Dictionary of the History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas |
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IV. | CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHTAND CULTURE |
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6 | III. |
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Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||
CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT
AND CULTURE
Like the West itself, China possesses an ancient civili-
zation of great complexity that is
difficult to compre-
hend quickly and fully.
Before 1514, Europeans learned of China mainly
through intermediaries, a few
travelers, and luxury
imports. In the sixteenth century China was
thought
to be a “Mightie Kingdome,” technologically
more
advanced than Europe. The Europeans of the seven-
teenth century were told by the Jesuits that China
had
a rational society of great antiquity and continuous
development
that would have to be incorporated, by
one means or another, into their
Christian, mono-
genetic view of the world.
Both the Jesuits and the
philosophes of the Enlightenment saw China as a
model
of Enlightened Despotism. Artists and connoisseurs of
the
eighteenth century were intrigued with China as
the source of exotic
objets d'art and as the home of
paintings on porcelain. The reaction against China as
a rational model and as a source of exotic delight came
in the nineteenth century. While Sinologists sought to
understand the China of historical reality, other
Europeans esteemed Chinese poetry and culture as
being aesthetically superior, and worthy of study and
imitation. There were Westerners who also derided
China as a stagnant, inferior society that had nothing
to offer the West but problems. The modernizing,
nationalizing, and communizing of China produced the
contemporary fear of China as a nemesis of Western
culture.
I
In antiquity China gradually received a delineation
in Western thought which
set it apart from the rest
of Asia, especially India, as an independent
civilization.
Trade on an important scale convinced the Romans
of
China's advanced technical capability, but the ideas
of China, even in arts
and crafts, left few deep or
lasting imprints upon Roman culture. From the
fourth
century A.D. to the return of Marco Polo to Venice,
nearly a
millennium later, medieval Europe almost lost
sight of China as an
independent civilization and it
again became an undifferentiated part of a
vague or
mythical Asia.
The restoration of overland communications by the
Mongols from 1215 to 1350
permitted Christian mis-
sionaries and
merchants to visit China (Cathay) and
enabled them to prepare accounts of
their experiences
there. But even commentators as acute as Marco Polo
and Odoric of Pordenone were unable to provide in-
sights into Chinese thought, probably because they did
not
command the language. What the European re-
porters of the Mongol era accomplished was to re-
awaken interest in China as an advanced, wealthy, and
independent civilization. It was not until the establish-
ment in the sixteenth century of permanent
relations
by the sea routes that Europe began to acquire a sense
of
the depth and sophistication of Chinese thought and
culture.
The sea passage opened to India by the Portuguese
in 1499 was extended to
the coast of south China by
1514. With the establishment of direct
intercourse the
Portuguese and their associates in Europe eagerly
sought information on the merchandise, military po-
tential, religion, and customs of the Chinese. Their
concern to
learn about religion and customs was origi-
nally inspired by the fear that the hated Muslims might
be firmly
entrenched in China, as they were in India
and southeast Asia. The
Portuguese were quick to
learn, however, that the obstacles to intercourse
with
China were not created by the Moors but by the
Chinese themselves. The Ming policy of isolation se-
verely restricted foreign intercourse, but a
few
Europeans still managed to penetrate China illegally.
The earliest
reports to reach the West based upon
direct experience came from Europeans
who were
prisoners in China.
In Europe the accounts of the Portuguese prisoners
were used as sources by
the chroniclers of the discov-
eries,
Fernão Lopes de Castanheda and Joāo de Barros.
The
chroniclers also garnered whatever information
they could from the oral
reports of European mer-
chants and sailors
and natives coming from China itself,
or from Eastern ports where
information on China was
current. Barros had a Chinese slave who read
and
abstracted materials for him from Chinese books that
had been
expressly collected for this purpose in the
East. The Portuguese
chronicles, like most of the pre-
vious
accounts, are limited to descriptions of the phys-
ical aspects of life, political institutions, and history,
and
the most striking and obvious social practices.
Observers and writers of the Catholic orders pro-
vided the first glimpses of China's religious and intel-
lectual life. The Portuguese
Dominican, Gaspar da
Cruz, after spending several months in south
China
in 1556, presented in his Tractado... (Evora,
1569)
a rounded and detailed account of life in China. In
obedience to
orders from Pope Gregory XIII, the
Spanish Augustinian, Juan
González de Mendoza,
completed his comprehensive Historia... del gran
Reyno de la China (Rome,
1585). It was quickly trans-
lated into most
European languages and soon became
one of the best selling and most widely
quoted books
of the day. The first systematic Jesuit work in which
China figures prominently is the compendium of
Giovanni Petri Maffei
entitled Historiarum Indicarum
libri XVI
(Florence, 1588). Maffei's sketch of China is
based in large part upon the
manuscript descriptions
prepared by Alessandro Valignano, the notable
Jesuit
Visitor to the Asian mission. Richard Hakluyt in his
Voyages (1599) published, in English translation, a
small discourse prepared by the Jesuits in China which
summarized briefly
what the missionaries had learned
of Chinese civilization to that time.
In their descriptions of China the sixteenth-century
religious observers in
the field and the compilers in
Europe show a fresh and lively interest in
Chinese
language, customs, arts, thought, and religious prac-
tices. The Jesuits are the first to
undertake the system-
atic study of the
Chinese language, the tool essential
to the penetration of learning. Aside
from describing
the peculiarities of the Chinese language, certain of
the more sophisticated commentators begin to specu-
late on the possible relationships between Chinese
pictographs,
Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Amerindian
monies, laws, sciences, arts, and history were collected
and sent to Europe. Excerpts from some of these books
were translated in the Philippines and then relayed to
Europe. Mendoza, apparently on the basis of such
translations, seeks to give a complete list of the names,
chronological limits, and great achievements of the
Chinese dynasties. All of the writers comment admir-
ingly on the architectural monuments, great cities, and
excellent social organization of the Chinese. Close
attention is paid to Chinese methods and organization
in education and to the examination system for state
offices. The religious writers comment favorably on
the treatment of women, and on the maintenance by
the state of almshouses and hospitals. While their ad-
miration in these cases is genuine, it should also be re-
membered that the religious commentators were
always writing for the edification of their European
readers.
Certain of the sixteenth-century religious writers are
highly critical of
the content of Chinese learning. More
than once the Europeans remark with
disdain on the
unsophisticated character of Chinese astronomy,
mathematics, and geography. The knowledge of the
Chinese in these fields is
judged to be limited to empir-
ical
observations of the sort that people everywhere
make. Chinese science is
esteemed to be in the same
primitive state that the European sciences were
in
before Aristotle organized them and before Christianity
enlightened
them.
In their social life the Chinese are said to suffer from
gross superstition,
inhumane tortures, unnatural prac-
tices, and
excessive preoccupation with pleasures of
the flesh. Their three principal
religions—Confucian-
ism,
Buddhism, and Taoism—do little, in the estimation
of the
Christians, to raise the moral tone of Chinese
personal life. Confucianism,
with its stress upon attain-
ing the five
virtues and an orderly society, approaches
truth more closely than the
other two faiths. Buddhism,
which teaches a primitive notion of
immortality, is
otherwise fraught with obvious errors that are easily
refuted. Neither the Taoists nor the Buddhists show
any interest in
learning and their priests are reviled
for their evil and servile behavior.
To the Europeans of the sixteenth century, China
was a “Mightie
Kingdome” whose major art was gov-
ernment, or the effective political and social orga-
nization of a large and heavily peopled
nation. Its
civilization was admired for longevity, continuity, and
cohesiveness. In the arts and crafts it was thought to
be as advanced as
Europe, perhaps even more so. Its
limitations in theoretical science, in
personal morality,
and in appreciation of religious truth were
attributed
to its ignorance of Christianity. Once China had been
evangelized, the inference is clear that it would neces-
sarily become worthy of emulation by
Europe.
II
The Jesuits of the last generation of the sixteenth
century had directed
their efforts toward the develop-
ment of a
policy and program that would help them
to penetrate the Chinese mainland
and establish rela-
tions with the highest
levels of cultivated society. On
the basis of their experiences at Macao,
the Jesuits
under Valignano's leadership decided to pursue a policy
of
“accommodation,” or cultural compromise. It was
in
this conciliatory spirit that the Jesuits began to study
seriously Chinese
language, customs, and learning.
Matteo Ricci, an Italian priest, appeared
on the
Chinese mainland in 1583, established cordial relations
with
Chinese officials and scholars, and ultimately
made his way to the imperial
court in Peking.
Ricci resided at Peking from 1601 to his death in
1610. During that decade
he won the confidence of
the Ming Emperor and the Confucian literati
through
his gracious and dignified bearing, his polite and intel-
ligent absorption in Chinese learning,
and his sincere
and sophisticated efforts to explain Western science
and
Christian teachings in terms that could be appreciated
and
understood by the learned and tolerant. While
writing of Western thought
and religion in Chinese,
Ricci composed a manuscript history of the introduc-
tion of Christianity to China. His
Italian text, and
references from his Journals, were
translated into Latin
by Father Nicolas Trigault while on a sea voyage
from
China to Europe. Trigault published Ricci's work in
five books
under the title De Christiana expeditione
apud
Sinas... (Rome, 1615). This account was quickly
accepted
throughout Europe as the official, best in-
formed, and most recent exposition on China and the
progress of
Christianity there. Within a few years after
its appearance, translations
were issued in French,
German, Spanish, and Italian. The first and the
last
of Ricci's books deal with China; the others are mainly
concerned
with the history of the mission.
Ricci, unlike Mendoza, was a close student of China's
thought and religions.
Since he lived in China at a time
when Buddhism and Taoism were
degenerating, his
works exhibit forthright scorn for them. Especially
repellent are Buddhist practices which appear to be
devilish parodies of
Christian rites. The “delirium” and
“ravings” of the Taoists about Lao-Tze he attributes
to the inspiration of the devil. Confucianism, the offi-
cial thought of the literati, is much more to
Ricci's
taste. Confucius he sees as the equal of the best pagan
philosophers of antiquity and superior to many of them.
The emphasis in
Confucianism upon morality, ration-
alism,
public order, and teaching by precept and ex-
principles. He points out further that the Confucianists
have no idols, believe in one God, and revere the
principle of reward for good and punishment for evil.
The Chinese literati convinced Ricci that Confu-
cianism was not a competing faith but rather a set of
moral
precepts which was used for the proper govern-
ment and general welfare of the state. Ricci was also
led to believe
that Confucianism “could derive great
benefit from Christianity
and might be developed and
perfected by it” (Gallagher, p. 98).
It was Ricci's sim-
plistic presentations of
early Confucianism, uncompli-
cated by the
subtleties of later exegesis, that led several
generations of Jesuits to
believe that China could best
be won by close study of the Confucian
Classics, by
alliance with a native literati devoted to its moral
precepts, and by conversion of the leading lights of
the realm and the
emperor himself to Christianity. To
the Jesuits at home such a program
seemed congenial
and likely, for it paralleled closely the
educational,
social, and conversion policies that they were then
following in Europe.
The Jesuit successors of Ricci in China included a
number of mathematicians
and scientists who contin-
ued to advance the
cultural mission. Reports on their
progress began to appear in Europe at
mid-century.
