In the very earliest inscriptions that have come down to us, the so-calledku-wênor “ancient figures,” all the above-mentioned forms occur. None are wholly pictorial, with one or two unimportant exceptions. These early inscriptions areStyles of writing.found on bronzes dating from the half-legendary period extending from the beginning of the Shang dynasty in the 18th centuryB.C., or possibly earlier, down to a point in the reign of King Hsüan of the Chou dynasty, generally fixed at 827B.C.They have been carefully reproduced and for the most part deciphered by painstaking Chinese archaeologists, and form the subject of many voluminous works. The following may be taken as a specimen, in which it will be noticed that only the last character is unmistakably pictorial:This is read:—”Shên made [this] preciousting.” These ancient bronzes, which mainly take the shape of bells, cauldrons and sacrificial utensils, were until within the last decade our sole source of information concerning the origin and early history of Chinese writing. But recently a large number of inscribed bone fragments have been excavated in the north of China, providing new and unexpected matter for investigation. The inscriptions on these bones have already furnished a list of nearly 2500 separate characters, of which not more than about 600 have been so far identified. They appear to be responses given by professional soothsayers to private individuals who came to them seeking the aid of divination in the affairs of their daily life. It is difficult to fix their date with much exactitude. The script, though less archaic than that of the earlier bronzes, is nevertheless of an exceedingly free and irregular type. Judging by the style of the inscriptions alone, one would be inclined to assign them to the early years of the Chou dynasty, say 1100B.C.But Mr L.C. Hopkins thinks that they represent a mode of writing already obsolete at the time of their production, and retained of set purpose by the diviners from obscurantist motives, much as the ancient hieroglyphics were employed by the Egyptian priesthood. He would therefore date them about 500 years later, or only half a century before the birth of Confucius. If that is so, they are merely late specimens of the “ancient figures” appearing long after the latter had made way for a new and more conventionalized form of writing. This new writing is called in Chinesechuan, which is commonly rendered by the word Seal, for the somewhat unscientific reason that many ages afterwards it was generally adopted for use on seals. Under the Chou dynasty, however, as well as the two succeeding it, the meaning of the word was not “seal,” but “sinuous curves,” as made in writing. It has accordingly been suggested that this epoch marks the first introduction into China of the brush in place of the bamboo or wooden pencil with frayed end which was used with some kind of colouring matter or varnish. There are many arguments both for and against this view; but it is unquestionable, at any rate, that the introduction of a supple implement like the brush at the very time when the forms of characters were fast becoming crystallized and fixed, would be sufficient to account for a great revolution in the style of writing. Authentic specimens of theta chuan, older or Greater Seal writing, are exceedingly rare. But it is generally believed that the inscriptions on the famous stone drums, now at Peking, date from the reign of King Hsüan, and they may therefore with practical certainty be cited as examples of the Greater Seal in its original form. These “drums” are really ten roughly chiselled mountain boulders, which were discovered in the early part of the 7th century, lying half buried in the ground near Fêng-hsiang Fu in the province of Shensi. On them are engraved ten odes, a complete ode being cut on each drum, celebrating an Imperial hunting and fishing expedition in that part of the country. A facsimile of one of these, taken from an old rubbing and reproduced in Dr Bushell’sHandbook of Chinese Art, shows that great strides had been made in this writing towards symmetry, compactness and conventionalism. The vogue of the Greater Seal appears to have lasted until the reign of the First Emperor, 221-210B.C.(seeHistory), when a further modification took place. For many centuries China had been split up into a number of practically independent states, and this circumstance seems to have led to considerable variations in the styles of writing. Having succeeded in unifying the empire, the First Emperor proceeded, on the advice of his minister Li Ssŭ, to standardize its script by ordaining that only the style in use in his own state of Ch‘in should henceforward be employed throughout China. It is clear, then, that this new style of writing was nothing more than the Greater Seal characters in the form they had assumed after several centuries of evolution, with numerous abbreviations and modifications. It was afterwards known as thehsiao chuan, or Lesser Seal, and is familiar to us from theShuo Wendictionary (seeLiterature). Though a decided improvement on what had gone before, the Lesser Seal was destined to have but a short career of undisputed supremacy. Reform was in the air; and something less cumbrous was soon felt to be necessary by the clerks who had to supply the immense quantity of written reports demanded by the First Emperor. Thus it came about that a yet simpler and certainly more artistic form of writing was already in use, though not universally so, not long after the decree abolishing the Greater Seal. Thisli shu, or “official script,” as it is called, shows a great advance on the Seal character; so much so that one cannot help suspecting the traditional account of its invention. It is perhaps more likely to have been directly evolved from the Greater Seal. If the Lesser Seal was the script of the semi-barbarous state of Ch‘in, we should certainly expect to find a more highly developed system of writing in some of the other states. Unlike the Seal, theli shuis perfectly legible to one acquainted only with the modern character, from which indeed it differs but in minor details. How long the Lesser Seal continued to exist side by side with theli shuis a question which cannot be answered with certainty. It was evidently quite obsolete, however, at the time of the compilation of theShuo Wên, about a hundred years after the Christian era. As for the Greater Seal and still earlier forms of writing, they were not merely obsolete but had fallen into utter oblivion before the Han Dynasty was fifty years old. When a number of classical texts were discovered bricked up in old houses about 150B.C., the style of writing was considered so singular by the literati of the period that they refused to believe it was the ordinary ancient character at all, and nicknamed itk‘o-t‘ou shu, “tadpole character,” from some fancied resemblance in shape. The theory that these tadpole characters were not Chinese but a species of cuneiform script, in which the wedges might possibly suggest tadpoles, must be dismissed as too wildly improbable for serious consideration; but we may advert for a moment to a famous inscription in which the real tadpole characters of antiquity are said to appear. This is on a stone tablet alleged to have been erected on Mount Hêng in the modern Hupeh by the legendary Emperor Yü, as a record of his labours in draining away the great flood which submerged part of China in the 23rd centuryB.C.After more than one fruitless search, the actual monument is said to have been discovered on a peak of the mountain inA.D.1212, and a transcription was made, which may be seen reproduced as a curiosity in Legge’sClassics, vol. iii. For several reasons, however, the whole affair must be regarded as a gross imposture.Out of the “official script” two other forms were soon developed, namely thets‘ao shu, or “grass character,” which so curtails the usual strokes as to be comparable to a species of shorthand, requiring special study, and thehsing shuor running hand, used in ordinary correspondence. Some form of grass character is mentioned as in use as early as 200B.C.or thereabouts, though how nearly it approximated to the modern grass hand it is hard to say; the running hand seems to have come several centuries later. The final standardization of Chinese writing was due to the great calligraphist Wang Hsi-chih of the 4th century, who gave currency to the graceful style of character known ask‘ai shu, sometimes referred to as the “clerkly hand.” When block-printing was invented some centuries later, the characters were cut on this model, which still survives at the present day. It is no doubt owing to the early introduction of printing that the script of China has remained practically unchanged ever since. The manuscript rolls of the T‘ang and preceding dynasties, recently discovered by Dr Stein in Turkestan, furnish direct evidence of this fact, showing as they do a style of writing not only clear and legible but remarkably modern in appearance.The whole history of Chinese writing, then, is characterized by a slow progressive development which precludes the idea of sharply-marked divisions between one period and another. The Chinese themselves, however, have canonized quite a series of alleged inventors, starting from Fu Hsi, a mythical emperor of the third millenniumB.C., who is said to have developed a complete system of written characters from the markings on the back of a dragon-horse; hence, by the way, the origin of the dragon as an Imperial emblem. As a rule, the credit of the invention of the art of writing is given to Ts‘ang Chieh, a being with fabulous attributes, who conceived the idea of a written language from the markings of birds’ claws upon the sand. The diffusion of the Greater Seal script is traced to a work in fifteen chapters published by Shih Chou, historiographer in the reign of King Hsüan. The Lesser Seal, again, is often ascribed to Li Ssŭ himself, whereas the utmost he can have done in the matter was to urge its introduction into common use. Likewise, Ch‘êng Mo, of the 3rd centuryB.C., is supposed to have invented theli shuwhile in prison, and one account attributes the Lesser Seal to him as well; but the fact is that the whole history of writing, as it stands in Chinese authors, is in hopeless confusion.
