China and the West

Achille Raffray ist Konsul des französischen Konsulats in Tianjin.

Guido Amedeo Vitale ist, nach seinen Chinesisch-Studien am Istituto universitario orientale in Neapel, Sekretär-Dolmetscher der italienischen Legation in Beijign.

Joseph Beauvais ist Dolmetscher der französischen Botschaft in Longzhou (Guangxi).

Guido Vitale ist Dolmetscher Schüler des italienischen Aussenministeriums und lernt Chinesisch.

Antonin Fantosati ist Apostolischer Vikar der Diözese in Hunan.

Frans Hoogers kommt als Missionar in Xixiang (Gansu) an.

William E. Macklin eröffnet das Drum Tower Hospital in Nanjing.

Hardy, Thomas. Works.
http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/.
1872
Hardy, Thomas. Under the greenwood tree : a rural painting of the Dutch school. (London : Tinsley Brothers, 1872).
Dame the tenth : the honourable Lara.
Chap. 7
"Before the words were half out of his mouth the old gentleman had exclaimed, 'Ah!' and precipitated himself along what seemed to be the passage to the kitchen; but as this turned out to be only the entrance to a dark china-closet, he hastily emerged again, after a collision with the inn-crockery had told him of his mistake."

1874
Hardy, Thomas. Far from the madding crowd. (London : Smith, Elder, 1874).
Chap. 24
"And, he was brought up so well, and sent to Casterbridge Grammar School for years and years. Learnt all languages while he was there; and it was said he got on so far that he could take down Chinese in shorthand ; but that I don't answer for, as it was only reported."
Chap. 44
"Liddy vanished, and at the end of twenty minutes returned with a cloak, hat, some slices of bread and butter, a tea-cup, and some hot tea in a little china jug."

1876
Hardy, Thomas. The hand of Ethelberta. (London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1875-1876).
Chap. 20
"That she had not the slightest notion of accepting the impulsive painter made little difference; a lover's arguments being apt to affect a lady's mood as much by measure as by weight. A useless declaration like a rare china teacup with a hole in it, has its ornamental value in enlarging a collection."

1878
Hardy, Thomas. The return of the native. (London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1878).
6. A conjuncture.
"She drew from the small willow reticule that she carried in her hand an old-fashioned china teacup without a handle; it was one of half a dozen of the same sort lying in the reticule, which she had preserved ever since her childhood, and had brought with her today as a small present for Clym and Eustacia."

1880
Hardy, Thomas. The trumpet major : a tale. (London : Smith, Elder, & Co., 1880).
Chap. 17
"Indoors, Miss Johnson admired everything: the new parrots and marmosets, the black beams of the ceiling, the double-corner cupboard with the glass doors, through which gleamed the remainders of sundry china sets acquired by Bob's mother in her housekeeping-- two-handled sugar-basins, no-handled tea-cups, a tea-pot like a pagoda, and a cream-jug in the form of a spotted cow."

1881
Hardy, Thomas. A laodicean ; or, The castle of the De Stancys : a story of to-day, etc. (London : S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881).
Chap. 12
"It was an old stock enough, though not a rich one. His great-uncle had been the well-known Vice-admiral Sir Armstrong Somerset, who served his country well in the Baltic, the Indies, China, and the Caribbean Sea."

1883
Hardy, Thomas. The romantic adventures of a milkmaid. (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1883).
Chap. 7
"Pair of silver candlesticks: inlaid work-table and work-box: one large mirror: two small ditto: one gilt china tea and coffee service: one silver tea-pot, coffee-pot, sugar-basin, jug, and dozen spoons: French clock: pair of curtains: six large pictures."

1886
Hardy, Thomas. The mayor of Casterbridge : the life and death of a man of character. (London : Smith, Elder, & Co., 1886).
Chap. 11
"I have to be away for a day or two on business, unfortunately; but during that time you can get lodgings--the only ones in the town fit for you are those over the china-shop in High Street--and you can also look for a cottage."

1887
Hardy, Thomas. The woodlanders. (London : Macmillan, 1887).
Chap. 7
"His companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers, villagers, and others ; mostly woodland men, who on that account could afford to be curious in their walking-sticks, which consequently exhibited various monstrosities of vegetation, the chief being cork-screw shapes in black and white thorn, brought to that pattern by the slow torture of an encircling woodbine during their growth, as the Chinese have been said to mould human beings into grotesque toys by continued compression in infancy."

