China and the West

Mao, Dun. [News of foreign literature]. In : Xiao shuo yue bao ; vol. 13, no 5 (1922).
"In drama, the new playwright Eugene O'Neill wins great popularity and deserves to be a genius in American theatre."
First mention of O'Neill in China.

Eugene O'Neill made an extensive study of Chinese history, religion, art and poetry in preparation for his composition of Marco millions.

[Babbitt, Irving]. Baibide zhong xi ren wen jiao yu tan. Hu Xiansu yi. [ID D28798].
In the editor's preface, Wu Mi tried to make Babbitt (known to his Chinese readers as Baibide) relevant to 1920s China. He ignored Babbitt's role in the American debate on higher education ; instead, he depicted him as a foreign expert who had answers to Chinese questions. First, he stressed that despite Babbitt's inability to read Chinese, he was well informed regarding the recent development in China. He told his readers, that Mr. Baibide 'is particularly concerned with the affairs of our country, and he reads all the published works on our country'. Second he pointed out that as 'a leading literary critic in America', Mr. Baibide offered a vision of society fundamentally different from that of other Western thinkers. While other Western thinkers stressed the benefits of scientism and materialism in producing more consumer goods, Mr. Baibide focused on the role of religion and morality in shaping an individual's spiritual life. As other Western thinkers saw modern Europe as the apex of human development, Mr. Baibide combined the learning of 'East and West, and past and present'.
Wu told his readers that from Babbitt's perspective, there was an oneness in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle in the West, and those of Siddhartha Guatama and Confucius in the East.

Mei, Guangdi. Xian jin xi yang ren wen zhu yi [ID D28806].
Mei Guangdi discussed New Humanism as a 'valuable doctrine' with direct relevance to contemporary China. He praised Irving Babbitt for his attempt to counter populism by stressing the need for discipline, restraint, and leadership. Mei turned Babbitt into 'Baibide', a foreign expert who offered answers to Chinese questions. Inspired by a reading of Babbitt's writings, Mei found that although political discussions in China often claimed to include the masses into the political process, few people had paid attention to the danger of equating quantity with quality. While he admitted that populism was indeed part of 'the global current' (shi jie chao liu), he remained his traders that only the well-educated elites could appreciate the 'permanent truth' (jiu yuan zhi zhen li) of humanity.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. (Paris : Shakespeare and Co., 1922).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm.
"A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting."
"Save China's millions. Wonder how they explain it to the heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for them. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo. Crown of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks?"
"Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me."
"I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse."
"Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon…"
"Flimsy China silks."
"Chinese eating eggs fifty years old, blue and green again."
"O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton."
"For them unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china."
"Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls. You had to laugh at her sometimes. For instance when she asked you would you have some more Chinese tea and jaspberry ram and when she drew the jugs too and the men's faces on her nails with red ink make you split your sides or when she wanted to go where you know she said she wanted to run and pay a visit to the Miss White."
"Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop."
"…the agnathia of certain chinless Chinamen…"
"I was in China and North America and South America."
"I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that had little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened and every pill was something different."
"The Skibbereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow shirt with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to be seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink intended to represent an anchor."
"He had doubled the cape a few odd times and weathered a monsoon, a kind of wind, in the China seas and through all those perils of the deep there was one thing, he declared, stood to him or words to that effect, a pious medal he had that saved him."
"Voyages in China by "Viator" (recovered with brown paper, red ink title)."
"I read in that Voyages of China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better."
"Orangekeyed ware, bought of Henry Price, basket, fancy goods, chinaware and ironmongery manufacturer."
".....a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off."

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 had given the Chinese people a new sensitivity to Western culture. There were Chinese scholars with mind open enough to be interested in a new work like Ulysses by James Joyce, as witness the orders received at Sylvia Beach's bookstore in Paris. "Ten copies to Peking !" Joyce himself reported with excitement to Harriet Weaver.

Letter from Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe (1922).
"Say that I consider the Writings of Confucius, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the only safe guides in religion."
Akiko Miyake : These two principles were chosen for his religion. Apparently he chose the former for his ethical and the latter for his artistic pinciple, although the Confucian sense of modesty and moderation is entirely antithetical to his temperament. It is best to consider Pound's enthusiasm for Confucius to be the result of his Prometheus-like defiance of Christianity.

Williams, William Carlos. The widow's lament in springtime. In : Poetry ; January (1922).
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumbree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turned away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
Vincent Yang : The women's lament in springtime was always a favorite theme of classical Chinese poets, and the home was the ideal setting for such poems. In choosing his subject, Williams not only employs a popular theme in Chinese poetry but also uses some traditional images in the literary heritage of Chinese poetry. Typical of most Chinese poets, Williams also employs the technique of interweaving natural scenery with human events and emotions throughout his poem. In keeping with Chinese poetic tradition, he also uses cherry blossoms to signify the widow's declining beauty in his poem.

John Middleton Murry, husband of Katherine Mansfield, arranged a short twenty-minute meeting with Xu Zhimo. Xu Zhimo visited Katherine Mansfield in Hampstead.
See : Xu, Zhimo. Manshufei'er. (1923).

Shen, Yanbing. Yingguo wen tan jin kuang [ID D30049].
"While most English writers imply mockery in their humour, Mansfield includes in her humour a sense of pathos for the plight of the unfortunate. Take The daughers of the late Colonel from this collection for example. It describes the state of mind of two spinsters at the death of their tyrannical father. Their reaction is a mixture of pleasurable relief and incredulity. The story is extremely humorous, yet free of contempt for them."

Morris Cohen kommt in Shanghai an und arbeitet für Eugene Chen, Sekretär von Sun Yat-sen. Er trainiert die Sun Yat-sen-Armee in Shanghai und Guangzhou (Guangdong).

Maugham, W. Somerset. On a Chinese screen [ID D30791].
This was a collection of 58 short story sketches, which Maugham had written during his 1919-1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, intending to expand the sketches later as a book.
Inhalt
I THE RISING OF THE CURTAIN
II MY LADY'S PARLOUR
III THE MONGOL CHIEF
IV THE ROLLING STONE
V THE CABINET MINISTER
VI DINNER PARTIES
VII THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN
VIII. THE SERVANTS OF GOD
IX THE INN
X THE GLORY HOLE
XI FEAR
XII THE PICTURE
XIII HER BRITANNIC MAJESTIES REPRESENTATIVE
XIV THE OPIUM DEN
XV THE LAST CHANCE
XVI THE NUN
XVII HENDERSON
XVIII DAWN
XIX THE POINT OF HONOUR
XX THE BEAST OF BURDEN
XXI Dr. MACALISTER
XXII THE ROAD
XXIII GOD'S TRUTH
XXIV ROMANCE
XXV THE GRAND STYLE
XXVI RAIN
XXVII SULLIVAN
XXVIII THE DINING-ROOM
XXIX ARABESQUE
XXX THE CONSUL
XXXI THE STRIPLING
XXXII THE FANNINGS
XXXIII THE SONG OF THE RIVER
XXXIV MIRAGE
XXXV THE STRANGER
XXXVI DEMOCRACY
XXXVII THE SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST
XXXVIII THE PHILOSOPHER
XXXIX THE MISSIONARY LADY
XL A GAME OF BILLIARDS
XLI THE SKIPPER
XLII THE SIGHTS OF THE TOWN
XLIII NIGHTFALL
XLIV TIIE NORMAL MAN
XLV THE OLD TIMER
XLVI THE PLAIN
XL VII FAILURE
XLVIII A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA
XLIX THE TAIPAN
L METEMPSYCHOSIS
LI THE FRAGMENT
LII ONE OF THE BEST
LIII THE SEA-DOG
LIV THE QUESTION
LV THE SINOLOGUE
LVI THE VICE-CONSUL
LVII A CITY BUILT ON A ROCK
LVIII A LIBATION TO THE GODS