In the very earliest inscriptions that have come down to us, the so-calledku-wênor “ancient figures,” all the above-mentioned forms occur. None are wholly pictorial, with one or two unimportant exceptions. These early inscriptions areStyles of writing.found on bronzes dating from the half-legendary period extending from the beginning of the Shang dynasty in the 18th centuryB.C., or possibly earlier, down to a point in the reign of King Hsüan of the Chou dynasty, generally fixed at 827B.C.They have been carefully reproduced and for the most part deciphered by painstaking Chinese archaeologists, and form the subject of many voluminous works. The following may be taken as a specimen, in which it will be noticed that only the last character is unmistakably pictorial:This is read:—”Shên made [this] preciousting.” These ancient bronzes, which mainly take the shape of bells, cauldrons and sacrificial utensils, were until within the last decade our sole source of information concerning the origin and early history of Chinese writing. But recently a large number of inscribed bone fragments have been excavated in the north of China, providing new and unexpected matter for investigation. The inscriptions on these bones have already furnished a list of nearly 2500 separate characters, of which not more than about 600 have been so far identified. They appear to be responses given by professional soothsayers to private individuals who came to them seeking the aid of divination in the affairs of their daily life. It is difficult to fix their date with much exactitude. The script, though less archaic than that of the earlier bronzes, is nevertheless of an exceedingly free and irregular type. Judging by the style of the inscriptions alone, one would be inclined to assign them to the early years of the Chou dynasty, say 1100B.C.But Mr L.C. Hopkins thinks that they represent a mode of writing already obsolete at the time of their production, and retained of set purpose by the diviners from obscurantist motives, much as the ancient hieroglyphics were employed by the Egyptian priesthood. He would therefore date them about 500 years later, or only half a century before the birth of Confucius. If that is so, they are merely late specimens of the “ancient figures” appearing long after the latter had made way for a new and more conventionalized form of writing. This new writing is called in Chinesechuan, which is commonly rendered by the word Seal, for the somewhat unscientific reason that many ages afterwards it was generally adopted for use on seals. Under the Chou dynasty, however, as well as the two succeeding it, the meaning of the word was not “seal,” but “sinuous curves,” as made in writing. It has accordingly been suggested that this epoch marks the first introduction into China of the brush in place of the bamboo or wooden pencil with frayed end which was used with some kind of colouring matter or varnish. There are many arguments both for and against this view; but it is unquestionable, at any rate, that the introduction of a supple implement like the brush at the very time when the forms of characters were fast becoming crystallized and fixed, would be sufficient to account for a great revolution in the style of writing. Authentic specimens of theta chuan, older or Greater Seal writing, are exceedingly rare. But it is generally believed that the inscriptions on the famous stone drums, now at Peking, date from the reign of King Hsüan, and they may therefore with practical certainty be cited as examples of the Greater Seal in its original form. These “drums” are really ten roughly chiselled mountain boulders, which were discovered in the early part of the 7th century, lying half buried in the ground near Fêng-hsiang Fu in the province of Shensi. On them are engraved ten odes, a complete ode being cut on each drum, celebrating an Imperial hunting and fishing expedition in that part of the country. A facsimile of one of these, taken from an old rubbing and reproduced in Dr Bushell’sHandbook of Chinese Art, shows that great strides had been made in this writing towards symmetry, compactness and conventionalism. The vogue of the Greater Seal appears to have lasted until the reign of the First Emperor, 221-210B.C.(seeHistory), when a further modification took place. For many centuries China had been split up into a number of practically independent states, and this circumstance seems to have led to considerable variations in the styles of writing. Having succeeded in unifying the empire, the First Emperor proceeded, on the advice of his minister Li Ssŭ, to standardize its script by ordaining that only the style in use in his own state of Ch‘in should henceforward be employed throughout China. It is clear, then, that this new style of writing was nothing more than the Greater Seal characters in the form they had assumed after several centuries of evolution, with numerous abbreviations and modifications. It was afterwards known as thehsiao chuan, or Lesser Seal, and is familiar to us from theShuo Wendictionary (seeLiterature). Though a decided improvement on what had gone before, the Lesser Seal was destined to have but a short career of undisputed supremacy. Reform was in the air; and something less cumbrous was soon felt to be necessary by the clerks who had to supply the immense quantity of written reports demanded by the First Emperor. Thus it came about that a yet simpler and certainly more artistic form of writing was already in use, though not universally so, not long after the decree abolishing the Greater Seal. Thisli shu, or “official script,” as it is called, shows a great advance on the Seal character; so much so that one cannot help suspecting the traditional account of its invention. It is perhaps more likely to have been directly evolved from the Greater Seal. If the Lesser Seal was the script of the semi-barbarous state of Ch‘in, we should certainly expect to find a more highly developed system of writing in some of the other states. Unlike the Seal, theli shuis perfectly legible to one acquainted only with the modern character, from which indeed it differs but in minor details. How long the Lesser Seal continued to exist side by side with theli shuis a question which cannot be answered with certainty. It was evidently quite obsolete, however, at the time of the compilation of theShuo Wên, about a hundred years after the Christian era. As for the Greater Seal and still earlier forms of writing, they were not merely obsolete but had fallen into utter oblivion before the Han Dynasty was fifty years old. When a number of classical texts were discovered bricked up in old houses about 150B.C., the style of writing was considered so singular by the literati of the period that they refused to believe it was the ordinary ancient character at all, and nicknamed itk‘o-t‘ou shu, “tadpole character,” from some fancied resemblance in shape. The theory that these tadpole characters were not Chinese but a species of cuneiform script, in which the wedges might possibly suggest tadpoles, must be dismissed as too wildly improbable for serious consideration; but we may advert for a moment to a famous inscription in which the real tadpole characters of antiquity are said to appear. This is on a stone tablet alleged to have been erected on Mount Hêng in the modern Hupeh by the legendary Emperor Yü, as a record of his labours in draining away the great flood which submerged part of China in the 23rd centuryB.C.After more than one fruitless search, the actual monument is said to have been discovered on a peak of the mountain inA.D.1212, and a transcription was made, which may be seen reproduced as a curiosity in Legge’sClassics, vol. iii. For several reasons, however, the whole affair must be regarded as a gross imposture.
Out of the “official script” two other forms were soon developed, namely thets‘ao shu, or “grass character,” which so curtails the usual strokes as to be comparable to a species of shorthand, requiring special study, and thehsing shuor running hand, used in ordinary correspondence. Some form of grass character is mentioned as in use as early as 200B.C.or thereabouts, though how nearly it approximated to the modern grass hand it is hard to say; the running hand seems to have come several centuries later. The final standardization of Chinese writing was due to the great calligraphist Wang Hsi-chih of the 4th century, who gave currency to the graceful style of character known ask‘ai shu, sometimes referred to as the “clerkly hand.” When block-printing was invented some centuries later, the characters were cut on this model, which still survives at the present day. It is no doubt owing to the early introduction of printing that the script of China has remained practically unchanged ever since. The manuscript rolls of the T‘ang and preceding dynasties, recently discovered by Dr Stein in Turkestan, furnish direct evidence of this fact, showing as they do a style of writing not only clear and legible but remarkably modern in appearance.
The whole history of Chinese writing, then, is characterized by a slow progressive development which precludes the idea of sharply-marked divisions between one period and another. The Chinese themselves, however, have canonized quite a series of alleged inventors, starting from Fu Hsi, a mythical emperor of the third millenniumB.C., who is said to have developed a complete system of written characters from the markings on the back of a dragon-horse; hence, by the way, the origin of the dragon as an Imperial emblem. As a rule, the credit of the invention of the art of writing is given to Ts‘ang Chieh, a being with fabulous attributes, who conceived the idea of a written language from the markings of birds’ claws upon the sand. The diffusion of the Greater Seal script is traced to a work in fifteen chapters published by Shih Chou, historiographer in the reign of King Hsüan. The Lesser Seal, again, is often ascribed to Li Ssŭ himself, whereas the utmost he can have done in the matter was to urge its introduction into common use. Likewise, Ch‘êng Mo, of the 3rd centuryB.C., is supposed to have invented theli shuwhile in prison, and one account attributes the Lesser Seal to him as well; but the fact is that the whole history of writing, as it stands in Chinese authors, is in hopeless confusion.
Grammar.—When about to embark on the study of a foreign language, the student’s first thought is to provide himself withtwo indispensable aids—a dictionary and a grammar. The Chinese have found no difficulty in producing the former (seeLiterature). Now what as to the grammar? He might reasonably expect a people so industrious in the cultivation of their language to have evolved some system of grammar which to a certain degree would help to smooth his path. And yet the contrary is the case. No set of rules governing the mutual relations of words has ever been formulated by the Chinese, apparently because the need of such rules has never been felt. The most that native writers have done is to draw a distinction betweenand“full” and “empty words,” respectively, the former being subdivided into“living words” or verbs, and“dead words” or noun-substantives. By “empty words” particles are meant, though sometimes the expression is loosely applied to abstract terms, including verbs. The above meagre classification is their nearest approach to a conception of grammar in our sense. This in itself does not prove that a Chinese grammar is impossible, nor that, if constructed, it might not be helpful to the student. As a matter of fact, several attempts have been made by foreigners to deduce a grammatical system which should prove as rigid and binding as those of Western languages, though it cannot be said that any as yet has stood the test of time or criticism. Other writers have gone to the other extreme, and maintained that Chinese has no grammar at all. In this dictum, exaggerated as it sounds, there is a very substantial amount of truth. Every Chinese character is an indivisible unit, representing a sound and standing for a root-idea. Being free from inflection or agglutination of any kind, it is incapable of indicating in itself either gender, number or case, voice, mood, tense or person. Of European languages, English stands nearest to Chinese in this respect, whence it follows that the construction of a hybrid jargon like pidgin English presents fewer difficulties than would be the case, for instance, with pidgin German. For pidgin English simply consists in taking English words and treating them like Chinese characters, that is, divesting them of all troublesome inflections and reducing them to a set of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence. “You wantchee my no wantchee” is nothing more nor less than literally rendered Chinese:“Do you want me or not?” But we may go further, and say that no Chinese character can be definitely regarded as being any particular part of speech or possessing any particular function absolutely, apart from the general tenor of its context. Thus, taken singly, the characterconveys only the general idea “above” as opposed to “below.” According to its place in the sentence and the requirements of common sense, it may be a noun meaning “upper person” (that is, a ruler); an adjective meaning “upper,” “topmost” or “best”; an adverb meaning “above”; a preposition meaning “upon”; and finally a verb meaning “to mount upon,” or “to go to.”is a character that may usually be translated “to enter” as in“to enter a door”; yet in the locution“enter wood,” the verb becomes causative, and the meaning is “to put into a coffin.” It would puzzle grammarians to determine the precise grammatical function of any of the words in the following sentence, with the exception of(an interrogative, by the way, which here happens to mean “why” but in other contexts is equivalent to “how,” “which” or “what”):“Affair why must ancient,” or in more idiomatic English, “Why necessarily stick to the ways of the ancients in such matters?” Or take a proverbial saying like, which may be correctly rendered “The less a man has seen, the more he has to wonder at.” It is one thing, however, to translate it correctly, and another to explain how this translation can be inferred from the individual words, of which the bald equivalents might be given as: “Few what see, many what Strange.” To say that “strange” is the literal equivalent ofdoes not mean thatcan be definitely classed as an adjective. On the other hand, it would be dangerous even to assert that the word here plays the part of an active verb, because it would be equally permissible to translate the above “Many things are strange to one who has seen but little.”
Chinese grammar, then, so far as it deals with the classification of separate words, may well be given up as a bad job. But there still remains the art of syntax, the due arrangement of words to form sentences according to certain established rules. Here, at any rate, we are on somewhat firmer ground; and for many years the dictum that “the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position” was regarded as a golden key to the written language of China. It is perfectly true that there are certain positions and collocations of words which tend to recur, but when one sits down to formulate a set of hard-and-fast rules governing these positions, it is soon found to be a thankless task, for the number of qualifications and exceptions which will have to be added is so great as to render the rule itself valueless.means “on a horse,”“to get on a horse.” But it will not do to say that a preposition becomes a verb when placed before the substantive, as many other prepositions come before and not after the words they govern. If we meet such a phrase as, literally “warn rebels,” we must not mentally labelas a verb andas a substantive, and say to ourselves that in Chinese the verb is followed immediately by its object. Otherwise, we might be tempted to translate, “to warn the rebels,” whereas a little reflection would show us that the conjunction of “warning” and “rebels” naturally leads to the meaning “to warn (the populace or whoever it may be)againstthe rebels.” After all our adventurous incursions into the domain of syntax, we are soon brought back to the starting-point and are obliged to confess that each particular passage is best interpreted on its own merits, by the logic of the context and the application of common sense. There is no reason why Chinese sentences should not be dissected, by those who take pleasure in such operations, into subject, copula and predicate, but it should be early impressed upon the beginner that the profit likely to accrue to him therefrom is infinitesimal. As for fixed rules of grammatical construction, so far from being a help, he will find them a positive hindrance. It should rather be his aim to free his mind from such trammels, and to accustom himself to look upon each character as a root-idea, not a definite part of speech.
Chinese grammar, then, so far as it deals with the classification of separate words, may well be given up as a bad job. But there still remains the art of syntax, the due arrangement of words to form sentences according to certain established rules. Here, at any rate, we are on somewhat firmer ground; and for many years the dictum that “the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position” was regarded as a golden key to the written language of China. It is perfectly true that there are certain positions and collocations of words which tend to recur, but when one sits down to formulate a set of hard-and-fast rules governing these positions, it is soon found to be a thankless task, for the number of qualifications and exceptions which will have to be added is so great as to render the rule itself valueless.means “on a horse,”“to get on a horse.” But it will not do to say that a preposition becomes a verb when placed before the substantive, as many other prepositions come before and not after the words they govern. If we meet such a phrase as, literally “warn rebels,” we must not mentally labelas a verb andas a substantive, and say to ourselves that in Chinese the verb is followed immediately by its object. Otherwise, we might be tempted to translate, “to warn the rebels,” whereas a little reflection would show us that the conjunction of “warning” and “rebels” naturally leads to the meaning “to warn (the populace or whoever it may be)againstthe rebels.” After all our adventurous incursions into the domain of syntax, we are soon brought back to the starting-point and are obliged to confess that each particular passage is best interpreted on its own merits, by the logic of the context and the application of common sense. There is no reason why Chinese sentences should not be dissected, by those who take pleasure in such operations, into subject, copula and predicate, but it should be early impressed upon the beginner that the profit likely to accrue to him therefrom is infinitesimal. As for fixed rules of grammatical construction, so far from being a help, he will find them a positive hindrance. It should rather be his aim to free his mind from such trammels, and to accustom himself to look upon each character as a root-idea, not a definite part of speech.
The Book Language.—Turning now to some of the more salient characteristics of the book language, with the object of explaining how it came to be so widely separated from common speech, we might reasonably suppose that in primitive times the two stood in much closer relation to each other than now. But it is certainly a striking fact that the earliest literary remains of any magnitude that have come down to us should exhibit a style very far removed from any possible colloquial idiom. The speeches of the Book of History (seeLiterature) are more manifestly fictitious, by many degrees, than the elaborate orations in Thucydides and Livy. If we cannot believe that Socrates actually spoke the words attributed to him in the dialogues of Plato, much less can we expect to find theipsissima verbaof Confucius in any of his recorded sayings. In the beginning, all characters doubtless represented spoken words, but it must very soon have dawned on the practical Chinese mind that there was no need to reproduce in writing the bisyllabic compounds of common speech.Chien“to see,” in its written form, could not possibly be confused with any otherchien, and it was therefore unnecessary to go to the trouble of writingk‘an-chien“look-see,” as in colloquial. There was a wonderful outburst of literary activity in the Confucian era, when it would seem that the older and more cumbrous form of Seal character was still in vogue. If the mere manual labour of writing was so great, we cannot wonder that all superfluous particles or other words that could be dispensed with were ruthlessly cut away. So it came about that all the old classical works were composed in the tersest of language, as remote as can be imagined from the speech of the people. The passion for brevity and conciseness was pushed to an extreme, and resulted more often than not in such obscurity that detailed commentaries on the classics were found to be necessary, and have always constituted an important branch of Chinese literature. After the introduction of the improved style of script, and when the mechanical means of writing had been simplified, it may be supposed that literary diction also became freer and more expansive. This did happen to some extent, but the classics were held in such veneration as to exercise the profoundest influence over all succeeding schools of writers, and the divorce between literature and pooular speech became permanent and irreconcilable. The book languageabsorbed all the interest and energy of scholars, and it was inevitable that this elevation of the written should be accompanied by a corresponding degradation of the spoken word. This must largely account for the somewhat remarkable fact that the art of oratory and public speaking has never been deemed worthy of cultivation in China, while the comparatively low position occupied by the drama may also be referred to the same cause. At the same time, the term “book language,” in its widest sense, covers a multitude of styles, some of which differ from each other nearly as much as from ordinary speech. The department of fiction (seeLiterature), which the lettered Chinaman affects to despise and will not readily admit within the charmed circle of “literature,” really constitutes a bridge spanning the gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged to translate, so to speak, into the colloquial of his audience as he goes along. There is no inherent reason why the conversation of everyday life should not be rendered into characters, as is done in foreign handbooks for teaching elementary Chinese; one can only say that the Chinese do not think it worth while. There are a few words, indeed, which, though common enough in the mouths of genteel and vulgar alike, have positively no characters to represent them. On the other hand, there is a vast store of purely book words which would never be used or understood in conversation.
The book language is not only nice in its choice of words, it also has to obey special rules of construction. Of these, perhaps the most apparent is the carefully marked antithesis between characters in different clauses of a sentence, which results in a kind of parallelism or rhythmic balance. This parallelism is a noticeable feature in ordinary poetical composition, and may be well illustrated by the following four-line stanza:
“The bright sun completes its course behind the mountains;The yellow river flows away into the sea.Would you command a prospect of a thousandli?Climb yet one storey higher.” In the first line of this piece, every single character is balanced by a corresponding one in the second:white byyellow,sun byriver, and so on. In the 3rd and 4th lines, where more laxity is generally allowed, every word again has its counterpart, with the sole exception of“wish” and“further.”
The question is often asked: What sort of instrument is Chinese for the expression of thought? As a medium for the conveyance of historical facts, subtle emotions or abstruse philosophical conceptions, can it compare with the languages of the Western world? The answers given to this question have varied considerably. But it is noteworthy that those who most depreciate the qualities of Chinese are, generally speaking, theorists rather than persons possessing a profound first-hand knowledge of the language itself. Such writers argue that want of inflection in the characters must tend to make Chinese hard and inelastic, and therefore incapable of bringing out the finer shades of thought and emotion. Answering one a priori argument with another, one might fairly retort that, if anything, flexibility is the precise quality to be predicated of a language in which any character may, according to the requirements of the context, be interpreted either as noun, verb or adjective. But all such reasoning is somewhat futile. It will scarcely be contended that German, being highly inflected, is therefore superior in range and power to English, from which inflections have largely disappeared. Some of the early Jesuit missionaries, men of great natural ability who steeped themselves in Oriental learning, have left very different opinions on record. Chinese appeared to them as admirable for the superabundant richness of its vocabulary as for the conciseness of its literary style. And among modern scholars there is a decided tendency to accept this view as embodying a great deal more truth than the other.
Another question, much debated years ago, which time itself is now satisfactorily answering, was whether the Chinese language would be able to assimilate the vast stock of new terminology which closer contact with the West would necessarily carry with it. Two possible courses, it seemed, were open: either fresh characters would be formed on the radical-phonetic principle, or the new idea might be expressed by the conjunction of two or more characters already existing. The former expedient had been tried on a limited scale in Japan, where in the course of time new characters were formed on the same principle as of old, which were yet purely Japanese and find no place in a Chinese dictionary. But although the field for such additions was boundless, the Chinese have all along been chary of extending the language in this way, probably because these modern terms had no Chinese sound which might have suggested some particular phonetic. They have preferred to adopt the other method, of which(rise-descend-machine) for “lift,” and(discuss-govern-country-assembly) for “parliament” are examples. Even a metaphysical abstraction like The Absolute has been tentatively expressed by(exclude-opposite); but in this case an equivalent was already existing in the Chinese language.
A very drastic measure, strongly advocated in some quarters, is the entire abolition of all characters, to be replaced by their equivalent sounds in letters of the alphabet. Under this schemewould figure asjênorren,asma, and so on. But the proposal has fallen extremely flat. The vocables, as we have seen, are so few in number that only the colloquial, if even that, could possibly be transcribed in this manner. Any attempt to transliterate classical Chinese would result in a mere jumble of sounds, utterly unintelligible, even with the addition of tone-marks. There is another aspect of the case. The characters are a potent bond of union between the different parts of the Empire with their various dialects. If they should ever fall into disuse, China will have taken a first and most fatal step towards internal disruption. Even the Japanese, whose language is not only free from dialects, but polysyllabic and therefore more suitable for romanization, have utterly refused to abandon the Chinese script, which in spite of certain disadvantages has hitherto triumphantly adapted itself to the needs of civilized intercourse.
See P. Premare,Notitiae Linguae Sinicae(1831); Ma Kien-chung,Ma shih wên t‘ung(1899); L.C. Hopkins,The Six Scripts(1881) andThe Development of Chinese Writing(1910); H.A. Giles,A Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd ed., 1910).
See P. Premare,Notitiae Linguae Sinicae(1831); Ma Kien-chung,Ma shih wên t‘ung(1899); L.C. Hopkins,The Six Scripts(1881) andThe Development of Chinese Writing(1910); H.A. Giles,A Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd ed., 1910).
(H. A. GI.; L. GI.)
VIII. Chinese Literature
The literature of China is remarkable (1) for its antiquity, coupled with an unbroken continuity down to the present day; (2) for the variety of subjects presented, and for the exhaustive treatment which, not only each subject, but also each subdivision, each separate item, has received, as well as for the colossal scale on which so many literary monuments have been conceived and carried out; (3) for the accuracy of its historical statements, so far as it has been possible to test them; and further (4) for its ennobling standards and lofty ideals, as well as for its wholesome purity and an almost total absence of coarseness and obscenity.
No history of Chinese literature in the Chinese language has yet been produced; native scholars, however, have adopted, for bibliographical purposes, a rough division into four great classes. Under the first of these, we find the Confucian Canon, together with lexicographical, philological, and other works dealing with the elucidation of words. Under the second, histories of various kinds, officially compiled, privately written, constitutional, &c.; also biography, geography and bibliography. Under the third, philosophy, religion,e.g.Buddhism; the arts and sciences,e.g.war, law, agriculture, medicine, astronomy, painting, music and archery; also a host of general works, monographs, and treatises on a number of topics, as well as encyclopaedias. The fourth class is confined to poetry of alldescriptions, poetical critiques, and works dealing with the all-important rhymes.
Poetry.—Proceeding chronologically, without reference to Chinese classification, we have to begin, as would naturally be expected, with the last of the above four classes. Man’s first literary utterances in China, as elsewhere, took the form of verse; and the earliest Chinese records in our possession are the national lyrics, the songs and ballads, chiefly of the feudal age, which reaches back to over a thousand years before Christ. Some pieces are indeed attributed to the 18th centuryB.C.; the latest bring us down to the 6th centuryB.C.Such is the collection entitledShih Ching(orShe King), popularly known as the Odes, which was brought together and edited by Confucius, 551-479B.C., and is now included among the Sacred Books, forming as it does an important portion of the Confucian Canon. These Odes, once over three thousand in number, were reduced by Confucius to three hundred and eleven; hence they are frequently spoken of as “the Three Hundred.” They treat of war and love, of eating and drinking and dancing, of the virtues and vices of rulers, and of the misery and happiness of the people. They are in rhyme. Rhyme is essential to Chinese poetry; there is no such thing as blank verse. Further, the rhymes of the Odes have always been, and are still, the only recognized rhymes which can be used by a Chinese poet, anything else being regarded as mere jingle. Poetical licence, however, is tolerated; and great masters have availed themselves freely of its aid. One curious result of this is that whereas in many instances two given words may have rhymed, as no doubt they did, in the speech of three thousand years ago, they no longer rhyme to the ear in the colloquial of to-day, although still accepted as true and proper rhymes in the composition of verse.
It is noticeable at once that the Odes are mostly written in lines of four words, examples of lines consisting of any length from a single word to eight, though such do exist, being comparatively rare. These lines of four words, generally recognized as the oldest measure in Chinese poetry, are frequently grouped as quatrains, in which the first, second and fourth lines rhyme; but very often only the second and fourth lines rhyme, and sometimes there are groups of a larger number of lines in which occasional lines are found without any rhyme at all. A few stray pieces, as old as many of those found among the Odes, have been handed down and preserved, in which the metre consists of two lines of three words followed by one line of seven words. These three lines all rhyme, but the rhyme changes with each succeeding triplet. It would be difficult to persuade the English reader that this is a very effective measure, and one in which many a gloomy or pathetic tale has been told. In order to realise how a few Chinese monosyllables in juxtaposition can stir the human heart to its lowest depths, it is necessary to devote some years to the study of the language.At the close of the 4th centuryB.C., a dithyrambic measure, irregular and wild, was introduced and enjoyed considerable vogue. It has indeed been freely adopted by numerous poets from that early date down to the present day; but since the 2nd centuryB.C.it has been displaced from pre-eminence by the seven-word and five-word measures which are now, after much refinement, the accepted standards for Chinese poetry. The origin of the seven-word metre is lost in remote antiquity; the five-word metre was elaborated under the master-hand of Mei Shêng, who died 140B.C.Passing over seven centuries of growth, we reach the T‘ang dynasty,A.D.618-905, the most brilliant epoch in the history of Chinese poetry. These three hundred years produced an extraordinarily large number of great poets, and an output of verse of almost incredible extent. In 1707 an anthology of the T‘ang poets was published by Imperial order; it ran to nine hundred books or sections, and contained over forty-eight thousand nine hundred separate poems. A copy of this work is in the Chinese department of the University Library at Cambridge.It was under the T‘ang dynasty that a certain finality was reached in regard to the strict application of the tones to Chinese verse. For the purposes of poetry, all words in the language were ranged under one or the other of two tones, theevenand theoblique, the former now including the two even tones, of which prior to the 11th century there was only one, and the latter including the rising, sinking and entering tones of ordinary speech. The incidence of these tones, which may be roughly described as sharps and flats, finally became fixed, just as the incidence of certain feet in Latin metres came to be governed by fixed rules. Thus, reading downward from right to left, as in Chinese, a five-word stanza may run:SharpFlatFlatSharpsharpflatflatsharpflatsharpflatsharp°°°°flatsharpsharpflatsharpflatsharpflatA seven-word stanza may run:FlatSharpSharpflatsharpsharpflatsharpflatflatsharpsharpflatflatsharp°°°°flatsharpflatflatflatsharpsharpflatsharpflatsharpsharpThe above are only two metres out of many, but enough perhaps to give to any one who will read them with a pause or quasi-caesura, as marked by ° in each specimen, a fair idea of the rhythmic lilt of Chinese poetry. To the trained ear, the effect is most pleasing; and when this scansion, so to speak, is united with rhyme and choice diction, the result is a vehicle for verse, artificial no doubt, and elaborate, but admirably adapted to the genius of the Chinese language. Moreover, in the hands of the great poets this artificiality disappears altogether. Each word seems to slip naturally into its place; and so far from having been introduced by violence for the ends of prosody, it appears to be the very best word that could have been chosen, even had there been no trammels of any kind, so effectually is the art of the poet concealed by art. From the long string of names which have shed lustre upon this glorious age of Chinese poetry, it may suffice for the present purpose to mention the following, all of the very first rank.Mêng Hao-jan,A.D.689-740, failed to succeed at the public competitive examinations, and retired to the mountains where he led the life of a recluse. Later on, he obtained an official post; but he was of a timid disposition, and once when the emperor, attracted by his fame, came to visit him, he hid himself under the bed. His hiding-place was revealed by Wang Wei, a brother poet who was present. The latter,A.D.699-759, in addition to being a first-rank poet, was also a landscape-painter of great distinction. He was further a firm believer in Buddhism; and after losing his wife and mother, he turned his mountain home into a Buddhist monastery. Of all poets, not one has made his name more widely known than Li Po, or Li T‘ai-po,A.D.705-762, popularly known as the Banished Angel, so heavenly were the poems he dashed off, always under the influence of wine. He is said to have met his death, after a tipsy frolic, by leaning out of a boat to embrace the reflection of the moon. Tu Fu,A.D.712-770, is generally ranked with Li Po, the two being jointly spoken of as the chief poets of their age. The former had indeed such a high opinion of his own poetry that he prescribed it for malarial fever. He led a chequered and wandering life, and died from the effects of eating roast beef and drinking white wine to excess, immediately after a long fast. Po Chü-i,A.D.772-846, was a very prolific poet. He held several high official posts, but found time for a considerable output of some of the finest poetry in the language. His poems were collected by Imperial command, and engraved upon tablets of stone. In one of them he anticipates by eight centuries the famous ode by Malherbe,À Du Perrier, sur la mort de sa fille.The T‘ang dynasty with all its glories had not long passed away before another imperial house arose, under which poetry flourished again in full vigour. The poets of the Sung dynasty,A.D.960-1260, were many and varied in style; but their work, much of it of the very highest order, was becoming perhaps a trifle more formal and precise. Life seemed to be taken more seriously than under the gay and pleasure-loving T‘angs. The long list of Sung poets includes such names as Ssŭ-ma Kuang, Ou-yang Hsiu and Wang An-shih, to be mentioned by and by, the first two as historians and the last as political reformer. A still more familiar name in popular estimation is that of Su Tung-p‘o,A.D.103-1101, partly known for his romantic career, now in court favour, now banished to the wilds, but still more renowned as a brilliant poet and writer of fascinating essays.The Mongols,A.D.1260-1368, who succeeded the Sungs, and the Mings who followed the Sungs and bring us down to the year 1644, helped indeed, especially the Mings, to swell the volume of Chinese verse, but without reaching the high level of the two great poetical periods above-mentioned. Then came the present dynasty of Manchu Tatars, of whom the same tale must be told, in spite of two highly-cultured emperors, K‘ang Hsi and Ch‘ien Lung, both of them poets and one of them author of a collection containing no fewer than 33,950 pieces, most of which, it must be said, are but four-line stanzas, of no literary value whatever. It may be stated in this connexion that whereas China has never produced an epic in verse, it is not true that all Chinese poems are quite short, running only to ten or a dozen lines at the most. Many pieces run to several hundred lines, though the Chinese poet does not usually affect length, one of his highest efforts being the four-line stanza, known as the “stop-short,” in which “the words stop while the sense goes on,” expanding in the mind of the reader by the suggestive art of the poet. The “stop-short” is the converse of the epigram, which ends in a satisfying turn of thought to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up; it aims at producing an impression which, so far from being final, is merely the prelude to a long series of visions and of feelings. The last of the four lines is called the “surprise line”; but the revelation it gives is never a complete one: the words stop, but the sense goes on. Just as in the pictorial art of China,so in her poetic art is suggestiveness the great end and aim of the artist. Beginners are taught that the three canons of verse composition are lucidity, simplicity and correctness of diction. Yet some critics have boldly declared for obscurity of expression, alleging that the piquancy of a thought is enhanced by its skilful concealment. For the foreign student, it is not necessary to accentuate the obscurity and difficulty even of poems in which the motive is simple enough. The constant introduction of classical allusions, often in the vaguest terms, and the almost unlimited licence as to the order of words, offer quite sufficient obstacles to easy and rapid comprehension. Poetry has been defined by one Chinese writer as “clothing with words the emotions which surge through the heart.” The chief moods of the Chinese poet are a pure delight in the varying phenomena of nature, and a boundless sympathy with the woes and sufferings of humanity. Erotic poetry is not absent, but it is not a feature proportionate in extent to the great body of Chinese verse; it is always restrained, and never lapses from a high level of purity and decorum. In his love for hill and stream which he peoples with genii, and for tree and flower which he endows with sentient souls, the Chinese poet is perhaps seen at his very best; his views of life are somewhat too deeply tinged with melancholy, and often loaded with an overwhelming sadness “at the doubtful doom of human kind.” In his lighter moods he draws inspiration, and in his darker moods consolation from the wine-cup. Hard-drinking, not to say drunkenness, seems to have been universal among Chinese poets, and a considerable amount of talent has been expended upon the glorification of wine. From Taoist, and especially from Buddhist sources, many poets have obtained glimpses to make them less forlorn; but it cannot be said that there is any definitely religious poetry in the Chinese language.
It is noticeable at once that the Odes are mostly written in lines of four words, examples of lines consisting of any length from a single word to eight, though such do exist, being comparatively rare. These lines of four words, generally recognized as the oldest measure in Chinese poetry, are frequently grouped as quatrains, in which the first, second and fourth lines rhyme; but very often only the second and fourth lines rhyme, and sometimes there are groups of a larger number of lines in which occasional lines are found without any rhyme at all. A few stray pieces, as old as many of those found among the Odes, have been handed down and preserved, in which the metre consists of two lines of three words followed by one line of seven words. These three lines all rhyme, but the rhyme changes with each succeeding triplet. It would be difficult to persuade the English reader that this is a very effective measure, and one in which many a gloomy or pathetic tale has been told. In order to realise how a few Chinese monosyllables in juxtaposition can stir the human heart to its lowest depths, it is necessary to devote some years to the study of the language.
At the close of the 4th centuryB.C., a dithyrambic measure, irregular and wild, was introduced and enjoyed considerable vogue. It has indeed been freely adopted by numerous poets from that early date down to the present day; but since the 2nd centuryB.C.it has been displaced from pre-eminence by the seven-word and five-word measures which are now, after much refinement, the accepted standards for Chinese poetry. The origin of the seven-word metre is lost in remote antiquity; the five-word metre was elaborated under the master-hand of Mei Shêng, who died 140B.C.Passing over seven centuries of growth, we reach the T‘ang dynasty,A.D.618-905, the most brilliant epoch in the history of Chinese poetry. These three hundred years produced an extraordinarily large number of great poets, and an output of verse of almost incredible extent. In 1707 an anthology of the T‘ang poets was published by Imperial order; it ran to nine hundred books or sections, and contained over forty-eight thousand nine hundred separate poems. A copy of this work is in the Chinese department of the University Library at Cambridge.
It was under the T‘ang dynasty that a certain finality was reached in regard to the strict application of the tones to Chinese verse. For the purposes of poetry, all words in the language were ranged under one or the other of two tones, theevenand theoblique, the former now including the two even tones, of which prior to the 11th century there was only one, and the latter including the rising, sinking and entering tones of ordinary speech. The incidence of these tones, which may be roughly described as sharps and flats, finally became fixed, just as the incidence of certain feet in Latin metres came to be governed by fixed rules. Thus, reading downward from right to left, as in Chinese, a five-word stanza may run:
A seven-word stanza may run:
The above are only two metres out of many, but enough perhaps to give to any one who will read them with a pause or quasi-caesura, as marked by ° in each specimen, a fair idea of the rhythmic lilt of Chinese poetry. To the trained ear, the effect is most pleasing; and when this scansion, so to speak, is united with rhyme and choice diction, the result is a vehicle for verse, artificial no doubt, and elaborate, but admirably adapted to the genius of the Chinese language. Moreover, in the hands of the great poets this artificiality disappears altogether. Each word seems to slip naturally into its place; and so far from having been introduced by violence for the ends of prosody, it appears to be the very best word that could have been chosen, even had there been no trammels of any kind, so effectually is the art of the poet concealed by art. From the long string of names which have shed lustre upon this glorious age of Chinese poetry, it may suffice for the present purpose to mention the following, all of the very first rank.
Mêng Hao-jan,A.D.689-740, failed to succeed at the public competitive examinations, and retired to the mountains where he led the life of a recluse. Later on, he obtained an official post; but he was of a timid disposition, and once when the emperor, attracted by his fame, came to visit him, he hid himself under the bed. His hiding-place was revealed by Wang Wei, a brother poet who was present. The latter,A.D.699-759, in addition to being a first-rank poet, was also a landscape-painter of great distinction. He was further a firm believer in Buddhism; and after losing his wife and mother, he turned his mountain home into a Buddhist monastery. Of all poets, not one has made his name more widely known than Li Po, or Li T‘ai-po,A.D.705-762, popularly known as the Banished Angel, so heavenly were the poems he dashed off, always under the influence of wine. He is said to have met his death, after a tipsy frolic, by leaning out of a boat to embrace the reflection of the moon. Tu Fu,A.D.712-770, is generally ranked with Li Po, the two being jointly spoken of as the chief poets of their age. The former had indeed such a high opinion of his own poetry that he prescribed it for malarial fever. He led a chequered and wandering life, and died from the effects of eating roast beef and drinking white wine to excess, immediately after a long fast. Po Chü-i,A.D.772-846, was a very prolific poet. He held several high official posts, but found time for a considerable output of some of the finest poetry in the language. His poems were collected by Imperial command, and engraved upon tablets of stone. In one of them he anticipates by eight centuries the famous ode by Malherbe,À Du Perrier, sur la mort de sa fille.
The T‘ang dynasty with all its glories had not long passed away before another imperial house arose, under which poetry flourished again in full vigour. The poets of the Sung dynasty,A.D.960-1260, were many and varied in style; but their work, much of it of the very highest order, was becoming perhaps a trifle more formal and precise. Life seemed to be taken more seriously than under the gay and pleasure-loving T‘angs. The long list of Sung poets includes such names as Ssŭ-ma Kuang, Ou-yang Hsiu and Wang An-shih, to be mentioned by and by, the first two as historians and the last as political reformer. A still more familiar name in popular estimation is that of Su Tung-p‘o,A.D.103-1101, partly known for his romantic career, now in court favour, now banished to the wilds, but still more renowned as a brilliant poet and writer of fascinating essays.
The Mongols,A.D.1260-1368, who succeeded the Sungs, and the Mings who followed the Sungs and bring us down to the year 1644, helped indeed, especially the Mings, to swell the volume of Chinese verse, but without reaching the high level of the two great poetical periods above-mentioned. Then came the present dynasty of Manchu Tatars, of whom the same tale must be told, in spite of two highly-cultured emperors, K‘ang Hsi and Ch‘ien Lung, both of them poets and one of them author of a collection containing no fewer than 33,950 pieces, most of which, it must be said, are but four-line stanzas, of no literary value whatever. It may be stated in this connexion that whereas China has never produced an epic in verse, it is not true that all Chinese poems are quite short, running only to ten or a dozen lines at the most. Many pieces run to several hundred lines, though the Chinese poet does not usually affect length, one of his highest efforts being the four-line stanza, known as the “stop-short,” in which “the words stop while the sense goes on,” expanding in the mind of the reader by the suggestive art of the poet. The “stop-short” is the converse of the epigram, which ends in a satisfying turn of thought to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up; it aims at producing an impression which, so far from being final, is merely the prelude to a long series of visions and of feelings. The last of the four lines is called the “surprise line”; but the revelation it gives is never a complete one: the words stop, but the sense goes on. Just as in the pictorial art of China,so in her poetic art is suggestiveness the great end and aim of the artist. Beginners are taught that the three canons of verse composition are lucidity, simplicity and correctness of diction. Yet some critics have boldly declared for obscurity of expression, alleging that the piquancy of a thought is enhanced by its skilful concealment. For the foreign student, it is not necessary to accentuate the obscurity and difficulty even of poems in which the motive is simple enough. The constant introduction of classical allusions, often in the vaguest terms, and the almost unlimited licence as to the order of words, offer quite sufficient obstacles to easy and rapid comprehension. Poetry has been defined by one Chinese writer as “clothing with words the emotions which surge through the heart.” The chief moods of the Chinese poet are a pure delight in the varying phenomena of nature, and a boundless sympathy with the woes and sufferings of humanity. Erotic poetry is not absent, but it is not a feature proportionate in extent to the great body of Chinese verse; it is always restrained, and never lapses from a high level of purity and decorum. In his love for hill and stream which he peoples with genii, and for tree and flower which he endows with sentient souls, the Chinese poet is perhaps seen at his very best; his views of life are somewhat too deeply tinged with melancholy, and often loaded with an overwhelming sadness “at the doubtful doom of human kind.” In his lighter moods he draws inspiration, and in his darker moods consolation from the wine-cup. Hard-drinking, not to say drunkenness, seems to have been universal among Chinese poets, and a considerable amount of talent has been expended upon the glorification of wine. From Taoist, and especially from Buddhist sources, many poets have obtained glimpses to make them less forlorn; but it cannot be said that there is any definitely religious poetry in the Chinese language.
History.—One of the labours undertaken by Confucius was connected with a series of ancient documents—that is, ancient in his day—now passing under a collective title asShu Ching(orShoo King), and popularly known as the Canon, or Book, of History. Mere fragments as some of these documents are, it is from their pages of unknown date that we can supplement the pictures drawn for us in the Odes, of the early civilization of China. The work opens with an account of the legendary emperor Yao, who reigned 2357-2255B.C., and was able by virtue of an elevated personality to give peace and happiness to his “black-haired” subjects. With the aid of capable astronomers, he determined the summer and winter solstices, and calculated approximately the length of the year, availing himself, as required, of the aid of an intercalary month. Finally, after a glorious reign, he ceded the throne to a man of the people, whose only claim to distinction was his unwavering practice of filial piety. Chapter ii. deals with the reign, 2255-2205B.C., of this said man, known in history as the emperor Shun. In accordance with the monotheism of the day, he worshipped God in heaven with prayer and burnt offerings; he travelled on tours of inspection all over his then comparatively narrow empire; he established punishments, to be tempered with mercy; he appointed officials to superintend forestry, care of animals, religious observances, and music; and he organized a system of periodical examinations for public servants. Chapter iii. is devoted to details about the Great Yü, who reigned 2205-2197B.C., having been called to the throne for his engineering success in draining the empire of a mighty inundation which early western writers sought to identify with Noah’s Flood. Another interesting chapter gives various geographical details, and enumerates the articles, gold, silver, copper, iron, steel, silken fabrics, feathers, ivory, hides, &c., &c., brought in under the reign of the Great Yü, as tribute from neighbouring countries. Other chapters include royal proclamations, speeches to troops, announcements of campaigns victoriously concluded, and similar subjects. One peculiarly interesting document is the Announcement against Drunkenness, which seems to have been for so many centuries a national vice, and then to have practically disappeared as such. For the past two or three hundred years, drunkenness has always been the exception rather than the rule. The Announcement, delivered in the 12th centuryB.C., points out that King Wên, the founder of the Chou dynasty, had wished for wine to be used only in connexion with sacrifices, and that divine favours had always been liberally showered upon the people when such a restriction had been observed. On the other hand, indulgence in strong drink had invariably attracted divine vengeance, and the fall and disruption of states had often been traceable to that cause. Even on sacrificial occasions, drunkenness is to be condemned. “When, however, you high officials and others have done your duty in ministering to the aged and to your sovereign, you may then eat to satiety and drink to elevation.” The Announcement winds up with an ancient maxim, “Do not seek to see yourself reflected in water, but in others,”—whose base actions should warn you not to commit the same; adding that those who after a due interval should be unable to give up intemperate habits would be put to death. It is worth noting, in concluding this brief notice of China’s earliest records, that from first to last there is no mention whatever of any distant country from which the “black-haired people” may have originally come; no vestige of any allusion to any other form of civilization, such as that of Babylonia, with its cuneiform script and baked-clay tablets, from which an attempt has been made to derive the native-born civilization of China. A few odd coincidences sum up the chief argument in favour of this now discredited theory.