China and the West

Huxley, Aldous. Jesting pilate : the diary of a journey [ID D31471].
Shanghai
I have seen places that were, no doubt, as busy and as thickly populous as the Chinese city in Shanghai, but none that so overwhelmingly im-pressed me with its business and populousness. In no city, West or East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life. Old Shanghai is Bergson's élan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is Life itself. Nothing more intensely living can be imagined. There are as many people—there are very likely more—in an equal area of London or Lahore, of Glasgow or Bombay ; but there is not so much life. Each individual Chinaman has more vitality, you feel, than each individual Indian or European, and the social organism composed of these individuals is therefore more intensely alive than the social organism in India or the West. Or perhaps it is the vitality of the social organism—a vitality accumu¬lated and economised through centuries by ancient habit and tradition—perhaps it is the intense aliveness and strength of the Chinese civilisation, which give to individual Chinamen their air of possessing a superabundance of life beyond the vital wealth of every other race. So much life, so carefully canalised, so rapidly and strongly flowing—the spectacle of it inspires something like terror. All this was going on when we were cannibalistic savages. It will still be going on—a little modified, perhaps, by Western science, but not much—long after we in Europe have simply died of fatigue. A thousand years from now the seal-cutters will still be engraving their seals, the ivory workers still sawing and polishing ; the tailors will be singing the merits of their cut and cloth, even as they do to-day; the spectacled astrologers will still be conjuring silver out of the pockets of bumpkins and amorous courtesans; there will be a bird market, and eating-houses perfumed with delicious cooking, and chemists' shops with bottles full of dried lizards, tigers' whiskers, rhinoceros horns and pickled salamanders ; there will be patient jewellers and embroiderers of faultless taste, shops full of marvellous crockery, and furriers who can make elaborate patterns and pictures out of variously coloured fox-skins ; there will still be letter-writers at the street corners and men whose business it is to sit in their open shops inscribing words of ancient wisdom on long red scrolls—and the great black ideographs will still be as perfectly written as they are to-day, or were a thousand years ago, will be thrown on to the red paper with the same apparent recklessness, the same real and assured skill, by a long fine hand as deeply learned in the hieratic gestures of its art as the hand of the man who is writing now. Yes, it will all be there, just as intensely and tenaciously alive as ever —all there a thousand years hence, five thousand, ten. You have only to stroll through old Shanghai to be certain of it. London and Paris offer no such certainty. And even India seems by com¬parison provisional and precarious.

Japan
… That sobriety, that strength, that faultless refinement which are the characteristics of Chinese art, and which give to the cheapest piece of Chinese earthenware, the most ordinary embroidery or carving or lettering, a magistral air of artistic importance and significance, are totally lacking, so it seems to me, in the art of Japan…