by Will Durant
Est le Meilleur lettré qui soit dans son Empire *
He ruled China for two generations (1736-96), abdicated in his eightyfifth year, and continued to dominate the government until his death (1799). During the last years of his reign an incident occurred which might have led the thoughtful to recall the forebodings of K’ang-hsi. England, which had aroused the Emperor’s anger by importing opium into China, sent, in 1792, a commission under Lord Macartney to negotiate a commercial treaty with Ch’ien Lung. The commissioners explained to him the advantages of trading with England, and added that the treaty which they sought would take for granted the equality of the British ruler with the Chinese emperor. Ch’ien Lung dictated this reply to George III:
I set no value on objects strange and ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures. This, then, is my answer to your request to appoint a representative at my court, a request contrary to our dynastic usage, which could only result in inconvenience to yourself. I have expounded my views in detail and have commanded your tribute envoys to leave in peace on their homeward journeys. It behooves you, O King, to respect my sentiments and to display even greater devotion and loyalty in future, so that, by perpetual submission to our throne, you may secure peace and prosperity for your country hereafter.19
In these proud words China tried to stave off the Industrial Revolution. We shall see in the sequel how, nevertheless, that Revolution came. Meanwhile let us study the economic, political and moral elements of the unique and instructive civilization which that Revolution seems destined to destroy.
II. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE*
Population—Appearance—Dress—Peculiarities of Chinese speech—Of Chinese writing
The first element in the picture is number: there are many Chinese. Learned guessers calculate that the population of the Chinese states in 280 B.C. was around 14,000,000; in 200 A.D., 28,000,000; in 726, 41,500,000; in 1644, 89,000,000; in 1743, 150,000,000; in 1919, 330,000,000.20 In the fourteenth century a European traveler counted in China “two hundred cities all greater than Venice.”21 The Chinese census is obtained through a registration law requiring every household to inscribe the names of its occupants upon a tablet at the entrance;22 we do not know how accurate these tablets are, or the reports which purport to be based upon them. It is probable that China now harbors some 400,000,000 souls.
The Chinese vary in stature, being shorter and weaker in the south, taller and stronger in the north; in general they are the most vigorous people in Asia. They show great physical stamina, magnificent courage in the bearing of hardships and pain, exceptional resistance to disease, and a climatic adaptability which has enabled them to prosper in almost every zone. Neither opium nor inbreeding nor syphilis has been able to impair their health, and the collapse of their social system has not been due to any visible deterioration in their biological or mental vitality.
The Chinese face is one of the most intelligent on earth, though not universally attractive. Some of the pauper class are incomparably ugly to our Western prejudice, and some criminals have an evil leer admirably suited to cinematic caricature; but the great majority have regular features calm with the physiological accident of low eyelids, and the social accumulation of centuries of civilization. The slant of the eyes is not so pronounced as one had been led to expect, and the yellow skin is often a pleasant suntanned brown. The women of the peasantry are almost as strong as the men; the ladies of the upper strata are delicate and pretty, starch themselves with powder, rouge their lips and cheeks, blacken their eyebrows, and train or thin them to resemble a willow leaf or the crescent moon.23 The hair in both sexes is coarse and vigorous, and never curls. The women wear theirs in a tuft, usually adorned with flowers. Under the last dynasty the men, to please their rulers, adopted the Manchu custom of shaving the fore half of the head; in compensation they left the remainder uncut and gathered it into a long queue, which became in time an instrument of correction and a support of pride.24 Beards were small, and were always shaved, though seldom by the owners thereof; barbers carried their shops about with them, and throve.
The head was ordinarily left bare; when men covered it they used in winter a cap of velvet or fur with a turned-up rim, and in summer a conical cap of finely woven filaments of bamboo, surmounted, in persons of any rank, by a colored ball and a silken fringe. Women, when they could afford it, clothed their heads with silk or cotton bands adorned with tinsel, trinkets or artificial flowers. Shoes were usually of warm cloth; since the floor was often of cold tile or earth, the Chinese carried a miniature carpet with him under each foot. By a custom begun at the court of the Emperor Li Hou-chu (ca. 970 A.D.), the feet of girls, at the age of seven, were compressed with tight bandages to prevent their further growth, so that the mature lady might walk with a mincing step erotically pleasing to the men. It was regarded as immodest to speak of a woman’s foot, and as scandalous to look at one; in the presence of a lady even the word for shoe was tabu.25 The practice spread to all ranks and groups except the Manchus and Tatars, and became so rigid that a deception about the size of the bride’s foot sufficed to annul an engagement or a marriage.26 K’ang-hsi tried to stop the custom, but failed; today it is one of the happier casualties of the Revolution.