Sekundärliteratur
1923
The Times literary supplement, Book review digest ; vol. 79 (1923).
"It is a very pretty piece of Maughamware, a bibelot in which the dainty marionettes of his lively imagination, delicate irony, pathos, and whimsical humour play their parts."
1974
Stephen C. Soong : The subject of Maugham's description in the chapter A student of the drama concerns his father Song Chunfang who met Maugham.
1994 / 1996
Philip Holden : Rather than representing itself as a diary, or a chronological record of a journey, On a Chinese screen is constituted through visual metaphors. The text's title is a visual metaphor, and the preface introduces the work as making 'a lively picture', giving an 'impression' of the East. Maugham's text seems less a guide, but closer to other forms of tourist memorabilia, such as the photograph album or sketch book. Like a photograph album, it cuts China up into a series of representative metonyms ; the narrator's actual geographical location does not matter. Maugham's narrator insistently pushes Europeans and Americans into the picture. There are individual portraits of representative types again : the British consul, the expatriate woman on a last 'fishing trip', various missionaries, all of whom are held up against the background of China. Yet there are also Westerners who sneak into the foreground of a portrait. On a Chinese screen is not held together by a rhetorical or a narrative structure. Its conclusions regarding China's allochrony are made in a slightly different way.
Almost every contact between China and the West is mediated by the narrator's interlocution. The Chinese and Europeans who are the subjects of Maugham's portraits never meet upon equal terms. Locales, commercial and industrial enterprieses, the higher echelons of local government, or the putatively national government in Beijing, are scrupulously avoided. The narrator himself controls intercourse between the two worlds. He interviews representative types on both sides of his modern/premodern binarism, critiquing Europeans for their lack of understanding of China, and then applying the same caustic irony to the Chinese.
2004
Jeffrey Meyers : Maugham never mentions his route or indicates where he is. Though traveling with Gerald Haxton, he claims to be alone. As he moves restlessy from place to place, he remains a detached and impersonal observer. He offers brief, impressionistic, sometimes satiric snapshots, with thumbnail physical descriptions of the people he meets and an ironic sting in the tail of his anecdotes. Maugham's not primarily interested in the Chinese, but in the English in China. Living in a time warp, permanent exiles with little desire to return to England, mos of the old China hands don't know and don't want to know the Chinese. Their lives of quiet desperation reveal the emotional attrition and spiritual waste of the white man in the East.
2011
Zhang, Yanping : China is represented as a piece of art : it is projected on a screen in the form of a series of pictures. China's foreignness is embodied not only in pictures of landscapes, but also in individual close-ups : slightly deformed coolies in ragged clothes, women walking on bound feet, a Mongol chief leading a truculent caravan, and a singing girl 'in splendid silks and richly embroidered coat, with jade in her black hair'. Maugham's conception of China as a land of 'singular' artistic sensibilities reflects the prevailing British imagination of China in his time. His Chinese screen is strewn with Chinese 'bibelots' : porcelain, bronze, embroidery, elegant calligraphy, exquisite Chinese paintings which bring you 'in touch with the eternal', elaborately-embellished shop-fronts and 'image of Buddha in his eternal meditation'. His collection includes also people. The 'strange' Chinese figures, such as a Chinese official in 'a long black robe of figured silk, lined with squirrel' and an old man wearing 'a small round cap of black silk', 'an old woman goes by in her blue smock and short blue trousers, on bound feet', are depicted as chinoiserie novelties. For Maugham, their exotic appearances have an invigorating effect on the imagination. What Maugham considers to be 'toleration' is less a kind of moral virtue than a sort of cultural freedom. His experience of China's strangeness enables him to shed off cultural prejudice that is inscribed in his cultural formation and allows him to acquire 'a new self'.
The chapter 'The Philosopher' refers to Gu Hongming. Maugham visited Gu Hongming in 1920 in Beijing. He writes : "And here lived a philosopher of repute the desire to see whom had been to me one of the incentives of a somewhat arduous journey. He was the greatest authority in China on the Confucian learning… He was an old man, tall, with a thin grey queue, and bright large eyes under which were heavy bags. His teeth were broken and sicoloured. He was exceedingly thin, and his hands, fine and small, were withered and claw-like… He was very shabbily dressed in a black gown, a little black cap, both murch the worse for wear. I hastened to express my sense of honour he did me in allowing me to visit him."
Gu Hongming presented Maugham the translation of a Chinese poem. What is so fascinating aoubt Gu in Maugham's eyes is his irreconcilable otherness – double otherness, not only in terms of his unambiguous Chineseness, but also of his being the other of the Chinese. Maugham discovered in Gu what he looked for – diversity. Through recognizing the diversity exhibited by Gu, Maugham discovered diversity within himself. It makes visible what is hidden in Maugham : his difference from other British people, his transgression from the banality and monotony that characterize British middle-class culture.
2013
Du Chunmei : The book is filled with caricatures of Western expatriates in China, who live a luxurious and wasted life there, and remain ignorant and disinterested in knowing the real Chinese, fearing racial pollution through direct contact. Maugham's darkest satires are undoubtedly reserved for missionaries, who appear hypocritical, pathetic, and corrupted. A devoted missionary is unable to conquer his innate hatred for the Chinese, whom he is at the same time striving to convert. Maugham's travel book and play take place in the essential old China, manifested in its narrow streets, rickshaw men, opium dens, and gambling houses, and resembles the familiar scenes of London's Chinatown in popular imagination. The nature of Maugham's projection, creating images of Chinamen as dangerous, immoral, and deviant, in fact results from Westerners' unacknowledged anxieties over their own amoral behavious in China.
'The philosopher' Gu Hongming was 'said to speak English and German with facility' and 'had been for many years secretary to one of the Empress Dowager's greatest viceroys'. Gu is an anachronism who lives in the imperial past and who opposes the reform and revolutionary movements in the new China. Maugham was greatly annoyed by Gu's behaviours in the meeting, calling the philosopher a 'pathetic figure'. Gu seems to illustrate the fundamental Oriental danger : its mimicry and retribution. Gu's attack on Western violence against Eastern civilisations – the machine gun as white superiority – explicitly exposes the violent nature of Western domination. Gu trapped Maugham in an uncomfortable position, an arena of pedagogy and punishment. He educated Maugham on the civlised nature of the Chinese and the barbarism of Westerners and their failues ; he punished Maugham by attacking, ignoring, and humiliating him. Gu set up the rules of Chinese etiquette from the very beginning, and forced the English guest to act on the Chinese terms.
Gu insisted on giving Maugham a calligraphy poem in Chinese, which turned out to be an erotic love poem.
"You loved me not ; your voice was sweet ;
Your eyes were full of lauther ; your hands were tender.
And then you loved me ; your voice was bitter ;
Your eyes were full of tears ; your hands were cruel.
Sad, sad that love should make you
Unlovable.
I craved the years would quickly pass
That ymou might lose
The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin.
And all the cruel splendor of your youth.
Then I alone would love you
And you at last would care.
The envious years have passed full soon
And you have lost
The brithness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin.
And all the charming splendor of your youth.
Alas, I do not love you
And I care not if you care."

