Sidelights on Chinese Life Part 4

They are the driest of dry books, and were really written for scholarly men, and for men of thought, whose thinking powers were considerably developed. There is not a single story in their pages. No child or woman's voice is heard from beginning to end, and no laughter, and no sob of pain, or any touch of the finer qualities of the human heart.

The boy begins at eight not with "Jack and Jill," or the "House that Jack built," or with any nursery rhyme that would appeal to a child's imagination, but with the solemn statements on high ethical questions that some of the greatest thinkers and teachers of China have produced. Some idea of the style of the books that these little urchins have to grind at, may be gathered from the fact that the first book that is put into the hands of that eight-year-old scholar is called _The Three Words Cla.s.sic_, from the fact that each sentence is made up of three words rhythmically set. It is about as crabbed and as profound a piece of writing as exists in the whole language. Its first sentence makes a dogmatic statement which has not been generally accepted in China, viz. "Man by nature is originally good." Just imagine a boy of ten, accustomed till to-day to run as wild as a climbing plant, that creeps up trees, or over ruined walls, or down the side of a precipice, brought face to face with a statement like this, instead of the conventional one, "My dog," or "His cat," that confronts the English lad as he first enters the domain of learning.

Try and conceive the wear and tear upon a child's spirit in having for years to shout and scream out at the top of his voice, as Chinese scholars do, such profound teaching as the above, and you will then have caught a glimpse of the steep and precipitous way along which these eight-year scholars have to travel in their pursuit after knowledge. A more dreary system of education, where imagination and humour, and poetry and romance, and all the finer emotions of the soul are rigorously excluded, it would be impossible to conceive than that which every Chinese scholar has to go through in every school throughout the Empire to-day.

And so the years go by, childhood is being slowly left behind, and young manhood comes with its own responsibilities and its own ambitions. It is a dreary road along which the young scholar travels. He gets no knowledge of life that will make him tender and sympathetic with his fellow-men in their sins or their sorrows. He acquires a profound contempt for every other country but his own. His natural hardness and selfishness of heart are intensified by a pride that nothing can soften, whilst his antipathy to any change or progress either in his own village or in his country is deeply rooted and the adoption of new ideas or liberal thoughts is considered a heresy so abominable as to brand any one that adopts it with the terrible name of "Barbarian," a term from which every self-respecting Chinaman shrinks as from a plague.

With the leaving of school, childhood has pa.s.sed away, and now the lads will have to select the occupations they are going to pursue in the future. Some elect to be scholars, especially if they have shown proficiency in their studies, and they finally join the great army of school-masters that are required for the countless schools throughout the country. Others become clerks in business houses, but as arithmetic is not a branch of school education, they are obliged to pay a small premium and learn the use of the abacus or counting boards, in one of the cash shops in the town. Others, again, engage themselves as book-keepers or shop a.s.sistants, or in some of the many employments that are open to young men who can read and write.

Not a few of them drift into evil habits and finally become opium-smokers and gamblers. If they are clever scamps, which this cla.s.s usually are, they turn their attention to medicine, and gathering together a few herbs they travel through the country as strolling doctors, professing to cure every disease to which the human frame is heir, and living a most precarious and, on the whole, a very wretched life.

About the same time that the great change takes place in the experience of the boy, the girl too comes to a point where the easy conditions under which she has. .h.i.therto lived suddenly stop and the great trial of her life begins. I refer to foot-binding.

In every home that professes to any respectability, foot-binding is an absolutely essential thing for the girls in it. To neglect this would be to confound them with slave girls, whose feet are never bound, and with the children of the very lowest cla.s.ses whose poverty would not admit of their adopting this polite custom. It has been found by a very large experience that a girl must be eight years old before her feet will bear the tremendous strain that is put upon them, in the effort to destroy the handiwork of nature.

It is true that in some of the more wealthy homes, where a very small foot is a sign of blue blood, they begin as soon as the girl is six to put her to the torture, but this is not the general rule. By the time the girl is eight, the bones of the feet have become sufficiently hardened to bear the incessant pressure that is put upon them to contract the feet into such a small compa.s.s that they will go into a shoe of two or three inches in length.

The process begins by turning all the toes, except the large one, on to the sole of the foot. This of course is a slow but an exceedingly painful one. It is continued week after week and month after month for several years until the toes have been thrown back, at the expense of the instep, which is made to bulge out by the pressure of the bandages; until finally the "Golden lilies," as these unsightly objects are called, are complete, and the poor girl is a veritable cripple for life.