1891
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. (London : James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., 1891).
Chap. 10
"All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the back of her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some distance below her waist, like a Chinaman's queue."

1892
Hardy, Thomas. The pursuit of the well-beloved : a sketch of a temperament. (London : Illustrated London News, 1892).
I. "There were Chinese lanterns, too, on the balcony."
VI. "The room was less furnished than when he had last beheld it. The 'bo-fet,' or double corner-cupboard, where the china was formerly kept, had disappeared, its place being taken by a plain board."

1894-1895
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the obscure. In : Harper's magazine (1894-1895). = The Simpletons.
Chap. 5
"Perhaps I can pick up a cheap bit of furniture or old china."

1898
Hardy, Thomas. Wessex poems and other verses. (London : Harper, 1898).
"If ye break my best blue china, children, I shan't care or ho."

1903
Hardy, Thomas. The dynasts : a drama of the Napoleonic wars. In three parts, nineteen acts, & one hundred and thirty scenes. (London : Macmillan, 1903).
Act first
"Travelling carriages, teams, and waggons, laden with pictures, carpets, glass, silver, china, and fashionable attire, are rolling
out of the city, followed by foot-passengers in streams, who carry their most precious possessions on their shoulders."

Lang, Andrew. Some Japanese bogie-books [ID D27855].
…Chinese ghosts are probably much the same as Japanese ghosts. The Japanese have borrowed most things, including apparitions and awesome sprites and grisly fiends, from the Chinese, and then have improved on the original model. Now we have a very full, complete, and horror-striking account of Chinese harnts (as the country people in Tennessee call them) from Mr. Herbert Giles, who has translated scores of Chinese ghost stories in his 'Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio' (De la Rue, 1880). Mr. Giles's volumes prove that China is the place for Messrs. Gurney and Myers, the secretaries of the Psychical Society.
Ghosts do not live a hole-and-corner life in China, but boldly come out and take their part in the pleasures and business of life. It has always been a question with me whether ghosts, in a haunted house, appear when there is no audience. What does the spectre in the tapestried chamber do when the house is NOT full, and no guest is put in the room to bury strangers in, the haunted room? Does the ghost sulk and complain that there is "no house," and refuse to rehearse his little performance, in a conscientious and disinterestedly artistic spirit, when deprived of the artist's true pleasure, the awakening of sympathetic emotion in the mind of the spectator? We give too little thought and sympathy to ghosts, who in our old castles and country houses often find no one to appear to from year's end to year's-end. Only now and then is a guest placed in the "haunted room." Then I like to fancy the glee of the lady in green or the radiant boy, or the headless man, or the old gentleman in snuff-coloured clothes, as he, or she, recognises the presence of a spectator, and prepares to give his or her best effects in the familiar style.
Now in China and Japan certainly a ghost does not wait till people enter the haunted room: a ghost, like a person of fashion, "goes everywhere." Moreover, he has this artistic excellence, that very often you don't know him from an embodied person. He counterfeits mortality so cleverly that he (the ghost) has been known to personate a candidate for honours, and pass an examination for him. A pleasing example of this kind, illustrating the limitations of ghosts, is told in Mr. Giles's book. A gentleman of Huai Shang named Chou-t'ien-i had arrived at the age of fifty, but his family consisted of but one son, a fine boy, "strangely averse from study," as if there were anything strange in THAT. One day the son disappeared mysteriously, as people do from West Ham. In a year he came back, said he had been detained in a Taoist monastery, and, to all men's amazement, took to his books. Next year he obtained is B.A. degree, a First Class. All the neighbourhood was overjoyed, for Huai Shang was like Pembroke College (Oxford), where, according to the poet, "First Class men are few and far between." It was who should have the honour of giving his daughter as bride to this intellectual marvel. A very nice girl was selected, but most unexpectedly the B.A. would not marry. This nearly broke his father's heart. The old gentleman knew, according to Chinese belief, that if he had no grandchild there would be no one in the next generation to feed his own ghost and pay it all the little needful attentions. "Picture then the father naming and insisting on the day;" till K'o-ch'ang, B.A., got up and ran away. His mother tried to detain him, when his clothes "came off in her hand," and the bachelor vanished! Next day appeared the real flesh and blood son, who had been kidnapped and enslaved. The genuine K'o-ch'ang was overjoyed to hear of his approaching nuptials. The rites were duly celebrated, and in less than a year the old gentleman welcomed his much-longed-for grand child. But, oddly enough, K'o-ch'ang, though very jolly and universally beloved, was as stupid as ever, and read nothing but the sporting intelligence in the newspapers. It was now universally admitted that the learned K'o-ch'ang had been an impostor, a clever ghost. It follows that ghosts can take a very good degree; but ladies need not be afraid of marrying ghosts, owing to the inveterate shyness of these learned spectres.