Maugham, W. Somerset. East of Suez : a play in seven scenes. (New York, N.Y. : George H. Doran, 1922). [Erstaufführung His Majesty's Theatre, London, 2 September 1922].
Scene I
"In all the shops two or three Chinamen are seated. Some read newspapers through great horn spectacles; some smoke water pipes. The street is crowded. Here is an itinerant cook with his two chests, in one of which is burning charcoal: he serves out bowls of rice and condiments to the passers-by who want food. There is a barber with the utensils of his trade. A coolie, seated on a stool, is having his head shaved. Chinese walk to and fro.
Some are coolies and wear blue cotton in various stages of raggedness; some in black gowns and caps and black shoes are merchants and clerks. There is a beggar, gaunt and thin, with an untidy mop of bristly hair, in tatters of indescribable filthiness. He stops at one of the shops and begins a long wail. For a time no one takes any notice of him, but presently on a word from the fat shopkeeper an assistant gives him a few cash and he wanders on. Coolies, half naked, hurry by, bearing great bales on their yokes. They utter little sharp cries for people to get out of their way. Peking carts with their blue hoods rumble noisily along. Rickshaws pass rapidly in both directions, and the rickshaw boys shout for the crowd to make way. In the rickshaws are grave Chinese. Some are dressed in white ducks after the European fashion; in other rickshaws are Chinese women in long smocks and wide trousers or Manchu ladies, with their faces painted like masks, in embroidered silks. Women of various sorts stroll about the street or enter the shops. You see them chaffering for various articles.
A water-carrier passes along with a creaking barrow, slopping the water as he goes; an old blind woman, a masseuse, advances slowly, striking wooden clappers to proclaim her calling. A musician stands on the curb and plays a tuneless melody on a one-stringed fiddle. From the distance comes the muffled sound of gongs. There is a babel of sound caused by the talking of all these people, by the cries of coolies, the gong, the clappers, and the fiddle. From burning joss-sticks in the shops in front of the household god comes a savour of incense.
A couple of Mongols ride across on shaggy ponies; they wear high boots and Astrakhan caps. Then a string of camels sways slowly down the street. They carry great burdens of skins from the deserts of Mongolia. They are accompanied by wild looking fellows. Two stout Chinese gentlemen are giving their pet birds an airing; the birds are attached by the leg with a string and sit on little wooden perches. The two Chinese gentlemen discuss their merits. Round about them small boys play. They run hither and thither pursuing one another amid the crowd."
Sekundärliteratur
1920
Spectator ; Sept 9 (1920).
"Another piece of work like this and his reputation as a serious playwright will be gone."
2011
Zhang Yanping : East of Suez is a play of seven scenes set in Beijing. The story revolves around Daisy, a Eurasian woman with a past. She is engaged to Harry, a simple, honest and upright Englishman serving for the empire in China, but she is passionately in love with his best friend George. Upon Harry's introduction, George soon recognizes that Daisy is his ex-lover who he has abandoned for the sake of his career prospect in the settlements. The reunion rekindles Kitty's passion, to which George half-unwillingly falls prey. Overwhelmed by Kitty's reckless love and tortured by her intimidation to disclose their affair, George commits suicide in the end. After knowing all, Harry is desperate, realizing that marriage with a half-Chinese woman is doomed to fail.
Maugham was addicted to opium since his journey to China. It temporarily cured him of his stammer, and thus offered him an illusory promise of freedom : "After you've smoked a pipe or two your mind grows extraordinarily clear. You have a strange facility of speech and yet no desire to speak. All the puzzles of this puzzling world grow plain to you. You are tranquil and free. Your souls I gently released from the bondage of your body, and it plays, happy and careless, like a child with flowers."
2013
Du Chunmei : In the play, Maugham draws heavily from stereotypical Chinaman images. The play shows his fear of miscegenation and hybridity. Maugham's accounts of persons of mixedrace are informed by contemporary 'scientific' ideas about biological and cultural evolution.

Wells, H.G. A short history of the world. [ID D31332].
30. Confucius and Lao Tse.
We have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and Lao Tse, who lived in that wonderful century which began the adolescence of mankind, the sixth century B.C. In this history thus far we have told very little of the early story of China. At present that early history is still very obscure, and we look to Chinese explorers and archæologists in the new China that is now arising to work out their past as thoroughly as the European past has been worked out during the last century. Very long ago the first primitive Chinese civilizations arose in the great river valleys out of the primordial heliolithic culture. They had, like Egypt and Sumeria, the general characteristics of that culture, and they centred upon temples in which priests and priest kings offered the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those cities must have been very like the Egyptian and Sumerian life of six or seven thousand years ago and very like the Maya life of Central America a thousand years ago.
If there were human sacrifices they had long given way to animal sacrifices before the dawn of history. And a form of picture writing was growing up long before a thousand years B.C.
And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western Asia were in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the nomads of the north, so the primitive Chinese civilizations had a great cloud of nomadic peoples on their northern borders. There was a number of tribes akin in language and ways of living, who are spoken of in history in succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks and Tartars. They changed and divided and combined and re-combined, just as the Nordic peoples in north Europe and central Asia changed and varied in name rather than in nature. These Mongolian nomads had horses earlier than the Nordic peoples, and it may be that in the region of the Altai Mountains they made an independent discovery of iron somewhen after 1000 B.C. And just as in the western case so ever and again these eastern nomads would achieve a sort of political unity, and become the conquerors and masters and revivers of this or that settled and civilized region.
It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was not Mongolian at all any more than the earliest civilization of Europe and western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was a brunette civilization and of a piece with the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian and Dravidian civilizations, and that when the first recorded history of China began there had already been conquests and intermixture. At any rate we find that by 1750 B.C. China was already a vast system of little kingdoms and city states, all acknowledging a loose allegiance and paying more or less regularly, more or less definite feudal dues to one great priest emperor, the “Son of Heaven.” The “Shang” dynasty came to an end in 1125 B.C. A “Chow” dynasty succeeded “Shang,” and maintained China in a relaxing unity until the days of Asoka in India and of the Ptolemies in Egypt. Gradually China went to pieces during that long “Chow” period. Hunnish peoples came down and set up principalities; local rulers discontinued their tribute and became independent. There was in the sixth century B.C., says one Chinese authority, five or six thousand practically independent states in China. It was what the Chinese call in their records an “Age of Confusion.”
But this Age of Confusion was compatible with much intellectual activity and with the existence of many local centres of art and civilized living. When we know more of Chinese history we shall find that China also had her Miletus and her Athens, her Pergamum and her Macedonia. At present we must be vague and brief about this period of Chinese division simply because our knowledge is not sufficient for us to frame a coherent and consecutive story.
And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and in shattered and captive Jewry prophets, so in disordered China there were philosophers and teachers at this time. In all these cases insecurity and uncertainty seemed to have quickened the better sort of mind. Confucius was a man of aristocratic origin and some official importance in a small state called Lu. Here in a very parallel mood to the Greek impulse he set up a sort of Academy for discovering and teaching Wisdom. The lawlessness and disorder of China distressed him profoundly. He conceived an ideal of a better government and a better life, and travelled from state to state seeking a prince who would carry out his legislative and educational ideas. He never found his prince; he found a prince, but court intrigues undermined the influence of the teacher and finally defeated his reforming proposals. It is interesting to note that a century and a half later the Greek philosopher Plato also sought a prince, and was for a time adviser to the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syracuse in Sicily.
Confucius died a disappointed man. “No intelligent ruler arises to take me as his master,” he said, “and my time has come to die.” But his teaching had more vitality than he imagined in his declining and hopeless years, and it became a great formative influence with the Chinese people. It became one of what the Chinese call the Three Teachings, the other two being those of Buddha and of Lao Tse.
The gist of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the noble or aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal conduct as much as Gautama was concerned with the peace of self-forgetfulness and the Greek with external knowledge and the Jew with righteousness. He was the most public-minded of all great teachers. He was supremely concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world, and he wanted to make men noble in order to bring about a noble world. He sought to regulate conduct to an extraordinary extent; to provide sound rules for every occasion in life. A polite, public-spirited gentleman, rather sternly self-disciplined, was the ideal he found already developing in the northern Chinese world and one to which he gave a permanent form.
The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge of the imperial library of the Chow dynasty, was much more mystical and vague and elusive than that of Confucius. He seems to have preached a stoical indifference to the pleasures and powers of the world and a return to an imaginary simple life of the past. He left writings very contracted in style and very obscure. He wrote in riddles. After his death his teachings, like the teachings of Gautama Buddha, were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them. In China just as in India primordial ideas of magic and monstrous legends out of the childish past of our race struggled against the new thinking in the world and succeeded in plastering it over with grotesque, irrational and antiquated observances. Both Buddhism and Taoism (which ascribes itself largely to Lao Tse) as one finds them in China now, are religions of monk, temple, priest and offering of a type as ancient in form, if not in thought, as the sacrificial religions of ancient Sumeria and Egypt. But the teaching of Confucius was not so overlaid because it was limited and plain and straightforward and lent itself to no such distortions.
North China, the China of the Hwang-ho River, became Confucian in thought and spirit; south China, Yang-tse-Kiang China, became Taoist. Since those days a conflict has always been traceable in Chinese affairs between these two spirits, the spirit of the north and the spirit of the south, between (in latter times) Pekin and Nankin, between the official-minded, upright and conservative north, and the sceptical, artistic, lax and experimental south.
The divisions of China of the Age of Confusion reached their worst stage in the sixth century B.C. The Chow dynasty was so enfeebled and so discredited that Lao Tse left the unhappy court and retired into private life.
Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the situation in those days, Ts’i and Ts’in, both northern powers, and Ch’u, which was an aggressive military power in the Yangtse valley. At last Ts’i and Ts’in formed an alliance, subdued Ch’u and imposed a general treaty of disarmament and peace in China. The power of Ts’in became predominant. Finally about the time of Asoka in India the Ts’in monarch seized upon the sacrificial vessels of the Chow emperor and took over his sacrificial duties. His son, Shi-Hwang-ti (king in 246 B.C., emperor in 220 B.C.), is called in the Chinese Chronicles “the First Universal Emperor.”
More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for thirty-six years as king and emperor. His energetic reign marks the beginning of a new era of unity and prosperity for the Chinese people. He fought vigorously against the Hunnish invaders from the northern deserts, and he began that immense work, the Great Wall of China, to set a limit to their incursions.