Alvaro Semedo, a Portuguese Jesuit, published at
Madrid
in 1642 a work on the empire of China in
which he pays far greater
attention to secular affairs
than Ricci had. He also gives the text of and
explana-
tory notes for the Nestorian
monument found at Sianfu
in 1625. He informs Europe about the wars
being
fought between the Ming and the Manchus. More
material on the
calamitous events taking place in north
China was provided with the
publication of Father
Martin Martini's De bello
Tartarico historia (Rome,
1654). In the following year
Martini published his
Novus Atlas Sinensis (Amsterdam), the first
scientific
atlas and geography of China and one that remains
a
standard reference work. In 1658 Martini published
at Munich his Sinicae historiae, the first history of
China
written by a European from Chinese annals. In
the meantime Father Michel
Boym had returned to
Europe to announce in 1654 the conversion to Chris-
tianity of members of the expiring
Ming family and
court. Far more important for European science and
thought was the publication of Boym's Flora
Sinensis
(Vienna, 1656), a work comparable in intellectual
merit to Martini's Atlas.
The Jesuits also published Latin translations of
selected Confucian
Classics. Prospero Intorcetta issued
the translation by Ignatius da Costa
of the Ta Hsüeh
(“Great
Learning”) in his Sapientia sinica
(Goa, 1662).
At Paris in 1673, Intorcetta published his own transla
tion of the Chung yung (Doctrine of the Mean). Four-
teen years later a group of French Jesuits headed by
Philippe
Couplet published the Confucius Sinarum
Philosophus (Paris) and dedicated it to King Louis XIV.
It
contains translations of the Classics previously pub-
lished as well as the Lun Yü
(“Analects”). Francisco
Noël in his Sinensis imperii libri classici sex (Prague,
1711)
republished the earlier translations and added
to them his own version of
the Meng-tzu (“Mencius”),
the
Hsiao ching (“Filial
Piety”), and the Hsiao
hsüeh
(“Moral Philosophy for
Youths”), a small work of inter-
pretation by Chu Hsi (1130-1200) that was then used
in China for
elementary instruction in the Classics. The
Classics selected by the
Jesuits for translation were
those which had been given new prominence by
Chu
Hsi and the Neo-Confucianists of the orthodox school
then dominant
in China.
While the Jesuits provided scholarly treatises and
translations of the
Confucian Classics, the merchants
and diplomatic emissaries of Europe
supplied by their
accounts a less sophisticated and a more
impressionistic
documentation on China and its people. The Dutch,
who
had been sailing directly to the East since 1595,
became particularly
aggressive in the 1620's as they
sought to secure a monopoly of the trade
with China.
In connection with these efforts they established a fort
and settlement in southern Taiwan in 1624. But with
the dynastic troubles
that swept China, Dutch hopes
for an expanded trade were quickly
disappointed. Once
the Ch'ing dynasty took over at Peking, the Dutch
tried
to negotiate directly at the capital. But the embassies
sent to
Peking in 1656, 1667, and 1685 produced few
concrete results, and so no
further efforts were made
to establish legitimate trading relations with
China.
The Dutch produced a number of independent ac-
counts of China that were published in Europe be-
tween 1644 and 1670. Isaac Commelin issued a collec-
tion of early Dutch travel accounts in
1644 that was
followed two years later by the publication of William
Bontekoe's Journal. These reminiscences paint a pic-
ture of the Chinese that is far different
from the glow-
ing and adulatory image of an
ancient, rational society
created by the Jesuits. To the Dutch observers
the
Chinese were sinister, devoid of all virtue, and experts
in
treachery. The Dutch emissary, Johann Nieuhof, in
his account of the
embassy of 1665, presents a more
balanced view of China based both on the
Jesuit writers
and his own experiences. Olfert Dapper, a Dutch phy-
sician, compiled in Holland the reports of
the second
Dutch embassy to Peking, and in 1670 issued an ency-
clopedic compendium on China gleaned
from the em-
bassy descriptions and a wide range
of other sources.
His book, entitled Atlas
Chinensis in its English trans-
lation, is often erroneously attributed to Arnoldus
Chinese and a skeptical view of China's vaunted civili-
zation. The Dutch also provided Europe with its first
comprehensive descriptions of the Chinese island of
Taiwan, and of the widespread ruin produced on the
mainland by the dynastic wars.
III
The Jesuits were meanwhile faced with a crisis of
their own, the Rites
Controversy. In its origins this
bitter struggle within the Catholic Church
can be
traced to Ricci's view, which stressed the idea that no
essential conflict existed between Confucianism in its
pristine form and
the tenets of Christianity. The origi-
nal
doctrines of Confucius, according to Ricci, taught
monotheism and possibly
even contained a primitive
knowledge of Jehovah. Corruption of ancient
Confu-
cianism had taken place over the
centuries as was
clearly demonstrated by the growth of Taoism and the
successful introduction of Buddhism into China.
Father Nicolas Longobardi, the Jesuit successor of
Ricci at Peking, was
himself skeptical that the ancient
Chinese had knowledge of the true God.
The Domini-
can and Franciscan missionaries,
who began to evan-
gelize in south China in
the 1630's, were hostile to
“accommodation” in any
form. They branded all the
Chinese sects as idolatrous, and initially made
no seri-
ous efforts to study the language or to
understand
Chinese civilization. The two methods of evangelizing
quickly came into conflict, as each group embarrassed
and outraged the
other. It was not long before the issue
was joined in Europe as well as in
the East.
At first the controversy raged over the question as
to whether or not the
ancient Chinese had a conception
of the true God. Soon this debate led to
the more
practical question of the Chinese term best suited to
render
in its full significance the Christian conception
of God, a problem that
the Jesuits had earlier resolved
in Japan by introducing the Latin word Deus into
Japanese. But in China, where the Jesuit
linguists knew
that new terms could not so readily be added to the
language, and where the Jesuits held that there already
existed a primitive
conception of Jehovah, the question
of terminology could not be so adroitly
handled. A host
of other Christian terms, “soul” and
“spirit” for exam-
ple,
could not easily be given Chinese equivalents that
would carry with them
the overtones that these words
and concepts necessarily must have for
believers. To
the Dominicans and Franciscans the Confucianists for
all
their learning were simple atheists or agnostics who
taught a materialistic
doctrine inimical to the Christian
faith. They were particularly outraged
when the Jesuits
permitted their Christian converts to continue per-
forming ancestral rites. The Jesuits,
following the logic
of their original position, held that these rites were
social
and political rather than religious ceremonies.
The controversialists first appealed to Rome for an
opinion in 1645. Pope
Innocent X took a position that
was critical of the Jesuit policies. But in
1656, Pope
Alexander VII took a benign attitude on the question
of the
“Chinese rites” and granted that they should
be
permissible under certain conditions. The Domini-
can, Domingo Fernández Navarrete, then assumed
leadership
in the struggle against the Jesuits. In China,
where he was superior of the
Dominican mission from
1664, Navarrete gathered a mass of data relating
to
the “terms” and “rites”
questions. On the basis of these
he prepared two imposing and authoritative
volumes
called Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos
y religiosos
de la Monarchia de China (Rome, 1674). While it
was
a powerful attack upon the Jesuit position, Navarrete's
book was
also an excellent compilation of observations
on Chinese life, customs, and
practices.
At this juncture the authorities in Rome became
understandably confused and
disturbed over the Rites
Question. The Congregation of the Propaganda
in
Rome decided to include the China question among
the problems of
general missionary activity and proce-
dure
then under investigation. The learned of Europe
were consulted and began to
take sides on the question.
The Missions
étrangères in Paris, which had increas-
ingly become critical of the Jesuit
effort to dominate
the mission field, urged the Holy See to dispatch
an
Apostolic Vicar to China. Charles Maigrot, sent to
China in this
capacity, stood firmly in his mandate of
1693 against the practices being
followed by the
Jesuits. In Europe the Jansenists joined forces with
those who denounced the Jesuit practices in China. The
faculty of the
Sorbonne in 1700 condemned the view
advanced by the Jesuit, Louis Le Comte,
that the
primitive Chinese had practiced morality while the rest
of
the world still lived in corruption. The Rites Con-
troversy, as it became involved with the Jesuit-Jansenist
debate, threatened to produce an irreparable split
within the Church.
In a dramatic effort to investigate and resolve the
controversy, Pope
Clement XI sent a special legate to
China in the person of Charles de
Tournon, Patriarch
of Antioch. The De Tournon legation arrived at
Canton
in 1705 to begin its investigation. The atmosphere
blackened
quickly when, in 1706, De Tournon roundly
denounced the Chinese, including
the emperor, as
atheists. Opposed on all sides for his ignorance and
intolerance, the legate was condemned and arrested
by the Chinese. De
Tournon died in China in 1710
without retracting. In Europe the Papacy
forbade
further controversy, and in 1715 issued the constitution
ex illa die which clearly condemned the Jesuit position.
China, until a strong papal pronouncement, ex quo
singulari, was issued in 1742 requiring the Jesuits in
China to take a special oath to abide by the papal
decisions.
IV
Étienne de Silhouette, a pupil of the Jesuits, wrote
in his
Idée générale du
gouvernement... des Chinois
(Paris, 1729) that the
controversies over the Chinese
Rites “have given rise in the
minds of everyone to a
desire to know China” (Rowbotham, p.
145). He might
also have observed that the question of the Rites and
the religious, philosophical, linguistic, and social ques-
tions linked to it, had long been of deep interest
and
concern to intellectuals both inside and outside the
Society. The
compilation of Athanasius Kircher, China
Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), an important work by
a Jesuit
scholar who had never been to China, inaugu-
rated for the last generation of the seventeenth century
the
European age of erudition on things Chinese.
Kircher's huge tome, with its
numerous illustrations,
was quickly reissued in Dutch, English, and
French
translations, and it thereafter became the starting-point
for
those who wrote or thought about China. Kircher's
distinction as a scholar,
his interest in the comparative
study of languages, his analytical
presentation of the
Nestorian monument, his perceptive comments on
flora
and fauna, and his incorporation of authentic and nu-
merous engravings of Chinese persons and
scenes all
combined to produce a work of enduring value and
persistent
influence.
The Chinese language with its peculiar system of
characters had intrigued
the earliest commentators.
Sample characters began to appear in European
publi-
cations of the late sixteenth
century. While a practical
knowledge of Chinese was acquired by most of
the
missionaries to China, the scientific study of the
Chinese
language in Europe emerged in the seven-
teenth century through diverse routes. Jacob Golius in
the
Netherlands first became interested in the Chinese
language by way of his
Arabic and Persian studies.
Students of Near Eastern languages were given
an even
better starting-point when Kircher published parallel
columns
of Syriac and Chinese (also Romanizations)
copied from the Nestorian
monument. Andreas Müller,
the provost of Berlin and a student of
Near Eastern
languages, was one of the first to use the Nestorian
inscriptions and other available materials in his fruitless
efforts to
produce a key for the easy understanding
of Chinese. His contemporary in
England, John Webb,
published in 1669 a book in which he sought to
prove
that Chinese was the primitive language spoken from
the time of
Adam to Noah, and that it had remained
in a petrified condition ever since.
When Father Philippe Couplet brought two Chinese
converts to Europe in
1685, the Jesuit and one of his
charges were quizzed by linguists at
Oxford, Berlin,
and Vienna about the nature of the Chinese language.
Another Chinese convert remained in Paris to work
on a dictionary that the
French Jesuits were preparing
as a tool for missionaries in the field. By
1700 European
scholars had learned from their investigations of
Chinese something about the differences between the
literary and spoken
languages; the tonal system and
dialects of the spoken tongue; the
monosyllabic nature
of the characters; the absence of grammar and inflec-
tion; the historical evolution of the
characters; and the
various styles of calligraphy. They were not able,
how-
ever, to produce the key either to
Chinese or to the
hieroglyphs of Egypt, which a number of them vainly
sought.
