China and the West

Percy, Thomas. Miscellaneous pieces relating to the Chinese [ID D11696].
James Watt : As far as Chinese gardening is concerned, Percy offered little comment on the extract that he included from Sir William Chambers's work (drawn from his Designs of Chinese Buildings), other than briefly to declare the insubstantiality of "such pompous shews and splendid processions." Percy was much more concerned with the need to defend Christian orthodoxy against the false sublime of Chinese antiquity, however, as well as to return to the issue of how Jesuit missionaries had established and tried to maintain their foothold in China. Percy's description of the Jesuits as "this crafty order" strikingly recalls the Pleasing History footnote that refers to the Chinese as "the most subtle crafty people in the world."
Several of the Miscellaneous Pieces were actually translated from different volumes of the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, but Percy once more sought to emphasize his critical distance from the sources on which he to a large extent relied, as well as to demonstrate his lack of illusions about the culture that these sources chronicled. In the extract that is included from "A Description of the Emperor of China's Gardens and Pleasure-Houses Near Peking," for example, the writer Jean-Denis Attiret laments the difficulties that "would quickly drive me back to Europe, if I did not think my pencil subservient to religion, and likely to render the Emperor favourable to the missionaries, who preach it". Addressing "the protestant reader," Percy's footnote cautions that "it is a Jesuit here who tells his own story," and who "whatever his real motives . . . will take care that none but the most plausible shall appear to the world"; alluding to the reputation for insinuating "craftiness" that he helped to perpetuate, but without offering any corroborating evidence, Percy knowingly stated that "other writers who have examined into the conduct of these gentlemen more narrowly, will tell a different tale."
As well as introducing the work of others, Percy's Miscellaneous Pieces incorporated one essay that was entirely his own, the first and also perhaps the most arresting essay in the whole collection. In his "Dissertation on the Language and Characters of the Chinese," Percy in effect anticipated the attack on the utility of Arabic and Sanskrit made by Macaulay's infamous "Minute on Indian Education" (1835), over seventy years later, with his claim that the Chinese were held back by their use of pictorial symbols, rather than "an alphabet of letters expressing the simple sounds into which all words may be resolved". At once unsophisticated and bewilderingly refined, in Percy's terms, this system of characters took so long to master that the Chinese spent their best years - "the finest and most vigorous part of human life" - learning to read and write. While even renowned sinophiles such as Voltaire claimed that the Chinese found the communication of ideas in written form "a thing of the greatest difficulty," Percy took this argument much further than any of his contemporaries, emphasizing the basic inadequacy of the Chinese manner of writing : "it does not so soon furnish them with the knowledge and learning already provided to their hands. It requires so much more time and pains for them to climb to the top of the edifice, that when once they have arrived there, they have less time or ability to raise it higher."