34. Between Rome and China.
The second and first centuries B.C. mark a new phase in the history of mankind. Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean are no longer the centre of interest. Both Mesopotamia and Egypt were still fertile, populous and fairly prosperous, but they were no longer the dominant regions of the world. Power had drifted to the west and to the east. Two great empires now dominated the world, this new Roman Empire and the renascent Empire of China. Rome extended its power to the Euphrates, but it was never able to get beyond that boundary. It was too remote. Beyond the Euphrates the former Persian and Indian dominions of the Seleucids fell under a number of new masters. China, now under the Han dynasty, which had replaced the Ts’in dynasty at the death of Shi-Hwang-ti, had extended its power across Tibet and over the high mountain passes of the Pamirs into western Turkestan. But there, too, it reached its extremes. Beyond was too far.
China at this time was the greatest, best organized and most civilized political system in the world. It was superior in area and population to the Roman Empire at its zenith. It was possible then for these two vast systems to flourish in the same world at the same time in almost complete ignorance of each other. The means of communication both by sea and land was not yet sufficiently developed and organized for them to come to a direct clash.
Yet they reacted upon each other in a very remarkable way, and their influence upon the fate of the regions that lay between them, upon central Asia and India, was profound. A certain amount of trade trickled through, by camel caravans across Persia, for example, and by coasting ships by way of India and the Red Sea. In 66 B.C. Roman troops under Propey followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and marched up the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In 102 A.D. a Chinese expeditionary force under Pan Chau reached the Caspian, and sent emissaries to report upon the power of Rome. But many centuries were still to pass before definite knowledge and direct intercourse were to link the great parallel worlds of Europe and Eastern Asia.
To the north of both these great empires were barbaric wildernesses. What is now Germany was largely forest lands; the forests extended far into Russia and made a home for the gigantic aurochs, a bull of almost elephantine size. Then to the north of the great mountain masses of Asia stretched a band of deserts, steppes and then forests and frozen lands. In the eastward lap of the elevated part of Asia was the great triangle of Manchuria. Large parts of these regions, stretching between South Russia and Turkestan into Manchuria, were and are regions of exceptional climatic insecurity. Their rainfall has varied greatly in the course of a few centuries. They are lands treacherous to man. For years they will carry pasture and sustain cultivation, and then will come an age of decline in humidity and a cycle of killing droughts.
The western part of this barbaric north from the German forests to South Russia and Turkestan and from Gothland to the Alps was the region of origin of the Nordic peoples and of the Aryan speech. The eastern steppes and deserts of Mongolia was the region of origin of the Hunnish or Mongolian or Tartar or Turkish peoples—for all these several peoples were akin in language, race, and way of life. And as the Nordic peoples seem to have been continually overflowing their own borders and pressing south upon the developing civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean coast, so the Hunnish tribes sent their surplus as wanderers, raiders and conquerors into the settled regions of China. Periods of plenty in the north would mean an increase in population there; a shortage of grass, a spell of cattle disease, would drive the hungry warlike tribesmen south.
For a time there were simultaneously two fairly effective Empires in the world capable of holding back the barbarians and even forcing forward the frontiers of the imperial peace. The thrust of the Han empire from north China into Mongolia was strong and continuous. The Chinese population welled up over the barrier of the Great Wall. Behind the imperial frontier guards came the Chinese farmer with horse and plough, ploughing up the grass lands and enclosing the winter pasture. The Hunnish peoples raided and murdered the settlers, but the Chinese punitive expeditions were too much for them. The nomads were faced with the choice of settling down to the plough and becoming Chinese tax-payers or shifting in search of fresh summer pastures. Some took the former course and were absorbed. Some drifted north-eastward and eastward over the mountain passes down into western Turkestan.
This westward drive of the Mongolian horsemen was going on from 200 B.C. onward. It was producing a westward pressure upon the Aryan tribes, and these again were pressing upon the Roman frontiers ready to break through directly there was any weakness apparent. The Parthians, who were apparently a Scythian people with some Mongolian admixture, came down to the Euphrates by the first century B.C. They fought against Pompey the Great in his eastern raid. They defeated and killed Crassus. They replaced the Seleucid monarchy in Persia by a dynasty of Parthian kings, the Arsacid dynasty.
But for a time the line of least resistance for hungry nomads lay neither to the west nor the east but through central Asia and then south-eastward through the Khyber Pass into India. It was India which received the Mongolian drive in these centuries of Roman and Chinese strength. A series of raiding conquerors poured down through the Punjab into the great plains to loot and destroy. The empire of Asoka was broken up, and for a time the history of India passes into darkness. A certain Kushan dynasty founded by the “Indo-Scythians”—one of the raiding peoples—ruled for a time over North India and maintained a certain order. These invasions went on for several centuries. For a large part of the fifth century A.D. India was afflicted by the Ephthalites or White Huns, who levied tribute on the small Indian princes and held India in terror. Every summer these Ephthalites pastured in western Turkestan, every autumn they came down through the passes to terrorize India.
In the second century A.D. a great misfortune came upon the Roman and Chinese empires that probably weakened the resistance of both to barbarian pressure. This was a pestilence of unexampled virulence. It raged for eleven years in China and disorganized the social framework profoundly. The Han dynasty fell, and a new age of division and confusion began from which China did not fairly recover until the seventh century A.D. with the coming of the great Tang dynasty.
The infection spread through Asia to Europe. It raged throughout the Roman Empire from 164 to 180 A.D. It evidently weakened the Roman imperial fabric very seriously. We begin to hear of depopulation in the Roman provinces after this, and there was a marked deterioration in the vigour and efficiency of government. At any rate we presently find the frontier no longer invulnerable, but giving way first in this place and then in that. A new Nordic people, the Goths, coming originally from Gothland in Sweden, had migrated across Russia to the Volga region and the shores of the Black Sea and taken to the sea and piracy. By the end of the second century they may have begun to feel the westward thrust of the Huns. In 247 they crossed the Danube in a great land raid, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in a battle in what is now Serbia. In 236 another Germanic people, the Franks, had broken bounds upon the lower Rhine, and the Alemanni had poured into Alsace. The legions in Gaul beat back their invaders, but the Goths in the Balkan peninsula raided again and again. The province of Dacia vanished from Roman history.
A chill had come to the pride and confidence of Rome. In 270–275 Rome, which had been an open and secure city for three centuries, was fortified by the Emperor Aurelian.

