horizontal reads from right to left--the
reverse of English. A fossilized Chinese whom the writer set to noting
down sentences in a ruled foreign blank-book could not be induced to
follow the lines as directed, but wished to make columns to which he was
used. When the foreign way was insisted upon, he simply turned the book
partly around and wrote on the lines perpendicularly as before! He would
not be a party to violent rearrangement of the ancient symbols of thought.
Such a man's mind resembles an obsolete high bicycle--very good if one but
knows how to work it, but not quite safe for any others. There is another
similarity likewise in the circumstance that many Chinese who have some
degree of scholarship are not expecting to employ their intellectual
faculties except when they happen to be called for. One is often told by
Chinese who have gone from home for some considerable time, that he cannot
read something which has been offered to him, as he has left his glasses
at home, not supposing that he should have any use for them. A greater
intellectual contrast between the East and the West it might not be easy
to name.
To almost all Chinese the _form_ of a written character appears to be of
indefinitely greater importance than its meaning. Those who are learning
to read, or who can read only imperfectly, are generally so completely
absorbed in the mere enunciation of a character, that they will not and
probably cannot pay the smallest attention to any explanation as to its
purport, the consideration of which appears to be regarded as of no
consequence whatever, if not an interruption. But the scholar and the new
beginner have this admirable talent in common, that they are almost always
able completely to abstract themselves from their surroundings,
disregarding all distractions. This valuable faculty, as already remarked
and a phenomenally developed verbal memory are perhaps the most enviable
results of the educational process which we are describing. As an
excellent example, however, of the degree to which verbal memory
extinguishes the judgment, may be mentioned a country schoolmaster (a
literary graduate) whom the writer interviewed in a dispensary
waiting-room as to the respective deserts of Chou, the tyrant whose crimes
put an end to the Ancient Shang Dynasty, and Pi Kan, a relative whom Chou
ordered disemboweled in mere wantonness in order to see if a Sage really
has seven openings in his heart. The teacher recollected the incident
perfectly, and cited a passage from the Classics referring to it, but
declined to express any judgment on the merits of these men as he had
forgotten what "the small characters" (the commentary) said about them!
We have already adverted to some of the principal defects in the routine
of Chinese schools, but there is another which should not be omitted.
There is scarcely a man, woman or child in China, who will not spend a
considerable fraction of life in handling brass cash, in larger or smaller
quantities. It is a matter of great importance to each individual, to be
able to reckon, if not rapidly, at least correctly, so as to save trouble,
and what is to them of far more importance, money. It seems almost
incredible that for instruction in this most necessary of arts, there is
no provision whatever. To add, to subtract, to divide, to multiply, to
know what to do with decimal fractions, these are daily necessities of
every one in China, and yet these are things that no one teaches. Such
processes, like the art of bookkeeping in Western lands fifty years ago,
must be learned by practical experience in shops and places of business.
The village schoolmaster not only does not teach the use of the abacus, or
reckoning board, but it is by no means certain that he understands it
himself. Imagine a place in England or in the United States where the
schoolboy is taught nothing of the rules of arithmetic at school, and
where he is obliged, if he desires such knowledge, to learn the simple
rules of addition, etc., from one person, those for compound numbers from
another person, not improbably in a distant village, the measurement of
land from yet a third individual, no one of them being able to give him
all the help he requires.
The Chinese reckoning board is no doubt a very ingenious contrivance for
facilitating computation, but it is nevertheless a very clumsy one. It has
the fatal defect of leaving no trace of the processes through which the
results have been reached, so that if any mistake occurs, it is necessary
to repeat them all, on the reiterative principle of the House that Jack
Built, until the answer is, or is supposed to be correct. That all the
complicated accounts of a great commercial people like the Chinese, should
be settled only through such a medium, seems indeed singular. An expert
arrives at his conclusions with surprising celerity, but even those who
are familiar with ordinary reckoning, become puzzled the moment that a
problem is presented to them beyond the scope of the ordinary rules. If
one adult receives a pound of grain every ten days, and a child half as
much, what amount should be allotted to 227 adults and 143 children, for a
month and a half? Over a problem as simple as this, we have seen a group
of Chinese, some of whom had pretensions to classical scholarship, wrestle
for half an hour, and after all no two of them reached the same
conclusion. Indeed the greater their learning, the less fitted do the
Chinese seem to be, in a mathematical way, to struggle with their
environment.
