CHAPTER XXII.

_ARTS AND INDUSTRIES._

Porcelain.--Bronzes.--Silver-work.--Pictures.--Architecture.-- Tea.--Silk.--White Wax.--Grass cloth.--Ivory Fans.--Embroidery.

Even if I had the knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to write exhaustively of Chinese porcelain in one chapter; but a few shreds of information about it may be new to the general reader. Julien's theory that it was first made between the years 185 B.C. and A.D. 87 is set aside by Dr. Hirth, the greatest living authority upon ancient Chinese porcelain. The latter believes it was first made during the Tʽang Dynasty, which lasted to A.D. 907; but there are no specimens of porcelain extant before the Sung Dynasty, which ended in 1259, the majority even then being of the class known as "celadons," which survived owing to their thickness and strength. The prevailing colour of these celadons is green, the colour of jade; and yellow is mentioned as one of the ingredients used for producing this colour. They were mostly made in the south-west of the province of Chekiang, taken by river to the Amoy waters, and thence distributed by Arab traders to Japan, Borneo, Sumatra, the west of Asia, and the east coast of Africa, in which last, curiously enough, large numbers have been discovered. They have been freely imitated at King-teh-chen, the great porcelain factory of China, as well as in Japan; but collectors should, it seems, have no difficulty in distinguishing the genuine articles, from their extreme hardness.

The safest guide to Chinese porcelain is Hsiang-tse-ching, who was collecting and cataloguing it whilst Shakespeare was writing his early poems, and whose richly illustrated catalogue has been translated. The most exquisite Chinese porcelain seems to have perished from its fragility, and the extraordinarily large demands of the Imperial Palace had apparently in old days the same effect European demands are said to have now. When the Palace ordered a hundred thousand pairs of cups or vases--the Chinese always want pairs--naturally the Government factories were obliged to supplement the most expensive and rare colours by others less costly and more simple, whilst the highest order of artistic excellence had to give way to mechanical repetition. Modern collectors get the bulk of their specimens from the dispersion of articles furnished to meet such vast orders; and the Ming porcelain is naturally somewhat coarse in make, faulty in shape, and decorated with paintings which, though characterised by boldness of design, have usually been executed without much care.

The ancient bronzes of China only became an object of interest to Chinese collectors about eight centuries ago. From that date on great attention has been paid to the inscriptions upon ancient vases, and it is very difficult to deceive Chinese archæologists, from their thorough knowledge of their own past history. A vase dating from the Chow Dynasty, and preserved at Silver Island near Chinkiang, has attracted especial attention. A former Viceroy of Kwangtung, Yuen-yuen, writing at the beginning of this century, describes his visit to Silver Island to see this vase. He examined it critically, and described it minutely in his four-volume archæological collection. He studied its colour, shape, and dimensions, and especially the inscriptions of forty characters. He was himself a scholar of the highest attainments, and his judgment in regard to the epoch to which this valuable relic of former ages belongs has been accepted and endorsed by succeeding scholars. The vase was much coveted by the notorious Yen-sung, an unprincipled statesman, who made great efforts to add it to his private collection in Peking in the Ming Dynasty. Yuen-yuen refers to these abortive designs, because, Yen-sung being a good judge of all relics of old times, this is an additional testimony to the genuine antiquity of the vase, and it indicates the deep interest felt in it by the archæologists of the Ming Dynasty. Beside the descriptions of it in the ordinary works which give details on bells and vases generally, monographs have been published on this particular vase showing that the best-informed native scholars are at one in the regard felt for it as genuine.

Twenty years ago the _Chin Shih So_ was published, and this work with its profuse illustrations helped to spread the knowledge both of the new-found Han Dynasty sculptures and of the earlier bronze vessels. Rich men and scholars became sensible of the great pleasure to be derived from archæological research. And this has become a real feature of modern Chinese life. Men of means and leisure visit all celebrated monuments to study them for themselves, and take back with them rubbings to preserve at home. The large demand that there is in China for rubbings of ancient inscriptions is very remarkable. The bells and vases have now, like the stone drums, after much cautious inquiry and no little collision of opinion, secured a place stronger than ever in the judgment of the well informed in the Chinese reading class.