The cruelty that is practised upon these poor children during the initial operation of binding is very severe. The first few weeks are so very trying that attempts are made by the girls to tear the bandages from their aching, tortured feet. This is resisted by their mothers, who have to resort to brutal methods to keep the little hands from endeavouring to relieve themselves of the pain that has become intolerable.

Tears and shrieks and groans that last all day long, and are heard through the sobs of the poor things, as sleep, restless and disturbed, comes to try and make them forget the agony they are enduring, are the constant experiences in that unhappy home.

The girl begs and entreats the mother to loosen the bandages a little so that the agonizing pain may be diminished, and life may become somewhat more tolerable. The only reply is a tighter wrench upon them, and a strain, that were not nature so elastic, would send the poor thing mad.

The morrow comes and the rebandaging takes place. For an instant, as the feet are relieved of the old bandages, and they are shown inflamed and discoloured, a momentary relief is felt by the poor girl who has slept in fitful dozes during the past night, but the moment they are rebound by the new ones, a cry of horror proceeds from her as though a raw sore had been touched, and the house resounds with her screams, whilst the mother, apparently untouched by the agony of her daughter, proceeds with her revolting task, as though she had no heart and no feeling left in her heathen soul.

This terrible martyrdom goes on with scarcely any alleviation for three or four years, the poor victim to fas.h.i.+on suffering acutely all the time.

There are moments often repeated when the poor child actually quivers all over from excruciating pain, and it would seem as though flesh and blood could no longer endure the frightful strain put upon her, but must dissolve in tears and groans and unutterable agony.

Foot-binding is one of the most senseless and cruel customs it is possible to imagine. Its origin is dimly hidden in the maze and mist of the past, and no one can say positively how it originated. Tradition holds that it arose in the palace of an Emperor, who had a most beautiful concubine, but whose feet were deformed. To hide their defect they were so manipulated that their glaring deformity was concealed, and the ladies of the court in order to gain her favour bandaged their own in such a manner as to be an exact imitation of those of the royal favourite. From that time, it is said, the insane and hideous custom began to spread from the court into the capital, and from there it began to be copied by the women of the Empire.

The popular legend makes this woman to be T'a Ki, the famous concubine of Show Sin, the last ruler of the famous Chow Dynasty (B.C. 1146). She is said to have been the most beautiful woman that ever lived, but to have been inhuman and vicious beyond anything that human language can express.

She was the cause of the fall of the dynasty, a dynasty in which was enshrined the great names of Confucius, Mencius, Tau-tze the founder of Tauism, and Wu w.a.n.g.

To account for the fatal influence of this famous beauty, it is declared that she was a fox fairy, who had a.s.sumed the form of a woman in order to be able to hurry on the ruin of China. In the transformation everything was changed but her feet, and in order to disguise these she had to resort to the most ingenious methods. To curry favour with her the ladies-in-waiting in the palace bound theirs to imitate the appearance of hers, and so the custom of foot-binding was commenced that has lasted all these ages.

This legend has become part of the national faith and is firmly believed in by every one. Of course it is absurd, and one that originated in an after age, but with the innate love of the Chinese for the mysterious and the supernatural, it is transmitted age after age as though it were part of authentic history.[1]

Foot-binding is a lifelong misery even after the first few years during which the feet are being tortured into such a hideous ma.s.s of deformity that no women will willingly show them to any one. Nature never becomes reconciled to the cruel caricature they present. She continues to make a vigorous protest by pains and suffering that more or less last as long as life itself. The bandages may never be loosed even for a single day, for nature, as if on the eternal watch, would at once begin to revert to the original size and shape with which she was born, and the feet would gradually return to their original shape, though with marks of the cruel treatment to which they have been exposed, and which can never be entirely effaced, no matter how long the owner may live.

The girls are employed in household duties, in learning to embroider, to weave cotton cloth, to make their own shoes, and to learn all kinds of sewing. The years pa.s.s on, and when they reach the age of sixteen their childhood begins to vanish, and womanhood, with its responsibilities and its stern demand that the girls shall leave their own clan and become members of others, looms up before them. The transition stage may be delayed for a year or two, but when a girl gets to be eighteen it is considered ample time for her to open her wings and to fly for ever from the parent home.

We have thus taken a very rough and bird's-eye view of Child Life in China. There are countless details that might have been gone into, but they would have required an entire book for themselves. The main outline that has been given will suffice to convey a very general idea of the kind of life that the black-eyed children of the Empire have to go through.

There is one thing about which there can be no manner of doubt, and that is that the children never forget the home in which they were reared. The home is to the Chinese what the country is to the most devoted patriot of other nationalities. The home is larger and dearer than the nation. It is the one thought that is always enshrined in his inmost heart, and which never dies out. A Chinaman went abroad and lived for a quarter of a century in Australia. He married an Irish woman, had several almond-eyed daughters, who had caught the brogue of their mother and might have been emigrants from Cork or Kerry. He had a thriving money-making business, he possessed a vote, and he was a man of substance in the community.

One day the home hunger came upon him. He handed over his business to his wife and daughters, took his balance out of the bank and returned to his home in China. This was situated by the edge of the sea on a sand dune, the most forlorn and mouldy-looking place one could possibly imagine. He regained his spirits as soon as his feet touched the desolate spot that lay within a few yards of the home where his childhood was spent, and nothing could induce him ever to think of returning to the far-off land where the family he had left behind him were living.

A strong and vigorous coolie showed symptoms of being far from well.

Physically there seemed nothing the matter with him. Gradually he lost his appet.i.te and his spirits. He occasionally acted as though his mind was affected. One day he said to his master, "I must go home. I feel very ill, but I am convinced that no medicine that I can take will cure me. Let me go home." The _mal du pays_ of the Switzer was upon him, and when permission was given him, his eye brightened and his step became elastic, and by the time he reached the old homestead every trace of disease had entirely vanished.

A man becomes a mandarin and is sent to another part of the Empire. He is gradually advanced in rank until he becomes a Viceroy of two Provinces, and rules over thirty millions of people. He marries, and has sons and daughters, and he ama.s.ses property in the place where his greatest honours have come to him.

He never has time to get away to his ancestral home, which is more than a thousand miles distant, but it is never out of his thoughts, and when he dies full of honours and wealth, his coffin is carried to his far-off village where he was born, and he is laid to his final rest almost in sight of the house in which his boyhood was pa.s.sed.

The Americans are greatly distressed because when the Chinese come to their country they do not bring their wives and families with them. The fact is to do so would be opposed to the spirit and genius of their race.

It would tend to alienate them from their home, which they intend to revisit as soon as ever they can, and to finally lay their bones amongst their kindred there. Every merchant and scholar, every coolie that lands with but the clothes he has on his back, every spendthrift and opium-smoker and gambler, and every millionaire of the Yellow race in the United States has one dream that never dies out of his brain, and that is the picture of his home, which either in life or in death it is his unalterable purpose to visit. To move their families and become denizens of their adopted country would be to run counter to one of the strongest instincts of their race.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN IMPERIAL CONFUCIAN TEMPLE.]

CHAPTER IV

RELIGIOUS FORCES IN CHINA

Chinese efforts to propitiate their G.o.ds--Figures of men on roofs of houses--Stone tiger--Fung-Shuy--The "Mountain City"--The county of "Peaceful Streams"--Density of population--The "dead hand"--Ancestral wors.h.i.+p--Idolatry--Koan-Yin--Heaven--Description of a scene in a popular temple.

The Chinese are an exceedingly superst.i.tious people, but they are capable of being intelligently religious when they become acquainted with the truths of the Gospel. Until then all their offerings and ceremonies and ritual are performed, either to avert the sorrows that the supernatural beings might bring upon them, or for the purpose of putting the minds of their G.o.ds into such a pleasing state of satisfaction that they will be ready to send sons into the family and prosperity into the business, and riches and honour and a continued stream of blessings upon the home. The spirits and the G.o.ds of all denominations are credited with having unlimited wealth at their command, which they can dispose of to any one who has gained their favour, without in the least degree impoveris.h.i.+ng themselves. They are also believed to be high-spirited, easily offended and vindictive, and careless as to the moral qualities of those who wors.h.i.+p them. The great thing is to keep these capricious beings in a good humour by making them constant offerings, which though comparatively valueless in themselves, by some sort of a hocus-pocus during the process of reaching the idols, become worth large sums of money to them.

Evidences of superst.i.tion abound in almost any direction in which one may turn. Looking at the roofs of the houses, one is struck with the large numbers of miniature figures of men, in all kinds of fantastic shapes and att.i.tudes, armed with bows with which they seem to be shooting at the sky.

These are supposed to be fighting with the invisible forces that are flying through the air, seeking for opportunities to descend into the houses and to bring plague or pestilence upon the people residing within them. Were it not for these little warriors it is believed that human life could not exist, and the homes that are now happy and prosperous would be filled with mourning and lamentation.

Walking along a straight street that terminates in another that is at right angles to it, one is surprised at seeing in the wall of the house at the extreme end of this road a rough slab of stone about three feet high and one in breadth, with the three words cut into it, "I dare defy." Where the road is winding, or deviates from the straight, no such stone is ever found.