The Chinese ghost is by no means always a malevolent person, as, indeed, has already been made clear from the affecting narrative of the ghost who passed an examination. Even the spectre which answers in China to the statue in 'Don Juan,' the statue which accepts invitations to dinner, is anything but a malevolent guest. So much may be gathered from the story of Chu and Lu. Chu was an undergraduate of great courage and bodily vigour, but dull of wit. He was a married man, and his children (as in the old Oxford legend) often rushed into their mother's presence, shouting, "Mamma! mammal papa's been plucked again!" Once it chanced that Chu was at a wine party, and the negus (a favourite beverage of the Celestials) had done its work. His young friends betted Chu a bird's-nest dinner that he would not go to the nearest temple, enter the room devoted to coloured sculptures representing the torments of Purgatory, and carry off the image of the Chinese judge of the dead, their Osiris or Rhadamanthus. Off went old Chu, and soon returned with the august effigy (which wore "a green face, a red beard, and a hideous expression") in his arms. The other men were frightened, and begged Chu to restore his worship to his place on the infernal bench. Before carrying back the worthy magistrate, Chu poured a libation on the ground and said, "Whenever your excellency feels so disposed, I shall be glad to take a cup of wine with you in a friendly way." That very night, as Chu was taking a stirrup cup before going to bed, the ghost of the awful judge came to the door and entered. Chu promptly put the kettle on, mixed the negus, and made a night of it with the festive fiend. Their friendship was never interrupted from that moment. The judge even gave Chu a new heart (literally) whereby he was enabled to pass examinations; for the heart, in China, is the seat of all the intellectual faculties. For Mrs. Chu, a plain woman with a fine figure, the ghost provided a new head, of a handsome girl recently slain by a robber. Even after Chu's death the genial spectre did not neglect him, but obtained for him an appointment as registrar in the next world, with a certain rank attached.
The next world, among the Chinese, seems to be a paradise of bureaucracy, patent places, jobs, mandarins' buttons and tails, and, in short, the heaven of officialism. All civilised readers are acquainted with Mr. Stockton's humorous story of 'The Transferred Ghost.' In Mr. Stockton's view a man does not always get his own ghostship; there is a vigorous competition among spirits for good ghostships, and a great deal of intrigue and party feeling. It may be long before a disembodied spectre gets any ghostship at all, and then, if he has little influence, he may be glad to take a chance of haunting the Board of Trade, or the Post Office, instead of "walking" in the Foreign Office. One spirit may win a post as White Lady in the imperial palace, while another is put off with a position in an old college library, or perhaps has to follow the fortunes of some seedy "medium" through boarding-houses and third- rate hotels. Now this is precisely the Chinese view of the fates and fortunes of ghosts. Quisque suos patimur manes.
In China, to be brief, and to quote a ghost (who ought to know what he was speaking about), "supernaturals are to be found everywhere." This is the fact that makes life so puzzling and terrible to a child of a believing and trustful character. These Oriental bogies do not appear in the dark alone, or only in haunted houses, or at cross- roads, or in gloomy woods. They are everywhere: every man has his own ghost, every place has its peculiar haunting fiend, every natural phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, as hunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowling about seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example, sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy, meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men. Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comic snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man under a vast umbrella.
The illustrations in this paper are only a few specimens chosen out of many volumes of Japanese bogies. We have not ventured to copy the very most awful spectres, nor dared to be as horrid as we can. These native drawings, too, are generally coloured regardless of expense, and the colouring is often horribly lurid and satisfactory. This embellishment, fortunately perhaps, we cannot reproduce. Meanwhile, if any child looks into this essay, let him (or her) not be alarmed by the pictures he beholds. Japanese ghosts do not live in this country; there are none of them even at the Japanese Legation. Just as bears, lions, and rattlesnakes are not to be seriously dreaded in our woods and commons, so the Japanese ghost cannot breathe (any more than a slave can) in the air of England or America. We do not yet even keep any ghostly zoological garden in which the bogies of Japanese, Australians, Red Indians, and other distant peoples may be accommodated. Such an establishment is perhaps to be desired in the interests of psychical research, but that form of research has not yet been endowed by a cultivated and progressive government.
The first to attract our attention represents, as I understand, the common ghost, or simulacrum vulgare of psychical science. To this complexion must we all come, according to the best Japanese opinion. Each of us contains within him "somewhat of a shadowy being," like the spectre described by Dr. Johnson: something like the Egyptian "Ka," for which the curious may consult the works of Miss Amelia B. Edwards and other learned Orientalists. The most recent French student of these matters, the author of 'L'Homme Posthume,' is of opinion that we do not all possess this double, with its power of surviving our bodily death. He thinks, too, that our ghost, when it does survive, has but rarely the energy and enterprise to make itself visible to or audible by "shadow-casting men." In some extreme cases the ghost (according to our French authority, that of a disciple of M. Comte) feeds fearsomely on the bodies of the living. In no event does he believe that a ghost lasts much longer than a hundred years. After that it mizzles into spectre, and is resolved into its elements, whatever they may be.