The object of the teacher is to compel his pupils, first to Remember,
secondly, to Remember, thirdly and evermore to Remember. For every
scholar, as we have seen, is theoretically a candidate for the district
examinations, where he must write upon themes selected from any one of a
great variety of books. He must, therefore, be prepared to recall at a
moment's notice, not only the passage itself, but also its connections,
and the explanations of the commentary, as a prerequisite for even
attempting an essay.
Under the conditions of the civil service examinations, as they have been
conducted for many hundred years, a system of school instruction like the
one here described, or which shall at least produce the same results, is
an imperative necessity in China. A reform cannot begin anywhere until a
reform begins everywhere. The excellence of the present system is often
assumed and in proof, the great number of distinguished scholars which it
produces, is adduced. But, on the other hand, it is absolutely necessary
to take into account the innumerable multitudes who derive little or no
benefit from their schooling. Nothing is more common than to meet men who,
although they have spent from one to ten years at school, when asked if
they can read, reply with literal truth that their knowledge of characters
has been "laid aside"--in other words they have forgotten almost
everything that they once knew, and are now become "staring blind men," an
expression which is a synonym for one who cannot read.
It is a most significant fact that the Chinese themselves recognize the
truth that their school system tends to benumb the mental faculties,
turning the teachers into machines, and the pupils into parrots. On the
supposition that all the scholars were to continue their studies, and were
eventually to be examined for a degree, it might be difficult to suggest
any system which would take the place of the one now in use, in which a
most capacious memory is a principal condition of success.
In the Village School, however, it is within bounds to estimate that not
one in twenty of the scholars--and more probably, not three in a
hundred--have any reasonable prospect of carrying their studies to
anything like this point. The practical result, therefore, is to compel at
least ninety-seven scholars to pursue a certain routine, simply because it
is the only known method by which three other scholars can compete for a
degree. In other words, nineteen pupils are compelled to wear a heavy
cast-iron yoke, in order to keep company with a twentieth, who is trying
to get used to it as a step towards obtaining a future name! If this
inconvenient inequality is pointed out to teachers or to patrons, and if
they are asked whether it would not be better to adopt, for the nineteen
who will never go to the examinations, a system which involves less
memorizing, and a wider range of learning in the brief time which is all
that most of the pupils can spend at school, they reply, with perfect
truth, that so far as they are aware there is no other system; that even
if the patrons desired to make the experiment (which would never be the
case), they could find no teacher to conduct it; and that even if a
teacher should wish to institute such a reform (which would never happen),
he would find no one to employ him.
The extreme difficulty which men of some education often find in keeping
from starvation, gives rise to a class of persons known as Strolling
Scholars, (_yu hsiao_), who travel about the country vending paper,
pictures, lithographs of tablets, pens and ink. These individuals are not
to be confounded with travelling pedlars, who, though they deal in the
same articles, make no pretension to learning, and generally convey their
goods on a wheelbarrow, whereas the Strolling Scholar cannot manage
anything larger than a pack.
When a Strolling Scholar reaches a schoolhouse, he enters, lowers his
bundle, and makes a profound bow to the teacher, who (though much
displeased at his appearance) must return the courtesy. If there are large
pupils, the stranger bows to them and addresses them as his Younger
Brothers. The teacher then makes some inquiries as to his name, etc. If he
turns out to be a mere pretender, without real scholarship, the teacher
drops the conversation, and very likely leaves the schoolroom. This is a
tacit signal to the larger scholars to get rid of the visitor. They place
a few cash on the table, perhaps not more than five, or even three, which
the Strolling Scholar picks up, and with a bow departs. If he sells
anything, his profits are of the most moderate description--perhaps three
cash on each pen, and two cash on each cake of ink. With a view to this
class of demands, a small fund is sometimes kept on hand by the larger
scholars, who compel the younger ones to contribute to it.