The reason for its existence at all is simply a superst.i.tious belief that everywhere prevails that evil spirits who are at war with mankind have special power to work mischief along roads that have no turnings in them.

Mad with glee, they fly swifter than the wind along them, and woe betide anything that lies in their course whilst they are careering along. It is for this reason that the owners of the house that abuts on this racecourse of the G.o.ds hasten to put up the stone with its three-worded inscription in order to avoid the baleful effects of their coming full tilt against it. Some calamity, they believe, would certainly be the result, but no sooner do the spirits see the words "I dare defy," than, paralyzed with fear, and trembling at the mystic words that have struck terror into them, they fly in disorder from the scene.

The Chinese on the whole are endowed with broad common-sense, and in anything that has to do with money-making or with commercial matters they are as wideawake and as shrewd as a canny Scotsman or a Yorks.h.i.+reman.

They are gifted, too, with a keen sense of humour, and yet when they come to deal with the question of spirits and ghosts and ogres, they seem to lose their reasoning faculties, and to believe in the most outrageous things that a mind with an ordinary power of perception of the ludicrous would shrink from admitting.

Quietly sauntering along by a road that skirts a hill, a rock is pointed out that plays an important part in the fortunes of the town that may be seen stretching away over the plain in front of us. Looked at from a certain angle it certainly conveys to one the impression that it is a huge crouching tiger. It has a defiant look about it, and an air of alertness, as though some enemy were about, that it must be on its guard against. Its gaze is fixed on the smokeless city, from which no sound can be heard and which would seem to be a veritable abode of the dead.

It turns out that this great stone brute that nature has so deftly chiselled is the presiding genius of the city that lies so silently in front. The Chinese believe that objects in natural life which, by a freak of fortune, have any resemblance to bird or beast are inhabited by the spirits of that animal, and have all the natural powers of such, only in a greatly intensified degree. The physical strength of the tiger and its naturally ferocious character make it an object of dread, and so when a district is found to possess the figure of such, only in an immensely exaggerated size, then it is seized upon as the embodiment of physical and supernatural forces that can be used for the protection of a city or sometimes of a whole region many miles square.

In this particular instance, the stone tiger, with its ma.s.sive jaws and huge body that seems to be vibrating with nervous energy, is looked upon as the real protector of the town and region which it overlooks. Through its mysterious influence plague and pestilence are kept away, and trade prospers, and twin sons appear in certain families, and boys are born and the ratio of girls is kept down, whilst a general air of prosperity pervades the city and the villages and hamlets on the plain beyond. This is not the casual belief of a few cranks. It is the profound conviction of the scholars and literary men, who are the leaders of thought. It is also one of the articles in the creed of the working men, and of the coolies and labourers, and it is tenaciously held by every woman in all the region. If any one should have the daring to suggest that this impostor of a tiger should be blown up by dynamite to see what it was made of, he would be looked upon as a dangerous heretic who ought to be put into a lunatic asylum, only there does not happen to be such a thing in the whole of China.

This form of superst.i.tion meets one in every direction, and is popularly called "Fung-Shuy," which means "Wind and water," chiefly, I presume, because in the province of the natural world these are the two agencies that seem to have a tremendous power in producing changes on the earth's surface.

We have another instance of its dominating influence in this beautiful valley before us. More exquisite scenery one could hardly find in the whole of China than that which has been grouped here by Nature's artistic hand. A mountain stream runs right through the centre of it, and night and day the sounds of its music break upon the air. The hamlets and villages scattered over it add to the beauty of the scene, for they give the charm of life to the silent forces that lie around.

The most beautiful feature about the whole, however, is the hills, which group themselves so artistically around this charming valley. They seem like colossal walls that mighty heroes built in ancient days to turn it into a city of which they should form the battlements. So obviously does this seem to have been the purpose, that the place has been called the "Mountain City." Now the stone of which these hills are composed is a beautiful granite, that is specially adapted for house-building, and one would naturally imagine that the houses in the valley and in the city which lies just over the hills would all be built of the stone that is found in such abundance around.

But such was not the case. A tradition has come down from the past that underneath these hills are mighty spirits who would never tolerate that the granite they contained should ever be quarried, and that should any one dare to lay a chisel upon these rocks they would send disease and death upon the valley and exterminate every human being in it.

The result was that all the stone that was used in this region had to be carried up the river from some place fifty or sixty miles distant, where the geomancers had declared that no spirits were to be found. Such is the force of superst.i.tion that all the rocks and boulders and stones of this region are absolutely safe from the chisel of the mason, and the people prefer to go to the expense of importing the material for their homes and bridges, rather than incur the anger of the spirits, who would use all the terrible power they possess to avenge themselves upon them.