Part 42
Chinese bronzes date back as far as the imperial Chou dynasty (1120 B. C.) which instituted the sacrifices and ancestor worship, and a few majestically simple bronze tripods, elemental monsters and sacrificial vessels date back to the Shang dynasty 1800 B. C. These tripods are similar to those that Homer describes in the ninth book of _The Iliad_, 2500 B. C. The oldest bronzes are, of course, noble and plain in design, the warmer, richer art of Buddhism coming in at a far later date, and bringing in the innovation of the human figure, flowers and incense burners. The Natural History Museum at New York has precious collections of the old mortuary bronzes of the Chou dynasty referred to in Professor Parker’s illuminating work on the days of Confucius. Bronze vases, goblets, censers, mirrors, tablets, baskets, bells, some of them studded, are in the collection which dates as far back as 1800 B. C. Chinese form has been persistent, its ornamentation progressive. When we are looking at these bronzes, we should realize that they were fashioned by men contemporary with Homer. The oldest tombs were in Turkestan, Kansu and Shensi provinces, lying alongside the path of the primeval emigration along the Tarim’s banks from Eden. In various articles I have instanced the similarity between old Greek and old Chinese designs. The dragon was used in art designs and considered a sacred Jovian portent by the Homerian Greeks who were camped before Troy, B. C. 2500. In anthropological customs, Pope relates that the Homerian Greeks of the Euboea tribe, drawn up before Troy’s walls, 2500 B. C., shaved their foreheads but left the hair on the back of their heads to grow long, like the present Manchus.
The new bronze portrait statue of Li Hung Chang at the Sicawei Gardens, Shanghai, is unusual, and marks a new era in memorials in China, pailoo arches and tablets having formerly been erected. True, there are many fanciful statues to Buddha and Confucius, and one to Marco Polo in the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii at Canton, but they are rather to be considered as effigies. In Tibet, they erect engraved, square stone monuments, a figure of Buddha being cut into three of the top panels, representing the past, present and future Buddha. A horned roof, with a little central pagoda covers the monument. These strikingly symmetrical monuments are erected on high places along the mountain passes. The Buddhists cut gigantic figures of the god into cliffs, bushes serving as hair, and grass as eyebrows. Notable among these are the colossal cliff Buddhas at Kiating and Yung Hsien in Szechuen province. Old caves and cave-temples are generally in proximity with these images.
In Szechuen province, the piers of bridges have a stone dragon as a terminal, the head looking up-stream, and across the bridge, the tail pointing down-stream. The proportions are beautiful and the effect delightful. The best known and most beautiful camel’s back bridge in the empire is at Wan Hsien at the head of the Yangtze gorges. Stone steps mount up the arch, which is crowned with a beautiful house of blue stucco. The house is used as a rest place, and a restaurant These bridges show how much the Chinese understood of engineering and also that they were good masons. In the caves along the Min River in Szechuen province, pottery coffins have been found, dating back previous to the Christian era, and showing that the early Chinese of the Chou dynasty did not bring all the civilization of China with them, but found many arts among the aborigines. At Ning Hsia, an oasis city in the horn of Kansu province, is a peculiar pagoda where the joylessness of the north has cut the curling ten galleries down to mere ridges, and roofed the eleven stories with a mere turban roof. Each story has Roman windows, except the top, which has circular windows. The architecture shows Mohammedan influence over these Buddhists, and the structure, with that at Liangchow in the same province, is exceedingly unique in so ornate a land of up-curling roofs, carved screens, and overhanging galleries. While the Chinese never build fences, the Manchus, of Manchuria, construct a curious palisade composed of crosses, one end of which is stuck in the ground. The whole of the Grand Canal was crossed by many thousands of beautiful marble bridges, erected during the Sung dynasty. Many of them still remain, with their great beauty of aspiring arch, balustrade, carving and anchorage. At Sui Fu, on the upper Yangtze, is a temple remarkable not for its size, but for the proportion of its galleries and roof, the cornices of which curl upward violently at great width from the walls. The temple is met by steps that climb up the mountain side from the great river. The walls too, with their panels, frieze and balustrade, are interesting, but the design of the roof is an artistic triumph, equaled only by the Loong Wah Temple which is photographed as a frontispiece in my book, _The Chinese_. It is this sweeping boldness and generosity of curve which should be copied in roofs and galleries in the new Chinese architecture, which lovers of the old China earnestly recommend.
Many of the poorer huts of Pechili province are built of clay poured around a reinforcing of kaoliang stalks. Sometimes tiles are set in the clay roof, which is very heavy, and in the rainy season, it often falls in on the tenant. In Kiangsu province the thatching is made of reeds. Of course improvements are often designed, and they attempt to make a cement or chunam by mixing burnt lime and stone in the clay. The very poor, however, really live in mud burrows like the fox, whether the mud is made into a hut, or the dwelling is cut as a cave in the loess hills of Shensi and Shansi provinces. The Manchurian and northern Pechili style of architecture is severe and strong, but it has its simple beauties. A Buddhist temple not far from Shan Hai Kwan is a good example. A plain brick and stucco wall, the height of the eaves of the buildings, surrounds the compound. It is broken by a fort-gate, with a Roman arched doorway. The tiled roofs of the fort and temple curl up only slightly. A few high pine trees, branching out only near the top, tower like nature’s banners over the temple, which is matched to the austere lives and buildings of the dwellers in the north. The proportions throughout are nobly and chastely balanced in accord with the architectural influence of the stern Great Wall throughout this region.
At the Edinburgh Mission Conference of the nations in 1908, the Chinese pleaded for the preservation of their architecture. Too great praise can not be given the British for their taste in occupying a Chinese palace as legation headquarters at Peking. Many missions, every foreign business house, nearly every foreign college, the government itself in its new buildings, even the kindred Japanese, and nearly every foreign legation, are all housed in an ugly adaptation of a Renaissance building with verandas. The fashion came from Singapore and Hongkong, but Hongkong gets some picturesqueness out of the style because that colonial city has a mountain to terrace it on. The ventilation and light are poor; the roof is hideous. There is one foreign architect whose soul will never escape from the purgatory of bad architects. He designed for the Honan Assembly a hall at Kaifong which is Moorish in general design; the roof is a Roman dome; the arches are Gothic; and the screens are Chinese. The Japanese do not bring their own beautiful buildings, like those gems, the incomparable Horiuji pagoda and monastery, Yakushiji pagoda; and the shrine of Ieasu at Nikko, to China, and they do not copy or adapt any of the tens of thousands of Chinese gems. They often build a ponderous, ugly, dark, Renaissance building like the Japanese consulate at Shanghai, costly enough but unrepresentative.
St. John’s University (American Episcopal), of Shanghai, has made the laudable concession of putting a Chinese roof on its valuable foreign buildings. The eaves have a slight Chinese up-turn, but there is little of Chinese ornament in apron, ridge, column, double roof, or pagoda spire here and there. However, America, nearly always the leader in sympathy with the Chinese, has here made a beginning in saving China’s peerless architecture and art. At Kweiyang, the capital of Kweichou, the French have erected a notable pagoda church, which concedes to Chinese canons a five-story pagoda entrance, and the rear façade is formed as a pailoo with five roofs. With the same idea the British architect has placed on the costly Renaissance “Audience Hall”, of Bangkok, three ornate Burmese pagoda spires. As Greece stands for simplicity and line, China stands for richness, curve and color. She should not die, if according to Keats, “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Ruskin insisted in his famous lectures to artistic Edinburgh that the salient feature of a building was the _roof_, and that there adornment should be rich, like a woman’s hair, or hat, her “crown of glory”. This rule, perhaps indirectly, he took from the Chinese, who from the buried centuries have undeviatingly been faithful to it. The _Assembly Herald_ of the American Presbyterian Church, January, 1912, page twenty-seven, illustrates a gem of modern Chinese architecture. It is a chapel built by a native elder in his simple but beautiful faith. On each side of the entrance there is a rich tile grille that relieves the plain façade. Under the eaves is another beautiful grille that relieves the plain surface. Over the door is a heavy tile canopy with characteristic up-curling points. The tile roof is peaked and might have been more up-curling at the eaves in the beautiful, characteristic Chinese style. The apron under the eaves is richly carved. The Chinese still have a strong rich grasp of beauty, when they are encouraged to develop their architecture.
It is not the custom in stores, temples or homes to keep curios, silks, etc., on view. They are all wrapped in paper, and kept in boxes or cupboards. When a trusted guest arrives, there is an exciting scene as the treasures are unpacked and revealed to admiring eyes. China has always had court painters, a notable one in the reign of the Empress Dowager Tse Hsi being Li Shih Chuan. He was a believer in joy, and developed the more human aspects of the countenance. He was a master in painting fine gowns, dainty embroideries and rich furniture. Portrait paintings are not common, but in the Yangtze provinces some are to be seen. They are in water color and painted on screens. Actors carry an enormous bamboo or ivory tusk, on which is engraved or painted their repertoire. The giver of a feast selects from this the plays which he wishes to have performed for his guests. The Chinese manufacture a hard wall-paper, similar to what we call Lincrusta Walton and use on the walls of our parlor cars and saloons of steamships. The mold is of hard wood, on which the sharp design is carefully chiseled _en relievo_. The blotter-like bamboo paper composition is hammered on this mold, then taken off and sun-dried. Sizing is applied. Afterward the design and final Ningpo or Szechuen rhus-nut varnishing is added. This paper is damp proof, which is an important quality in so humid a climate.
The Chinese of Queens Road, Hongkong, made me two bamboo trunks that have served me on a trip around the world, and are strong enough to make several more. They are remarkable in five important points, elasticity, lightness, strength, resistance to dampness, and cheapness in purchase price and transportation cost. Travelers and explorers bemoan the fact that excess baggage charges cost them almost as much as passenger fares. This problem the wonderful Chinese solved with these remarkable trunks. The framework is of strong bamboo, on which a tough rattan and bamboo envelope is wound. This is lined with soldered zinc, and covered with strong canvas, and for serviceability in the five important points mentioned, the iron and leather trunks can not compare. Go to the Chinese, thou traveler, and be wise! Many of the chairs used at Tientsin have a dome-top, with curious scale design and knob, and are therefore more Burmese than Chinese in design. The chairs of Hongkong are strictly flat-topped. Jade is green, pink and crystal, and retains a soapy glisten. Jades buried in tombs as mortuary ornaments, however, acquire a brown smoky tinge, and the distinction should be made in assorting collections at museums. The Bishop collection of art jades, and the Peters collection of tomb jades in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, are deservedly world famous.
The typical Chinese rug shows beautiful apricot ground, spangled with blue medallions. Rich brown and gold rugs are also frequently made, the centers of weaving being Tientsin, Nanking, Hangchow, Canton, etc. The most accessible places where specimens are shown are the large museums. The yellow rugs are used in China in connection with the red tile floorings, and the brown rugs are used often upon blue-tiled floorings, so that if one would catch the true Chinese ensemble, a colored crash must be used in connection with the rugs. Some critics are hasty in declaring that a Chinese rug is glaring when they place a yellow rug on a yellow floor! Chinese rugs were made generally for temples, imperial and viceregal yamens, mandarins’ yamens, and guild halls, as the designs often reveal. Rugs exist which were woven as long ago as the reign of the native Ming kings, fifteenth century. Other rugs date from the Kang Hi and Chien Lung reigns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Temple rugs five by eight feet, or a little over, come from Buddhist monasteries. The ground, as one would expect, is orange, ornamented with clouds, water, figures of Buddha or his mother, Kun Yam, and the zodiac. Imperial Manchu rugs employ the Manchu dragon. Each rug differs slightly, as the artist trusted to his eye alone in following the pattern which hung over his head.
China is almost depleted of her ceramic treasures. The Anglo-French expedition of 1860 under Lord Wolseley destroyed the Emperor Hien Fung’s summer and other palaces near Peking. Some of the allies of 1900 looted Peking itself. The Manchus in the 1911–12 revolution sold the Peking, Mukden and Jehol palace treasures. The collection of the Roman Bishop of Peking, Monsieur Favier, gathered during a long life, was sold in New York in 1912. The Taiping rebellion of 1854 swept bare the pottery province of Kiangsi, and the distress following the 1911–12 revolution and the floods of 1910–11–12 sent the hidden treasures of the Yangtze and Hwei River provinces to the block. An artist of the King Teh Ching potteries would now have to resort to Occidental museums to find his models of cloisonné and champlevé enamels studded with precious stones; yellow and red Lang Yao monochromes of inimitable purity; Ku Hsu Hsuan translucent glass; Kang Hi hawthorn, ginger, and peach-bloom vases, round and square; Yung Cheng landscape and fish vases; flaming jars of the royal Mings; egg shell, rose, green, peony, medallion, dragon, lion vases and plaques of Yung Cheng and Chien Lung periods; the joyous, finely finished pottery of the Kang Hi (seventeenth century period); the rugged, strong, stern work of the tenth century; strutting camels, grinning griffins, spirited horses; the elegant, soft Ming work; the square, flower-covered, green and yellow vases of the sixteenth century; bulging vases of the seventeenth century, with green decoration on a blue ground, as fine as a mixture of emeralds and amethysts; awful gods and funny men stepping about in priceless porcelain. It was not a slight price that to attain political liberty China had to lose her artistic soul. More fortunate Japan never had to pay this price, though she had little art and architecture to lose as compared with the rich and glorious treasures of vast China. A remarkable catalogue of Chinese porcelains with two hundred and fifty-four gorgeously colored plates was written by Messrs. Gorer and Blacker and published by Quaritch, London, in 1912.
In an attempt, even so late, to save China’s art from the foreigner, the public-spirited Tze Tsan Tai, of Hongkong, a collector himself, proposes the establishing of national museums to preserve at least the paintings of China that are notable for their graphic quality, color, humor and love of nature. The most famous schools were in the Sung, Yuan and Ming dynasties, and Mr. Tze’s collection, which he proposes to give to the cause, includes collections from many other schools also. It would be better to open at first museums at Hongkong and Shanghai, and then at Peking, Nanking, Hankau, etc. Some of the names of the artists can be secured in Paleologue’s _L’Art Chinois_, Owen Jones’ _Chinese Ornament_, Dyer Ball’s _Things Chinese_, and E. F. Penellosa’s _Epochs of Chinese Art_.
Chinese temple and house furniture is made of teak. This wood does not grow in China, but in Siam, Java, Ceylon and the Philippines, the main source of supply being the afforested belt of Northern Siam. The tree is an upland one. It is barked or girdled and allowed to die. After two years the tree is felled, the exposure killing off the small branches and developing the oils which help in giving the extraordinary life of the wood. The government does not permit trees of under six and one-half feet girth to be felled. The Chinese of Canton particularly carve the wood in its rich red color, and they also stain it ebon black. Another desirable quality in the Orient is that the wood resists the white ant. The woodwork and furniture of the palatial Hongkong Club is teak, and many of Hongkong’s, Canton’s, Shanghai’s, Manila’s and San Francisco’s palatial residences and public buildings and yachts now use the wood. Hard as it is, the Chinese seem to prefer to saw it by hand even in Hongkong. They tilt the immense logs on end, and one man works under the log, and one stands on the log, the dust being dragged upward by their contrary cut saws, which are designed to save the eyes of the under-man. The natural oil in the wood prevents driven nails or bolts from rusting, and is therefore valuable in ship-sheathing. It is the most durable wood known. The teak piles of West End, Hongkong, and Kowloon over on the mainland, are a unique sight. Water-buffaloes are used to drag up the immense timbers.
A Chinese proverb is, “Speed for a horse, but a slow race for a good jeweler”. The German machinery-stamping jeweler has not yet reached the Orient with his machines, though his products imitate even the Chinese ideograph-buckles. One of their humorous proverbs is, “He thought he painted a tiger, but only a dog waged his tail at the likeness”, and this is about the relationship between the Chinese and the German products. Wherever you buy, remember the artist can put his soul and his taste only into what he makes by hand.
XXX
SOCIOLOGICAL CHINA
When America was as yet undiscovered, and Europe was largely a forest inhabited by hunting tribes, China had taken up an advanced position on sociology. She has long been the world’s clearest and bravest economical thinker, from whom even Germany has consciously or unconsciously copied, and for thousands of years she has followed a thorough civil service in political appointments. It is not surprising therefore that Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the organizer of the revolution of 1911–12, the first president of republican China, and the leading economist of the race, enunciated himself as follows on April 5, 1912: “I have finished the political revolution and now will commence the greatest social revolution in the world’s history. The abdication of the Manchus is only the beginning of a greater development, and the future policy of the republic will be in the direction of socialism. I am an ardent admirer of Henry George, whose ideas are practicable on the virgin soil of China, as compared with their impracticability in Europe or the United States, where the money is controlled by the capitalists. I have the full consent of the new republican government to start a propaganda immediately, whereby the railroads, mines, and similar industries, will be controlled by the government. The single tax system, and as far as possible, free trade, will be adopted.”
Shang, a minister of the Tsin clan of Confucius’ time--the age of courageous statesmen--said: “To restore balance in the state, and remove the dangerous discontent of the poor, renew taxes on the privileged classes.” The Chinese predate all that we claim in America, Britain and Germany as the modern discovery of the formulæ of sociology, economics, commerce, taxes and tariffs, and their aim is always toward free trade, repression of monopoly, opportunity for the ordinary man, who, instead of the privileged, represents the importance of a state, and the necessity of the greater punishment of the rich than the poor for the same offense, because hunger and self-preservation do not drive the rich to crime. Under the ancient criminal code, the hsiang lao (village head) under penalty of the bamboo, must compel all available land to be cultivated, not only that government may receive taxes, but that famine may be averted. The Chinese, Koun Tze, as early as B. C. 100, wrote: “The more horses that are put to the chariots of the rich, the more those who are poor will have to walk.”
“The more the houses of the rich are vast and magnificent, the more those of the poor will be small and miserable.”
“The more the tables of the rich are covered with dainties, the more people there will be reduced to plain rice.”
“At all costs, government should secure to all, all the necessities of life.”
This last sentence is worthy of being linked with the immortal epigram in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.
Other notable economic writers were Tsien Tche and Leang Tsien, but towering above them all for adaptability to the convictions and crying necessities of our day was Wang Ngan Shih, 1069 A. D., a Rooseveltian statesman of the Sung dynasty, whose capital was the present Kaifong. Remember that this statesman-author wrote when William the Conqueror was putting England under the yoke of feudalism, which hated the principles of liberty. Wang taught partly as follows:
1. The first duty of government is to secure plenty and relaxation for the common people.
2. The state should take possession of all important resources and become the main and dictating employer in commerce, industry and transportation, with the view of preventing the working classes being ground to the dust by the monopolizing rich.
3. Government tribunals should fix the local prices of provisions and merchandise.
4. The rich shall pay all taxes; the small owner shall pay nothing as long as he remains small.
5. Old age pensions.
6. The state to insure work for workmen.
7. The state to assign land, distribute seed and direct sowing, so that there shall neither be cornering of food by the rich, nor lack of food for the poor.
8. Destruction of usurers.
9. Confiscation of large and criminally-won estates; that is, retroactive laws and restitution, instead of “Go and sin no more, but keep what you got by former sins.”