"It was about A.D. 166 that a king of Rome sent an embassy which arrived from the borders of Annam, bringing tribute of ivory, rhinoceros-horn, and tortoise-shell. From that time began the direct intercourse with that country. The fact that no jewels were found among the articles of tribute must be accounted for by the supposition that the ambassadors retained them for themselves." In the following century, the third, Western traders resorted to Canton; so that it appears the Cantonese have been afflicted by the presence of barbarians for no less than sixteen hundred years. Possibly this explains how the Mæander pattern on old Chinese bronzes so resembles the Greek "key" pattern, and why the lions' heads at the approach to the tomb of the first Ming Emperor at Nanking have rings in their mouths, thus exactly resembling the lions' heads so often to be seen on the mahogany cellarettes of our grandfathers, possibly also why the Chinese Buddhist ritual and that of Roman Catholics are so strikingly similar.

According to Dr. Hirth, paper already existed in China in the second century. But to leave these ancient researches and come down to modern times.

It was a real pleasure to me at Kiukiang to see Chinamen hammering away at silver ornaments exactly after the method advocated in Mr. Leland's (Hans Breitmann's) excellent volume in the Art at Home Series, and just as so many amateurs are now making admirable brasswork at home--laying a thin sheet of metal on pitch, and working at the background with a hammer and sharpened nail or punch, thus making the pattern, previously traced out, start into high relief. The more roughly this work is done, the handsomer is its effect; so that it seems better suited for brass sconces for candles or doorplates than for silver hair ornaments. But it was pleasant to find these Chinamen in their little shops provided with a plentiful supply of sharpened nails, together with the familiar punches.

It is not an equal pleasure to study modern Chinese paintings. Centuries have passed since they were what we must imagine from the story of Wu Taotze, the Chinese Giotto, who flourished in the eighth century. It is related that, when he was commanded to paint a landscape upon the walls of the great Hall of Audience at the Palace, he begged that he might work alone and undisturbed. When he announced that all was ready, the Emperor and the Court, on entering, found the artist standing alone in front of a great curtain. "As the folds of drapery rolled away, a marvellous and living scene was spread out before the amazed spectators,--a vast perspective of glade and forest, hill and valley, with peaceful lakes and winding streams, stretching away to a far horizon closed in by azure mountain-peaks; and in a wild, rocky foreground, in the very front of the picture, stood a grotto, its entrance closed by a gateway. 'All this, sire, is as naught,' said the painter, 'to that which is concealed from mortal gaze within.' Then at a sign the gate opened, and he passed through, beckoning his royal master. But in a moment, before the entranced Emperor could move a step, the whole eerie prospect faded away, leaving the blank and solid wall. And Wu Taotze was never seen again."

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard----" The pictures that never were painted, the poems that never were written!--the Chinese thought it all out long ago, how those that were only imagined were the best. And yet we think them a people without sentiment or artistic sensibility--we, with our fairest scenes disfigured by coarse advertisements, every silken detail in our theatres given us by Mr. So-and-so, only the acting left out.

The glorious white falcon attributed to the Emperor Hui Tsung at the beginning of the twelfth century and the exquisite pictures of flowers and birds to be seen at the British Museum show whence the Japanese borrowed their art inspiration; but in China, its birthplace, it is wanting now, though probably in many rich official residences glorious specimens are still to be found such as I have myself been delighted by in Japan, where alone and at the British Museum I have seen Chinese masterpieces of painting. Before Giotto was born the Chinese were painting living human figures such as they cannot paint now. It is, however, true that in Chungking, the only Chinese city I know really well, there is to this day an artist who paints flowers as a connoisseur, the head of an English technical school, pronounced only one man in England could. And how does this poor artist sell his pictures? Of course, it will never be believed in England that he is an artist at all, when I tell the sad truth--he sells them by the square foot! And when you decide to buy a picture, he--measures it!

The popularly received opinion is that there is no architecture in China. Houses and temples alike are built with wooden pillars, raised off the ground upon stone bases. The roofs are placed upon the pillars, and only when the roofs are finished are the walls built up like screens. The proportions often strike me as very beautiful; and the cunningly contrived perspectives add much to their dignity. But, as in Japan, whilst moved to admiration by the approach, one often has a disappointed feeling of not arriving at anything in the end. At the same time, the conception of a Chinese house, like the design of Peking, strikes me as very lordly; the courtyards are extremely graceful and elegant, whilst the beautiful sweep of the roofs makes European roofs painfully mean by comparison. Indeed, a European house now usually gives me the same effect as a face would divested of eye-lashes. The Chinese roofs in the west of China and at Peking are, however, far more beautiful than those generally to be seen along the east coast.