42. The dynasties of Suy and Tang in China.
Throughout the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, there was a steady drift of Mongolian peoples westward. The Huns of Attila were merely precursors of this advance, which led at last to the establishment of Mongolian peoples in Finland, Esthonia, Hungary and Bulgaria, where their descendants, speaking languages akin to Turkish, survive to this day. The Mongolian nomads were, in fact, playing a rôle towards the Aryanized civilizations of Europe and Persia and India that the Aryans had played to the Æean and Semitic civilizations ten or fifteen centuries before.
In Central Asia the Turkish peoples had taken root in what is now Western Turkestan, and Persia already employed many Turkish officials and Turkish mercenaries. The Parthians had gone out of history, absorbed into the general population of Persia. There were no more Aryan nomads in the history of Central Asia; Mongolian people had replaced them. The Turks became masters of Asia from China to the Caspian.
The same great pestilence at the end of the second century A.D. that had shattered the Roman Empire had overthrown the Han dynasty in China. Then came a period of division and of Hunnish conquests from which China arose refreshed, more rapidly and more completely than Europe was destined to do. Before the end of the sixth century China was reunited under the Suy dynasty, and this by the time of Heraclius gave place to the Tang dynasty, whose reign marks another great period of prosperity for China.
Throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries China was the most secure and civilized country in the world. The Han dynasty had extended her boundaries in the north; the Suy and Tang dynasties now spread her civilization to the south, and China began to assume the proportions she has to-day. In Central Asia indeed she reached much further, extending at last, through tributary Turkish tribes, to Persia and the Caspian Sea.
The new China that had arisen was a very different land from the old China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous literary school appeared, there was a great poetic revival; Buddhism had revolutionized philosophical and religious thought. There were great advances in artistic work, in technical skill and in all the amenities of life. Tea was first used, paper manufactured and wood-block printing began. Millions of people indeed were leading orderly, graceful and kindly lives in China during these centuries when the attenuated populations of Europe and Western Asia were living either in hovels, small walled cities or grim robber fortresses. While the mind of the west was black with theological obsessions, the mind of China was open and tolerant and enquiring.
One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai-tsung, who began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of Heraclius at Nineveh. He received an embassy from Heraclius, who was probably seeking an ally in the rear of Persia. From Persia itself came a party of Christian missionaries (635). They were allowed to explain their creed to Tai-tsung and he examined a Chinese translation of their Scriptures. He pronounced this strange religion acceptable, and gave permission for the foundation of a church and monastery.
To this monarch also (in 628) came messengers from Muhammad. They came to Canton on a trading ship. They had sailed the whole way from Arabia along the Indian coasts. Unlike Heraclius and Kavadh, Tai-tsung gave these envoys a courteous hearing. He expressed his interest in their theological ideas and assisted them to build a mosque in Canton, a mosque which survives, it is said, to this day, the oldest mosque in the world.