Men covered their nakedness with trousers and tunics, almost always blue. In winter the trousers were overlaid with leggings, and additional tunics, sometimes to the number of thirteen, were put on. These were kept on night and day throughout the winter, and were removed one by one with the progress of spring.27 The tunic fell variously to the loins, or the knees, or the feet; it was buttoned closely up to the neck, and had immense sleeves instead of pockets; China does not say that a man “pocketed” an object, but that he “sleeved” it. Shirts and underwear were well-nigh unknown.28 In the country women wore trousers like the men, since they were accustomed to doing a man’s work and more; in the towns they covered the trousers with skirts. In the cities silk was almost as common as cotton.29 No belt compressed the waist, and no corsets held in the breasts. In general the Chinese dress was more sensible, healthy and convenient than the garb of the modern West. No tyranny of fashion harassed or exalted the life of the Chinese woman; all urban classes dressed alike, and nearly all generations; the quality of the garment might differ, but not the form; and all ranks might be sure that the fashion would last as long as the gown.
The language of the Chinese differed from the rest of the world even more distinctly than their dress. It had no alphabet, no spelling, no grammar, and no parts of speech; it is amazing how well and how long this oldest and most populous nation on earth has managed without these curses of Occidental youth. Perhaps in forgotten days there were inflections, declensions, conjugations, cases, numbers, tenses, moods; but the language as far back as we can trace it shows none of them. Every word in it may be a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb, according to its context and its tone. Since the spoken dialects have only from four to eight hundred monosyllabic word-sounds or vocables, and these must be used to express the 40,000 characters of the written language, each vocable has from four to nine “tones,” so that its meaning is made to differ according to the manner in which it is sung. Gestures and context eke out these tones, and make each sound serve many purposes; so the vocable I may mean any one of sixty-nine things, shi may mean fifty-nine, ku twenty-nine.30 No other language has been at once so complex, so subtle and so brief.
The written language was even more unique than the spoken. The objects exhumed in Honan, and tentatively dated back to the Shang Dynasty, bear writing in characters substantially like those in use until our own generation, so that—barring a few Copts who still speak ancient Egyptian—Chinese is both the oldest and the most widespread language spoken on the earth today. Originally, as we infer from a passage in Lao-tze, the Chinese used knotted cords to communicate messages. Probably the needs of priests in tracing magic formulas, and of potters in marking their vessels, led to the development of a pictorial script.32 T
hese primitive pictograms were the original form of the six hundred signs that are now the fundamental characters in Chinese writing. Some two hundred and fourteen of them have been named “radicals” because they enter as elements into nearly all the characters of the current language. The present characters are highly complex symbols, in which the primitive pictorial element has been overlaid with additions designed to define the term specifically, usually through some indication of its sound. Not only every word, but every idea, has its own separate sign; one sign represents a horse, another sign “a bay horse with a white belly,” another “a horse with a white spot on his forehead.” Some of the characters are still relatively simple: a curve over a straight line (i.e., the sun over the horizon) means “morning”; the sun and the moon together represent “light”; a mouth and a bird together mean “singing”; a woman beneath a roof means “peace”; a woman, a mouth and the sign for “crooked” constitute the character for “dangerous”; a man and a woman together mean “talkative”; “quarreling” is a woman with two mouths; “wife” is represented by signs for a woman, a broom and a storm.33
From some points of view this is a primitive language that has by supreme conservatism survived into “modern” times. Its difficulties are more obvious than its virtues. We are told that the Chinese takes from ten to fifty years to become acquainted with all the 40,000 characters in his language; but when we realize that these characters are not letters but ideas, and reflect on the length of time it would take us to master 40,000 ideas, or even a vocabularly of 40,000 words, we perceive that the terms of the comparison are unfair to the Chinese; what we should say is that it takes any one fifty years to master 40,000 ideas. In actual practice the average Chinese gets along quite well with three or four thousand signs, and learns these readily enough by finding their “radicals.” The clearest advantage of such a language—expressing not sounds but ideas—is that it can be read by Koreans and Japanese as easily as by the Chinese, and provides the Far East with an international written language. Again it unites in one system of writing all the inhabitants of China, whose dialects differ to the point of mutual unintelligibility; the same character is read as different sounds or words in different localities. This advantage applies in time as well as in space; since the written language has remained essentially the same while the spoken language has diverged from it into a hundred dialects, the literature of China, written for two thousand years in these characters, can be read today by any literate Chinese, though we cannot tell how the ancient writers pronounced the words, or spoke the ideas, which the signs represent. This persistence of the same script amidst a flux and diversity of speech made for the preservation of Chinese thought and culture, and at the same time served as a powerful force for conservatism; old ideas held the stage and formed the mind of youth. The character of Chinese civilization is symbolized in this phenomenon of its unique script: its unity amid diversity and growth, its profound conservatism, and its unrivaled continuity. This system of writing was in every sense a high intellectual achievement; it classified the whole world—of objects, activities and qualities—under a few hundred root or “radical” signs, combined with these signs some fifteen hundred distinguishing marks, and made them represent, in their completed forms, all the ideas used in literature and life. We must not be too sure that our own diverse modes of writing down our thoughts are superior to this apparently primitive form. Leibnitz in the seventeenth century, and Sir Donald Ross in our time, dreamed of a system of written signs independent of spoken languages, free from their nationalist diversity and their variations in space and time, and capable, therefore, of expressing the ideas of different peoples in identical and mutually intelligible ways. But precisely such a sign language, uniting a hundred generations and a quarter of the earth’s inhabitants, already exists in the Far East. The conclusion of the Oriental is logical and terrible: the rest of the world must learn to write Chinese.
III. THE PRACTICAL LIFE
1. In the Fields
The poverty of the peasant—Methods of husbandry—Crops—Tea—Food—The stoicism of the village
All the varied literature of that language, all the subtleties of Chinese thought and the luxuries of Chinese life, rested in the last analysis on the fertility of the fields. Or rather on the toil of men—for fertile fields are not born but made. Through many centuries the early inhabitants of China must have fought against jungle and forest, beast and insect, drought and flood, saltpetre and frost to turn this vast wilderness into fruitful soil. And the victory had to be periodically rewon; a century of careless timbercutting left a desert,* and a few years of neglect allowed the jungle to return. The struggle was bitter and perilous; at any moment the barbarians might rush in, and seize the slow growths of the cleared earth. Therefore the peasants, for their protection, lived not in isolated homesteads but in small communities, surrounded their villages with walls, went out together to plant and cultivate the soil, and often slept through the night on guard in their fields.
Their methods were simple, and yet they did not differ much from what they are today. Sometimes they used ploughs—first of wood, then of stone, then of iron; but more often they turned up their little plots patiently with the hoe. They helped the soil with any natural fertilizer they could find, and did not disdain to collect for this purpose the offal of dogs and men. From the earliest times they dug innumerable canals to bring the water of their many rivers to rice paddies or millet fields; deep channels were cut through miles of solid rock to tap some elusive stream, or to divert its course into a desiccated plain. Without rotation of crops or artificial manures, and often without draft animals of any kind, the Chinese have wrung two or three crops annually from at least half their soil, and have won more nourishment from the earth than any other people in history.34
The cereals they grew were chiefly millet and rice, with wheat and barley as lesser crops. The rice was turned into wine as well as food, but the peasant never drank too much of it. His favorite drink, and next to rice his largest crop, was tea. Used first as a medicine, it grew in popularity until, in the days of the T’angs, it entered the realms of export and poetry. By the fifteenth century all the Far East was esthetically intoxicated with the ceremony of drinking tea; epicures searched for new varieties, and drinking tournaments were held to determine whose tea was the best.35 Added to these products were delicious vegetables, sustaining legumes like the soy bean and its sprouts, doughty condiments like garlic and the onion, and a thousand varieties of berries and fruits.36 Least of all products of rural toil was meat; now and then oxen and buffalos were used for ploughing, but stock-raising for food was confined to pigs and fowl.37 A large part of the population lived by snaring fish from the streams and the sea.
Dry rice, macaroni, vermicelli, a few vegetables, and a little fish formed the diet of the poor; the well-to-do added pork and chicken, and the rich indulged a passion for duck; the most pretentious of Peking dinners consisted of a hundred courses of duck.38 Cow’s milk was rare and eggs were few and old, but the soy bean provided wholesome milk and cheese. Cooking was developed into a fine art, and made use of everything; grasses and seaweeds were plucked and birds’ nests ravished to make tasty soups; dainty dishes were concocted out of sharks’ fins and fish intestines, locusts and grasshoppers, grubs and silkworms, horses and mules, rats and water-snakes, cats and dogs.40 The Chinese loved to eat; it was not unusual for a rich man’s dinner to have forty courses, and to require three or four hours of gentlemanly absorption.
The poor man did not need so much time for his two meals a day. With all his toil the peasant, with exceptions here and there, was never secure from starvation until he was dead. The strong and clever accumulated large estates, and concentrated the wealth of the country into a few hands; occasionally, as under Shih Huang-ti, the soil was redivided among the population, but the natural inequality of men soon concentrated wealth again.41 The majority of the peasants owned land, but as the population increased faster than th
e area under cultivation, the average holding became smaller with every century. The result was a poverty equaled only by destitute India: the typical family earned but $83 a year, many men lived on two cents a day, and millions died of hunger in each year.42 For twenty centuries China has had an average of one famine annually;43 partly because the peasant was exploited to the verge of subsistence, partly be’ cause reproduction outran the fertility of the soil, and partly because transport was so undeveloped that one region might starve while another had more than it required. Finally, flood might destroy what the landlord and the tax-collector had left; the Hoang-ho—which the people called “China’s Sorrow”—might change its course, swamp a thousand villages, and leave another thousand with desiccated land.
The peasants bore these evils with stolid fortitude. “All that a man needs in this transitory life,” said one of their proverbs, “is a hat and a bowl of rice.’44 They worked hard, but not fast; no complex machine hurried them, or racked their nerves with its noise, its danger and its speed. There were no weekends and no Sundays, but there were many holidays; periodically some festival, like the Feast of the New Year, or the Feast of the Lanterns, gave the worker some rest from his toil, and brightened with myth and drama the duller seasons of the year. When the winter turned away its scowling face, and the snow-nourished earth softened under the spring rains, the peasants went out once more to plant their narrow fields, and sang with good cheer the hopeful songs that had come down to them from the immemorial past.
2. In the Shops
Handicrafts—Silk—Factories—Guilds—Men of burden—Roads and canals—Merchants—Credit and coinage—Currency experiments—Printing-press inflation