A somewhat similar and (to my own mind) probably sound theory of ghosts prevails among savage tribes, and among such peoples as the ancient Greeks, the modern Hindoos, and other ancestor worshippers. When feeding, as they all do, or used to do, the ghosts of the ancestral dead, they gave special attention to the claims of the dead of the last three generations, leaving ghosts older than the century to look after their own supplies of meat and drink. The negligence testifies to a notion that very old ghosts are of little account, for good or evil. On the other hand, as regards the longevity of spectres, we must not shut our eyes to the example of the bogie in ancient armour which appears in Glamis Castle, or to the Jesuit of Queen Elizabeth's date that haunts the library (and a very nice place to haunt: I ask no better, as a ghost in the Pavilion at Lord's might cause a scandal) of an English nobleman. With these instantiae contradictoriae, as Bacon calls them, present to our minds, we must not (in the present condition of psychical research) dogmatise too hastily about the span of life allotted to the simulacrum vulgare. Very probably his chances of a prolonged existence are in inverse ratio to the square of the distance of time which severs him from our modern days. No one has ever even pretended to see the ghost of an ancient Roman buried in these islands, still less of a Pict or Scot, or a Palaeolithic man, welcome as such an apparition would be to many of us. Thus the evidence does certainly look as if there were a kind of statute of limitations among ghosts, which, from many points of view, is not an arrangement at which we should repine.
The Japanese artist expresses his own sense of the casual and fluctuating nature of ghosts by drawing his spectre in shaky lines, as if the model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or "Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies in the future world, good or evil, but is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned, as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell in the tomb and hover near it. The Chinese and Japanese have their own definite theory of the next world, and we must by no means confuse the eternal fortunes of the permanent, conscious, and responsible self, already inhabiting other worlds than ours, with the eccentric vagaries of the semi-material tomb-haunting larva, which so often develops a noisy and bear- fighting disposition quite unlike the character of its proprietor in life.
The next bogie, so limp and washed-out as he seems, with his white, drooping, dripping arms and hands, reminds us of that horrid French species of apparition, "la lavandiere de la nuit," who washes dead men's linen in the moonlit pools and rivers. Whether this simulacrum be meant for the spirit of the well (for everything has its spirit in Japan), or whether it be the ghost of some mortal drowned in the well, I cannot say with absolute certainty; but the opinion of the learned tends to the former conclusion. Naturally a Japanese child, when sent in the dusk to draw water, will do so with fear and trembling, for this limp, floppy apparition might scare the boldest. Another bogie, a terrible creation of fancy, I take to be a vampire, about which the curious can read in Dom Calmet, who will tell them how whole villages in Hungary have been depopulated by vampires; or he may study in Fauriel's 'Chansons de la Grece Moderne' the vampires of modern Hellas.
Another plan, and perhaps even more satisfactory to a timid or superstitious mind, is to read in a lonely house at midnight a story named 'Carmilla,' printed in Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu's 'In a Glass Darkly.' That work will give you the peculiar sentiment of vampirism, will produce a gelid perspiration, and reduce the patient to a condition in which he will be afraid to look round the room. If, while in this mood, some one tells him Mr. Augustus Hare's story of Crooglin Grange, his education in the practice and theory of vampires will be complete, and he will be a very proper and well- qualified inmate of Earlswood Asylum. The most awful Japanese vampire, caught red-handed in the act, a hideous, bestial incarnation of ghoulishness, we have carefully refrained from reproducing.
Scarcely more agreeable is the bogie, or witch, blowing from her mouth a malevolent exhalation, an embodiment of malignant and maleficent sorcery. The vapour which flies and curls from the mouth constitutes "a sending," in the technical language of Icelandic wizards, and is capable (in Iceland, at all events) of assuming the form of some detestable supernatural animal, to destroy the life of a hated rival. In the case of our last example it is very hard indeed to make head or tail of the spectre represented. Chinks and crannies are his domain; through these he drops upon you. He is a merry but not an attractive or genial ghost. Where there are such "visions about" it may be admitted that children, apt to believe in all such fancies, have a youth of variegated and intense misery, recurring with special vigour at bed-time. But we look again at our first picture, and hope and trust that Japanese boys and girls are as happy as these jolly little creatures appear.

W.B. Yeats and China : general.
Aintzane Legarreta-Mentxaka : In my view, the evidence of the exhaustive research undertaken by Yeats, and his failure to mention Taoist thought and yin yang theory, do not prove his ignorance of them, but rather suggest that he must have been aware of both and chose to omit his sources for some unknown reason. Yeats applies the theory of the gyres to elements only tangentially associated to historical changes. His A vision, as well as a number of examples from his poetry and drama, reflect not only yin yang theory, but also other concerns and stylistic features associated with Taoist philosophy. Yeats could have come in contact with Taoism through a variety of sources, the most likely of which is the work of Oscar Wilde.
Madison Morrison : Yeats's China is predominantly daoist. China represents for him a philosophical view and a civilization seen broadly as alternatives to those of the West.

Yeats, W.B. When you are old. In : Yeats, W.B. The countess Kathleen, and various legends and lyrics. (London : T.F. Unwin, 1892). (Cameo series). http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/when-you-are-old/.
WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Lu Wenchao : This poem is very famous in China.We first know Yeats by this wonderful poem, which contain a story of Yeats himself that move us so deeply. From this poem, we konw what is the true love, we know how deeply love can be. (2008)

Thanos Kalamidas : Beardsley took a trip to Paris in 1892 and encountered Toulouse-Lautrec, an admirer and lover of Eastern art, introducing Beardsley to a style that he quickly evolved.
In his drawings and illustrations you can see and feel the strokes of the ink and his emphasized grotesque approach to his characters ; you can see his fears and agonies, yet also feel his deep knowledge in Chinese ink drawings and his respect for the style.
The peacock in his painting The Peacock Skirt, a strong element in Chinese art, can be seen from the woman's dress, the background and in the wreath. The final element of the Chinese influence can also be seen in the mystic symbolic writing in the painting's top-right corner.
Beardsley is one of the best representatives of the Chinese style. All the porcelain or decorations elements are connected with this style. He was adapting the Chinese thought behind the actual ink strokes to his work.

Heinrich Cordes ist Dolmetscher an der Botschaft in Beijing.

Aleksei Matveevich Pozdneev reist in der Mongolei.

Moir Duncan geht nach Shaanxi wo chinesische Christen das Gospel Village gegründet haben. Er gründet einen Bücherladen, Schulen, Kirchen und medizinische Zentren.

Marcus Lorenzo Taft ist Professor of Historical Theology, Wiley School of Theology, Beijing University.

Michie Forbes Anderson Fraser ist handelnder Konsul der britischen Gesandtschaft in Qiongzhou, Taiwan.

Alexander Hosie ist Generalkonsul der britischen Gesandtschaft in Xiamen (Fujian).

Gründung und Bestehen des britischen Konsulats in Yichang (Hubei).

William N. Beauclerk ist Chargé d'aiffaires der britischen Gesandtschaft in Beijing. (1892, 1895-1896).