ARTICLE III.—A STUDY IN CHINESE HISTORY.

To the traveller the first view of China conveys an impression which grows stronger with every hour of his stay. It is the impression of civilization. The coasters that swarm about the islands and capes as he approaches do not betoken a savage state; they are the messengers of commerce and traffic; they are the carriers of wealth; they are the servants of luxury; and they are manned not by barbarians, but by men of enterprise and industry. When he reaches the land, it is to find himself on the shores of an empire more extensive than was ever the Persian or the Macedonian, more populous than the Roman in its golden age, as ancient as the Egyptian and far more enduring; an empire with cities, temples, bridges, roads, and canals; with a history and a literature, with libraries and schools, with paper mills and printing shops, with government and revenue laws, with agriculture, manufactures, and art, with minted coin, and even that last refinement of Western civilization, paper money. He discovers that all these things are centuries old, and some of them emerge from an antiquity that had passed into authentic history before the mythical times of Greece began. He is forced to admit that here is civilization. China may be heathen, but she is civilized. These people may be fossils, but they are not savages. They have environed themselves in a Central Flower Kingdom which is exclusive, opinionated, and stationary, but which is nevertheless the product of a hundred ages of philosophy and toil. This is not barbarism. It is society; and that in an advanced stage. The elements which have mingled in the result have been peculiar, and they have produced a civilization which is peculiar. But it is civilization, and withal a very remarkable example of it; produced in a country separate from others, and walled in by ocean, desert, and mountain chain almost as effectually as the Happy Valley of Rasselas; the growth of a people but twice conquered by any foreign power, and then not till ages after their national life. had become mature and permanent; a civilization, in fine,

which, so far from being aided by the religion or the culture of the West, had never heard of Christianity, or of the Roman eagles, or of Grecian art, or of Phenician commerce, till its own life could be measured by twenty centuries. "Of all the peoples," says M. Pauthier, "who have existed or who still exist on the globe, the Chinese people is the only one, with the exception of the Indian, whose civilization from the time when the earth began to be peopled has accomplished its complete development of its own movement and by its own nature, without the help of any foreign civilization brought in by conquest or transmitted by literary monuments, as have been the European civilizations, and perhaps even that of ancient Egypt.*

A country which has thus wrought out its own problems apart from all others, cannot fail to exhibit some interesting phases of experience. Here we have an indigenous civilization. Its processes have not been tampered with by any meddlesome hand. It has expanded by its own spontaneous life. It would be surprising, therefore, if some of its methods did not prove to be unique, and stand in strong contrast with those of the civilizations more familiar to us, which have been shaped by forces more arbitrary and compulsive. It is not our purpose, however, to institute such a comparison as this within the limits of a single paper. We shall confine ourselves to tracing the two main currents of historic movement which are most distinctly visible in Chinese as in all other civilizations—namely, the course of material progress, and the history of religious knowledge.

Beginning with the present stage and tracing slowly backward, we shall find the elements of modern Chinese life sifting out one by one, until we reach a period where only the merest rudiments of the social fabric will be left; life reduced to its lowest and simplest terms. And still beyond lies an age of darkness and myth, a Black Forest which affords no clue but an occasional fragment of tradition, and whose denizens, shrouded in that primeval twilight, appear rather as unreal spectres roving among the shadows of the historic dawn, than as real beings of flesh and blood who could have had anything in common with the cultivated man of to-day.

*Chine, ou Descrip. Historique, &c., p. 5. He does not allow that the introduction of Buddhism from India was a civilizing agency, since China was already in advance of any influence which that might otherwise have been able to wield.

It will be convenient for the purposes of this sketch to divide Chinese history into periods of a thousand years each.

The first period will carry us back from the nineteenth century to the ninth; and the China of to-day must be reduced to the China which was visited and so quaintly described by the two Mohammedan travellers of that earlier date.* At the outset of our backward journey, we leave behind all those modern arts and appliances which have come directly or indirectly from intercourse with Western powers, and which linger along the shores of the great Empire, without penetrating inland to any great extent, or exerting any sensible influence upon the mass of the nation. Many branches of mechanical industry have sprung up in our own times, whose products are both tokens and appliances of civilization, and whose success shows that the Chinese are not so entirely servile and imitative as they have had the credit of being. Such are the arts of glass-blowing and bronze work, the preparation of vermilion and prussian blue, the manufacture of gold leaf, pearl buttons, glass mirrors, sweet meats, &c., the use of such conveniences as the capstan and windlass, and the improvements in mathematical instruments, field artillery, copperblock printing, and the like, taught them by the Jesuit missionaries. These recent marks of Chinese growth are the first to drop from our view. By the time we are half through our first stage, we shall also miss the racy columns of the Pekin Gazette, the oldest daily in the world, and some two or three hundred years farther along shall be obliged to continue our journey without the convenience of paper money,

which has been in use at various times since the tenth cen

*Their Account was translated from the Arabic by Renaudot.

