China and the West

Brief von Victor Segalen über Paul Claudel an seine Frau.
Pékin, 16 juin
Je suis resté deux jours à Tien-Tsin (Tien-Tsin est à 3 H. de Pékin. Voie plate sans intérêt. Pays d'alluvions assez riche). L'après-midi, je me rends au Consulat, et voici Claudel. Froid et aimable d'abord, plus aimable que froid. Tête ronde, yeux porcelaine très vifs ; menton et bouche empâtée comme son parler un peu. Il a reçu mon livre et ma lettres, les a lus. Il me retient longuement. Il m'emmène en voiture pour me montrer Tien-Tsin. D'abord l'église neuve, couronnée des épitaphes des massacrés de 1870. Puis, dans la ville chinoise, vers le temple de Li-hong-tchang, le dernier vice-roi du Tcheli, que l'on vient de écréter dieu. Claudel me parle ensuite fort à la légère de l'hindouisme, qu'il me semble ne connaître qu'à travers [Jules] Michelet. Mais, comme moi, il est d'emblée en Chine, allé vers le Tao-tö King, l'abyssale pensée du vieux Lao-tseu. Et là encore, il ne la pense qu'à travers une vague traduction ; car, - voici le piquant ! Si [Louis] Laloy et moi avions reconnu, clair comme le jour, l'influence du style chinois écrit, sur sa prose, Claudel m'apprend qu'il 'ne sait pas un mot de chinois'. J'ai employé cette matinée aux visites officielles du corps consulaire.

Gründung der Ecole municipale française in Shanghai.

Aufführung von Re lei = Re xie = La Tosca : pièce en cinq actes von Victorien Sardou durch die Chun liu she (Spring Willow Society) mit Lu Jingruo und Ouyang Yuqian als Floria (Tosca) in Shanghai.

[Byron, George Gordon]. Bailun shi xuan. Su Manshu [ID D23321].
Chu Chih-yu : Su Manshu was the first important Byron translator ; his life was characterized by a mixture of melancholy, nostalgia, delicate sentimentalism, and revolutionary enthusiasm ; his seemingly neurotic behaviour and disarming personality had an aura of fascination about them ; and finally, his poems manifest a unique personal freshness as well as a sort of 'modern flavour' in keeping with admiration and deliberate self-identification with Byron. Su Manshu once described Byron's poems as being "like a stimulating liquor – the more one drinks, the more one feels the sweet fascination". The reason why he enjoyed Byron's work can be explained by the similarities between their peronalities and experiences. In the Turkish conquest of Greece, Su saw a parallel to the subjugation of China by the Manchus against whom he fought bravely in his youth. Being a man with a strong national pride, he was immensely impressed by the relevance of the spirited poem to his time and felt inspired by Byron's heroic militant efforts in Greece. In his translation, he interpreted Byron's poem to utter his own views about his people and the fate of his country. During the time when he did the translation, he was a lonely wanderer in Japan, distressed by his fate and that of his country which was still under the corrupt rule of the Manchus. There was not a single soul upon whom he could rely for comfort and understanding. It was natural that the pathetic exile, Childe Harold, would arouse his nostalgic feelings and The Isles of Greece incite his nationalistic indigation. Essentially, his enjoyment and translation of Byron were compensatory. He turned to Byron as if to a pre-existen pattern of his own suffering which afforded him both self-expression and catharsis.
Su Manshu voiced his personal feelings and sentiment in the translation. He rendered his version in pentasyllabic regulated verse.

Oscar Wilde : Rezeption in China allgemein.
Bonnie S. McDougall : In the debates which took place in the early stages of the new movement in China, Oscar Wilde's name did not commonly appear, nor did he provide the major inspiration to any group of young writers. He did have some influence : the Xin yue she (Crescent Moon Society) writers acknowledged his theories on art.
Wilde's work had much to offer the creators and critics of China's new literature. On the social side, there is his defence of individualism and of feminism, his criticism of governments and politicians, his exposure of the moral poverty underlying conventional respectability and his contribution to libertarian socialism ; on the artistic side, apart from the actual example set by his own work, there is his stress on the importance of criticism in art, and on the importance of art in literature. If there were other aspects of his writing left unexplored or unappreciated, such as his ideas on abstract art, or his general theory of making an art of life, this is hardly to be wondered at, the violent prejudice which led most English and American critics to dismiss him as 'insincere' and 'frivolous', obscured Wilde's standing in his own country for many years. It is even possible that the initial enthusiasm for Wilde in China was dampened by the unfavourable remarks of these critics who had an undue influence among the intellectually impressionable young critics of the early twenties. Neither in China nor in England could censorious critics prevent the widespread popularity of Wilde's fairy-tales and plays.
For Chinese readers, less dazzled by the brilliance of Wilde's wit and remembering his persecution in England, the satire of the plays was sharp and powerful. Again, less aware of the luxury and artificiality of his personal life, they were able to believe in the sincerity of the fairy-tales and prose-poems, which describe the beauty of humility and simplicity.
Wilde's theories on art and literature were neglected in the early period of the new literary movement, though there is some evidence that the Crescent group took them up in the late twenties and early thirties. None of the critics seems to have said that he liked Wilde's plays simply because they were very funny.

Zhou Xiaoyi : The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a 'Wilde-mania' throughout China. After his tragic death in Paris in 1900, the English aesthete was introduced into China as the figure head of England's aesthetic movement. Chinese responses to his works, which adumbrate the principle of art for art's sage, were enthusiastic. A large number of Chinese writers were attracted to aestheticism and produced voluminous works in the aesthetic style. Wilde was regarded as the symbol of an artistic lifestyle and the major representative of those Western writers who lived cloistered away from the ordinary world and devoted themselves entirely to pure art.
Wilde was first introduced into China not simply as a writer of a Western literary genre entirely new to the Chinese, but mainly as an apostle of pure art or, to be more specific, a practitioner of a new way of life.
The aesthetic ideas of Wilde that attracted modern Chinese writers were in many ways simplified. Wilde's earlier thinking, which developed in his first 'aesthetic' period during the 1880s, was much emphasized by his Chinese audience. In the Chinese account of Wilde, his various ideas from that period, such as art as religion, art for art's sake , and pure form as the ultimate value of artistic creation, subtle impressions and feelings, the flamboyantly aesthetic mode of being and the severe critique of the existing social order, were regarded as basic principles of aestheticism and key concepts of Wilde's thinking. But the moral radical side of Wilde and his most radical conceptions which are presented in The picture of Dorian Gray and Intentions and other essays on life and art are pointedly ignored. In 1920s and 1930s, Wilde was better known for his literary works than for his critical essays.
The Chinese reception of Wilde's works was thus highly selective. If Wilde was not entirely misread, he was at least only partially received and interpreted. His aesthetic theory and literary practice were transfigured into the forms which conformed to the social realities and cultural dynamics of China at that time. He was regarded as an artistic symbol of the time surrounded by a mysterious aesthetic aura. His life and his thought on art were widely admired, and his arguments were frequently quoted as the most important sources for Chinese modernists defending their aesthetic approach to art.
Wilde represented an idealized image that rebellious May Fourth writers could identify with. It is not the Wilde of wit and paradox that fascinated the Chinese aesthetes, it is the flamboyant Wilde, the extravagant and self-fashioning Wild, that impressed the Chinese minds questing for a new and alluring way of life.

Linda Pui-ling Wong : The reception of Wilde in China in the 1920s and 1930s, new and modern modes from the West surfaced in various areas like fashion, general Westernized appearance, schools, establishment of different social and literary communities and journals.
The Chinese intellectuals' new perception of their social and personal positions in relation to Chinese traditions, in which a different and modern mentality emerged. Such consciousness warred against the conservative Confucian mode of thinking and engendered new, or anti-traditional, visions of the concept of self.
Wilde was widely known for his extravagant and eccentric clothes, which was a mark of his 'aesthetic dandyism'. Guo Moruo condemned such a movement which was entirely external and had nothing to do with inner problems.
The Chinese writers, as seen in their commentaries and essays, praised Wilde for being a phenomenal literary figure of the nineteenth-century, especially for his leading position in the aesthetic movement. Their reviews and comments on Wilde's work basically were consistent with those of the Victorian readers. Readers of both cultures, regardless of the time and cultural lapses and gaps, understood ideas like social satire, hypocrisy, conservatism, social injustice, and class discrimination shown in his plays.

Yu wai xiao shuo ji. Zhou Zuoren yi. [ID D12489].
Earliest translation of Oscar Wilde was The happy prince by Zhou Zuoren in classical Chinese. In his short introduction, Zhou argues that the key point of Wilde's aestheticism is to 'transform life into an art. He himself practiced it by wearing eccentric clothes of an extraordinary shape and walking down in the street with a sunflower in hand'. According to Zhou, Wilde was an artist with a will to transcend ordinary life and elevate himself to the higher level of the kingdom of art.
Zhou Zuoren's efforts to promote Western humanist writing were unsuccessful at that time. A re-issue of these translations in 1921 was soon out of print, this time presumably because classical Chinese was now superseded by the vernacular.