If, however, the Strolling Scholar is a scholar in fact, as well as in
name, so that his attainments become apparent, the teacher is obliged to
treat him with much greater civility. Some of these roving pundits make a
specialty of historical anecdotes, and miscellaneous knowledge, and in a
general conversation with the teacher, the latter, who has not improbably
confined himself to the beaten routine of classical study, is at a
disadvantage. In this case, other scholars of the village are perhaps
invited in to talk with the stranger, who may be requested to write a pair
of scrolls, and asked to take a meal with the teacher, a small present in
money being made to him on his departure.
It is related that a Strolling Scholar of this sort, being present when a
teacher was explaining the Classics, deliberately took off his shoes and
stockings in presence of the whole school. Being reproved by the teacher
for this breach of propriety, he replied that his dirty stockings had as
good an "odour" as the teacher's classical explanations. To this the
teacher naturally replied by a challenge to the stranger to explain the
Classics himself, that they might learn from him. The Strolling Scholar,
who was a person of considerable ability, had been waiting for just such
an opportunity, and taking up the explanation, went on with it in such an
elegant style, "every sentence being like an examination essay," that the
teacher was amazed and ashamed, and entertained him handsomely. If a
teacher were to treat with disrespect one whose scholarship was obviously
superior to his own, he would expose himself to disrespect in turn, and
might be disgraced before his own pupils, an occurrence which he is very
anxious to avoid.
In China the relation between teacher and pupil is far more intimate than
in Western lands. One is supposed to be under a great weight of obligation
to the master who has enlightened his darkness, and if this master should
be at any time in need of assistance, it is thought to be no more than the
duty of the pupil to afford it. This view of the case is obviously one
which it is for the interest of teachers to perpetuate, and the result of
the theory and of the attendant practice is that there are many decayed
teachers roving about, living on the precarious generosity of their former
pupils.
X
CHINESE HIGHER EDUCATION--THE VILLAGE HIGH SCHOOL--EXAMINATIONS--RECENT
EDUCATIONAL EDICTS
When it is definitely decided that a pupil is to study for the
examinations, he enters a high school, which differs in many respects from
the ones which he has hitherto attended. The teacher must be a man of more
than average attainments, or he can neither gain nor hold such a place.
His salary is much greater than that given by the ordinary school. The
pupils are much harder worked, being compelled to spend almost all their
waking hours in the study of model examination essays. These are to be
committed to memory by the score and even by the hundred, as a result of
which process the mind of the student gradually becomes so saturated with
the materials of which they are composed, that he will always be able to
take advantage of the accumulations of his patient memorizing in weaving
his own compositions in the examination hall.
During the preceding years of study he has already committed to memory the
most important parts of the literature of his native land. He is now
intimately familiar with the orthodox explanations of the same. He has
been gradually but thoroughly inducted into the mystery of tones and
rhymes, the art of constructing poetry, and the weaving of antithetical
couplets, beginning with the announcement that the heaven is high,
balanced by the proposition that the earth is thick, and proceeding to the
intricate and well-nigh inscrutable laws by which relation and
correlation, thesis and antithesis are governed. He has now to learn by
carefully graded stages the art of employing all his preceding learning in
the production of the essay, which will hereafter constitute the warp and
the woof of his intellectual fabric. In future he will eat, drink, write,
talk, and sleep essays, essays, essays.
Measured by Chinese standards, the construction of a perfect essay is one
of the noblest achievements of which the human mind is capable. The man
who knows all that has been preserved of the wisdom of the ancients, and
who can at a moment's notice dash off essays of a symmetrical
construction, lofty in sentiment, elevated in style, and displaying a wide
acquaintance not only with the theme, but also with cognate subjects, such
a man is fit not only to stand before kings, but before the very Son of
Heaven himself.
A high official called a provincial Literary Chancellor, (_Hsiao YA1/4an_),
is despatched from Peking to the provinces, to hold periodical
examinations once in three or twice in five years. Upon the occasion of an
emperor's ascending the throne, his marriage, the birth of an heir, etc.,
there are extra examinations bestowed as a favour (_AȘn k'o_). When the
village scholar is able to produce an essay, and to write a poem that will
pass the scrutiny of this formidable Literary Chancellor, he may hope to
become a hsiu-ts'ai or graduate. In order to fit him for this ordeal,
which is regarded by outsiders with awe, and is anticipated by the young
candidate himself with mingled hope and
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