"As much as they are pretended to have been skilled in casting of cannon, Father Adam Schall and Martini were at the head of all the meltings in their time; and notwithstanding what is commonly said, that the severe prohibition against infringements on the ancient usages, or receiving instruction from strangers, has prevented them from improving the arts they invented; these strangers have taught them an infinite number of things, before unknown in the country."-Renaudot, Dissertation on the Chinese Learning, appended to Ancient Account, &c., by Two Mohammedan Travellers.

It was hard, however, for Renaudot, Frenchman though he was, to admit anything good in Chinese character or art, which was not traceable to some other

source.

tury.* We shall very soon emerge also on the other side of the great court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol conqueror of China, and the "most civilized prince of his time." The Grand Canal, of which he was the builder, will disappear; and his whole vast power, then at its greatest extent, will melt from view "like the baseless fabric of a vision"; as indeed it did in reality, within less than a century after the death of the great Khan. Certain other peculiarities of Chinese life belonging to this modern epoch will likewise disappear; as opium, which has been known to the Chinese scarcely more than two centuries, even as a medicinal prescription; the shaven crown and braided cue, which were originally marks of subjection imposed by the Manchu Tatars so late as 1627; and even the small feet, which cannot be traced back farther then the middle of the tenth century. These are the chief differences we should observe between the Chinese of to-day and the Chinese of a thousand years ago. On completing the first stage of our journey and looking around upon the country and the times, we find the same industrious people, the same employments of rice and tea culture in the fields and trading in the towns, and the same busy commerce on the rivers and along the coast. In dress the people are precisely the same, save that, untrammeled by either fashion or Tatar, the women have the whole of the feet, and the men have the whole of the hair, which nature had provided. The period we have reached is the era of the Norman sea-kings, of Alfred the Great, of the successors of Charlemagne, of the Augustan age of the Moors in Spain, of the separation of the Greek and Latin churches, and the early growth of the temporal sovereignty. The elements which were combining to form the modern states of Europe were then in their ferment. The dark ages still brooded over the ignorant nations. Christianity was doing its utmost to regenerate society, but was itself too often borne back in the struggles of those turbulent times. In China, on the contrary, we behold a heathen civilization which had already entered upon its period of maturity. The Empire of the ninth century was already possessed of an immense population; and

*See prefatory remark to an Article on paper money, by Klaproth, Journal Am. Oriental Soc., i, 136.

by the discipline of its own civil feuds, and the contests with Hun, Mongol, Corean, and Japanese, was compacted into a solid state. The Mohammedan travellers found a country in which letters were cultivated by high and low. There were schools in every town for teaching the poor to write and read, and the masters were paid at the public charge. There was a large literature of printed books. The governmental officers were selected from the literary graduates, and had been for three centuries. The emperors sent written mandates to the provincial kings and governors by relays of post-horses. The people were skilled in porcelain, in silk-weaving, in lacquered ware. There were good artists among them, and expert carvers. The women wore ivory combs. Tea had been cultivated for many centuries, and was now in general use.* The people were not addicted to wine, and the ravages of opium and samshu were unknown. They lived in good houses of wood or brick or even stone; and their rooms were adorned with ancestral tablets and mottoes from Confucius. They had dials to measure time, and the two travellers declare that they saw "clocks with weights." They had copper coin in great abundance, but no money of silver or gold. They were fond of gaming and all manner of diversions. They married as many wives as they pleased, worshiped idols, cultivated astronomy, but knew nothing of other sciences, and very little of that. They were a peaceable nation, though able to fight on occasion; and had an army, equipped with bows, spears, and a rude artillery in which they used gunpowder. They derived most of their subsistence from the soil then as now, and used hoes, spades, shovels, mattocks, plows, harrows, and water-wheels for irrigation; and these im

*The earliest notice we have from any foreigner of this now universal drink is so curious that it is worthy of being transcribed: "The Emperor also reserves to himself the revenues which arise from the salt-mines, and from a certain herb which they drink with hot water, and of which great quantities are sold in all the cities, to the amount of great sums. They call it Sah, and it is a shrub more bushy than the pomegranate-tree and of a more taking smell, but it has a kind of bitterness with it. Their way is to boil water, which they pour upon this leaf, and this drink cures all sorts of diseases. Whatever sums are lodged in the Treasury arise from the poll-tax, and from the duties upon salt and upon this leaf."-Ancient Accounts. &c., Renaudot, p. 25.