48. The Mongol conquests.
But in the thirteenth century, while this strange and finally ineffectual struggle to unify Christendom under the rule of the Pope was going on in Europe, far more momentous events were afoot upon the larger stage of Asia. A Turkish people from the country to the north of China rose suddenly to prominence in the world’s affairs, and achieved such a series of conquests as has no parallel in history. These were the Mongols. At the opening of the thirteenth century they were a horde of nomadic horsemen, living very much as their predecessors, the Huns, had done, subsisting chiefly upon meat and mare’s milk and living in tents of skin. They had shaken themselves free from Chinese dominion, and brought a number of other Turkish tribes into a military confederacy. Their central camp was at Karakorum in Mongolia.
At this time China was in a state of division. The great dynasty of Tang had passed into decay by the tenth century, and after a phase of division into warring states, three main empires, that of Kin in the north with Pekin as its capital and that of Sung in the south with a capital at Nankin, and Hsia in the centre, remain. In 1214 Jengis Khan, the leader of the Mongol confederates, made war on the Kin Empire and captured Pekin (1214). He then turned westward and conquered Western Turkestan, Persia, Armenia, India down to Lahore, and South Russia as far as Kieff. He died master of a vast empire that reached from the Pacific to the Dnieper.
His successor, Ogdai Khan, continued this astonishing career of conquest. His armies were organized to a very high level of efficiency; and they had with them a new Chinese invention, gunpowder, which they used in small field guns. He completed the conquest of the Kin Empire and then swept his hosts right across Asia to Russia (1235), an altogether amazing march. Kieff was destroyed in 1240, and nearly all Russia became tributary to the Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a mixed army of Poles and Germans was annihilated at the battle of Liegnitz in Lower Silesia in 1241. The Emperor Frederick II does not seem to have made any great efforts to stay the advancing tide.
“It is only recently,” says Bury in his notes to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “that European history has begun to understand that the successes of the Mongol army which overran Poland and occupied Hungary in the spring of A.D. 1241 were won by consummate strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming superiority of numbers. But this fact has not yet become a matter of common knowledge; the vulgar opinion which represents the Tartars as a wild horde carrying all before them solely by their multitude, and galloping through Eastern Europe without a strategic plan, rushing at all obstacles and overcoming them by mere weight, still prevailsƒ.
“It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrangements were carried out in operations extending from the Lower Vistula to Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond the power of any European army of the time, and it was beyond the vision of any European commander. There was no general in Europe, from Frederick II downward, who was not a tyro in strategy compared to Subutai. It should also be noticed that the Mongols embarked upon the enterprise with full knowledge of the political situation of Hungary and the condition of Poland—they had taken care to inform themselves by a well-organized system of spies; on the other hand, the Hungarians and the Christian powers, like childish barbarians, knew hardly anything about their enemies.”
But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did not continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands and hilly country, which did not suit their tactics; and so they turned southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or assimilating the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously massacred and assimilated the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns before them. From the Hungarian plain they would probably have made raids west and south as the Hungarians had done in the ninth century, the Avars in the seventh and eighth and the Huns in the fifth. But Ogdai died suddenly, and in 1242 there was trouble about the succession, and recalled by this, the undefeated hosts of Mongols began to pour back across Hungary and Roumania towards the east.
Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon their Asiatic conquests. By the middle of the thirteenth century they had conquered the Sung Empire. Mangu Khan succeeded Ogdai Khan as Great Khan in 1251, and made his brother Kublai Khan governor of China. In 1280 Kublai Khan had been formally recognized Emperor of China, and so founded the Yuan dynasty which lasted until 1368. While the last ruins of the Sung rule were going down in China, another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was conquering Persia and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter animosity to Islam at this time, and not only massacred the population of Bagdad when they captured that city, but set to work to destroy the immemorial irrigation system which had kept Mesopotamia incessantly prosperous and populous from the early days of Sumeria. From that time until our own Mesopotamia has been a desert of ruins, sustaining only a scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never penetrated; the Sultan of Egypt completely defeated an army of Hulagu’s in Palestine in 1260.
After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The dominions of the Great Khan fell into a number of separate states. The eastern Mongols became Buddhists, like the Chinese; the western became Moslim. The Chinese threw off the rule of the Yuan dynasty in 1368, and set up the native Ming dynasty which flourished from 1368 to 1644. The Russians remained tributary to the Tartar hordes upon the south-east steppes until 1480, when the Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his allegiance and laid the foundation of modern Russia.
In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol vigour under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis Khan. He established himself in Western Turkestan, assumed the title of Grand Khan in 1369, and conquered from Syria to Delhi. He was the most savage and destructive of all the Mongol conquerors. He established an empire of desolation that did not survive his death. In 1505, however, a descendant of this Timur, an adventurer named Baber, got together an army with guns and swept down upon the plains of India. His grandson Akbar (1556–1605) completed his conquests, and this Mongol (or “Mogul” as the Arabs called it) dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater part of India until the eighteenth century.
One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century was to drive a certain tribe of Turks, the Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan into Asia Minor. They extended and consolidated their power in Asia Minor, crossed the Dardanelles and conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until at last Constantinople remained like an island amongst the Ottoman dominions. In 1453 the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II, took Constantinople, attacking it from the European side with a great number of guns. This event caused intense excitement in Europe and there was talk of a crusade, but the day of the crusades was past.
In the course of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultans conquered Bagdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North Africa, and their fleet made them masters of the Mediterranean. They very nearly took Vienna, and they exacted a tribute from the Emperor. There were but two items to offset the general ebb of Christian dominion in the fifteenth century. One was the restoration of the independence of Moscow (1480); the other was the gradual reconquest of Spain by the Christians. In 1492, Granada, the last Moslem state in the peninsula, fell to King Ferdinand of Aragon and his Queen Isabella of Castile.
But it was not until as late as 1571 that the naval battle of Lepanto broke the pride of the Ottomans, and restored the Mediterranean waters to Christian ascendancy.

49. The intellectual revival of the Europeans.
… They had with them a gold tablet and other indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly facilitated their journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil from the lamp that burns in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and so thither they first went, and then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went thus far north because the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Mongol domains at this time. Thence they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz they met merchants from India. For some reason they did not take ship, but instead turned northward through the Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor into the Hwang-ho valley and on to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great Khan, and they were hospitably entertained.
Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was young and clever, and it is clear he had mastered the Tartar language very thoroughly. He was given an official position and sent on several missions, chiefly in south-west China. The tale he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling and prosperous country, “all the way excellent hostelries for travellers,” and “fine vineyards, fields and gardens,” of “many abbeys” of Buddhist monks, of manufactures of “cloth of silk and gold and many fine taffetas,” a “constant succession of cities and boroughs,” and so on, first roused the incredulity and then fired the imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah, and of its great armies with hundreds of elephants, and how these animals were defeated by the Mongol bowmen, and also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of Japan, and greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. For three years Marco ruled the city of Yang-chow as governor, and he probably impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being very little more of a foreigner than any Tartar would have been. He may also have been sent on a mission to India. Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached to the imperial council in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of the general truth of the Polo story.
The publication of Marco Polo’s travels produced a profound effect upon the European imagination. The European literature, and especially the European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes with the names in Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay (North China) and Cambulac (Pekin) and the like.
Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of Marco Polo was a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, who conceived the brilliant idea of sailing westward round the world to China… The idea of going westward to China was therefore a fairly obvious one. It was encouraged by two things. The mariner’s compass had now been invented and men were no longer left to the mercy of a fine night and the stars to determine the direction in which they were sailing, and the Normans, Catalonians and Genoese and Portuguese had already pushed out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary Isles, Madeira and the Azores.

53. The new empires of the Europeans in Asia and overseas.
… In 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java and the Moluccas, and the Portuguese were setting up and fortifying trading stations round and about the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa, and two smaller possessions in India, Macao in China and a part of Timor are to this day Portuguese possessions…
And while the Western European powers were thus fighting for these fantastic overseas empires upon every ocean in the world, two great land conquests were in progress in Asia. China had thrown off the Mongol yoke in 1360, and flourished under the great native dynasty of the Mings until 1644. Then the Manchus, another Mongol people, reconquered China and remained masters of China until 1912. Meanwhile Russia was pushing East and growing to greatness in the world’s affairs…
The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very difficult to explain. Within two or three centuries from the days of Jengis and Timurlane Central Asia had relapsed from a period of world ascendancy to extreme political impotence. Changes of climate, unrecorded pestilences, infections of a malarial type, may have played their part in this recession—which may be only a temporary recession measured by the scale of universal history—of the Central Asian peoples. Some authorities think that the spread of Buddhist teaching from China also had a pacifying influence upon them. At any rate, by the sixteenth century the Mongol, Tartar and Turkish peoples were no longer pressing outward, but were being invaded, subjugated and pushed back both by Christian Russia in the west and by China in the east…