To turn to Chinese industries. When tea was first discovered, all sorts of medicinal properties were attributed to it. It is to be hoped the virtue lay rather, as we are told now it does with whisky-and-water, in the hot water; for if not, what does the poor Tibetan get out of the _£_150,000 he is said to spend on tea at Tachienlu, the frontier city--for 65 per cent. of wild scrub leaves, scrub oak, etc., are said to be mixed up in the brick tea he receives? And the cost of the tea in the Tachienlu market is nearly doubled before the Tibetan receives it at Batang; at Lassa it has quadrupled its price. It is only for the last four centuries the Tibetans have had silver to exchange for tea; till then it was exchanged for horses, a good horse being valued at 240 lb. of tea. Even to this day the tea trade is much too limited for the four million of Tibetans; and the many thousand Tibetans who cannot afford tea use oak bark instead, astringency being the quality they desire to relieve them from headache and excessive meat-eating. The tea trade with Russia still thrives; but that with Europe has been killed by the much more carefully grown and prepared tea of Ceylon and India--though melancholy experience must ere long teach people that this tea has altogether other and more undesirable properties than the soothing, refreshing beverage of China.

It is, however, no wonder that the China tea trade has languished. Home industries are universal in China, and each peasant who farms a bit of land grows his tea, picks it and dries it, according to his own ideas. To introduce any improvement it would be therefore necessary to educate the great mass of peasant cultivators. European tea-buyers' exhortations have so far proved fruitless; and it is distressing to see the utter want of care with which the tea-plant, with its glossy green leaves and delicate white blossom, is treated, compared with the untiring labour expended upon the poisonous poppy-plant. The latter is carefully weeded, planted in regular lines, with the earth mounded round its roots, and presents an appearance of the most perfect vigorous health, with its erect stalk over five feet high, its blue-green leaves, and beautiful blossoms. Sometimes it stands out brilliant crimson against a transcendently blue sky, making the eyes ache with the gorgeous colour contrast; at others it is white, delicately fringed and pink-tipped, or pink, or scarlet, or scarlet and black, or with the purple of the purple iris, or oftenest of all--and perhaps, after all, most beautiful--white of that frail fair whiteness that makes it impossible to think of crime or vice as connected with it--impossible even to believe in the existence of so foul a weed as vice being able to exist in a world that produces so frail and pure a flower, able to stand upright in the full heat of a China noonday sun and remain unwilted. The tea-shrubs, on the other hand, are old and gnarled, planted irregularly just anywhere, and never by any chance weeded. The same want of care is shown in the drying of the young leaves, picked just as they are opening out off their young shoots. At the same time, if Scotland would take to China tea, there would not be so many cases of tea-poisoning as there now are in Glasgow; but the beverage is a mild one, that must seem tasteless to whisky-drinkers. It has the further apparent disadvantage that an equal amount of leaf will not make anything like the same strength of decoction that Indian tea will.

China silk is also in a bad way; but, indeed, all over the world now it seems difficult to get healthy silkworm eggs. To turn, however, to an especially Chinese industry, and one which still seems to me even, after seeing it, to border on the marvellous--the white or vegetable wax of China. The processes essential to its use began about six centuries ago. The tree which produces the white wax insect grows in the Chienchang valley, on the far or western side of the unconquered Lolos, a valley about five thousand feet above the level of the sea. The Kew authorities pronounce that this tree is the _Ligustrum lucidum_, or large-leaved privet, an evergreen with very thick dark-green glossy foliage, bearing clusters of white flowers in May and June, succeeded afterwards by fruit of a dark-purple colour. In March brown excrescences become visible, attached to the branches; and if these be opened, a crowd of minute insects, looking like flour, will be discovered. Two or three months later these develop into a brown insect with six legs. And as the Chinese have discovered that these insects would not continue to flourish on the trees, their birthplace, they make them up into paper packets of about sixteen ounces each; and porters, each carrying sixty of these packets, hurry by night along the dangerous mountain paths to Kiating, a city about two hundred miles to north and east, and place them there on severely pollarded trees of the _Fraxinus chinensis_. It is this flight by night that has always fascinated my imagination, even before I traversed the successive high mountain passes, descending into the valleys over-grown by ferns and lit up every here and there by waxy clusters of the beautiful begonia flower that there flourishes as a wallflower. But it would be impossible to carry the insects through the noonday heat, as it would develop them too fast. Therefore, at the season of the carriage of the insect, all the city gates along the route have to be left open at night to facilitate the passage of the army of running porters. And to think of the rough, rocky ascents and descents those poor porters have to stumble along! The packages of insects are each wrapped in a leaf of the wood-oil tree; rice straw is used to suspend the packet under the branches of the ash-tree; rough holes are drilled in the leaf with a blunt needle, so that the insects may find their way out; and they creep rapidly up to the leaves of the ash-tree, where they nestle for about thirteen days. They then descend to the branches, and the females begin to develop scales on which to deposit their eggs, and the males to excrete what looks like snow as it coats the under side of the boughs and twigs, till at the end of three months it is a quarter of an inch thick. The branches are then lopped off, and the wax removed, chiefly by hand, and placed in an iron pot of boiling water, where it rises to the surface, is skimmed off, and deposited in a rough mould. This is then the extraordinary hard white wax of commerce, used to coat the ordinary tallow candles, and give the tallow greater consistence, thus enabling the Chinese to carry tallow candles about in the paper lanterns that supply still the place of lamps, gas, and electric lighting for the greater part of China. It is used also to size paper and cotton goods, as furniture polish, and to impart a gloss to silk.

There is a tribute of white wax sent every year to Peking; and to see it going down-river in native junks, or being trans-shipped from that more romantic mode of travel into an ordinary steamer, has a certain fascination for me: but the real romance about the white wax is that hurried midnight journey across the Szechuan mountains before it has ever come into the world at all. And it rather spoils the interest than otherwise to be told such dry facts as that from Hankow every year fifteen thousand piculs of white vegetable wax are exported, Chinkiang, Tientsin, Canton, and Swatow each requiring one thousand piculs, Shanghai absorbing seven thousand, and exporting four thousand more to other places. But any one who has been benighted on a lonely hillside or on the banks of some unknown river knows the transport of delight with which a light in the distance is recognised. With what joy one gradually convinces oneself it is coming towards one, and in the end has to restrain oneself from embracing the always sympathetically joyful lantern-bearer; and so in those twinkling lights along little-trodden paths, or in scattered Chinese homesteads of many curves and courtyards, once more the romance attaching to the white wax reasserts itself.

Grass-cloth is another very interesting Chinese industry. It is produced from a nettle, and with large wooden things like butter-pats and a rough bamboo thumb-protector the women beat out the fibre on the threshing- or drying-floor in front of the farmsteads. I often wonder grass-cloth is not more common in England. Perhaps it lasts too long to pay to import. It is very cool, and like a glossy kind of linen, but far more durable. Cotton goods are made at home. They do not crease as our cottons do; they let the air through like cellular goods, and are therefore very wholesome wear in summer; and they last for ever.

Ningpo carvings, fanciful and rich, but in rather perishable wood, Canton ivory carvings, and silks generally, are too well known to need description. Only, till I went to China, I had no idea new patterns of silks came out nearly every year even in that most conservative country, and are much sought after. Fans are recorded as having been used to keep the dust from the wheels of the chariots as far back as the Chow Dynasty, 1106 B.C. Ivory fans were invented by the Chinese 991 B.C.; but it was not till the fifteenth century the folding-fan, long before invented by the Japanese, found its way into China. In the west of China it is, however, still not etiquette to carry such a fan to a party; for it looks as if you had no servant to stand behind your chair and hold it for you when you do not want it. The Chinese ivory fans are carved all over right through till the whole looks like lace, the part not taken up by the design being very delicately cut in short perpendicular lines.

But probably the art and industry carried to the greatest perfection in China is that of embroidery. English people do not appreciate what Chinese embroideries really are, because such a quantity of work is done by men working at frames, and merely for so much a day. The best has always been done by ladies, working at home, and putting all the fancy of a lifetime into a portière, or bed-hanging. One of the most fairylike pieces of embroidery I have ever seen was mosquito-curtains worked all over with clusters of wistaria for either the Emperor or Empress, and somehow or other bought, before being used, out of the Imperial Palace by a European collector. The rich yet delicate work upon the very fine silky material made these mosquito-curtains a thing to haunt the dreams of all one's after-life.

Whilst, however, the handiwork of the Chinese appears to me unsurpassed, and their colour arrangements in old days, before the introduction from Europe of aniline dyes, are much more agreeable to me than those of Japan, there seems to be nothing to satisfy the soul in Chinese artistic work, which gratifies the senses, but appeals to none of the higher part of man. I should, however, say quite the same of that of Japan, which got all its art originally from China, and has never, I think, quite arrived at the ancient dignity of Chinese art, although at the present day Japan's artistic work is certainly far more graceful and pleasing.

One day in the neighbourhood of Shanghai we walked along a path where, marvellous for China, two people could walk abreast, and, crossing a variety of creeks in a variety of ways, came upon the ruins of a camp, finally reaching two tall chimneys, a landmark in the scene. Our puzzle was what fuel they could possibly find to burn inside those tall chimneys. It turned out to be rice husks. A man sat on the ground, and with one hand worked a bellows, thus making forced draught, while with the other he threw on a tiny handful of rice husks, not enough to choke the bright flame roused by the draught. Another man weighed out crushed cotton seeds into a little basket, emptied them into a vessel on the fire till it just boiled, then emptied them again into another vessel--if you can call it such--a sort of frame of split bamboo twisted, kneaded it, all hot as it was, with his feet, and then piled it up ready to be pressed, always with a bit of basket-work flattening it on the top. We waited to see the cakes pressed. They were like cheeses, each with their twisted bamboo rings round them. When as many as could be were fitted into the trough, then by putting in wedges the bulk was reduced to rather less than half what it at first appeared, during which time a constant stream of oil was flowing through the trough. A man hammered the wedges, towards the end using a stone hammer so heavy I could only just lift it. It was rather amusing to see the politeness of these men. One of them wanted to smoke. But before doing so he offered his pipe both to my husband and to myself, quite with the air of expecting his offer to be accepted. I had an ulster, and they all admired the material of it very much, saying each in turn they were quite sure it was _pi chi_ (long ells). There were buffaloes crushing the cotton seeds, walking round and round with basket-work blinkers over their poor eyes. Curiously enough, the heavy millstones they wheeled round, all of hardest granite as they were, yet were decorated with carvings. One had the key pattern, or a slightly different scroll; also characters, very carefully carved, to the effect that it was the fairy carriage and the dragon's wheel.

It seemed strange to come upon this touch of æstheticism in this very homely sort of factory, whose whole plant must have cost so very little, and which was in consequence, though so well adapted for its purpose, yet so simple that it might well serve as an illustration for an elementary primer in mechanics. Indeed, this factory at home, and in the fresh air, was the very ideal Ruskin writes about, and that the Village Industries Society at home has lately been formed to realise, if yet it may be, in England. It has been realised during long centuries in China, and yet the millennium has not arrived.

We went back through a long, crowded, flourishing street. At an open doorway there were young priests sitting inside, chanting. They had musical instruments and gongs. A man behind a table was very busy stamping envelopes such as Chinese officials use, very large and covered with characters. He was good enough to pause, and show us the letters these envelopes were to contain, very long and beautifully written, and most neatly and cunningly folded. There was some one very ill in the house, and these letters were addressed to heaven, describing circumstantially his sad case. They were presently to be burnt, and thus delivered. The lanterns with which this house was decorated were blue for semi-mourning. Only a few doors farther off, curiously enough, we came upon a wedding. The doors stood wide open, and we saw a long vista of courtyards and _ting-tzes_, all with open doors, and at the end what I fancied were a number of smartly dressed servants standing. There was a band in the first courtyard, with the quaint, pretty-looking instruments of crocodile-skin which I had before so much admired in Shanghai Chinese city. Every one seemed so obliging, I asked to look inside the wedding-chair. It was remarkably smart, really beautifully embroidered all over outside. But, to my intense disgust, the cushion on which the bride was to sit was an old common red cushion, worn at the corners, and actually dirty, and the inside of the chair had not even been swept out.