Ezra Pound and China : general
Quellen :
Binyon, Laurence.
Chou king. Trad. De Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2601].
Li ki ; ou, Mémoires sur les bienséances et les céremonies. Trad. de Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2642].
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141].
Giles, Herbert A. A history of Chinese literature [ID D7726].
Goullart, Peter. Forgotten kingdom [ID D3683].
Hare, William Loftus. Chinese egoism. In : The Egoist ; vol. 1, no 23 (1914).
The Chinese classics. Transl. by James Legge. [ID D2212]. Pound übernimmt die übersetzerischen Grundlagen.
Karlgren, Bernhard. Glosses on the Book of odes [ID D3516].
La Charme, Alexandre de. Confucii Chi-king : sive, liber carminum [ID D1988].
Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de. Histoire générale de la Chine [ID D1868].
Mathews, R[obert] H[enry]. A Chinese-English dictionary [ID D8646].
Economic dialogues in ancient China. Ed. by Lewis Maverick [ID D29079].
Mori Kainan / Ariga Nagao. [On Chinese poetry].
Morrison, Robert. Morrison, Robert. A dictionary of the Chinese language [ID D1934].
Pauthier, [Jean-Pierre] Guillaume. Les livres sacrés de l'Orient [ID D2040].
Rock, Joseph : Monographs on the Naxi. [s. Rock].
[Wang, Youpu]. The sacred edict. With a translation of the colloquial rendering, notes and vocabulary by F[rederick] W[illiam] Baller [ID D10024].
Zhang, Tiemin. Chinese-English dictionary. (Shanghai : Commercial Press, 1933).
[Correspondence with Chinese friends : About 400 letters, postcards, and telegrams in three Pound archives and three private collection.]

Sekundärliteratur
1950
Hugh Gordon Porteus : Throughout the works of Ezra Pound one comes across references to Chinese literature, and to quotations from the Chinese classics – sometimes in English paraphrase, sometimes in Chinese character. Increasingly, since the first world war, Pound has busied himself with things Chinese. Constantly he has advocated the inclusion of Chinese language, poetry and (Confucian) doctrine in the English educational system. Pound's avowed ignorance of Chinese literature in general and of the Chinese language in particular makes only the more spectacular his singular achievements in these two field.
What is remarkable about Pound's Chinese translations is that so often they do contrive to capture the spirit of their originals, even when, as quite often happens, they funk or fumble the letters. For Pound, the Chinese character is a mysterious and magical unknown quantity, which sets all his faculties vibrating at the highest pitch of excitement. His pseudo-sinology releases his latent clairvoyance, just as the pseudo-sciences of the ancients sometimes gave them a supernormal insight. A Chinese text serves Pound as a receipt for the elixir served a Chinese alchemist. The result is a phenomenon of psychometry abetted by aesthetics.

1953
Kenner, Hugh : Pound never translates 'into' something already existing in English. He has had both the boldness and resource to make a new form, similar in effect to that of the original, which permanently extends the bounds of English verse.
Translation is for Pound somewhat easier than what is called 'original composition'.
Many Poundian principles meet in the translator's act that the best of his translations exist in three ways, as windows into new worlds, as acts of homage, and as personae of Pound's.
In the Cathay poems, Pound is at his best both as poet and as translator ; he is amazingly convincing at making the Chinese poet's world his own.

1955
Angela Jung Palandri : The redeeming feature in Pound is that even when his imagination runs wild, which is often does, he does not always go overboard by substituting the generally recognized meanings with the ones he draws out from the indeogramic analysis. Sinologists who dismiss Pound's translations as mere nonsense without a second thought actually betray their own limitations in scholarship and lack of imagination. For although apparently unorthodox and wild, Pound's interpretations are not as groundless as generally assumed.

1960
Winters, Yvor. In defence of reason. (London : Routledge, 1960).
… the Chinese poets, like Pound, were primitive in their outlook, and dealt with the more obvious and uncomplicated aspects of experience ; but their outlook, though primitive, like Pound's, differed from Pound's in a richness and security of feeling within its limits – their subjects, though simple, were nevertheless more rich than any with which Pound has thus far dealt, and they lent themselves to the composition of poems longer than most which Pound has thus far attempted, so that he had an opportunity to explore the possibilities of the free verse which he had previously begun to employ whereas the Chinese translations are written in what is really 'a heavily cadenced prose that continually verges on verse without achieving it', the Cantos are written in a slow and heavily accentual verse, which at its best displays and extraordinary suavity and grace of movement.

1960
Rosenthal, M.L. A primer of Ezra Pound. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1960).
The development of Pound's interest in Chinese poetry and thought, as well as his varied translations from the Chinese, is in itself an important subject. This interest, like every other to which he has seriously turned his attention, he has brought directly to bear on his own poetic practice and on his highly activistic thinking in general.

1964
Donald Davie : As for his [Pound's] contention that no Chinese can read Chinese characters without being aware of how they are built up out of pictorial metaphors, most authorities now appear to disagree with him. It is in any case something that can be neither proven nor disproven. Just as most speakers of English use the word 'discourse' without being aware of the metaphor of running about concealed in its etymology, so one concedes that a slow-witted Chinese, or a sharp-witted Chinese in a state of fatigue, would not register the pictorial metaphors in the Chinese he was reading. The argument can then be pushed further only by unprofitably speculating on what is the statistically normal degree of slow-wittedness or exhaustion among Chinese.

1970
Akiko Miyake : Confucianism always meant for Pound the idea of order which he found lacking in his understanding of European civilization and which is particularly indispensable for constructing his counterpart of Dante's cosmos for ascending from hell to paradise in his fictitious cosmos and thereby metaphorically liberating the Platonic essence of beauty and knowledge. The most impressive fact about Pound as a poet is the way he sacrificed anything for creating his poetic contemplation and his personal mystery. The vorticist movement, through which Pound succeeded in starting the Cantos, ruined his early reputation. The obscurity of the Cantos very much impeded his career as a poet, and finally his glorification of Mussolini's regime as a part of the manifestation of his ideal provoked his long imprisonment. It is not unlikely that writing the Cantos increased his mental disorder. One cannot determine for certain whether Pound's apotheosis of Confucianism was a cause or a symptom of his mental disorder. It is spectacular to contrast his Cantos, however, which steadily proceeded with their own kind of skill. His mental disorder advanced along with his exaltation of the Confucian order, till his pro-fascist broadcasting during the war invited catastrophe. Pound pointed out the defect of Platonism for an artist and offered a correction in his ideogramic method, which is probably the first correction of Platonism through Chinese influence in history. He presented a possible parallelism between the Sung Confucians' metaphysical interpretation of Confucian classics and Christian contemplation though he worked through the vague suggestions of the former that appeared in Pauthier's text. Particularly, his paralleling of Chinese history and the Eleusinian concept of the recurrence of life is a very interesting attempt to interpret Chinese culture within a basic pattern of anthropology common to any type of culture.

1976
Monika Motsch : Ezra Pound begeistert sich für Konfuzius aus folgenden Gründen : James Legge hält viele Passagen für unverständlich ; Arthur Waley entschuldigt sich im Vorwort seiner Übersetzung des Lun yu für die Trockenheit. Die konfuzianischen Schriften sind für Pound eine Lebensphilosophie, die Summer der Weisheit. Sie sind der Schlüssel zum guten Staat und der Beginn des Denkens. Wie Konfuzius lebte Pound in einer von Kriegen erschütterten Welt, wie Konfuzius war er ein grosser, suggestiver Lehrer. Wie dieser, pflegte Pound aus der Literatur früherer Zeiten zu zitieren. Am Ende des Canto XIII und 116 deutet er an, dass er sich als Nachfolger von Konfuzius betrachtet. Pound sieht in Konfuzius einen Philosophen, der 'ideogrammatisch' denkt, d.h. der die Dinge selbst in ihren Beziehungen zur Umwelt untersucht. In sich aufgenommen hat Pound die für die konfuzianische Philosophie charakteristische Vorstellung eines Kosmos, in dem Natur und menschliche Gemeinschaft in organischer Beziehung stehen. Er macht sie – in verwandelter Form – zu dem zentralen Leitgedanken seiner konfuzianischen Übersetzungen und der Cantos. Pound sieht die Natur, die konfuzianische Ethik und die Mythologie in einem grossen, ständig fortschreitenden Prozess, und diese Gedankenverbindung erwies sich für seine Konfuzius-Übersetzungen und vor allem für seine Cantos als sehr fruchtbar. Er betonte immer wieder, dass der Westen Konfuzius brauche. Er glaubte, durch Konfuzius eine Philosophie gefunden zu haben, die sich in China und in den frühen Jahren in Amerika schon bewährt hatte. Er versucht, die konfuzianischen Ideen dynamisch im Prozess der Anwendung zu zeigen, wobei er die Schriftzeichen als lebendige Szenen darstellt. Es gelingt ihm dadurch, dem Begriff seine ursprüngliche Vitalität zurückzugeben und gleichzeitig den späteren moralischen Sinn des Wortes zu treffen. Pounds Stil ist lebendig und voller Bilder und trifft in seiner Prägnanz und Suggestionskraft oft genau das chinesische Original. Er führt bei der organischen Dekomposition die konfuzianischen Werte auf legendige Bilder und Handlungen zurück, die sich gegenseitig beeinflussen. Oft erscheinen diese Werte in einer Reihe von verschiedenen Metamorphosen. Pound macht die konfuzianischen Begriffe dynamischer, präziser und wesentlich komplizierter und mehrdeutiger als im chinesischen Text. Er greift über den Kosmos hinaus, in metaphysische Bereiche und er ruft die Götter an. Er bricht den geschlossenen konfuzianischen Kreis auf und weitet ihn so, dass er sich erst im Unendlichen schliesst. Wie Konfuzius die vergessene Weisheit der Antike für seine Zeit zu neuem Leben erweckte, so vermittelt Pound dem Westen östliche Weisheit.

1980
Wesling, Donald. The chances of rhyme : device and modernity. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1980).
[About the importance of Chinese syllabic metre for Ezra Pound] :
Apparently Chinese, with its rhythms and excitements different from ours, cannot achieve the special expectation of syntactical delay or the pleasure frustration of the English periodic sentence. With ideograms as equal units, juncture and disjuncture are insistent, but Chinese will not display the specific track of feeling of the Western languages, which do not so strongly employ separation of the parts of the line. There are in English more units (words) in a given line ; therefore more partitions ; and therefore the line is more possessed of continuity… Thus when, as with Pound, a writer wanted the laconism of the clumped phrase, he consciously imitated, in English, the Chinese mode.

1984
Y.T. Walther : There are elements particular to Pound as a poet and to English as a language different from Chinese that have prevented Pound's ideogrammic method from procuring the desired effects. The major instrument of the ideogrammic method is the technique of juxtaposition, which is the omission of grammatical links and interpretive elements in a sentence or sentences. The common belief is that when the links or transitions are taken away, obscurity takes place. This is a misconception. Obscurity occurs only then the expectation of the complete sentence form is frustrated. The first major reason why juxtaposition creates obscurity in Pound's modern English but not in T'ang poetry is the difference in the English and Chinese reading patterns : the former constitutes an expectation of the full sentence while the latter relies much on discontinuity.
The first major reason why Pound's ideogrammic method fails to communicate is that 'the traditional ways of coming into relation with each other' in the English language and thinking pattern do not yield to ideogrammic understanding. Pound's incommunicativeness is not so much a result of his using the ideogrammic method as of using it indiscriminatingly and of making it the only norm acceptable in poetry, in other word, monism. The method to Pound, is a tool to purify a poetry of 'emotional slither' that he had inherited from a previous century.

1985
Chang Yao-hsin : Pound took in his Chinese translations sufficient notice of other rhetorical figures such as simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and even allegory embedded in classical Chinese poetry. He also gave due consideration to the symmetrical structure, the refrains, and the pathetic fallacy, so conspicuously noticeable in some of the odes. A general perusal of Pound's Chinese translation of the odes reveals an unmistakable editorial bias. He wants to give an accurate, precise, and definite description. He wants to achieve direct and exact treatment and most basic economy of poetic expression. He wishes to avoid the slightest hint of a moral and artistic defection through unforgivably careless use of an unnecessary word. In fine, he intends to substantiate his imagist aesthetic and prove its efficacy as an antidote to Victorian poetics. The translation of classic Chinese poetry affords him a fine opportunity to do this, and at the suggestion of Fenollosa, he seized it with both hands. Thus the endeavor is a labor of love indeed. On the matter of translation, Pound holds that the translator should not pester the reader with superfluities of any kind which would put him further from the masterwork. Whatever Pound's weakness and however outrageous his editorial licence, he succeeds well where most translators of Chinese literature fail : he seldom puts himself between the reader and the master he undertakes to translate.
Pound's work as a translator of Chinese literature made his Confucius unintelligible and ridiculous sometimes, so much so that we can not take his version of the 'Four books' seriously as a work introducing the thought system of Confucius. The moment he starts to apply the method, he ceases to be communicative and draws ridicule upon himself. In his character-analysis which is part of the 'method', he made very few lucky hits, and picked little that is germane.
The Cantos, in structure, bears a clear stamp of classic Chinese poetry. We may even suggest that classic Chinese poetry may have served as an aesthetic prototype for the form of Pound's epic. Just as in a Chinese poem the characters stand at one apart and yet correlated as if by an inner cohesive force to form an organic whole, so the hundred-odd cantos juxtapose and relate to one another to add up the weird colossus of the masterwork.
The influence of Confucius' philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in Confucian classic which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One of these relates to race and racial discrimination. Obviously chauvinistic, Confucius never spoke of minority nationalties in outlying areas of China except as barbarians.

1988
Chang Yao-hsin : Nostalgia for the ideal past, desire to salvage a world from total decay, and devotion to humanity proved to be the bonds that tied him and Confucius together. Whether for good or for evil, rightly or wrongly, Pound was for the most part of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could help him save the West. The influence of Confucius's philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in the Confucian classics which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One such issue relates to race and racial discrimination.
Works of art, once completed, acquire an independent existence and invite interpretations which may not always have much to do with their creators. To say that a person with bad political ideas cannot write good poetry and thus condemn both Pound and his masterwork is perhaps as simplistic as to dismiss Wagner's music as worthless.

1996
Robert Kern : Pound Orientalized modernism, in the sense that his versions of Chinese poems became models for modernist poetry in general, both in his own work and in that of other poets as well. Pound's involvement with Chinese poetry represents a certain, probably unavoidable, neglect of its full reality as an independent and exotic cultural production. Although it provokes and enables Pound's pursuit of modernism, Chinese poetry itself is displaced as a literary tradition in its own right. Thus if Chinese poetry in our time is Pound's invention, and if that invention's most essential concern is, in fact, with 'a new kind of English poem', then what we are dealing with as Chinese poetry is something that has been produced in and by the West.
The publication of Cathay ushered in a whole new era of Anglo-American regard for Chinese poetry, along with a new era of translation. To see that Cathay constitutes a watershed in the history of Chinese translation, we may consider the attitude of translators active during the period just prior to its publication, a period extending roughly from the 1880s to 1915. English translators of this era tend variously to appropriate, domesticate, or otherwise impose themselves and their culture upon Chinese texts, and there seem to be few if any explicit rules or conventions to guide the practice of translation. The writers, for the most part, introduce their work by expressing dissatisfaction with existing translations and calling for some new approach, one which will not necessarily constitute a closer approximation of the Chinese, but which will correct what they feel to be the excesses of previous translators, especially James Legge. Frequently they articulate their dissatisfactions in terms of a postromantic distinction between the scholarly and the literary or the poetic, where the former represents an uninviting literalism or a pedantic adherence to the text, thought to impede a freer, more imaginative interpretations of the material. Pound himself, who would later assume his own antischolarly stance and insist on not translating the words, was often the target of criticism directed at what was seen to be his own unseemly or ignorant deviations from the text. But if Pound appears to take the side of the poets against the scholars in this debate, a further distinction must be made between his understanding of poetic translation and that of many of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Pound's distaste for literal translation makes him more responsive and responsible to other aspects of the poem, including its sequence of images, its rhythms, and its tone. It is in this sense that Pound satisfies his obligations to the original text and in this sense also that his translations become acts of homage to the poets he translates.
After his reading of Fenollosa in 1913, Pound apparently came to feel that imagism is not merely a modernist style but a category or genre of poetry with a lineage as ancient as that of the lyric itself. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader, in part, by defamiliarizing his English – which means not that he translates from Chinese into English, or from a foreign idiom into a familiar one, but that he allows his English to be reordered or even disordered, for expressive purposes, by his sense of the cultural and linguistic otherness of the experience to be conveyed.
Pound's interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese after Cathay takes the form as well of an increasingly intense focus on Chinese characters, also understood as universal, natural. They constitute a permanently available system of signs, and not so much a language as an authorizing source of language, more immediate to nature or things themselves than any alphabetical writing could be, and therefore less arbitrary than alphabetical scripts. Pound never abandons his own 'virtu' or creativity as a reader, regardless of whether that which is to be read is a whole text or a single ideogram. His aim is to make it new, and making it new for him means both to preserve and to reconstruct. In presenting Chinese characters, he could hardly go further toward preserving the reality of Chinese in its difference or otherness, at least from the point of view of English or Western readers. In regarding the characters as universal signs, and in tending to read them creatively, to suit his own purposes, Pound can be seen in his own way to the downplaying the difference of Chinese.

1997
Mary Paterson Cheadle : For Pound, translation should not be 'philology', which fails to give to the literary works at hand the vitality or contemporary relevance the original had in its own time and place, but 'interpretation', where the 'translator' is definitely making a new poem.
Even if Pound had been interested in philological translations of Confucian texts, he would not have been sufficiently trained in the rules of sinology to produce such a translation, and most critics writing on the subject agree that Pound's translations are wrong in many specifics. At the same time, Pound's Chinese translations have been judged favorably in respect to capturing the 'spirit' of the Chinese works. Pound's Confucian translations are extremely rich in imagery, and this is because, working with an antiquated theory about the composition of Chinese characters, he found more images in individual Chinese words than other twentieth-century sinologists do.
What is essential to an understanding of Pound as a translator of Confucian texts, he did not take into account the fact that some of the elements of those words indicate the sound of the word more than, or even rather than, represent the meaning of the word pictographically.

1999
Eric Hayot : Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover in poetry the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it. As a young man, he translated Chinese poetry into English, and through that poetry developed an aesthetic theory rooted in an ontology of Chinese writing. Later on, Pound intertwined Chinese characters and philosophy with his Cantos, published translations of Confucian texts, and partially explained his interest by insisting that the texts belonged as much to him as to the Chinese. 'Pound and China' produces various understandings of the West's relationship to China in general, understandings influenced both by literary judgments and by moral ones.

1999
Ming Xie : Both Fenollosa and Pound had consistently ignored or played down the phonetic aspect of Chinese characters in order to accentuate their primitive pictorial element. The Chinese ideogram, according to Fenollosa and Pound, is not the picture of a sound, but 'the picture of a thing'. Pound himself was perhaps both expressing his doubts about and professing his ignorance of the nature of the Chinese character. Fenollosa's ideogrammic principle seems to refer the image to the external object, which, through the mediation of the image, acts upon the human mind. Pound's Cathay versions do not seem to contain any lines or images that are made on the basis of pictorial etymology. Pound seemed always more interested in the process of perception and definition that lies behind the pictorial analogy. For him, the ideogram thus becomes the fundamental principle of poetry, and of a new mental economy in general.
Pound's actual encounter with the Fenollosa materials may have been merely accidental, but Pound's own sense of his search for fundamental values in poetry and civilization was not. His Chinese adventures were not just fanciful exoticism, but a search for universal standards of 'perfection'. Pound believed that good translation should not try to replicate exactly the original experience that may be extracted from the poem and that good translation should consist in the expression of the translaros's own interpretation of the original structure of form and feeling in a new idiom.

2003
Ira B. Nadel : [Ezra Pound in Philadelphia 1889-1906].The young Ezra Pound encountered his first Chinese object, a Ming dynasty vase at Fernbrook Avenue in Wyncote, Penn. At Aunt Frank Weston's in New York, he saw a remarkable screen book, a sequence of oriental scenes adorned with poems in Chinese and Japanese ideograms. The oriental collections in the museums of Philadelphia provided additional exposure to Chinese culture, preparing Pound for his later absorption in Orientalism developed through the work of Laurence Binyon, Ernest Fenollosa, Nô drama, and his own study of Chinese. Family interest in China originated in Homer and Isabel Pound's concern with the work of Christian missionaries in China. Accounts of travel, religious work, and trade formed part of the family's reading. But the oriental objects in the Pound home indicate more than homage to a foreign culture with things Chinese. They represent Philadelphia's continuing attraction to the material culture of China, which had a formative role in Pound's earliest conception of the Orient. Chinese decorative and fine art formed Pound's initial encounter with China and contributed to his likely being the first major American writer to respond more to oriental art than to its literary tradition. Chinese painting and imagery acted as a catalyst for his writing and formation of his work. Pound found in the cultural heritage of Philadelphia's celebration of China the beginnings of a lifelong preoccupation with the country.

2005
Zhu Chungeng : Confucianism, Pound believes, offers a solution to the West that, from its political institutions to its economic system, has fallen into chaos and disorder. Ideology and aesthetics are inextricable. Pound also sees in Confucianism a way of making poetry in articulating his vision of a new earthly paradise. Unlike other failing metaphysical religions, Confucianism, in Pound's view, does not commit 'splitting' – the separation of ideas from the phenomenal or culture from nature. Pound considers Confucianism not just a balanced system ; he finds Confucianism particularly attractive because of Confucius's deep concern with man and culture, his focus on social and ethical issues, his emphasis on individual responsibility, and, above all, his strong commitment to realizing social order and harmony in this world. Pound embraces Confucianism also because he considers it verifiable truth obtainable through empirical experience. He repeatedly expresses his confidence in modern science, which he thinks is not only characteristic of his cosmology but also sets an example for literary study. This empirical approach is evident in his inductive aesthetics, such as his imagism or ideogrammic method, where ideas are to be expressed through the concrete particulars. Confucianism, for Pound, is entirely assimilable to his trusted 'method of modern science' as a comprehensive means of attaining verifiable truth. The objective of this procedure is to establish social order and harmony, from family all the way to the state. The Confucian master man must have self-discipline, great sensibility, and strong sense of responsibility to accomplish this objective.

2007
Sean Macdonald : Pound was merely promoting one aspect of Chinese etymology, 'xiangxing', the pictographic category for Chinese characters, and was not particularly concerned with the many other categories and forms of semantic associations. Pound's understanding of the Chinese language aside, the ideogrammic method is an obvious parallel to montage : "The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader's mind, onto a part that will register."
Pound liked to play with etymology, and he had a tendency to split words up into etymons. His ideogrammic method was, right from the outset, a way to fragment language at the basic level of vocabulary, where individual words are split into fractured juxtaposition. In addition, Pound's fractured syntax, his particular use of citation, extra-literary text, and typography, in his prose and The cantos shows clear links to avant-garde movements. For a modernist like Pound, the view of written Chinese as a script which overcomes the mediation of alphabetical writing systems seemed to justify his own view of the potential immediacy of language. On the one hand, such a view of Chinese can only be maintained at a distance : Chinese is idealized as a form of direct access to the signified, as a sort of signified in the flesh and not seen as an everyday mode of communication. On the other hand, for Pound, his appropriation of Chinese language and culture was the very least a very positive appropriation. "The Chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS", writes Pound.
Pound's interests in Chinese culture changed over time, but his Confucianism shows a distinctly political streak, especially in light of his support of Mussolini's government. For Pound, Confucius and Mencius would have been a couple of good fascists.
Poundian ideograms tend to work in cumulative and constractive juxtapositional clusters of text and imagery. His ideograms can be placed on a continuum of attitudes toward Chinese culture and language that goes back as far as seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in China. The association of Chinese culture with a particular modern technique cannot be dismissed as solely a modernist or avant-gardist appropriation of Chinese language and culture as primitive, or an historical curiosity.

2008
Qian Zhaoming : In Pauthier's Confucius Pound seems to have found a philosopher, a cultural hero, who shared their modernist values. While affirming social responsibility the Chinese sage also stressed the relevance of individual dignity. To Pound such a philosopher could serve as an antidote against evils in the West.

2009
Williams, R. John : In their attention to Chinese ideography, Pound and Fenollosa entirely misunderstood the nature of the Chinese writing system, fixating somewhat blindly on its more exotic secondary elements. Pound even thought that Chinese ideography was so pictographically transparent that one could decipher the characters without even knowing Chinese. But even if Pound had a few truly ideographic examples to point to, the fact is that even the most generous estimates indicate that only a handful of Chinese characters actually conform to the ideographic principles, causing us to feel naturally suspicious of Pound's propensity to speak of 'the' Chinese character. Pound's translations may have accomplished a degree of 'openness' for his Anglo-American audience in the 1920s, but, in continuing to view Pound's translations as a framework for understanding 'the' Chinese poem today creates a scandal on two fronts : First, such a view closes our eyes to the simple fact that Chinese poetry is much more than the imagistic expressionism that Pound attributed to it ; and second, it glosses over the contemporary realities that Pound ignored by continually turning to the proverbially ancient and the aesthetically ideographic.

2010
Roslyn Joy Ricci : Ezra Pound romanticized Chinese characters as ideograms, signifiers attached to the signified, bypassing language. This misunderstanding of the Chinese character became productive error by stimulating the creation of a new poetic style – ideogrammic method. The visual aesthetics of characters appealed to his creativity. The journey from complege ignorance of the composition if Chinese writer characters to sufficient understanding to appreciate their complex evolution is both challenging and rewarding. Pound saw in Chinese characters the potential to transmit generalities with both detail and succinctness – in an aesthetical appealing form. He believed that each character conveyed a concept with broad associations to the universe as a whole. He translated Chinese characters and used them in his own poetic creations with this belief in mind. What he actually did, by using the characters in isolation without character context, was to inadvertently open the boundaries of signification providing readers with the opportunity to create their own truth constructs from the details of the character. Using this premise to construct an ideogrammic poetic method allowed Pound the licence to corrupt language signification without the shackles of conventional poetic restraints.
Pound strived for simplicity in his poetry, including poetry translation, but he also endeavoured to employ the most efficient medium available. He used musical notation, both ancient and modern, and symbols juxtaposed with Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, ancient Greek and Latin.
Pound was a lateral thinker, decades ahead of his time. His fascination with Confucian ideology led him to Chinese characters as the storage place of this knowledge. The visual aesthetics of characters captured his imagination – turning his interest towards them.

2010
Xin Ning : Unlike professional sinologists and translators, Pound's interest in Confucianism was the direct result of his discontent with the modern Western world. His self-appointed mission was to 'civilize the Americans' with the Chinese example. He wanted to reform the West under the guidance of the wisdom of the East. His interpretation of Confucianism is a creative 'misreading' rather than a faithful introduction to the original teaching of Confucius. Pound's 'misreading' provides us with a good example of the cross-cultural dialogue between the traditional and the modern age, between China and the West, and between translation and creative writing, which demonstrates not only the individual talent of Pound as an artist and cultural figure, but also the relevance of ancient Chinese thought to the modern world as well as the possibility of this ancient cultural tradition's self-renovation.

Ezra Pound met Laurence Binyon. He attended his lectures on 'Art and thought in East and West' and frequently visited him at the British Museum with Dorothy Shakespear, who often copied Chinese paintings while Binyon and Pound talked.
Pound may have heard about Wang Wei in the Gallery of Prints and Drawings, where are two famous Chinese landscape paintings, one attributed to Wang Wei. In Painting in the Far East, Binyon describes Wang Wei as the 'founder of the southern school, who was even more famous for his poetry than for his painting'. Even if Pound hadn't read the book, he would have gotten the information from Binyon when viewing the paintings.

William Carlos Williams : Allgemein
Quellen :
Brouner, Walter Brooks ; Mow, Fung Yuet. Chinese made easy. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1904).
Confucius. The unwobbling pivot and The great digest [ID D29063].
Fenollosa, Ernest. Instigations [ID D22141].
Giles, Herbert A. A history of Chinese literature [ID D7726].
The new poetry : an anthology. Ed. by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1918).
Pound, Ezra. Lustra [ID D29059].
Rexroth, Kenneth. One hundred poems from the Chinese [ID D29176].
Waley, Arthur. A hundred and seventy Chinese poems [ID D8884].

Sekundärliteratur
Henry W. Wells : William Carlos Williams's poetry is based on irony, paradox and contradiction. He became a violent partisan of the moral and aesthetic standards of the West and scarcely less in accord with those of the East. With the Chinese he cultivates violent transitions. Connectives are flagrantly omitted, stimulating imagination, prohibiting redundancy. Like the Chinese poets when seen through Western eyes, Williams tolerates no stale, flat, conventional word order. Like so many of his poems as well as poems by Du Fu and Li Bo, the subject is a landscape with a few buildings as supplementary features. The major theme is certainly the devastation of the landscape. Like the Chinese poets, he favors ambiguous, especially the earliest days of spring, when, in the chill, clear air one doubts whether spring has actually arrived or winter still lingers. His own verse does not even give evidence that he had at any time digested the full meaning of any Chinese poems. Some real influence, either direct or indirect, is highly probable and the close analogies are instructive for the reader of Williams of the typical Chinese poem, or of both.
It is certain that Williams had no conception of the 'fu' or of any of the more complex forms of Chinese verse. In general way Williams might have known of these poems but the probability is that even in this respect he remained thoroughly ignorant. There are striking analogies between his accomplishments as poet not only between his brief lyrics and the Chinese short poems but between his most complex art firms and those of the ancient Chinese. In their views of both art and life, in the practice of their craft and their attitudes toward living, they often hold remarkably similar positions. Williams's verse might not have been materially different from the achievement that it is had China remained in the twentieth century as unknown to the West as it was in the Middle Ages.

Mu Xiangyue studiert an der University of Illinois und erhält 1913 den B.A.

Yung, Wing [Rong, Hong]. My life in China and America [ID D7870].
The breaking of the 'Chinese Educational Commission' and the young students in 1881 was not brought about without a strenuous effort on the part of some thoughtful men… who came forward in their quiet and modest ways to enter a protest against the revocation of the Mission. Chief among them were my life-long friend, the Rev. J.H. Twichell, and Rev. John W. Lane, through whose persistent efforts Presidents Porter and Seelye, Samuel Clemens [Mark Twain], T.F. Frelinghuysen, John Russell Young and others were enlisted and brought forward to stay the work of retrogression of the part of the Chinese.

Stevens, Wallace. The letters of Wallace Stevens [ID D30294].
Letter from Wallace Stevens to Elsie Moll ; Thursday Evening [New York, March 18, 1909]
Shall I send a picture or two to make a private exhibition for you ? Well, here they are, and all from the Chinese, painted centuries ago : 'pale orange, green and crimson, and white, and gold, and brown' ; and 'deep lapis-lazuli and orange, and opaque green, fawn-color, black, and gold' ; and 'lapis blue and vermilion, white, and gold and green. I do not know if you feel as I do about a place so remote and unknown as China – the irreality of it. So much so, that the little realities of it seem wonderful and beyond belief. – I have just been reading about the Chinese feeling about landscape. Just as we have certain traditional subjects that our artists delight to portray (like 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' or 'Mother and Child' etc. etc.!) so the Chinese have certain aspects of nature, of landscape, that have become traditional. – A list of those aspects would be as fascinating as those lists of 'Pleasant Things' I used to send. Here is the list (upon my soul!) –
The Evening Bell from a Distant Temple
Sunset Glow over a Fishing Village
Fine Weather after Storm at a Lonely Mountain Town
Homeward-bound Boats off a Distant Shore
The Autumn Moon over Lake Tung-t'ing
Wild Geese on a Sandy Plain
Night Rain in Hsiao-Hsiang.
This is one of the most curious things I ever saw, because it is so comprehensive. Any twilight picture is included under the first title, for example. 'It is just that silent hour when travellers say to themselves, 'The day is done', and to their ears comes from the distance the expected sound of the evening bell'. – And last of all in my package of strange things from the East, a little poem written centuries ago by Wang-an-shih :
'It is midnight ; all is silent in the house ; the
Water-clock has stopped. But I am unable to
sleep because of the beauty of the trembling
shapes of the spring-flowers, thrown by the moon
upon the blind. '
I don't know anything more beautiful than that anywhere, ore more Chinese – and Master Green-cap bows to Wang-an-shih. No : Wang-an-shih is sleeping, and may not be disturbed. – I am going to poke around more or less in the dust of Asia for a week or two and have no idea what I shall disturb and bring to light. – Curious thing, how little we know about Asia, and all that. It makes me wild to learn it all in a night – But Asia (a brief flight from Picardy – as the mind flies) will do for some other time…

Letter from Wallace Steven to his wife Elsie ; Monday Afternoon, [New York], Jan. 2 [1911].
Walked down Fifth Avenue to Madison Square and, after lunch, went into the American Art Galleries, where, among other things, they are showing some Chinese and Japanese jades and porcelains.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to his wife Elsie ; 20 Aug. (1911).
Stevens enclosed in his letter the excerpt of the essay on Chinese painting The noble features of the forest and the stream by Guo Xi.
"Nearly a thousand years ago the critic, Kuo His [Guo Xi], in his work, The Noble Features of the Forest and the Stream, expressed once for all the guiding sentiment of Chinese landscape painting. He takes it as axiomatic that all gently disposed people would prefer to lead a solitary and contemplative life in communion with nature, but he sees, too, that the public weal does not permit such an indulgence. This is not the time for us [he writes] to abandon the busy worldly life for one of seclusion in the mountains, as was honorably done by some ancient sages in their days. Though impatient to enjoy a life amidst the luxuries of nature, most people are debarred from indulging in such pleasures. To meet this want, artists have endeavored to represent landscapes so that people may be able to behold the grandeur of nature without stepping out of their houses. In this light painting affords pleasures of a nobler sort, by removing from one the impatient desire of actually observing nature. Such a passage yields its full meaning only upon very careful reading. One should note the background of civilization, quietism, and rural idealism implied in so casual an expression as the luxuries of nature. Nor should one fail to see that what is brought into the home of the restless worldling is not the mere likeness of nature, but the choice feeling of the sage."

Letter from Wallace Stevens to his wife Elsie ; Sunday Evening [New York July 25, 1915].
Then I went over to the Botanical Garden where I spent several hours in studying the most charming things. I was able to impress on myself that larkspur comes from China. Was there ever anything more Chinese when you stop to think of it ? And coleus comes from Java. Good Heavens, how that helps one to understand coleus – or Java. There were bell-flowers from China too, incredibly Chinese… There are patches of marigolds, portulaca, petunias, everlastings, etc. One or two things were absolutely new to me. One was a Chinese lantern plant. This is a plant about two feet high which bears pods, the size of peppers. The pods are green at one end and at the bottom, as they hang, are orange or yellow, so that they resemble lantenrs…

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monroe ; Highland Court Hotel, Harford, Connecticut, May 29th, 1916.
The characters are a little more individualized. They seem to me to be distinct parts. Proper acting would bring them out. They may be a little thin to a reader's eye, particularly since I have retained 1st Chinese, 1nd Chinese etc.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monroe ; Hartford, Wednesday, October 8, 1919.
Have you seen this month's Little Review with the quotation from the Chinese ?
[Fenollosa, Ernest ; Pound Ezra. The Chinese written character. In : Little review ; vol. 6 (Oct. 1919)].

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monroe ; Hartford. Aug. 24 [1922].
It is a pleasant surprise to have your card from North Carolina with its news from Peking. One of these days, when the different things on their way to Hartford from Peking, Paris, Geneva, London, Mexico (cigars), actually arrive I shall have exhausted the possibilities of life within my scope.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monroe ; Sept. 23rd, 1922
I have just returned to the office to-day from a short absence and find the announcement of yr soirée. A telegram would be so demned conspicuous. Sorry. But I also find a package from Peking containing two packages of jasminerie, one of which I have pried open to smell one of the good smells, out of China. It is a very good smell indeed and I am delighted. Nothing could please me more. Do, please, tell your sister, la belle jasminatrice, how grateful I am. I look forward to some subsequent marvel ; but am patient as you required me to be. For a poet to have even a second-hand contact with China is a great matter ; and a desk that sees so much trouble is blessed by such reversions to innocence.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monroe ; Harford, Oct. 28, 1922.
The box from Peking reached us yesterday. Box, I say, for lo and behold, Mrs. Calhoun sent not one or two, but five, really delightful things. Of these, the chief one is a carved wooden figure of the most benevolent old god you ever saw. He has a staff in one hand and in the other carries a lotus bud. On the back of his head he has a decoration of some sort with ribbons running down into his gown. The wood is of the color of dark cedar but it is neither hard nor oily. And there you are. But the old man, Hson-hsing, has the most amused, the nicest and kindliest expression : quite a pope after one's own heart or at least an invulnerable bishop telling one how fortunate one is, after all, and not to mind one's bad poems. He is on a little teak stand as is, also, each of the other things. The other things are a small jade screen, two black crystal lions and a small jade figure. The jade pieces are white. We have placed the screen behind the prophet, so that if he desires to retire into its cloudy color he can do so conveniently and we have set the lions in his path, one on each side. The heads of these noisy beasts are turned back on their shoulders, quite evidently unable to withstand the mildness of the venerable luminary. The other figure precedes the group as hand-maiden and attendant casting most superior glances at the lions meaning, no doubt, to suggest that it would be best for them to put their tails between their legs and go about their business. Can you, in plain Sandburg, beat it ? Mrs. Stevens will try to take a photograph of the group, so that you can see it for yourself. I have had considerable experience in buying things abroad through other people. This, however, is the first time the thing has been wholly successful ; for this group has been chosen with real feeling for the objects. The old man is so humane that the study of his is a good as a jovial psalm. I must have more, provided he is not a solitary. But I intend to let that rest for the moment for Mrs. Calhoun has clearly gone to a lot of trouble. I have written to her today. But I am as much indebted to you for this blissful adventure and I must thank you too. One might have got a more vanity ! Is it the case, as it seems to be, that there is no vanity in China ? There is, of course, since China has its own classics. This group, however, is pure enough…

Letter from Wallace Stevens to his wife Elsie ; [Havana, Cuba] Sunday Afternoon, Febr. 4, 1923.
There are plenty of places where English is spoken but to move about freely it is imperative to know Spanish. Even the Chinese speak it. There are a good many Chinese here…

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monore ; Harford, [July 1924?].
Mrs. Calhoun wrote to me a few weeks ago, from which it appears that 'Harmonium' reached Peking.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Morton Dauwen Zabel ; [Hartford] Oct. 22, 1934.
I wish I knew Miss Monroe's address in Peking : that is to say, I wish I knew it, if you thought that she would be interested in doing a little shoping.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monroe ; Harford, March 13, 1935.
Last autumn, when I heard that you were in Pekin I wrote to Mr. Zabel (his name sounds like an exercise in comparative philology) to ask him your address, because, of course, the mere idea of your being in Pekin, instead of suggesting temple roofs, suggested tea and other things. He sent me your address, but you would have been starting home before my letter reached you… But I suppose that, in the course of a few months, I shall have some money that I can call my own : not much, but enough to buy, say, a pound of Mandarin Tea, a wooden carving, a piece of porcelain or one piece of turquoise, one small landscape painting, and so on and so on. On the other hand, if you think that this would bore your sister, let me know. I should want to send the money through you, and not directly.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Ronald Lane Latimer ; [Hartford], Nov. 5, 1935.
I think that I have been influenced by Chinese and Japanese lyrics.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Ronald Lane Latimer ; [Harford] Nov. 21, 1935.
A man would have to be very thick-skinned not to be conscious of the pathos of Ethiopia or China, or one of these days, if we are not careful, of this country.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Harriet Monore ; Hartford, Dec. 4, 1935.
As you know, I had intended to send you some money for Mrs. Calhoun and, if I had carried out my plans, I should about now be receiving several crates of ancient landscapes, rare Chinese illustrated books, Chun Yao ware, Tang horses, and so on. The truth is that I actually wrote a letter giving you some idea of what I should like to have and then tore it up because it would have run into a great deal of money. I felt too that it would do me good to go without something that I could not have. The exhibition of Chinese works of art that has just opened in London must be a marvelous thing. I get as much satisfaction from reading well-written descriptions of an exhibition of that sort and of the objects in it as I do from most poetry.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to James A. Powers ; [Hartford] Dec. 17, 1935.
I sent Mr. Qwock [Benjamin Kwok, student Lingnan University, Guangzhou] some money last spring, with a request for some erudite teas. It appears that, when this letter reached Canton, he had left on a holiday in Central China, or in the moon, or wherever it is that Chinese go in the summer time. But on his return to his studies in the autumn he wrote to me and said that he had written to one of his uncles, who lives in Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo-Woof-Woof-Woof, and has been in the tea business for hundreds of generations. I have no doubt that in due course I shall receive from Mr. Qwock enough tea to wreck my last kidney, and with it some very peculiar other things, because I asked him to send me the sort of things that the learned Chinese drink with that sort of tea.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Benjamin Kwok ; Hartford, Dec. 20, 1935.
Yesterday (that is to say, on December 19th) three boxes reached me, their contents in perfect condition. This too was very pleasant, because they came just in time for Christmas. What you have sent is precisely what I desired to have, and I particularly liked the little metal jars or canisters containing the better teas. Only recently I had been reading about Chrysanthemum Tea ; now you have made it possible for me to have some myself. This morning for breakfast I had some of the best Kee-Moon, and found it to be a delightful tea. Hearing about Central China and about Hankow, and now about Macao (which we only know of here as a celebrated Portugese gambling center) somehow or other brings me in much closer contact with these places than I ever had before… The climate that you will have in Macao is, I suppose, something like our climate in Florida, because, as I remember the pictures of Macao, the place is full of palms and gives one the impression of being distinctly southern.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Henry Church ; [Harford] Nov. 20, 1944.
About Duthuit : I have his little book, or perhaps I should call it album, on Chinese Mysticism and modern Painting. This was published in Paris, and I had Vidal send it to me. I looked at it over the weekend and I should judge from the style that Duthuit is an affable, witty and extremely tolerant person. This is a little broader view of him than I should have had except for the suggestions in your letter. He seemed to be highly sensitive and intelligent, but his friendliness and wit are something that one would have to experience. If you are interested in this book, I shall be glad to send it down to you… [Duthuit, Georges. Chinese mysticism and modern painting. (Paris : Chroniques du Jours, 1936)].

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Henry Church ; [Hartford], July 19, 1945.
At the end of June I went up to Cambridge. I met Dr. Richards ; Robert Woods Bliss was there… There was a Chinese there, one of China's delegates to San Francisco, who quoted from Confucius one of those sayings that relieve life of all its complexities.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Thomas McGreevy ; [Harford] ; Febr. 17, 1950.
Something has spoiled going south : perhaps it is the cold war, or the iron curtain, or the bamboo curtain. A am afraid that the Chinese have been much disappointed in the bamboo curtain, but it would be a good thing for Russia.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Earl Miner ; Nov. 30, 1950
While I know about haiku, or hokku, I have never studies them… I have been more interested in Japanese prints although I have never collected them… No doubt, too, I have perhaps a half dozen volumes of Chinese and Japanese poetry somewhere in the house. But all this is purely casual.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Helen Head. Simons ; [Hartford], Dec. 21, 1950.
This year there is so much to be thankful for : the Eskimos have corrugated roofs on their houses at your expense and mine ; Tito is passing around sandwiches and lemonade on the U.S.A. ; and we are giving a million Chinese a little outdoor exercise which is probably good for them.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Peter H. Lee ; [Hartford], Febr. 26, 1952.
The scroll pleases me more than I can tell you. I have hung it in my own room and shall keep it there for a little while, although not permanently because there is a good deal of dust in that room and I want to keep it clean. It goes perfectly with the paper in that room. On the whole, the tones are all neutral. It may be said that even the tones of the berries are neutral because they are so inconspicuous. I don't recognize the birds with their crests and strong feet. They are probably birds very well known in your part of the world, but I do not recall them. On the other hand, the flowers with the reed-like stems around the rocks are what are called Chinese lilies here. They might be white jonquils. All this seems to be part of an idyllic setting in some remote past, having nothing to do with the tormented constructions of contemporary art. The scroll made the same impression on me when I first looked at it that a collection of Chinese poems makes : an impression of something venerable, true and quiet. I am happy to have the scroll. I know that scroll is not the world for it but I do not recall the correct name for it.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Fredrick Morgan ; [Harford], March 20, 1953.
There is a young Korean at Yale, Peter Lee, who sent me some translations of ancient Korean poetry which made the same impression on me that translations of ancient Chinese poetry make.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Peter H. Lee ; [Hartford], June 30, 1954.
If you want to send one of your Korean paintings to me, don't hesitate because there is nothing that I should like more. On the other hand, Europe is full of museums that are interesting in things of that sort. There used to be at Frankfort a China-Haus. I have no doubt that it would grab at anything you offered it.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Peter H. Lee ; [Harford], July 9, 1954.
The most fashionable translator from the Chinese in England at the present time is Arthur Waley and if you could find out who published his books, you might find that those publishers, having developed, possibly, something of a clientele for such subjects, would be interested.

Letter from Wallace Stevens to Peter H. Lee ; [Hartford] Jan. 4, 1955.
The scroll reached me yesterday. And also a letter from Mr. Pearson, who spoke about you, so that in a way yesterday was Peter Lee Day. The scroll is delightful. I have not yet quite determined where to put it. It is enough for the moment just to possess it and to be able to look at it. It represents my ideal of a happy life : to be able to grow old and fat and lie outdoors under the trees thinking about people and things and things and people… Mr. Pearson bought a little piece of sculpture in London on his last trip which I hope to see. Your scroll will do for me what that piece of sculpture will do for him. Both things are like an old book full of associations of which one becomes the possessor and which makes more difference to one than the most brilliant novel by the most fashionable novelist.

London Times ; 11 Febr. 1909.
"Mr. Laurence Binyon will give a course of four lectures on Art and Though in East and West, in the small theatre of the Albert Hall, Kensington, at 5:30 on Wednesday afternoons, March 10, 17, 24, and 31."

William J. Calhoun ist Gesandter der amerikanischen Gesandtschaft in Beijing. Während der Xinhai Revolution arrangiert er für Präsident William Howard Taft den Schutz der Gesantschaft durch Marine-Soldaten.

Amos Parker Wilder ist Generalkonsul des amerikanischen Konsulats in Shanghai.

Fritz Max Weiss versucht die Minderheit Yi in Daliang zu besuchen, wird aber von chinesischen Regierungsvertretern verhindert.

Baring, Maurice. Orpheus in Mayfair, and other stories and sketches. (London : Mills & Boon, 1909).
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2492.
The flute of Chang Liang
On the other hand, it seemed strange that any Chinaman should be about. The tune continued to break the perfect stillness with its iterated sadness, and a vague recollection came into my mind of a Chinese legend or poem I had read long ago in London, about a flute-player called Chang Liang…
But these soldiers were Chinamen, and yet unlike any Chinamen I had ever seen; for some of them carried halberds, the double-armed halberds of the period of Charles I., and others, halberds with a crescent on one side, like those which were used in the days of Henry VII. And I then noticed that a whole multitude of soldiers were lying asleep on the ground, armed with two-edged swords and bows and arrows. And their clothes seemed unfamiliar and brighter than the clothes which Chinese soldiers wear nowadays…

A Chinaman in Oxford
"Yes, I am a student," said the Chinaman, "And I came here to study the English manners and customs."
We were seated on the top of the electric tram which goes to Hampton Court. It was a bitterly cold spring day. The suburbs of London were not looking their best.
"I spent three days at Oxford last week," he said.
"It's a beautiful place, is it not?" I remarked.
The Chinaman smiled. "The country which you see from the windows of the railway carriages," he said, "on the way from Oxford to London strikes me as being beautiful. It reminded me of the Chinese Plain, only it is prettier. But the houses at Oxford are hideous: there is no symmetry about them. The houses in this country are like blots on the landscape. In China the houses are made to harmonise with the landscape just as trees do."
"What did you see at Oxford?" I asked.
"I saw boat races," he said, "and a great many ignorant old men."
"What did you think of that?"
"I think," he said, "the young people seemed to enjoy it, and if they enjoy it they are quite right to do it. But the way the older men talk about these things struck me as being foolish. They talk as if these games and these sports were a solemn affair, a moral or religious question; they said the virtues and the prowess of the English race were founded on these things. They said that competition was the mainspring of life; they seemed to think exercise was the goal of existence. A man whom I saw there and who, I learnt, had been chosen to teach the young on account of his wisdom, told me that competition trained the man to sharpen his faculties; and that the tension which it provoked is in itself a useful training. I do not believe this. A cat or a boa constrictor will lie absolutely idle until it perceives an object worthy of its appetite; it will then catch it and swallow it, and once more relapse into repose without thinking of keeping itself 'in training.' But it will lie dormant and rise to the occasion when it occurs. These people who talked of games seem to me to undervalue repose. They forget that repose is the mother of action, and exercise only a frittering away of the same."
"What did you think," I asked, "of the education that the students at Oxford receive?"
"I think," said the Chinaman, "that inasmuch as the young men waste their time in idleness they do well; for the wise men who are chosen to instruct the young at your places of learning, are not always wise. I visited a professor of Oriental languages. His servant asked me to wait, and after I had waited three quarters of an hour, he sent word to say that he had tried everywhere to find the professor in the University who spoke French, but that he had not been able to find him. And so he asked me to call another day. I had dinner in a college hall. I found that the professors talked of many things in such a way as would be impossible to children of five and six in our country. They are quite ignorant of the manners and customs of the people of other European countries. They pronounce Greek and Latin and even French in the same way as English. I mentioned to one of them that I had been employed for some time in the Chinese Legation; he asked me if I had had much work to do. I said yes, the work had been heavy. 'But,' he observed, 'I suppose a great deal of the work is carried on directly between the Governments and not through the Ambassadors.' I cannot conceive what he meant or how such a thing could be possible, or what he considered the use and function of Embassies and Legations to be. They most of them seemed to take for granted that I could not speak English: some of them addressed me in a kind of baby language; one of them spoke French. The professor who spoke to me in this language told me that the French possessed no poetical literature, and he said the reason of this was that the French language was a bastard language; that it was, in fact, a kind of pidgin Latin. He said when a Frenchman says a girl is 'beaucoup belle,' he is using pidgin Latin. The courtesy due to a host prevented me from suggesting that if a Frenchman said 'beaucoup belle' he would be talking pidgin French.
"Another professor said to me that China would soon develop if she adopted a large Imperial ideal, and that in time the Chinese might attain to a great position in the world, such as the English now held. He said the best means of bringing this about would be to introduce cricket and football into China. I told him that I thought this was improbable, because if the Chinese play games, they do not care who is the winner; the fun of the game is to us the improvisation of it as opposed to the organisation which appeals to the people here. Upon which he said that cricket was like a symphony of music. In a symphony every instrument plays its part in obedience to one central will, not for its individual advantage, but in order to make a beautiful whole. 'So it is with our games,' he said, 'every man plays his part not for the sake of personal advantage, but so that his side may win; and thus the citizen is taught to sink his own interests in those of the community.' I told him the Chinese did not like symphonies, and Western music was intolerable to them for this very reason. Western musicians seem to us to take a musical idea which is only worthy of a penny whistle (and would be very good indeed if played on a penny whistle!); and they sit down and make a score of it twenty yards broad, and set a hundred highly-trained and highly-paid musicians to play it. It is the contrast between the tremendous apparatus and waste of energy on one side, and the light and playful character of the business itself on the other which makes me, a Chinaman, as incapable of appreciating your complicated games as I am of appreciating the complicated symphonies of the Germans or the elaborate rules which their students make with regard to the drinking of beer. We like a man for taking his fun and not missing a joke when he finds it by chance on his way, but we cannot understand his going out of his way to prepare a joke and to make arrangements for having some fun at a certain fixed date. This is why we consider a wayside song, a tune that is heard wandering in the summer darkness, to be better than twenty concerts."
"What did that professor say?" I asked.
"He said that if I were to stay long enough in England and go to a course of concerts at the Chelsea Town Hall, I would soon learn to think differently. And that if cricket and football were introduced into China, the Chinese would soon emerge out of their backwardness and barbarism and take a high place among the enlightened nations of the world. I thought to myself as he said this that your games are no doubt an excellent substitute for drill, but if we were to submit to so complicated an organisation it would be with a purpose: in order to turn the Europeans out of China, for instance; but that organisation without a purpose would always seem to us to be stupid, and we should no more dream of organising our play than of organising a stroll in the twilight to see the Evening Star, or the chase of a butterfly in the spring. If we were to decide on drill it would be drill with a vengeance and with a definite aim; but we should not therefore and thereby destroy our play. Play cannot exist for us without fun, and for us the open air, the fields, and the meadows are like wine: if we feel inclined, we roam and jump about in them, but we should never submit to standing to attention for hours lest a ball should escape us. Besides which, we invented the foundations of all our games many thousand of years ago. We invented and played at 'Diabolo' when the Britons were painted blue and lived in the woods. The English knew how to play once, in the days of Queen Elizabeth; then they had masques and madrigals and Morris dances and music. A gentleman was ashamed if he did not speak six or seven languages, handle the sword with a deadly dexterity, play chess, and write good sonnets. Men were broken on the wheel for an idea: they were brave, cultivated, and gay; they fought, they played, and they wrote excellent verse. Now they organise games and lay claim to a special morality and to a special mission; they send out missionaries to civilise us savages; and if our people resent having an alien creed stuffed down their throats, they take our hand and burn our homes in the name of Charity, Progress, and Civilisation. They seek for one thing—gold; they preach competition, but competition for what? For this: who shall possess the most, who shall most successfully 'do' his neighbour. These ideals and aims do not tempt us. The quality of the life is to us more important than the quantity of what is done and achieved. We live, as we play, for the sake of living. I did not say this to the professors because we have a proverb that when you are in a man's country you should not speak ill of it. I say it to you because I see you have an inquiring mind, and you will feel it more insulting to be served with meaningless phrases and empty civilities than with the truth, however bitter. For those who have once looked the truth in the face cannot afterwards be put off with false semblances."
"You speak true words," I said, "but what do you like best in England?"
"The gardens," he answered, "and the little yellow flowers that are sprinkled like stars on your green grass."
"And what do you like least in England?"
"The horrible smells," he said.
"Have you no smells in China?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied, "we have natural smells, but not the smell of gas and smoke and coal which sickens me here. It is strange to me that people can find the smell of human beings disgusting and be able to stand the foul stenches of a London street. This very road along which we are now travelling (we were passing through one of the less beautiful portions of the tramway line) makes me homesick for my country. I long to see a Chinese village once more built of mud and fenced with mud, muddy-roaded and muddy-baked, with a muddy little stream to be waded across or passed by stepping on stones; with a delicate one-storeyed temple on the water-eaten bank, and green poppy fields round it; and the women in dark blue standing at the doorways, smoking their pipes; and the children, with three small budding pigtails on the head of each, clinging to them; and the river fringed with a thousand masts: the boats, the houseboats, the barges and the ships in the calm, wide estuaries, each with a pair of huge eyes painted on the front bow. And the people: the men working at their looms and whistling a happy tune out of the gladness of their hearts. And everywhere the sense of leisure, the absence of hurry and bustle and confusion; the dignity of manners and the grace of expression and of address. And, above all, the smell of life everywhere."
"I admit," I said, "that our streets smell horribly of smoke and coal, but surely our people are clean?"
"Yes," he said, "no doubt; but you forget that to us there is nothing so intolerably nasty as the smell of a clean white man!"

The ikon
One day an artist friend of his presented him with a small Chinese god made of crystal; he put this on his chimney-piece. It was on the evening of the day on which he received this gift that he dined, together with a friend named Sledge who had travelled much in Eastern countries, at his club. After dinner they went to Ferrol's rooms to smoke and to talk. He wanted to show Sledge his antiquities, which consisted of three large Egyptian statuettes, a small green Egyptian god, and the Chinese idol which he had lately been given…
In two or three days' time the picture returned and was once more hung on the wall over the chimney-piece immediately above the little crystal Chinese god…
It had again fallen down, and this time it had brought with it in its fall the small Chinese god, which was broken in two…
The Chinese god was a valuable thing. He stood in front of the chimney-piece contemplating the damage with a sense of great irritation…
In the place of the Chinese idol he had put his little green Egyptian god on the chimney-piece. The candlesticks and the Ikon were still in their places. "After all," thought Ferrol, "I did wrong to have any Chinese art in the place at all…

Chun Wa
Chun Wa said "Ping!" "Ping" in Chinese means soldier-man, and if you wish to express your contempt for a man there is no word in the whole of the Chinese language which expresses it so fully and so emphatically as the word "Ping."…
He made friends with him by playing with the dog. The dog, like most Chinese dogs, was dirty, distrustful, and not used to being played with; he slunk away if you called him, and if you took any notice of him he evidently expected to be beaten, kicked, or to have stones thrown at him…
There was not a trace of any human being, save that in the only room which remained undestroyed, on the matting of the hard Khang—that is the divan which stretches like a platform across three-quarters of every Chinese room—lay the dead body of a Chinese coolie. The dog, the cat, and the hens had all gone…

London, Jack. If Japan awakens China [ID D34482].
[London wrote this piece in 1909, five years after his return from Manchuria. He predicts the rise of Japan and its endeavor to transform itself into a major world power by harnessing the labor of four hundred million Chinese. The Chinese, in turn, would eventually overthrow their conservative leaders, drive out the Japanese and develop a prosperous modern economy.]
When one man does not understand another man's mental processes, how can the one forecast the other’s future actions? This is precisely the situation today between the white race and the Japanese. In spite of all our glib talk to the contrary, we know nothing (and less than nothing in so far as we think we know something), of the Japanese. It is a weakness of man to believe that all mankind is moulded in his own image, and it is a weakness of the white race to believe that the Japanese think as we think, are moved to action as we are moved and have points of view similar to our own.
Perhaps one white man in the world best fitted by nature and opportunity to know the Japanese was Lafcadio Hearn. To begin with, he was an artist, and he possessed to an extreme degree the artists’ sympathy. By this I mean that his sympathy was of an order that permits a may to get out of himself and into the soul of another man, thus enabling him to lodv at life out of that man’s eyes and from that man’s point of view—to be that man, in short.
Lafcadio Hearn went to Japan. He identified himself with the Japanese. To all intents and purposes he became a Japanese. A professor at a Japanese university, he took to himself a Japanese wife, lived in a Japanese household, and even renounced his own country and became a Japanese citizen. Being an artist, enthusiastically in touch with his subject, he preceded to interpret the Japanese to the English-speaking world, turning out the most wonderful series of books on Japan ever written by an Occidental. The years passed, and ever he turned out more of his wonderful books, interpreting, explaining, elaborating, formulating, every big aspect and minute detail of the Japanese mind.
Just at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war, full of years and wise with much experience, Lafcadio Hearn died. His last book was in the press, and it appeared shortly afterward. It was entitled, ‘"Japan: An Interpretation.” In the forward Lafcadio Hearn made a confession. He said that after all his years of intimate living with the Japanese, he was at last just on the verge of beginning to understand the Japanese. And he felt justified in this belief, by virtue of the fact that he had taken all those years to find out that he knew nothing of the Japanese. This was a hopeful sign. He had come farther than any white man, who still believed they did know something, in greater or lesser degree, of the Japanese.
As for himself, after many years of thinking, he knew, he frankly confessed, that the Japanese mind baffled him. He told of the Japanese schoolboys with whom he had been in daily contact—of how' he had watched their mind unfold and expand as they grew into manhood. And he had sadly explained that now that the)' w'ere men, Japanese men. our in the world of Japanese men, they were strangers to him. Oh. they greeted him, and shook hands with him and talked with him as of yore; but they were soul-strangers to him. He looked into their faces but not their souls. He saw their eyes, but no glimmering could he catch of what went on behind those eyes. Their mental processes were veiled to him. Why they did this that or some other action was a puzzle to him. He found them actuated by motives he could not guess—motives generated in the labyrinths of their minds where he could not follow the process. Life appeared to them in perspective differently from the way it appeared to him. And he could get no inkling of that perspective. To him it was an inconceivable fourth dimension. And so he wrote that last sad forward to that last sad book of his, gazing mournfully the while into the mysterious eyes of Asia, which had baffled him as they have baffled men of the West from the days of Marco Polo to this our day.
The point that I have striven to make is that much of the reasoning of the white race about the Japanese is erroneous, because is it based on fancied knowledge of the stuff and fiber of the Japanese mind. An American lady of my acquaintance, after residing for months in Japan, in response to a query as to how she liked the Japanese, said: "They have no souls."
In this she was wrong. The Japanese are just as much possessed of a soul as she and the rest of her race. And far be it from me to infer that the Japanese soul is in the smallest way inferior to the Western soul. It may even be superior. You see, we do not know’ the Japanese soul, and what its value may be in the scheme of things. And yet that American lady’s remark but emphasizes the point. So different was the Japanese soul from hers, so unutterably alien, so absolutely without any kinship or means of communication, that to her there w as no slightest sign of its existence.
Japan, in her remarkable evolution, has repeatedly surprised the world. Now the element of suiprise can be present only when one is unfamiliar with the data that go to constitute the surprise. Had we really know'n the Japanese, we should not have been surprised. And as she has surprised us in the past, and only the other day, may she not surprise us in the days that are yet to be? And since she may surprise us in the future, and since ignorance is the meat and wine of surprise, who are we, and with what second sight are we invested, that we may calmly say: "Surprise is all very well, but there is not going to be any Yellow peril or Japanese peril?"
There are forty-five million Japanese in the world. There are over four hundred million Chinese. That is to say, that if we add together the various branches of the the white race, the English, the French, and the German, the Austrian, the Scandinavian, and the white Russian, he Latins as well, the Americans, the Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, the South Africans, the Anglo Indians, and all the scattered remnants of us, we shall find that we are still outnumbered by the combined Japanese and Chinese.
We understand the Chinese mind no more than we do the Japanese. What if these two races, as homogenous as we, should embark on some vast race-adventure? There have been no race adventures in the past. We English-speaking peoples are just now in the midst of our own great adventure. We are dreaming as all race-adventurers have of dreamed. And who will dare to say that in the Japanese mind is not burning some colossal Napoleonic dream? And what if the dreams clash?
Japan is the one unique Asiatic race, in that alone among the races of Asia, she has been able to borrow from us and equip herself with all our material achievement. Our machinery of warfare, of commerce, and of industry she has made hers. And so well has she done it that we have been surprised. We did not think she had it in her. Next consider China. We of the West have tried, and tried vainly, to awaken her. We have failed to express our material achievements in terms comprehensible to the Chinese mind. We do not know the Chinese mind. But Japan does. She and China spring from the same primitive stock—their languages are rooted in the same primitive tongue; and their mental processes are the same. The Chinese mind may baffle us, but it cannot baffle the Japanese. And what if Japan wakens China—not to our dream, if you please, but to her dream, to Japan’s dream? Japan, having taken from us all our material achievement, is alone able to transmute that material achievement in terms intelligible to the Chinese mind.
The Chinese and Japanese are thrifty and industrious. China possesses great natural resources of coal and iron—and coal and iron constitute the backbone of machine civilization. When our hundred and fifty million of the best workers in the world go into manufacturing, a new competitor, and a most ominous and formidable one, will enter the arena where the races struggle for the world- market. Here is the race-adventure—the first clashing of the Asiatic dream with ours. It is true, it is only an economic clash, but economic clashes always precede clashes at arms. And what then? Oh, only that will-o’-wisp, the Yellow peril. But to the Russian, Japan was only a will-o’-wisp until one day, with fire and steel, she smashed the great adventure of the Russian and punctured the bubble-dream he was dreaming. Of this be sure: if ever the day comes that our dreams clash with that of the Yellow and the Brown, and our particular bubble-dream is punctured, there will be one country at least unsurprised, and that country will be Russia. She was awakened from her dream. We are still dreaming.

Bernhard Karlgren studiert Chinesisch an der Universität St. Petersburg.

Bernhard Karlgren erhält den B.A. der Universität Uppsala.