63. European aggression in Asia, and the rise of Japan.
It is difficult to believe that any large number of people really accepted this headlong painting of the map of Africa in European colours as a permanent new settlement of the world’s affairs, but it is the duty of the historian to record that it was so accepted. There was but a shallow historical background to the European mind in the nineteenth century, and no habit of penetrating criticism. The quite temporary advantages that the mechanical revolution in the west had given the Europeans over the rest of the old world were regarded by people, blankly ignorant of such events as the great Mongol conquests, as evidences of a permanent and assured European leadership of mankind. They had no sense of the transferability of science and its fruits. They did not realize that Chinamen and Indians could carry on the work of research as ably as Frenchmen or Englishmen. They believed that there was some innate intellectual drive in the west, and some innate indolence and conservatism in the east, that assured the Europeans a world predominance for ever.
The consequence of this infatuation was that the various European foreign offices set themselves not merely to scramble with the British for the savage and undeveloped regions of the world’s surface, but also to carve up the populous and civilized countries of Asia as though these people also were no more than raw material for exploitation. The inwardly precarious but outwardly splendid imperialism of the British ruling class in India, and the extensive and profitable possessions of the Dutch in the East Indies, filled the rival Great Powers with dreams of similar glories in Persia, in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, and in Further India, China and Japan.
In 1898 Germany seized Kiau Chau in China. Britain responded by seizing Wei-hai-wei, and the next year the Russians took possession of Port Arthur. A flame of hatred for the Europeans swept through China. There were massacres of Europeans and Christian converts, and in 1900 an attack upon and siege of the European legations in Pekin. A combined force of Europeans made a punitive expedition to Pekin, rescued the legations, and stole an enormous amount of valuable property. The Russians then seized Manchuria, and in 1904 the British invaded Tibet.
But now a new Power appeared in the struggle of the Great Powers, Japan. Hitherto Japan has played but a small part in this history; her secluded civilization has not contributed very largely to the general shaping of human destinies; she has received much, but she has given little. The Japanese proper are of the Mongolian race. Their civilization, their writing and their literary and artistic traditions are derived from the Chinese. Their history is an interesting and romantic one; they developed a feudal system and a system of chivalry in the earlier centuries of the Christian era; their attacks upon Korea and China are an Eastern equivalent of the English wars in France. Japan was first brought into contact with Europe in the sixteenth century; in 1542 some Portuguese reached it in a Chinese junk, and in 1549 a Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, began his teaching there. For a time Japan welcomed European intercourse, and the Christian missionaries made a great number of converts. A certain William Adams became the most trusted European adviser of the Japanese, and showed them how to build big ships. There were voyages in Japanese-built ships to India and Peru. Then arose complicated quarrels between the Spanish Dominicans, the Portuguese Jesuits, and the English and Dutch Protestants, each warning the Japanese against the political designs of the others. The Jesuits, in a phase of ascendancy, persecuted and insulted the Buddhists with great acrimony. In the end the Japanese came to the conclusion that the Europeans were an intolerable nuisance, and that Catholic Christianity in particular was a mere cloak for the political dreams of the Pope and the Spanish monarchy—already in possession of the Philippine Islands; there was a great persecution of the Christians, and in 1638 Japan was absolutely closed to Europeans, and remained closed for over 200 years. During those two centuries the Japanese were as completely cut off from the rest of the world as though they lived upon another planet. It was forbidden to build any ship larger than a mere coasting boat. No Japanese could go abroad, and no European enter the country.
For two centuries Japan remained outside the main current of history. She lived on in a state of picturesque feudalism in which about five per cent. of the population, the samurai, or fighting men, and the nobles and their families, tyrannized without restraint over the rest of the population. Meanwhile the great world outside went on to wider visions and new powers. Strange shipping became more frequent, passing the Japanese headlands; sometimes ships were wrecked and sailors brought ashore. Through the Dutch settlement in the island of Deshima, their one link with the outer universe, came warnings that Japan was not keeping pace with the power of the Western world. In 1837 a ship sailed into Yedo Bay flying a strange flag of stripes and stars, and carrying some Japanese sailors she had picked up far adrift in the Pacific. She was driven off by cannon shot. This flag presently reappeared on other ships. One in 1849 came to demand the liberation of eighteen shipwrecked American sailors. Then in 1853 came four American warships under Commodore Perry, and refused to be driven away. He lay at anchor in forbidden waters, and sent messages to the two rulers who at that time shared the control of Japan. In 1854 he returned with ten ships, amazing ships propelled by steam, and equipped with big guns, and he made proposals for trade and intercourse that the Japanese had no power to resist. He landed with a guard of 500 men to sign the treaty. Incredulous crowds watched this visitation from the outer world, marching through the streets.
Russia, Holland and Britain followed in the wake of America. A great nobleman whose estates commanded the Straits of Shimonoseki saw fit to fire on foreign vessels, and a bombardment by a fleet of British, French, Dutch and American warships destroyed his batteries and scattered his swordsmen. Finally an allied squadron (1865), at anchor off Kioto, imposed a ratification of the treaties which opened Japan to the world.
The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was intense. With astonishing energy and intelligence they set themselves to bring their culture and organization to the level of the European Powers. Never in all the history of mankind did a nation make such a stride as Japan then did. In 1866 she was a medieval people, a fantastic caricature of the extremest romantic feudalism; in 1899 hers was a completely Westernized people, on a level with the most advanced European Powers. She completely dispelled the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable way hopelessly behind Europe. She made all European progress seem sluggish by comparison.
We cannot tell here in any detail of Japan’s war with China in 1894–95. It demonstrated the extent of her Westernization. She had an efficient Westernized army and a small but sound fleet. But the significance of her renascence, though it was appreciated by Britain and the United States, who were already treating her as if she were a European state, was not understood by the other Great Powers engaged in the pursuit of new Indias in Asia. Russia was pushing down through Manchuria to Korea. France was already established far to the south in Tonkin and Annam, Germany was prowling hungrily on the look-out for some settlement. The three Powers combined to prevent Japan reaping any fruits from the Chinese war. She was exhausted by the struggle, and they threatened her with war.
Japan submitted for a time and gathered her forces. Within ten years she was ready for a struggle with Russia, which marks an epoch in the history of Asia, the close of the period of European arrogance. The Russian people were, of course, innocent and ignorant of this trouble that was being made for them halfway round the world, and the wiser Russian statesmen were against these foolish thrusts; but a gang of financial adventurers, including the Grand Dukes, his cousins, surrounded the Tsar. They had gambled deeply in the prospective looting of Manchuria and China, and they would suffer no withdrawal. So there began a transportation of great armies of Japanese soldiers across the sea to Port Arthur and Korea, and the sending of endless trainloads of Russian peasants along the Siberian railway to die in those distant battlefields.
The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were beaten on sea and land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed round Africa to be utterly destroyed in the Straits of Tshushima. A revolutionary movement among the common people of Russia, infuriated by this remote and reasonless slaughter, obliged the Tsar to end the war (1905); he returned the southern half of Saghalien, which had been seized by Russia in 1875, evacuated Manchuria, resigned Korea to Japan. The European invasion of Asia was coming to an end and the retraction of Europe’s tentacles was beginning.

Chen Xiying promoviert an der University of London.

[Carroll, Lewis]. Alisi man you qi jing ji. Zhao Yuanren yi [ID D8584].
Zhao Yuanren : "The first step of my way to translate this book is, I'd think of what we'll say in spoken Chinese at sight of a sentence. After that I put it down, checked it against the original. And then, in order to reach the standard of 'every word is faithfully translates', I tried to make some amendments, and kept alert never to get it sound like a foreign language. It would be impossible to translate this book perfectly into Chinese if we didn't employ the vernacular Chinese, so this translation can serve as a sample to judge the vernacular Chinese too.
The joke in this book is of another kind, whose sense lies in its nonsense. Why ? There're two reasons : firstly, the author intends to create an artwork instead of a fable ; secondly, the so-calles 'nonsense' in English means 'butong' in Chinese. However, not all nonsense is significant. The point of nonsense is that, it sounds like a word of sense, but nonsense in fact ; it looks like a thing of sense, but nonsense too. The book is a reference book of philosophy and logic as well. When probing into the profoundest of logic, many puzzles of 'nonsense' will emerge, and some are unsolvable till now."
Sekundärliteratur
Hu Rong : Zhao Yuanren found the book for children would offer a best sample for his linguistic experiment : "The Chinese language is now undergoing an examination, and it's good chance to make an experiment for several purposes". To translate Alice's adventures in Wonderland into Chinese looked for him like a mission impossible to put such a book full of 'nonsense' into Chinese, the vernacular Chinese particularly, since no one had succeeded in the last half century. He acquired the best reward by attaching his name to his favorite book forever as a result.