European interest in the Chinese language was orig-
inally linked to the general Renaissance concern with
Hebrew and
Egyptian as primitive and emblematic
languages; to the efforts of the
rationalists to discover
the primitive language from which all others
were
supposed to derive; to the hopes of certain optimists
who sought
to find a language more universal than
Latin, and to the ambitions of
others to construct an
artificial and perfected philosophical language for
use
in the arts and sciences. Chinese appealed to language
theorists
because the characters, they believed, were
based on concepts rather than
arbitrary sounds.
Seventeenth-century linguists thought this
conceptual
basis essential to the construction of a universal lan-
guage.
Some interested scholars thought of Chinese as the
lost language of Noah, or
as the primitive language
of all mankind; others persisted in holding the
belief
that the revival of Chinese would restore the languages
of the
world to that perfect condition which had ob-
tained before Babel. Leibniz hoped to use elements
from Chinese in
developing a philosophical language
that would replace Latin and help to
make direct
communication possible among the intellectuals of the
world.
Closely related to the confusion of tongues was the
problem of China's
antiquity and history, and its rela-
tionship to orthodox Christian and Western beliefs in
monogenesis.
The publication of Martini's Historiae
sinicae (1658) set the stage for a fundamental contro-
versy over historical chronology which was finally
to
shatter Western concepts based upon the Bible. Issac
Vossius, an
eminent Dutch scholar who was avowedly
an ardent admirer of the Chinese,
published his Disser-
tatio de vera aetate mundi... (The Hague, 1659), the
first essay to examine the implications of Martini's
historical data for
Western thought. Martini's book,
according to Vossius, showed that China's history
continuous, and that its historical records took no
notice of the Flood. Vossius, casting Christian tradition
aside, proceeded directly to the conclusion that the
history of man was fourteen hundred and forty years
older than it was commonly supposed to be. The reason
for the error in the West was the tendency of the
Christian chroniclers to rely upon Hebrew texts rather
than upon the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.
Vossius likewise concluded that, because the Flood is
not mentioned in the Chinese annals, the probability
is that it was not universal but simply an event in the
history of the Jews. Vossius, on the basis of his faith
in the Chinese annals, thus reduced the Bible to a book
of local history (Pinot, p. 205).
The critics of Vossius, especially Georg Horn,
stressed his rashness in
accepting uncritically the evi-
dence of the
Chinese annals. They also attacked the
authenticity of China's historical
traditions and the
accuracy of Martini's chronological calculations. A
tendency gradually developed, however, to effect a
reconciliation of
Chinese and biblical history through
numerous elaborate devices, including
the use of the
Septuagint chronology suggested by Vossius. The
Chinese
annals were thought to be at best distorted
renditions of the events
related in Genesis. The
Chinese, it was surmised, could recall their antedilu-
vian history through remembrances
preserved for them
by Noah's family. The sage emperors of China were
identified with Adam, Cain, Enoch, and Noah. Once
such identifications had
been established, it became
possible to argue that the Chinese annals
provided
verification for the historical authenticity of Genesis.
The Jesuits, in part because of their position in the
Rites Controversy,
were compelled to uphold the
veracity of the Chinese annals. In 1686
Philippe
Couplet published a Tabula chronologica
monarchiae
sinicae... (Paris), an effort at reconciling
Chinese and
Christian chronologies by trying to show that concord
existed between the Septuagint and the Chinese
records. In so doing he
added fourteen hundred years
to the period between creation and the life
of
Abraham. But this solution failed to satisfy either the
intellectuals of Europe or the missionaries in China.
The Bible was
hereafter used historically by the mis-
sionaries in China mainly for the purpose of filling in
gaps or of
explaining obscure references in the Chinese
annals. In Europe the Bible as
a source for world
chronology increasingly fell into desuetude. Even
in
the 1970's we are required to use concordances to
reconcile Chinese
and European dates.
In their conception of the beginnings of the world
the Europeans were
committed to a search for common
origins. The ancient civilizations of
Persia and Egypt
were familiar to the writers of antiquity and the Bible,
and so could be brought into universal history through
these
channels. China raised an almost insoluble prob-
lem because its civilization developed in isolation, its
history was
uninterrupted, and its chronology con-
flicted with Western conventions based on the Bible.
Theories had to
be devised consequently to account
for the repopulation of China after the
Flood. Egypt,
because of its antiquity and the affinities of the hiero-
glyphs to Chinese characters, was
identified by some
as the center from which the great postdiluvian migra-
tion to the East began. The people of
Pre-Columbian
America, who likewise wrote in pictographs, were
thought
to be descendants of the earliest wave in the
great eastward migration. But
such a theory of devel-
opment upset the
traditional periodization of the world
based on the “four
monarchies”: Chaldean, Persian,
Hellenistic, and Roman. In the
light of the new knowl-
edge this old
geographical and political scheme of
periodizing gave way completely, and
was supplanted
by periods based entirely on chronology, i.e., ancient,
medieval, and modern. It was only by this device that
China's history could
be correlated with classical and
later Western historical periods.
The most ingenious and tortuous effort to reconcile
Judeo-Christian and
Chinese traditions was advanced
by a small group of Jesuits in China who
have been
called “Figurists.” They claimed to find
evidence in
the Confucian classics and in other Chinese works that
would support a theory of the common origin of man-
kind and the law. The Figurists held that the Ancient
Law given
by God to man was originally in the hands
of a supreme lawgiver: Enoch in
the Hebrew tradition,
Zoroaster in Persia, Fu Hsi in China. Shem, the
son
of Noah, carried the pure Logos to China after
the
Flood. Fu Hsi, following the precepts of Enoch, pro-
mulgated the law in three forms: pictographic
concepts
and folk heroes for the simple people, more complex
symbols
for scholars and religious leaders, and mystical
symbols for the sages. A
source of mystical symbols
of great import was thought to be the I Ching (Book
of Changes),
one of the most cryptic of the Chinese
classical books. Once they had
concluded that the
mystical figures (trigrams and hexagrams) of the I Ching
were symbols of eternal verities they tried
to decipher
them. While nothing came of these attempts at
cryptography, the Figurists by their enthusiasm and
ingenuity did help to
elevate China and its civilization
to a place of primary importance in the
deliberations
of those intrigued with theories of common origin and
universal kinship.
The first and greatest of the European thinkers to
come under the spell of
Figurist ideas was Leibniz.
The German philosopher, who had long been fasci-
nated by the revelation of China's great
civilization,
became a correspondent of Father Joachim Bouvet, one
over to the idea that the “hieroglyphics” of the I Ching
were the creations of Fu Hsi and were mystical symbols
that represented the Infinite and the Chaos from which
God had rescued mankind. For a time he himself ex-
perimented with the trigrams, and sought through the
analytical use of his binary arithmetic to show that
they had a coherence and order about them which
indicated that they might be a key to all the sciences.
A successful deciphering of these symbols might lead,
Leibniz thought, to the establishment of a firm scien-
tific basis for the story of Creation and for the history
of the antediluvian epoch. André-Michel Ramsay and
Montesquieu were also intrigued by the ideas of the
Figurists, but they made no serious efforts to help the
Jesuits document their fantastic claims. However, they
were impressed, as Leibniz was, by the Chinese Classics
as sources which provide evidence for the homogeneity
of human thought and for the objective existence of
universality.
European religious and lay thinkers of the seven-
teenth century, under the influence of the debates
attending the
Rites Controversy, began to speculate
as to whether the Chinese were
materialists or spirit-
ualists, atheists
or deists. The freethinker François La
Mothe le Vayer in his
De la vertu des payens (Paris,
1642)
placed Confucius in Paradise with other great
pagan thinkers. He also
asserted that the Chinese, from
time immemorial, have recognized but one
God, and
he then deduced that the Chinese ethical system is
based on
reason and the law of nature. Pascal believed
that the Chinese were
God-fearing people whose reli-
gious beliefs
could be understood only allegorically.
In the Pensées (1670) he wrote: “China obscures, but
there is clearness to be found; seek it.” Pierre Bayle
suggested
that Spinoza's pantheism owed a debt to
Confucian concepts of God. But
Bayle, while praising
the tolerance of China, like many other
rationalists
unhesitatingly branded the Chinese as atheists, and his
opinion was to have influence well into the eighteenth
century. Herbert of
Cherbury, a precursor of the
English Deists, looked upon the Chinese as
proponents
of natural religion. Antoine Arnauld, the Jansenist
lawyer
and articulate foe of the Jesuits, saw nothing
but iniquity in the
Confucian ideas. Christian
Thomasius, the Protestant educator of Halle,
viewed
Chinese religion as blind faith in the authority of
dogma.
Malebranche, the Oratorian philosopher, in his
Conversation between a Christian Philosopher and a
Chinese Philosopher on the Existence of God (1708)
tried to refute
the Chinese idea that matter is eternal.
He, like Bayle, saw points of
similarity between
Spinoza's philosophy and Chinese thought.
Leibniz was the only secular philosopher of the later
seventeenth century to support the Jesuits in the Rites
Controversy and in their interpretation of Chinese
religion and thought. In
his diverse writings Leibniz
shows himself to be convinced that the ancient
Chinese
were monotheists who conceived of God as being both
spirit and
matter. This Chinese God he sees as an
entelechy similar to his own Supreme
Monad. In the
practice of their religion the Chinese worship God in
the virtues of particular objects. But they are not idol-
aters, for they worship the spiritual rather than
the
material essence. In ancestral worship, he contends,
there
persists a concept of the immortality of the soul;
rites are performed
before the ancestors to remind the
living to act so as to deserve the
recognition of poster-
ity. Leibniz'
interpretation of Chinese religion was
more than faintly reminiscent of the
leading ideas in
his own Monadology.
Like the Jesuits themselves, Leibniz rejoiced openly
in the edict of
toleration for Christianity promulgated
in 1692 by the K'ang-hsi emperor.
He congratulated
the Jesuits on this success and heralded it as a vindica-
tion of their understanding of how
best to reconcile
Christian and Chinese thought. In 1697 he published
his Novissima Sinica as a call to Protestants to
emulate
the example of the Jesuits and to dispatch a mission
to China.
He was even encouraged to hope, after the
conclusion in 1689 of the Treaty
of Nerchinsk between
Russia and China, that the land route to Peking
might
be reopened and regular communications established
through
Russia between learned groups in China and
Europe.
V
The Jesuits took seriously Leibniz' advice to send
more useful objects and
practical information to
Europe from China. They also continued
throughout
the eighteenth century, even after the suppression of
the
Society in 1773, to publish detailed information
on Chinese life ranging
from the history of the Jews
in China to brief essays on Chinese games. The
Lettres
édifiantes et curieuses,
an intentional popularization,
were issued in printed form beginning in
1702, and
were later compiled and reissued in twenty-six volumes
at
Paris between 1780 and 1783. J. B. Du Halde, one
of the editors of the
Lettres édifiantes, published in
four volumes his encyclopedic Description de la
Chine
... (Paris, 1735) which was translated into English
and
Dutch in the following year. In following the encyclo-
pedic tradition which they helped to inaugurate,
the
Jesuits published at intervals from 1777 to 1814 what
were called
Mémoires concernant les Chinois
(Paris).
Unlike their earlier publications, the Jesuits, who were
now
generally in disrepute, here issued in sixteen vol-
umes, with but few editorial coomments, a wide vari-
poraneously, Father Mauriac de Mailla published in
1778 a translation in twelve volumes of the Tung-chien,
kang-mu (“The Outline and Details of the Compre-
hensive Mirror”), a twelfth-century version of Chinese
history prepared under the direction of the philosopher
Chu Hsi.
What most impressed the Jesuits and Leibniz about
China, was its superiority
to Europe in the establish-
ment and
maintenance of a rational social order.
Leibniz fancied from what he read
that the K'ang-hsi
emperor was a model ruler who governed his subjects
firmly but with great respect for law and the advice
of his counsellors. So
great was Leibniz' admiration
for the government, social stability, and
moral system
of the Chinese that he confessed:
... we need missionaries from the Chinese who might teach
us the use
and practice of natural religion, just as we have
sent them
teachers of revealed theology
(trans. in Lach,
Novissima Sinica, p. 75).
To Leibniz and the Jesuits, the morality of the
Chinese was inseparable from
government. The
Chinese, it was alleged, have no concern with abstract
questions of morality but are interested only in apply-
ing to daily life the teachings of Confucius
regarding
the duties of men. The morality of the Chinese is seen
to be
a set of prescriptions designed to procure and
assure individual, familial,
and social happiness. The
successful organization of the Chinese monarchy,
as
opposed to the European states, is based on the fact
that the
emperor applies and adapts to the adminis-
tration of the state the principles which obtain in
individual
and family life. Political means are used in
China to achieve a more
perfect morality. The end
of life, society, and government in China is
happiness,
here and now. Abstract religious virtue, with its invisi-
ble and other worldly rewards, is of no
interest to the
Chinese. China flourishes as a great and virtuous em-
pire without the aid of revealed religion.
Among the earliest of the philosophical popularizers
to propagate to the
learned public the Sinophilism of
the Jesuits was Christian Wolff, the
follower of Leibniz.
In a lecture delivered at the University of Halle
in
1721 before the combined faculty and student body,
Wolff proclaimed
the excellence of Chinese moral
philosophy and its correspondence with his
own teach-
ings regarding the efficacy of
human reason in meeting
the problems of daily life. Duty and virtue, the
differ-
ence between good and evil, and
the imperative to
right action may be learned from nature as well as
revelation, according to both the Chinese and Wolff.
While Wolff contends
that no conflict exists between
this doctrine of lay morality and Christian teachings,
his Pietistic colleagues at the university remained un-
convinced. In their determination to end
what they
thought of as Wolff's heretical teachings, the Pietists
prevailed in 1723 upon King Frederick William I of
Prussia to banish Wolff
from his territories.
From the sanctuary of the University of Marburg
Wolff continued thereafter
to write about and teach
his “practical philosophy.”
Others continued to write
polemical tracts about Wolff and his
interpretations
of Confucian morality and Chinese statecraft. In 1730
at Marburg Wolff delivered a lengthy lecture on China
as the outstanding
working example of an enlightened
government. His views of the
“Real Happiness of a
People under a Philosophical
King” did not go un-
noticed by
Voltaire and the young Frederick whom
he was tutoring at Rheinsberg. Within
German univer-
sity circles the moral
philosophy and Sinophilism of
Wolff continued to be a subject for learned
debate until
the last generation of the eighteenth century. Wolff's
major pronouncements on Chinese morality and gov-
ernment were greeted with great cordiality by the
Jesuits. In
the Description of Du Halde, issued five years
after
Wolff's lecture at Marburg, emphasis continued
to be placed upon the
natural morality, rational reli-
gion, and
enlightened statecraft of the Chinese.
The first systematic treatise on the science of state-
craft published in Europe was Montesquieu's L'esprit
des lois (The Spirit of
the Laws, 1748). For his informa-
tion on China Montesquieu used the merchant accounts
as well as the
adulatory statements of the Jesuits, but
preferred the merchants as the
less biased observers.
The merchants, as we have seen, were as
unanimous
in their condemnation of the treachery, deceit, and
dishonesty of the Chinese as the Jesuits were in their
praise of China's
natural morality and good govern-
ment. In
response to the conflict in his sources, and
in harmony with the thesis of
his book, Montesquieu
concluded that a wide gulf separates theory from
prac-
tice in the governing of China. Peace
and tranquillity
are assured by patriarchal repression and by the do-
minion of fear. An attack upon a magistrate
becomes
an attack upon the entire system, hence dissent and
liberty
are nonexistent and reform of evil impossible.
As long as the elements are
cooperative, the people
industrious, and the state not too repressive, life
in
China is satisfactory. But nature is not often benign
and so
disruptions occur. And, since reform of the state
is not possible, the
individual Chinese make out as best
they can by resorting to artifice. The
state, handcuffed
by its own system, tolerates deception while
eschewing
reform. China, because it is governed by the rod, is
classified as a despotism in which honor and virtue are
little more than
theoretical objectives. Nonetheless, by
the attention he gave to China,
Montesquieu recog-
to any objective examination of the principles of gov-
ernment and similar questions of universal import.
Rousseau, in his Discourse on Political Economy
(first
printed in the Encyclopédie in 1755)
likewise experi-
enced the need to reckon
with China in propounding
his generalizations. The emperor of China he sees
as
being exemplary in unswervingly following the dictates
of the
“general will” in resolving disputes between the
officials and the people. Rousseau approvingly noted
that it is
“the constant maxim of the prince to decide
against his
officers” without delay or investigation, and
concludes that
since the “public outcry does not arise
without
cause” the Chinese emperor finds “seldom any
injustice to be repaired.” He also praised the fiscal
system of
China “where taxes are greater and yet better
paid than in any
other part of the world.” The reason
for this, in Rousseau's
estimation, is that food grains
are free of taxes, and the heavy duties
levied on other
commodities are paid by the ultimate consumer, or by
those who can afford to pay.
Voltaire in his historical works, especially in the
Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations
(1756),
measured China's civilization against the achievements
of
other peoples. China occupies the place of honor
in his Essai and is the first civilization he considers.
The Chinese are
especially successful, in Voltaire's
eyes, in using government to protect
civilization. The
emperors of China, comparable to philosopher-kings,
for centuries maintained a stable, tolerant, and wise
regime. Their benign,
patriarchal rule, reinforced and
aided by a corps of dedicated mandarins,
served the
people well. Society, following the Confucian princi-
ples, was built on respect for the
Golden Rule, mutual
toleration, and public service. In upholding the Confu-
cian ideals, the Chinese produced
throughout history
an intelligent, rational, and deistic ruling class
which
set an example to the rest of society by cultivating
virtue,
refined manners, and an elevated style of life.
But the Chinese system, for
all of its moral and political
virtue, could do nothing to encourage the
expansion
of the arts and sciences. Superstition, ancestor worship,
and the character system of the language were persist-
ent deterrents to advancement. The consequence
was
that China did not develop the arts and sciences as
it might have
done. That China's ancient civilization
was overtaken by the European in
the mid-seventeenth
century is best documented by the fact that
“even”
the Jesuits were able to teach the mandarins
something
from their first arrival on the Chinese scene.
If Voltaire's Sinophilism was qualified, a number of
political theorists of
the mid-eighteenth century were
convinced that Europe had more to learn
from China
than it had to teach. In Germany, a leading cameralist
writer of the day, J. H. G. Justi published in Berlin
in 1762
Vergleichungen der europäischen mit den
asiatischen und andern vermeintlich barbarischen
Regierungen.
In this comparative work, as well as in
several of his other writings on
political economy, Justi
concentrates on China as the foreign state most
worthy
of study. He is particularly attracted by China as an
example
of enlightened monarchy in which the un-
limited authority of the ruler is effectually combined
with
moderation in its exercise. Moral restraint in the
monarch is inculcated in
China by careful education
of the prince in humility, industry, respect for
human
life, reverence for learning, and concern for agricul-
ture, the main occupation of the people. Like
Leibniz,
he believed that the Chinese emperor is constrained
to virtue
by his desire to receive the favorable judg-
ment of history. While subjects have the duty to re-
monstrate with the ruler, he sees in China no formal
constitutional restrictions on the emperor. Systematic
training in civil
morality is taught to the people by
the mandarins, who are themselves
selected, rated, and
promoted by a civil service institution. No
hereditary
nobility exists in China, and elevation to high rank
comes
only through excellent performance in public
service. The censorate, which
acts as the eyes and ears
of the emperor, is the surveillance institution
that
guarantees integrity and efficiency at all levels of gov-
ernment. Administration by boards rather
than by
individuals alone also helps to check license and des-
potism among officials. Most impressive of
all is the
fact that the Chinese system is internally so well bal-
anced and its administrative machinery so
wisely con-
structed that it works automatically to insure the gen-
eral welfare. In China, Justi clearly thought he had
found a
working example of the kind of enlightened
despotism that he and others
were advocating for the
German states.
In France the ideal of an enlightened and rational
absolutism was most fully
articulated by the Physio-
crats. The
Physiocrats were especially critical of state
economic policies which
overstress commerce and
neglect agriculture. In China they saw a
government
vitally concerned with agriculture, as was symbolized
dramatically by the annual spring rites at which the
emperor, or his
deputy, turned the first furrow. The
most characteristic of the
Physiocratic writings which
elevated China to a model for Europe was
François
Quesnay's Le despotisme de la
Chine (Paris, 1767).
Quesnay sees the government of China as one
in which
the ruler through legal despotism enforces the natural
economic laws. Authority is rightly invested in an
emperor who is
impartial, tolerant, and constantly
careful to protect the public welfare.
Since China is
an agricultural nation, the ruler correctly pays special
cultivator. He does not lay arbitrary taxes, but follows
the Natural Law by requiring as payment “a portion
of the annual produce of the soil” (Maverick, p. 290).
He does not tolerate monopolies, but does his best to
encourage free and natural competition in all economic
enterprises. He demands regular accountings of public
funds and swiftly punishes malversations. The per-
petuity of China's government is attributed to the
stable natural order enforced by the ruler. China's
greatest problem is overcrowding of the land with the
result that too many of its people live in poverty or
slavery.
VI
With the beginning of direct intercourse in the six-
teenth century, the artists and craftsmen of Europe had
become
intrigued with Chinese textiles, porcelain, and
lacquer ware. A pronounced
taste for Chinese art ob-
jects was widespread
in Europe by the time tea was
introduced to Restoration England. The motifs
on the
Chinese products were widely copied in Europe both
in
imitations that were made of the products them-
selves and in other art forms. Europeans were success-
ful by the late seventeenth century in producing
an
acceptable and competitive lacquer ware. A generation
later they
had learned to make true hardpaste porce-
lain. Along with the art products themselves, the
Europeans sought
to obtain information on Chinese
techniques. Books and articles on Chinese
arts were
collected and read by interested amateurs and profes-
sionals as the China vogue spread
from France to the
other European countries, and from the nobility to
the
lowest classes in society. Never before had Europe
received so
powerful and varied an artistic stimulus
from a distant civilization.
The craze for Chinese art objects reached its peak
in the early and middle
years of the eighteenth century.
Royalty, nobility, and men of substance
collected
Chinese cabinets, chairs, tables, screens, fans, hangings,
porcelains, and lacquered bowls. Interiors were pan-
eled with lacquer or wallpapered with Chinese designs.
In the
palaces a special chamber was often designed
to house the porcelain
collection of the owner. Many
of the items collected were prepared in China
espe-
cially for this vast European
market and were designed
to appeal to the European taste for the exotic. As
a
consequence they often reflected more about the
Chinese conception
of European taste than about
Chinese art itself. Parasols, pagodas, and
mandarins
were depicted on the wares made in China as the
Europeans
conceived of them rather than as they ac-
tually looked. European artists, who incorporated these
contrived
designs into their own works, were often
copying Chinese people, objects, and scenes that were
born in
the minds of those European artists and artisans
afflicted by Sinomania.
“Chinoiserie” (meaning bizarre tricks or monkey-
shines in modern French usage) is a
term descriptive
of the eighteenth-century European view of China as
a
place of escape from the trials of daily life, as a haven
of leisure and
luxury, as a utopia where laughter is
always gay. In this conception China
is remote in
distance rather than in time. Its “Golden
Age” is not
in the past or future, but in a perpetual and
glorious
present. Its landscapes are always green, its waters
clear
and cool, its skies sunny. The Chinese people are
graceful, delicate, and
colorful; they love beautiful
gardens, quiet ponds, tinkling bells, and
happy society.
They are the gay Chinese of the porcelains who have
almost no relationship to the wise Chinese of the Jesuits
and philosophers
or the wicked Chinese of the mer-
chants. They
are the untroubled people who live under
the reasonable and tolerant rule
of an enlightened and
prosperous king.
The playful, and sometimes wistful, spirit of chi-
noiserie is best reflected in the visual arts. To
Europeans,
weary of Renaissance adulation of the staid
art of antiquity, the strange
objects of China provided
welcome relief. Frivolous courtiers and serious
artists
at Versailles in the time of Louis XIV were among the
first to
bring the light spirit of chinoiserie into the
established arts of Europe.
Perhaps as a reaction against
the classical plan of the park at Versailles,
an exquisite
pleasure house, the Trianon de
porcelaine, was erected
in the gardens in 1670. This was but the
first of many
such pavilions that would dot the classical and land-
scape gardens of Europe in the following
century. But,
as was often the case, the Trianon was a building whose
basic architecture was uncompromisingly French and
baroque. It was only the
surface ornamentation which
gave it a bizarre, Chinese appearance. As a
general
rule, the Chinese taste was incorporated into baroque
art by
the addition of exotic ornaments and motifs to
forms that remained
fundamentally European both in
conception and structure alike.
The rococo art of the Regency period in France lent
itself especially well
to exotic treatment. Antoine
Watteau in his drawings and paintings was the
earliest
and most influential of the creators of rococo chi-
noiseries. His mandarins, temples, and
parasols became
hallmarks of decoration à la
Chine and were copied
by lesser artists all over Europe.
Monkeys came fre-
quently into his fantastic
decorations and they were
regularly added to chinoiseries for exotic
effects. The
increased use of watercolors in painting probably owed
a
debt to the porcelain pictures. François Boucher, a
painter and a
designer of tapestries, stressed the charms
began to look like real Chinese in face and figure.
Jean-Baptiste Pillement, draughtsman and painter to
Louis XIV, drew chinoiseries for engravers that were
even more fantastic and vivacious than the paintings
of Watteau. The drawings of Pillement were copied
everywhere, and are still considered to be the best
examples of chinoiserie at the height of its refinement.
While the artists themselves were not influenced by
the conception of China found in the philosophes, there
is no doubt that the popularity of the chinoiseries owed
a debt to the high reputation which the savants gave
to China. The ordinary person could readily draw the
conclusion that these happy people lived under a phi-
losopher-king.
In the eighteenth century it was generally agreed
that the English landscape
garden, as it then evolved,
owed a substantial debt to the art of Chinese
gardening.
Sir William Temple, a critic of classical, formal gar-
dens, noted in 1685 that the Chinese in their
gardens
seek to reproduce natural effects by following schemes
based
on “Sharawadgi,” his own rendition of a Chinese
or
Japanese term meaning “studied irregularity.” On
the
basis of Temple's remarks the conviction grew that
the Chinese example was
more important to the evolu-
tion of the
landscape garden than were Roman proto-
types, the semi-formal garden, or a new attitude to-
wards nature in its wild state. Naturalism as an end
in itself was not enough to satisfy Sir William Cham-
bers, who believed that an inanimate, simple nature
was too
insipid and that gardens required “every aid
that either art or
nature can furnish” (Bald, p. 318).
It was as such an aid that the chinoiserie form was
used. But because
European garden architects had
almost no direct knowledge of Chinese garden
design,
art historians today generally hold that the Chinese
example
had no influence upon what has been called
the Anglo-Chinese garden. The
case for Chinese influ-
ence has usually been
supported exclusively by refer-
ence to the
large number of garden buildings, pagodas,
and bridges which were included
in the new gardens
by their designers or added by their owners.
Whatever
else it was, the Anglo-Chinese garden was certainly
another
art form which came under the influence of
the vogue for ornamenting
through chinoiseries.
From the arts of gardening and architecture, the
revolt against classical
rigidity stimulated by the idea
of “Sharawadgi”
speedily passed to the other arts.
Chinese persons or scenes were
introduced into
baroque novels to provide gallant, grotesque, or fan-
tastic elements, as in C. W. Hagdorn,
Aeyquan, oder
der Grosse Mogul (1670).
Romances were based upon
Oriental tales to lend them an idyllic and exotic
air.
Utopian writers cited China as an example of a tolerant
society. Books on Chinese designs as exhortations to
adopt the
new taste are typified by Thomas Chippen-
dale's
The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director
(1754).
Writers of fictional travel accounts, sometimes
called extraordinary
voyages, provided thumbnail
sketches of Chinese people and places.
The sage chinois, who represented in literature
the
idealized Chinese of the philosophes, was
frequently
used as a literary spectator of and commentator upon
the
European scene. The Marquis d'Argens dedicated
his Lettres chinoises (The Hague, 1755) to the shade of
Confucius, “the greatest man the world has yet pro-
duced,” and he speculated that Confucius and
Leibniz
were holding frequent conversations in another world.
Oliver
Goldsmith in his Chinese Letters, which ap-
peared in The Public
Ledger between 1760 and 1762,
put his critical observations of
European society into
the mouth of Lien Chi Altangi out of deference to
the
prevailing fashion. Voltaire in his play of 1755 called
L'Orphelin de la Chine (or “Confucian
morals in five
acts”) actually utilized as the basis for his
plot the
translation of a Chinese drama that had been published
by Du
Halde. Voltaire's play, which was extremely
popular on the contemporary
stage, celebrates the
triumph of Chinese civilization over the
barbarous
Mongols. Voltaire's drama was also an indirect attack
upon
Rousseau's adulation of the primitive and un-
spoiled society. The essayists of the Encyclopédie wrote
at length on Chinese customs and
compared them to
those prevailing in Europe and in other parts of the
world. In most of these comparisons China's practices
almost always win
high honor for their rationality,
refinement, and good taste.
VII
Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century disillu-
sionment with China as a model of rationality, good
government,
and the gay life was expressed with in-
creasing frequency and greater vigor. The hostility in
Europe
towards the Society of Jesus, its expulsion from
a number of countries, and
its formal dissolution by
the Papacy in 1773 led many contemporary
observers
to be more than a bit skeptical about the veracity of
the
glowing Jesuit reports of China. The growing criti-
cism of rationalistic thought and enlightened absolut-
ism also produced a reaction against a China
which
had been elevated to a model society by rationalistic
social,
economic, and political theorists. The more
effective closure of China to
European trade had the
practical result of eliminating regular intercourse
and
of forcing Europe's attention to turn to other more
hospitable
places. The outbreak of the French Revolu-
tion and the continental wars brought an end to almost
all European
relations with eastern Asia. England,
from continental involvements, turned the major share
of its attention to India. The United States, where the
China craze imported from Europe began just after
the revolt against Britain, was one of the few places
in the Western world where disenchantment with
China had not set in by the end of the eighteenth
century.
The intellectual and artistic foes of rationalism and
classicism stood in
the vanguard of those who attacked
the China of the philosophes and the rococo painters.
The young Rousseau in his
Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences (1750) raised
two fundamental questions.
What advantage, he asked, has China
“reaped from
the honors bestowed on its learned men?”
Can it be,
he goes on satirically, “that of being peopled by a
race
of scoundrels and slaves?” Or is the reward for
holding
learning in honor the defeat of the empire by “rude
and ignorant Tatars?” Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had
been an ardent
admirer of China in his earlier years,
came to look upon the Chinese as
barbarians who had
no art other than “pottery” and
who had never ad-
vanced sufficiently to
possess an alphabet. Baron F. M.
Grimm, who castigated the Jesuits in his
literary corre-
spondence for deceiving
Europe with false reports,
branded China an unenlightened despotism with
the
Confucian moral code fitting precisely a “herd of
frightened slaves” (Reichwein, p. 96). The young
Goethe, who had
read the Analects as well as Mon-
tesquieu and Rousseau, had no patience with the
“knickknacks” of chinoiserie and was inclined to
regard
China itself as possessing a hybrid, overrefined, super-
ficial, and sick civilization.
As ideas about China during the Enlightenment were
subjected to a more
intimate inspection, the tendency
grew to stress the static quality of its
civilization.
Enlightenment philosophers of progress generally con-
cerned themselves with the advance of
reason in the
West and rarely referred in their considerations to
other parts of the world. Voltaire and other rationalists
were primarily
intent upon revealing the universality
of reason and were content with
simply finding a place
for China in their cosmic designs. In doing so,
even
some of the greatest admirers of China posited a civili-
zation that was unchanging,
unprogressive, and being
rapidly overtaken by the West. None of the
englightened
writers, not even the authors of universal history from
Bossuet to the Göttingen school, undertook seriously
to bring
China into their considerations of historical
process.
Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) asserted
that the poverty of China's lowest classes is far greater
than anything to
be found in Europe. Like Montes-
quieu,
Smith was inclined to accept the travelers' view
of China and to put aside that of the Jesuits as suspect.
“The accounts of all travelers,” he noted,
“inconsistent
in many respects, agree in the low wages of labor,
and
in the difficulty which a laborer finds in bringing up
a family in
China” (Book I, Ch. VIII). Since the travel
accounts from Marco
Polo to those of his own day
describe China in essentially the same terms,
Smith
concluded that China “seems to have been
stationary”
(ibid.). But though China appears to stand still,
“it does
not seem to go backwards” (ibid.). Its towns
and culti-
vated lands are not deserted or
neglected. China's
failure to develop economically, despite its acknowl-
edged wealth in people and
resources, he ascribed to
its neglect of international trade. Failure of
the state
to encourage trade and provide security for investors
and
workers produces a bipolarization of Chinese eco-
nomic life by which “the oppression of the poor must
establish the monopoly of the rich” (Book I, Ch. IX).
J. G. von Herder, in his earliest writings, conceived
of China as an
agrarian country dominated by a pater-
nalistic government which inhibits the growth of the
intellectual
and creative capacities of the people. In
his Ideen
(1791) Herder self-consciously attempted an
objective appraisal of Chinese
civilization in an effort
to let it fit itself into his universal
historical conception.
He reviewed China's natural environment and
history
and concluded that its physical isolation and rigid
institutions prevent the growth of dynamism and cre-
ativity. The descent of the Chinese from barbaric
Mongols left a
heritage of coarse habits and unrefined
tastes. Natural growth is repressed
by the false stress
placed upon filial piety and obedience to
authority.
The civilization that evolves in stubborn isolation from
other world cultures is stultified, artificial, and un-
imaginative. “The empire,” he
asserted, “is an em-
balmed mummy
inscribed with hieroglyphics and
wrapped in silk.” Later in life
Herder modified this
view and praised the Chinese for their tolerance,
pa-
tience and enlightened government.
T. R. Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Popu-
lation... (1798) analyzed the
incentives to and checks
upon the increase of China's population. He
estimated
on the basis of Du Halde's figures that China's popula-
tion in the early eighteenth century
was almost
240,000,000; at the end of the century Sir George
Staunton,
the British emissary to Peking, estimated it
at about 334,000,000. Malthus
accounted for China's
vast numbers and their rapid increase by reference
to
the productivity of the land, its intensive cultivation,
the
government's concern for agriculture, the indus-
triousness and relatively high social position of
the
farmer, and the encouragement given to marriage by
the religious
and social systems. He also noted that
despite its vast area, China had a
population density
brought on mainly by the cultural imperatives encour-
aging marriage. But limits are set upon the operation
of marriage as an incentive to increase of population
by the large number of priests, monks, scholars, serv-
ants, and slaves who remain single and childless. Dis-
ease, especially among children, is a positive check but
not as important as might be expected in such an
overcrowded country. Infanticide by exposure and
drowning is common but it varies with abundance and
scarcity. Frequent crop failures from drought, floods,
or plagues of insects produce devastating famines that,
because of China's isolation, cannot be relieved by
outside help. Unrelieved scarcity results in riots and
wars, which with widespread famine act as the most
powerful check on population increase. Malthus saw
little prospect for China to improve the lot of its
people through manufacture and the encouragement
of foreign trade. Its wealth, based on cultivation, had
already reached its zenith and little hope for relief
could be envisaged either through greater agricultural
or industrial productivity. In terms of material devel-
opment China seemed doomed to stagnation and pre-
destined to suffer a staggering burden of overpopula-
tion and grinding poverty.
The thesis that China was a static and unprogressive
civilization received
its classical formulation in Hegel's
Philosophy of History (1830-31). Hegel was a close
student of the critical merchant and Protestant ac-
counts of China as well as of the adulatory writings
of the
Jesuits. China, like other Oriental states, pos-
sesses for Hegel a civilization in which nature terrorizes
man
and in which progress is limited by geographical
and racial contradictions.
While China has its own
Volksgeist, it has never advanced beyond the initial
stages in the realization of freedom. The only free
individual is the
despot; for others freedom under the
state has never been realized and no
sense exists of
the infinite worth of the individual.
Hegel saw Confucius as a moralist, not a systematic
or speculative
philosopher. The sage prescribed prin-
ciples
for action, and made morality for the individual
identical with the
emperor's will and law. It is this
prescriptive quality of Chinese morality
which ac-
counts for the unchanging, despotic
character of
Chinese society and for the failure of the Chinese to
have an interest in abstract knowledge for itself. Since
China's
civilization does not progress, it is relatively
certain that China was not
better off in antiquity than
at present. Study of prevailing conditions
might then
be assumed sufficient to unlock the secrets of China's
past. Hegel, who was also a close student of Voltaire's
idea of universal
history, explicitly rejected the uni-
formity
of nature and placed the stagnant Orient,
including China, at the bottom of his ladder of linear
history
which culminates in freedom's self-realization
in the Europe of his day.
But by this scheme Hegel
did not succeed in explaining how universal
history
itself progressed from its first “unchanging”
phase to
the Greek stage in which a greater degree of freedom
somehow
developed.
Marx's concept of Asia, as spelled out in his writings
of the 1850's, was
based essentially on the views of
the classical economists, especially John
Stuart Mill.
Both Marx and Engels embraced the then current belief
in
an Asiatic society that was unique in possessing
peculiar systems of land
ownership and production
which definitely set it apart from the agrarian
societies
of classical antiquity and feudalism in the West. Cli-
mate and geography necessarily made
artificial irriga-
tion the basis of Asian
agriculture. The Asiatic state
came into being to control waterworks spread
over vast
territories where the people, living in dispersed, self-
supporting villages, depended upon
strong central au-
thority to organize and
control irrigation. In China the
economy rests upon a combination of small
agriculture
and domestic industry in which the state consumes
almost
totally whatever surplus value can be produced.
The Asiatic mode of
production thus made the state
the real landlord, and it maintains in
perpetuity a
condition of general slavery for the masses.
China, Marx and Engels thought in 1850, was the
“oldest and most
unshakeable empire of the world”
(Lowe, p. 19), isolated and
rotting. But, at about this
time, China began to be forced out of its shell
of
isolation by imperialist attacks from the West. The best
evidence
for China's loss of stability was the outbreak
of the Taiping rebellion in
the 1850's and the changes
that it threatened. Faced by the reality of a
China in
decline, Marx and Engels had to fit China into their
theoretical framework as a changing element. China,
it was concluded, under
pressure from industrial capi-
talism, would
leap over antiquity and feudalism to the
capitalist and ultimately to the
socialist modes of pro-
duction. Marx and
Engels saw changes in China of the
kind they expected to see in the West.
In their preoc-
cupation with Europe they
failed to notice indigenous
reasons for change. In their concern with a
changing
China, they abandoned their efforts to fit China into
their
unilinear scheme of universal history as they tried
to understand what
influence it might have upon the
world transition from capitalism to
socialism.
VIII
Professional study of China, especially of language,
literature, and
history, made rapid progress in the early
nineteenth century. In the
eighteenth century a few
compendia, grammars, and dictionaries had been
pro-
Petersburg, 1730) and Étienne Fourmont's Grammaire
chinoise (Paris, 1742). The Society of Jesus, which was
revived in 1815, continued to provide the scholars of
Europe with raw materials from the field. The Jesuits
issued translations as well as essays on Chinese and its
relation to other Asian tongues. J. P. Abel Rémusat,
who in 1814 became professor of Chinese at the Col-
lège de France, inaugurated serious study of Taoism
and Chinese medicine, and translated novels of ro-
mance and family life. He also participated in the
organization of the Société asiatique in 1822. J. H.
Klaproth, an associate of Rémusat, published the Asia
Polyglotta (1823) in which he divided Asian languages
into twenty-three groups and indicated how compara-
tive studies might be undertaken. Sir William Jones,
the father of modern Sanskrit studies in the West,
studied Chinese language and history in his efforts to
understand India's early relations with China.
The Protestant missionaries, who started evangeliz-
ing China in 1807, compiled dictionaries in English,
studied
dialects seriously, and established educational
institutions and printing
presses in southeast Asia and
China. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant
missionary
in China (1807), published between 1815 and 1823 a
six-volume Dictionary of the Chinese Language. W. H.
Medhurst published between 1832 and 1837 his Dic-
tionary of the Hok-kien Dialect of the
Chinese Lan-
guage. Both of these
early dictionaries were published
at Macao as were other early vocabularies
and ency-
clopedias designed for the use
of missionaries. The
Chinese themselves began around 1875 to prepare
dictionaries for the use of Westerners. But the English-
speaking world owes its greatest debt to the
British
scholar Herbert A. Giles who published at Shanghai
in 1892 his
Chinese-English Dictionary, designed for
merchants and missionaries. He provided as well a
system of transliteration
which Western students still
depend upon in working with the Chinese
language.
In the nineteenth century Chinese dictionaries were
also
prepared for Portuguese, French, German, and
Russian users.
As comprehension of Chinese improved, translations
of popular literature,
classics, histories, and documents
became more numerous. Dramas, poems, and
short
stories were translated into English and French. As the
Protestant pastors and their families steadily grew in
number, they came to
exercise an enormous influence
upon the growth of scholarly knowledge and
upon the
formation of public opinion and policy in their home-
lands. Elijah C. Bridgman the first
American missionary
to China, launched a periodical called the Chinese
Repository, published in China from 1832
through
1851, which was designed to inform foreigners about
China's past and present. Bridgman also translated the
Bible
into Chinese (with M. S. Culbertson), published
in 1862. S. Wells Williams,
an American mission-
ary-scholar,
lectured on China and compiled an ency-
clopedic two-volume study, The Middle Kingdom
(1848), which remained a standard reference work until
the end of the
nineteenth century. Many of the mis-
sionaries or their children acted as interpreters in
diplomatic
negotiations with China or returned home
to teach in the universities,
advise the government, or
work in export businesses. In the learned
societies
devoted to the investigation of Chinese affairs the
views of
the missionaries commanded respect.
Knowledge of China produced a practical impact
upon the agriculture and
administration of the enter-
prising West.
Serious projects were undertaken in the
United States during the
mid-nineteenth century to
compete with China in raising silk and tea, and
experi-
ments were performed to adapt
Chinese plants and
animals to the needs of American agriculture. T. T.
Meadows, a British diplomat, published Desultory
Notes on
the Government and People of China (1847)
in which he described
the civil service system of China
and urged the institution in Britain of a
comparable
examination system for the recruitment, rating, and
advancement of civil servants. Through his statement
the problem was aired,
and in 1855 Britain created
its first civil service commission. Most of the
civil
service systems now in existence, including those
started before
the British system, owe an incalculable
debt to the Chinese example.
James Legge, in the 1850's, undertook the translation
into English of the
Confucian and Taoist texts, and
became the first professor of Chinese at
Oxford. His
pioneer translations, worked out with the aid of a
Chinese
assistant, have been criticized by modern
scholars as being ethnocentric
and inaccurate. None-
theless, they still
remain the standard English versions.
In France the Marquis d'Hervey
Saint-Denys published
a valuable anthology of T'ang poetry in 1852 that
was
influential among the literati of Europe. The Berlin
Orientalist,
Karl Arendt, rendered into German in the
1870's a number of selections from
Ming novels the
themes of which inspired poets and dramatists of the
following generation. Continental Sinologists also
wrote at length on
Chinese administration and inter-
national
affairs with increasing reliance on Chinese
sources. H. B. Morse in the
early twentieth century
organized for the English-speaking world the interna-
tional relations and commercial
administration of the
Chinese empire, mainly on the basis of Western
sources.
The study of China in relation to its continental
neighbors was given its
present structure in the works
Ser Marco Polo the Venetian with a complete scholarly
apparatus. His documentation, drawn from his personal
travel experiences as well as from the best available
literary sources, set a new standard for Eurasian studies.
He also edited the works of other medieval travelers
and his studies were continued and augmented by
Henri Cordier, a French diplomat and scholar. It was
Cordier who compiled the Bibliotheca Sinica (1904-08)
which remains the standard bibliography of Western
works on China. Paul Pelliot, the founder of the lead-
ing scholarly journal T'oung Pao (1890-), continued
the Yule tradition but with a greater attention to
monographic research. René Grousset, a French popu-
larizer of Asian studies, sought more self-consciously
than his colleagues to reinforce the literary sources
with materials derived from study of the visual arts.
The Protestants, originally hostile to Buddhism for
its outward resemblances
to Catholicism, began seri-
ously by the end
of the century to translate and study
its texts. Much of the growing
interest in the study
of Asian religions historically and on their own
terms
was due to the inspiration of Max Müller, the editor
of
the Sacred Books of the East (1875-1900). In this
collection he presents, side by side with other Oriental
books, most of the
Chinese philosophical and religious
texts in careful translations. The
availability in English
of this repository of material inspired serious
historical
and comparative studies of world religions.
Max Weber in his lengthy essays on Confucianism
and
Taoism, first published in 1916, brought China into
his sociology
of religion and more specifically into his
theoretical considerations about
the relationship be-
tween the Protestant ethic
and the spirit of capitalism.
These essays, which consider the social and
economic
as well as the religious foundations of Chinese society,
constitute one part of a series of comparative studies
designed to throw
light on the general question as to
why rational bourgeois capitalism
became a dominant
phenomenon only in the West. In
China, as in other
Asian societies, Weber concludes that the dominant
religious traditions did not possess an “economic
ethic”
compatible with capitalistic growth. He concedes
that
traditional China possessed the materialistic potential
for
capitalistic development, but contends that Confu-
cianism lacked the dynamism of ascetic Protestantism
since it
stressed rational adjustment to the world as
given rather than rational
mastery of it. Taoism he sees
as a conservative and negative force which
stressed
passive acceptance rather than innovation and activ-
ism. In his analysis of the structure and function
of
Chinese society, Weber provides startling insights into
the roles
of the bureaucracy, literati, and the kinship
system, which have inspired
numerous recent investi
gations in depth by specialists in social history. For
comparative religion, his examinations of Confucianism
and Taoism still
constitute empirical starting-points for
generalized typological concepts.
IX
In the early nineteenth century the reaction against
China as a model state
led to a more positive interest
in the Chinese as human beings. The sources
for this
new interest were found in the translations of popular
literature, especially poetry, which had become in-
creasingly available. A precursor of this trend was
Ludwig Unzer, the German poet, who published in
1773 an elegy entitled
Vou-ti bey Tsin-nas Grabe, eine
Elegie im
chinesischen Geschmack. In this poem, which
the young Goethe
criticized as contrived, Unzer sought
to depict the feelings of a Chinese
who is bereaved
at the death of his beloved. Unzer's allusions to
Taoist
beliefs and other Chinese attitudes are naive, but his
poem is
important as the first European effort to show
that the individual Chinese
is subject to the same
emotions as others when facing death.
Goethe, who had satirized the Chinese in his youth,
was in the final decade
of his life to express open
admiration for the Chinese attitude towards
nature, the
self-discipline and refinement of the people, and the
aesthetic qualities of Chinese literature. He was par-
ticularly moved by the Chinese poems which were
published in English translation in Peter Perring
Thoms' Chinese Courtship (1824). He rendered a few
of Thoms'
translations into his own poetic language
and epitomized others in his set
of lyrical poems called
Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten
(1827).
Friedrich Rückert published in 1833 his imitation in
freely paraphrased odes of the Shih-ching
(“Book of
Poetry”). The German romantic poets thus
deepened,
personalized, and beautified Europe's conception of the
Chinese. In their vision of Chinese imaginative life they
fused an
admiration for the intellectual resources of
the Chinese with a sensitivity
to Chinese creativity that
was not appreciated in the eighteenth century.
But not all of the German poets shared Goethe's
enthusiasm. Heinrich Heine,
at the beginning of the
third book of his Romantische
Schule (1833), used one
of the stories of Chinese beauties,
translated by Thomas,
to lend color to his own attack upon the
grotesque
character of German romanticism. Others in the ro-
mantic and Young German movements saw in
China
nothing but dry pedantry and tiresome automatism in
government.
The Liberals of the 1830's regarded China
as a model of the police state
that they so heartily
despised (see Rose, p. 314). The American Transcen-
dentalists, like the British
romantic poets, were con-
cerned more with
Indian than with Chinese thought.
Emerson, particularly the emphasis on the duty of the
individual to assume social responsibility. Tennyson
expressed the Victorian exasperation with a static and
unprogressive China by proclaiming: “Better fifty years
of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” (“Locksley Hall,”
line 184).
In France, Théophile Gautier, influenced by the
China specialist G.
Pauthier and the novelist René
Bazin, became at mid-century a
propagandist for
Chinese literature and art. He wrote stories and
verses
on Chinese themes, collected Chinese art, and talked
about
Oriental subjects with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and
Victor Hugo. His daughter,
Judith Gautier, who studied
Chinese with a tutor, translated Chinese poems
into
French verse in the Livre de jade
(1867). Her intention
was to transmit poetic quality rather than
linguistic
accuracy, a goal which has been retained by most
Western
translators of Chinese poetry ever since. She
also wrote several novels
about China and collaborated
with Pierre Loti in preparing a Chinese play entitled
La Fille du Ciel. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
who
were more interested in Japan than in China, were
among the first
to point out the debt of Japanese litera-
ture and art to China. Among those who fell under
the spell of the
Goncourts was Émile Guimet, an in-
dustrialist and founder of the Paris museum of Oriental
art that
still bears his name. Georges Clemenceau,
while not active in politics,
prepared just at the begin-
ning of the
twentieth century a play about China that
was inspired by his study of the
Chinese classics and
his reactions to the Boxer Rebellion.
Collection of Chinese art became popular in Europe
after 1860, the date of
the sacking of the summer
palace in Peking. The Boxer expedition of 1900
also
brought a windfall of Chinese art into the West. But
while
individual connoisseurs and museums built up
impressive collections of all
forms of Chinese art,
Western artists have so far not been inspired to
imitate
Chinese painting and sculpture. The influence of
Chinese art
in the West has been limited to a continu-
ation of the popular vogue for chinoiseries and the
decorative arts.
This is particularly surprising in the
light of the attraction that
Japanese color prints, archi-
tecture, and
furnishings have had for Western artists.
The visual arts have also had but
a small interest as
sources for China's social and intellectual history.
Only
in recent years, and especially in the works of C. W.
Bishop and
H. G. Creel, have the findings of archae-
ology been used in the West as aids in the reconstruc-
tion of China's ancient past.
The dispatch of Chinese students to the West on
Boxer fellowships and other
grants helped at the be-
ginning of the
twentieth century to stimulate a new
interest in Chinese thought. Irving Babbitt at Harvard
early
evinced an interest in the humane and moderate
qualities in Buddhism and
other faiths as they were
practiced in China. The Imagist poets,
particularly
Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, were attracted to
Chinese
poetry for its compact portrayal of universal
wisdom. In Germany, O. J.
Bierbaum, one of the lead-
ers of impressionist
art and culture, wrote novels and
poems on the basis of his own renditions
of Chinese
themes. He stressed the erotic elements and burlesqued
the
pompous characters of his Chinese literary sources.
More accurate
translations of the meaning and spirit
of Chinese poetry were provided in
Germany by
Richard Wilhelm, in America by Florence Ayscough,
and in
England by Arthur Waley. Through the efforts
of both poets and translators,
Chinese poetry, mythol-
ogy, and history
became a source of inspiration for
creative writers in the contemporary
West.
X
The industrial development of Europe and its ex-
pansion overseas in the mid-nineteenth century had the
general
result of forcing an end to the seclusion of both
China and Japan. China
was opened to Western pene-
tration by the
wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, and by
the treaties which followed. Japan was
opened by the
“black ships” of the Americans in
1853-54 and there-
after by a series of
treaties with the Western powers.
It was this train of events, observed and
commented
upon by Marx and Engels, which transformed quickly
the
belief in China's stagnation into a positive assertion
of Europe's
superiority. In his essay “On Liberty”
(1859), John
Stuart Mill envisaged China as a nation
victimized by despotic custom.
China's failure to im-
prove over the millennia
he attributed to the success
of the Chinese in repressing individuality and
mental
liberty, and in impressing uniformity of thought and
conduct
through education and state control. The yoke
of conformity to maxims and
rules weighs so heavily
upon society that, in Mill's view, if China is
“ever to
be farther improved, it must be by
foreigners.”
The Protestant missionaries were initially scornful
of Chinese society,
thought, science, and religion. Un-
like the
scholarly Jesuits, the conservative Protestants
of the Victorian age saw
little but vice and deprivation
in China. The work of the missionary, they
thought,
was to bring the light of Christ to the heathen Chinese
in
order to save them from eternal damnation. But
preoccupation with Chinese
language and literature
gradually brought a more enlightened generation
of
missionary scholars into being in Europe and America,
a generation
which took a more tolerant view of
Chinese civilization. For example, James
Legge, the
missionary linguist, concluded in 1867 after long study
as a great man; but by 1893 he admitted: “The more
I have studied his character and opinions, the more
highly have I come to regard him” (Mason, p. 204,
n. 33).
In the mid-nineteenth century the vast majority of
Europeans held widely
divergent and contradictory
views on Chinese society. Both missionary and
secular
writers praised the Chinese for mildness, docility, and
adaptability. They were also thought of as industrious,
shrewd, and
practical, but with a penchant for lying
and deceit without conscience.
Chinese of all social
levels were considered to be extremely polite,
urbane,
and courageous in facing personal adversities; but they
were
also thought to be cruel, sensual, and licentious.
“Of the earth
earthy,” in Legge's words, “China was
sure to go to
pieces when it came into collision with
a Christianly-civilized
power” (Dawson, p. 139).
The “scientific” historians of the nineteenth century,
in their preoccupation with national and European
history, rejected China
even for comparative purposes.
Leopold von Ranke in his Lectures on World History
(ca. 1830-48) pronounced as
“unhistorical” Hegel's
postulation of the eternal
stagnation of the Orient, and
classified the Hindus and Chinese as living
eternally
in a state of Naturgeschichte of a
completely secular
and unreligious character. Ranke then went on to
exclude China from history proper by asserting that
the Chinese sources are
mythical, unreliable, second-
ary, or
unavailable to one who does not read Chinese.
Jakob Burckhardt prized the
Western heritage so
highly that he completely excluded China from his
lectures in the fear that alien infiltrations might muddy
the limpid
stream. Ernest Lavisse, who shared Burck-
hardt's high regard for the West and his fears for the
future,
grimly prophesied in 1890: “All strength gives
out; the ability
to maintain the lead in history is not
a permanent attribute. Europe, which
inherited it from
Asia three thousand years ago, will perhaps not
always
keep it” (Vue
générale de l'histoire politique de
l'Europe, p. 239).
The potential wealth of China in natural resources
was spelled out for the
West in three large volumes
and an atlas published between 1877 and 1885
by
Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. In his China,
Richthofen gave for the first time a geographer's sys-
tematic estimate of China's economic
resources. He
called attention to the rich oil fields of Shantung and
Manchuria and to the huge reservoirs of capable labor
available in China.
The prospect envisaged by
Richthofen of an industrialized and modernized
China
was shortly transmuted in the West into the specter
known as the
“Yellow Peril.”
The threat of China to white, Christian supremacy
was raised repeatedly in the last third of the nineteenth
century by missionaries, racists, and military theorists.
Count Arthur de
Gobineau who theorized on the supe-
riority
of the white over the yellow and black races,
warned of the dangers to
white dominance from exces-
sive intermingling
with inferior breeds. Blood pollution
was identified by Houston Stuart
Chamberlain as a
threat to the superiority of the Teutonic supermen.
Kaiser William II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II
of Russia corresponded
after 1895 about “the Defense
of the Cross and the old Christian
European culture
against the inroads of the Mongols and
Buddhism...”
(Levine, Letters from the
Kaiser..., p. 10). The British
publicist, C. H. Pearson, prophesied in
1893: “We shall
wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled and
per-
haps even thrust aside by peoples whom
we looked
down upon as servile and thought of as bound always
to
minister to our needs” (National Life and
Character,
p. 85). In the United States, the Hearst press
warned
at the end of the century that more adequate defenses
were
needed to protect the American way of life
against the floodtide of
Oriental emigration. The ghosts
of the theorists were given flesh and bones
by the
startling military victory of Japan over Russia in 1905
and by
the swift rise thereafter of strong nationalist
and anticolonial sentiment
throughout the Far East.
XI
While it was generally alleged in the West that the
Chinese were
scientifically inept and militarily weak,
it also gradually became apparent
after 1860 that
China had staying-power as well. How was it possible
that the Chinese with all their adversities continued
to go their own way
and to remain singularly unim-
pressed with
the material superiority of the West?
Chinese immigrants proved to be
industrious, willing,
and honest workers who adapted successfully to
new
environments. The Chinese of the treaty ports were
also quick to
learn the ways of the West. The govern-
ment
in Peking, despite its obvious weakness, showed
a remarkable ability to
play off one Western power
against the other to preserve China from
partition.
Nationalist demands for the reform of the Manchu
government
and the development of an embryonic
industrial base in the Yangtse valley
during the 1860's
provoked Westerners to begin probing for the sources
of China's seemingly unquenchable vitality.
The basis for this new vision of China was not found
simply in the increased
knowledge and understanding
that resulted from closer contact. It also
emerged from
the belief that there was something to discover in
Chinese culture that the West did not possess at all
or possessed only to a
lesser degree. Growing disillu-
sionment
with the nationalistic, materialistic, capital-
leading thinkers to seek for new values and directions.
Joseph Ferrari, an Italian parliamentarian, wrote a
comparative study called La Chine et l'Europe (1867)
which denies that China is barbarous, static, or isolated
and asserts that its civilization merits attention as an
historical counterpoise to Europe. Eugène Simon, a
French agricultural expert and consul in China, pub-
lished La cité chinoise (1885; cf. Fustel de Coulanges,
La cité antique, 1864), which idealizes China as a
peasant society where liberty in all its forms—political,
economic, religious, and intellectual—is realized.
Simon's book, which was very popular, prophesied that
all European attempts to subject China to industriali-
zation, colonization, or modernization would fail be-
cause of the astounding vitality of the rural nation and
its naturalistic civilization. On contemporaries, Simon's
book, along with Richthofen's of about the same pe-
riod, had an impact out of all proportion to its intrinsic
importance. Paul Ernst, the German poet, was inspired
by Simon to adulate the collectivist peasant culture
of China for giving a higher place to spiritual than
to material values. Later in life Ernst took most of his
illustrations and inspirations from his study of Chinese
art, poetry, and Taoism. He eventually concluded that
China offered the rest of the world a unique meta-
physical revelation.
Tolstoy began to take an interest in China following
the religious crisis he
experienced in 1884. He read
widely, especially in the books of T. T.
Meadows and
Eugène Simon, on the political and social
organization
of China. Like Simon he was intrigued with Taoism
and the
peasant society of China and in his publications
he urged the Chinese not
to follow the way of the
West. He discerned a spiritual kinship among
China,
Russia, and the other great agrarian countries which
set them
apart from the industrialized, materialistic
West. He was especially
attracted by the Taoist doc-
trine that men by
their own efforts achieve harmony
with nature and that the role of
government should
be kept to a minimum. He also responded
affirmatively
to Confucian theories about the moral and immoral
effects of music. Tolstoy so greatly admired China that
he asserted just
before his death in 1910: “Were I young
I would go to
China” (Bodde, p. 29).
John Dewey first lectured at Peking in 1912, and
again after the First World
War. Along with his pupil,
Hu Shih, Dewey was disturbed by the popularity
of
“isms” in China. He urged Chinese and
Westerners
alike to study the problems themselves, propose work-
able solutions, and avoid the panaceas of
socialism,
anarchism, or bolshevism. Dewey was convinced that
socialism could have no roots in China because of its
low level of
industrial development. Bertrand Russell,
a devoted pacifist in World War I, spent one year
lecturing in
China during 1920. Although he was
known internationally as a socialist,
Russell felt that
industrialization in China could best be promoted by
a partially nationalized system of capitalism. In the
articles which he
wrote for Dial and the Atlantic
Monthly in 1921, Russell unabashedly asserted that the
Chinese
were more “laughter-loving than any other
race,” not
self-assertive either nationally or individ-
ually, avaricious for money for enjoyment rather than
power, and
socialist and scientific rather than capital-
istic and mechanistic in temperament. R. H. Tawney,
the British
historian and member of the League of
Nations Commission (1931-32) on the
reorganization
of education in China, likewise held a romantic notion
of the historical isolation of China and its effects upon
the growth of
institutions, ideas, and practices.
While disenchantment grew in the twentieth-
century West over China's inability to solve its own
political
and economic problems, inquiring minds
nonetheless continued to examine
China's past institu-
tions for fresh
ideas. Henry A. Wallace, as a progressive
American student of agriculture,
was inspired by
studying the economic principles of Confucius to ad-
vocate experimenting in the United States
with the
“ever-normal granary” idea of the Chinese.
When
Wallace became Secretary of Agriculture in 1933, he
continued to
work for a program that would provide
a constant supply of grain at all
times without serious
price fluctuations. In 1938 Wallace's program
became
part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a piece of
legislation
that owed its direct inspiration to Chinese
ideas and practices. At the end
of the Second World
War Wallace called for the internationalization of
the
“ever-normal granary” idea as a necessary step on
the
road to world recovery. In response to Wallace's sug-
gestions and the pressing needs of the
time, the United
Nations created a World Food Bank to establish and
manage a world food reserve. Heavy political attacks
from various nations
quickly brought an end to this
scheme.
Twentieth-century efforts at world history have self-
consciously sought to make room for China and to
integrate its civilization into the totality of history.
H. G. Wells, in
his Outline of History (1920) deplores
the fact that
Chinese culture has received such a
minimal treatment in world history.
While he strives
to bring China into his work at each appropriate
point,
his isolated paragraphs on China are sketchy to the
point of
being unintelligible. Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of
the West (1918-22) treats Chinese civili-
zation as an organism with a life cycle of its own that,
after
an initial flowering, fell into decay and putrefac-
tion. Arnold Toynbee in his monumental A Study of
sophical equivalence to Europe. But
the actual amount
of space devoted to Chinese civilization is nonethe-
less relatively slight. Toynbee's
ideas about the ori-
gins of the Yellow River
civilization as a response to
a challenging environment and his
chronological divi-
sions of Chinese history
have been severely attacked
by specialists. In William McNeill's The Rise of the
West (1963), China is for the first
time integrated
intelligibly into the history of the human community
by the stress that is placed on its relationship to
rather than its
isolation from other centers of civiliza-
tion.
Academic study of China in the West during the
twentieth century has mainly
been characterized by
greater attention to command of the language, to
in-
ternal developments, and to case
studies of village life,
social classes, bureaucracy, and the effects of
moderni-
zation and Westernization.
Translations from popular
literature have focused upon the novels and
dramas
of social and individual discontent. Western literary
creations
about China, especially those of Alice Tisdale
Hobart and Pearl Buck,
glorified the sturdiness of the
common man in meeting adversity and the
satisfactions
found by Chinese of all classes in the fullness and
vitality of the ancient culture. The resistance of China
to Japanese
aggression reawakened interest in the study
of China's relations with its
neighbors and in the na-
tion's ability to
survive in spite of foreign depredations
and internal political divisions.
To the end of World
War II the belief was commonly held that the
social
and cultural ties of traditional China were still solid
enough
to withstand fundamental changes.
XII
Lenin, originally wedded to the Marxist idea that
China suffered from the
system of production and
governmental despotism peculiar to Asia,
gradually
began by the First World War to shift to the view that
China
might become a future center of revolution and
social democracy. In his
writings of the war years,
Lenin dismissed as irrelevant the peculiar
character of
Asiatic society and sought to demonstrate that elimi-
nation of private property would lead
everywhere to
the victory of socialism. But in the 1920's he advocated
a closer union between the Western proletariat and
the Eastern toilers in
their common struggle against
traditional bondage and capitalistic
imperialism.
Trotsky, a close student of Chinese affairs, saw in
the economic
backwardness of China a positive in-
centive
to creative revolutionary action. In his theory
of permanent revolution
Trotsky envisaged China as
one of the leading elements in the movement
towards
global revolution and rapid social and economic
progress.
While he did not believe that the peasantry
as a class was devoted to international revolution, he
was
convinced by 1927 that a socialist revolution
would succeed in China. The
undirected political radi-
calism of the
Chinese would be swept towards social-
ism by
world revolutionary trends too powerful to be
resisted.
Stalin, once Lenin's influence was removed, began
to emphasize the
“feudal” character of China's agrar-
ian society and bureaucratic government, and to
deny
the common interests of the peasants and workers. Of
the three
types of class societies described by Stalin
(slave-holding, feudal, and
capitalist), Nationalist China
was to become the prototype for latter-day
Marxists
of the “feudal” or
“semi-feudal” society. Until his death
Stalin
remained convinced that the followers of Mao
Tse-tung were
“margarine Communists” and that rev-
olution based upon the peasantry would fail. In 1950,
the leading lights in Oriental studies in Russia declared
the complete
“rout of the notorious theory of the
'Asiatic mode of
production'” (Wittfogel, p. 5).
Karl Wittfogel, a close student of the Marxists and
Weber, finds the source
of Oriental Despotism (1957)
in what he defines as
the hydraulic society. The total
power characteristic of Asian states
derives in his eyes
from governmental management of the large-scale
works of irrigation and flood control necessary to the
development and
nurturing of agriculture. The class
that manages the government, not the
property-owners
or the workers, constitutes the dominant elite in such
societies. Agrarian despotisms, such as China, suffer
from landlordism,
capitalism, and domination by a
gentry inspired and sustained by the
administrative
bureaucracy. Social stagnation is characteristic of
hydraulic societies, and fundamental social changes in
them have been
affected historically only through the
impact of external forces. The
endurance of the Con-
fucian tradition in
China is a cultural expression of the
staying power of the monopoly
bureaucracy which
upheld it as the official credo. Even in Communist
China a managerial order has been retained which,
while differing from the
old bureaucracy in structure
and intent, owes a substantial debt to the
agrarian
despotism of traditional China.
The victory of communism in China in 1949 brought
sympathy and affection in
most Western powers to a
swift end. The treason of China to the West, and
to
Western expectations, set up a formidable, and through
the 1960's,
irreducible barrier to communication and
understanding. Communist China is
seen by those who
fear it as a growing industrial and nuclear power as
nothing but a belligerent and implacable foe. Respect
persists for its
ancient culture; but fear of a united,
efficient, and totalitarian China as
the leader of Asian
communism has come to override almost all other
considerations.
Throughout the history of modern Western thought,
China and its civilization
have been subject to a variety
of interpretations. The number increased
with the
passage of time, but no one interpretation was ever
completely lost. At all periods the West remained
undecided as to how best
to evaluate and relate to
Chinese civilization as a totality. A fascinating
ambi-
guity constantly appears between the
Westerner's view
of objective conditions in China, and his own vision
of European society in its relations to other civili-
zations. While the West's changing conception of
China strongly reflects the main currents of Western
intellectual history,
occasions arise when objective
conditions in China impress themselves upon
the cur-
rent image. To our own day China is
still conceived
of as being at once remote and fantastic, wise and
admirable, backward and inferior, and fearful and
dangerous. While it is
conceivable that these paradox-
ical
characterizations are entirely of the West's own
creation, they are also
reflections of the distortions that
inevitably occur whenever spokesmen of
one civili-
zation take a fixed position
from which to look at or
generalize upon an alien civilization of great
longevity
and complexity. The total impression which Westerners
possessed at every period derived from the prevailing
intellectual
conditions at home, the stereotypes in-
herited from the Western past, and the objective con-
ditions in China itself.
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DONALD F. LACH
[See also Buddhism; Enlightenment; Islamic Conception;Language; Marxism; Romanticism; Socialism.]
Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||