Waley, Arthur. Review of Fir-flower tablets by Florence Wheelock Ayscough ; English versions by Amy Lowell. In : Literary review of The New York Evening Post ; Febr. 4 (1922).
"It is a real book of Chinese poetry, it is worth criticizing".

Bynner, Witter. Translating Wang Wei [ID D32337].
Just as Tu Fu and Li Po are often spoken of in conjunction by the Chinese, so are two other great poets of the T'ang Dynasty, Meng Hao-jan and Wang Wei. The latter, who lived 699-759 A. D., is distinguished among the poets of China by a deep and beautiful optimism. The melancholy that wounded Tu Fu and Meng Hao-jan seems not to have touched Wang Wei beneath the surface.
And, whereas Li Po sought in wine solace from the ills and sorrows of life, Wang Wei found an abiding content in the "green and healing hills" and in the highly humbled and attuned mysticism of Lao-tzu's teaching.
As a young man, Wang Wei became Assistant Secretary of State; but at the age of thirty-one, when his wife died, he left his post and retired to live near Mount Chung-nan. Two of his poems about Mount Chung-nan are published in this number, both breathing the sober sweetness and simplicity of his retired life. One of them begins with the line, "My heart in middle age found the Way"; the Chinese word for the Way being Tao, the first character of the title of Lao-tzu's book, Tao-Te-Ching, which may be translated in whole as The Way and the Exemplification. Taoism appears, then, to have been the consolation of Wang Wei, although Professor Herbert M. Giles, in his volume Chinese Literature, declares it to have been Buddhism. We realize, not only from the direct statement in this one poem, but from the spirit of all his poems, that he had serenely accepted the Way, the natural way of the universe.
There was for a while a strong division between the followers of Lao-tzu and the followers of Confucius. Po Chu-yi ridiculed Taoist doctrines in the following four lines, crisply translated by Professor Giles:
"Who know speak not, who speak know naught,"
Are words from Lao-tzu's lore.
What then becomes of Lao-tzu's own
Five thousand words or more?
The answer is that Lao-tzu's words, fused now with both Buddhism and Confucianism, have become an integral part of the religion of China. Here are two characteristic quotations from his gospel:
Follow diligently the Way in your own heart, but make no display of it to the world.
Do nothing, and all things will be done.
Among the selections printed in this issue, note the last two lines of the poem, Answering Vice-Prefect Chang: a question asked in terms of complicated morality and answered in terms of simple happiness:
You ask me about good and evil?
Hark, on the lake there's a fisherman singing.
This does not mean that the ideal Taoist literally "did nothing." As a matter of fact Wang Wei was a physician, a high government official, a great poet, and also one of China's most illustrious painters. (A scroll attributed to him is on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.) His activities, however, were all in flow with universal forces: they sang like the fisherman — there was no fret, no jealousy, no self-exaltation, no irritated struggle; only harmony, humility, exalted identity with nature — a true and wide knowledge of values, making him a master of words, a master of the brush, and a master of life. Yes, there was a sure gaiety in Wang Wei, instanced in his Message to P'ai Ti, the fellow-poet with whom he longed to drink again and to "sing a wild poem"; or in the verses already mentioned, My Retreat at Chung-nan, in which he happily anticipated the day when he should "meet an old wood-cutter, and talk and laugh and never return." In the last two lines of the poem to P'ai Ti, he addressed his friend, according to a too frequent Chinese manner, by the name of Chieh-yu, who was a recluse of the Ch'u kingdom, famous somewhat for drinking, but more for stopping Confucius' chariot and warning him against politics with the song:
O phoenix, O phoenix,
Virtue is corrupted!
What is past is past all counsel,
What is future may be moulded.
Come away! Come away!
Politics are dangerous!
And Wang Wei's reference in the final line of this same poem is to the place where he will be drinking with his friend; yet Five Willows is the place named, where long ago T'ao Ch'ien had lived, another famous recluse who was both a great writer and a great drinker.
The last two lines of the poem In my Lodge at Wang-Ch'uan after a Long Rain, clear and significant as they are in themselves, yet contain, for the Chinese reader, enriching allusion and connotation. There was once a scholar, Yang-tzu, who, before he became a student of Lao-tzu, was highly respected and honored by his fellow-men. Later, through the many years of his discipleship, he lost his prestige, and even a boor would take precedence over him; but he was glad because he had formerly been proud and pretentious. The last line refers to a hermit who was fond of sea-gulls; they followed him wherever he went. His father asked why they were not afraid and bade the son bring him some; but next day, when the hermit went out intending to take them to his father, they all flew away.
The poem in the group most in need of explanation, because of its allusion to historic events and personages, is The Beautiful Hsi-shih; and the last two lines of A Song of Young Girls from Lo-Yang also require the following summary:
During the Chou Dynasty, when the Yueh kingdom was conquered by the Wu kingdom, the Yueh king still held his throne and plotted to throw off the tributary yoke. Aided by his able minister, Fan Li, he planned to distract the king of Wu with women. Fan Li searched through the Yueh kingdom for girls to beguile him and came upon Hsi-shih washing clothes by a lake. Conquering his own love for her, he fiercely persuaded her to his scheme. She remained at court for some time; and the Wu king, in his infatuation, forgot affairs of state. Weakened by this means, the Wu kingdom was overcome by the Yueh kingdom; and Fan Li eventually accepted Hsi-shih as his reward. The whimsical phrasing of the line "If by wrinkling their brows they can copy her beauty" alludes to the fact that she had heart trouble,
and it was said that her drawn brows, her look of gentleness in suffering, which the girls of her time tried unsuccessfully to imitate, made her more beautiful.
One might enlarge upon references in others of the poems. For instance, the quatrain called Lines contains the phrase "my silken window." This is not a decorative adjective. It merely means that, before the use of paper or glass, windows in China were of silk. The last line of the same poem is made lovelier by knowledge that the mei, or plum blossom, is in China the earliest flower of spring. It is interesting to know that A Song at Wei-Cheng, which was written for music, is still popular through China as a song of farewell, and that to this day "since we picked willow-branches at Wei-Cheng" means "since we parted." The beauty of the four lines called
A Parting, with its simple, profound expression of the abiding presence of friendly nature and the transient presence of friendly man, is heightened by the reader's response to the grace of the name Wang Sun, which from a dim and ancient origin still means in China a noblehearted young scholar, or sometimes lover. But on the whole, these T'ang poems are so valid and universal in uttering beauty that they may vitally enter the poetic consciousness of a westerner still ignorant of the various allusions.
Translating the work of Wang Wei and others in the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, Dr. Kiang and I have tried constantly to transfer the Chinese idiom into an equivalent idiom in English, rather than to stress the local novelty and pungency of Chinese phrasing. It would be as erroneous to overemphasize the component radicals of a Chinese character as to overemphasize the component meanings of such words in English as day-break, breakfast, nightfall or landscape. The delicate importance of the translator's office lies in bringing from one language to another the rounded and proportioned effect of a whole poem. And we, conscientiously, have tried to make felt, in our translations, the high honesty and wise humanness of poets who have in many ways, and in one Wei especially, lived closer to the heart of life than importunate passion brings the poets of the West.

Witter Bynner, as president of the Poetry Society, invited Chang Peng-chun as the principal speaker who contrasted American and Chinese attitudes towards poetry.

Thomé H. Fang erhält den M.A. in Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison.