Part 18

The Chinese eunuchs are addicted to all the vices that distinguish these creatures in other countries. There is scarcely one about the palace, whether of the class of porters and sweepers, or of that which is qualified for the inner apartments, but have women in their lodgings, who are generally the daughters of poor people, from whom they are purchased, and are consequently considered as their slaves. It is difficult to conceive a condition in life more humiliating, or more deplorable, than that of a female slave to an eunuch; but happily for such females, in this country the mental powers are not very active. Several of the missionaries assured me of the truth of this fact, which indeed I have strong reasons for believing even of the _Rasibus_. The keeper of the hall of audience once took me to his lodgings, but on coming to the door he desired me to wait till he had made some arrangements within; the meaning of which was, until he had removed his lady out of the way; nor was he in the least displeased at my hinting this to him. Being one of the favourite attendants of the ladies of the court, he was of course a _black eunuch_. He was the most capricious creature in the world; being sometimes extremely civil and communicative, sometimes sullen, and not deigning to open his lips: and whenever he took it into his head to be offended, he was sure to practice some little revenge. I fancy he was clerk of the kitchen, for the quality and the quantity of our dinner generally depended on the state of his humour. When the report of the Embassador's making conditions with regard to the ceremony of introduction first reached _Yuen-min-yuen_, he was more than usually peevish, and conceived, as he thought, a notable piece of revenge. Some pains had been taken to arrange the presents in such a manner in the great hall as to fill the room well, and set them off to the best advantage. The old creature, determined to give us additional trouble and to break through the arrangement that had been made, desired that the whole might be placed at one end of the room. On my objecting to this he pretended to have received the Emperor's order, and that at all events it must be obeyed; and the reason he assigned for the change was, "that his Majesty might see them at once from his throne, without being at the trouble of turning his head."

The great number of these creatures about the palace of _Yuen-min-yuen_ made my residence there extremely disagreeable. They seemed, indeed, to be placed as spies on our conduct. If I attempted to move ever so little beyond the court of our apartments, I was sure of being watched and pursued by some of them; to persist in my walk would have thrown the whole palace in an uproar. I one day happened inadvertently to stray through a thicket, which it seems led towards the apartments of the ladies, but I had not proceeded far before I heard several squalling voices in the thicket, which I soon recognised to be those of eunuchs. They had run themselves out of breath in seeking me, and my old friend of the kitchen was not to be pacified for putting him to the hazard, as he pretended, of losing his head by my imprudence.

The eunuchs and the women are the only companions of the Emperor in his leisure hours: of the latter, one only has the rank of Empress, after whom are two Queens and their numerous attendants, which constitute the second class of the establishment; and the third consists of six Queens, and their attendants. To these three ranks of his wives are attached one hundred ladies, who are usually called his concubines, though they are as much a legal part of his establishment as the others. They would seem to be of the same description, and to hold the same rank as the handmaids of the ancient Israelites. Their children are all considered as branches of the Imperial family, but the preference to the succession is generally given to the male issue of the first Empress, provided there should be any. This however is entirely a matter of choice, the Emperor having an uncontrouled power of nominating his successor, either in his own family or out of it. The daughters are usually married to Tartar princes, and other Tartars of distinction, but rarely, if ever, to a Chinese.

On the accession of a new Emperor, men of the first rank and situation in the empire consider themselves as highly honoured and extremely fortunate, if the graces of their daughters should prove sufficient to provide them a place in the list of his concubines; in which case, like the nuns in some countries of Europe, they are doomed for ever to reside within the walls of the palace. Such a fate, however, being common in China in a certain degree to all women-kind, is less to be deplored than the similar lot of those in Europe, where one sex is supposed to be entitled to an equal degree of liberty with the other; and as the custom of China authorizes the sale of all young women by their parents or relations to men they never saw, and without their consent previously obtained, there can be no hardship in consigning them over to the arms of the prince; nor is any disgrace attached to the condition of a concubine, where every marriage is a legal prostitution. At the death of the sovereign all his women are removed to a separate building, called by a term which, divested of its metaphor, implies the _Palace of Chastity_, where they are doomed to reside during the remainder of their lives.

CHAP. VI.

Language.--Literature, and the fine Arts.--Sciences.--Mechanics, and Medicine.

_Opinion of the Chinese Language being hieroglyphical erroneous.--Doctor Hager's mistakes.--Etymological Comparisons fallacious.--Examples of--Nature of the Chinese written Character.--Difficulty and Ambiguity of.--Curious Mistake of an eminent Antiquarian.--Mode of acquiring the Character.--Oral Language.--Mantchoo Tartar Alphabet.--Chinese Literature.--Astronomy.--Chronology.--Cycle of sixty Years.--Geography. --Arithmetic.--Chemical Arts.--Cannon and Gunpowder.--Distillation. --Potteries.--Silk Manufactures.--Ivory.--Bamboo.--Paper.--Ink. --Printing.--Mechanics.--Music.--Painting.--Sculpture.--Architecture. --Hotel of the English Embassador in Pekin.--The Great Wall.--The Grand Canal.--Bridges.--Cemeteries.--Natural Philosophy.--Medicine.--Chinese Pharmacopoeia.--Quacks.--Contagious Fevers.--Small pox.--Opthalmia. --Venereal Disease.--Midwifery.--Surgery.--Doctor Gregory's Opinion of their Medical Knowledge.--Sir William Jones's Opinion of their general Character._

If no traces remained, nor any authorities could be produced, of the antiquity of the Chinese nation, except the written character of their language, this alone would be sufficient to decide that point in its favour. There is so much originality in this language, and such a great and essential difference between it and that of any other nation not immediately derived from the Chinese, that not the most distant degree of affinity can be discovered, either with regard to the form of the character, the system on which it is constructed, or the idiom, with any other known language upon the face of the globe. Authors, however, and some of high reputation, have been led to suppose that, in the Chinese character, they could trace some relation to those hieroglyphical or sacred inscriptions found among the remains of the ancient Egyptians; others have considered it to be a modification of hieroglyphic writing, and that each character was the symbol or comprehensive form of the idea it was meant to express, or, in other words, an abstract delineation of the object intended to be represented. To strengthen such an opinion, they have ingeniously selected a few instances where, by adding to one part, and curtailing another, changing a straight line into a curved one, or a square into a circle, something might be made out that approached to the picture, or the object of the idea conveyed by the character as, for example, the character 田, representing _a cultivated piece of ground_, they supposed to be the picture of an inclosure, turned up in ridges; yet it so happens that, in this country, there are no inclosures; the character, 口 a _mouth_, has been considered by them as a very close resemblance of that object; 上 and 下 _above_ and _below_, distinctly marked these points of position; the character 人, signifying _man_, is, according to their opinion, obviously an abbreviated representation of the human figure; yet the very same character, with an additional line across, thus 大, which by the way approaches nearer to the human figure, having now arms as well as legs, signifies the abstract quality _great_; and with a second line thus 天 the material or visible _heaven_, between either of which and _man_ it would be no easy task to find out the analogy; and still less so to trace an affinity between any of them, and 犬 which signifies _a dog_.

It is true certain ancient characters are still extant, in which a rude representation of the image is employed; as for instance, a circle for the sun, and a crescent for the moon, but these appear to have been used only as abbreviations, in the same manner as these objects are still characterized in our almanacks, and in our astronomical calculations. Thus also the _kingdom of China_ is designed by a square, with a vertical line drawn through the middle, in conformity perhaps with their ideas of the earth being a square, and China placed in its center; so far these may be considered as symbols of the objects intended to be represented. So, also, the numerals one, two, three, being designed by 一 二 三, would naturally suggest themselves as being fully as convenient for the purpose, and perhaps more so than any other; and where the first series of numerals ended, which according to the universal custom of counting by the fingers was at _ten_, the very act of placing the index of the right hand on the little finger of the left would suggest the form of the vertical cross 十 as the symbol or representation of the number ten.

I cannot avoid taking notice in this place of a publication of Doctor Hager, which he calls an "_Explanation of the Elementary Characters of the Chinese_." In this work he has advanced a most extraordinary argument to prove an analogy between the ancient Romans and the Chinese, from the resemblance which he has fancied to exist between the numeral characters and the numeral sounds made use of by those two nations. The Romans, he observes, expressed their numerals one, two, three, by a corresponding number of vertical strokes I. II. III. which the Chinese place horizontally 一 二 三. The Romans designed the number ten by an oblique cross X, and the Chinese by a vertical one 十. This resemblance in the forming of their numerals, so simple and natural that almost all nations have adopted it, is surely too slight a coincidence for concluding, that the people who use them must necessarily, at some period or other, have had communication together. The Doctor however seems to think so, and proceeds to observe, that the three principal Roman cyphers, I. V. X. or one, five and ten, are denoted in the Chinese language by the same sounds that they express in the Roman alphabet. This remark, although ingenious, is not correct. _One_ and _five_, it is true, are expressed in the Chinese language by the _y_ and _ou_ of the French, which it may be presumed, were the sounds that the letters I. and V. obtained in the ancient Roman alphabet; but with regard to the _ten_, or X, which, he says, the Chinese pronounce _xe_, he is entirely mistaken, the Chinese word for _ten_ in Pekin being _shee_, and in Canton _shap_. This error the Doctor appears to have been led into by consulting some vocabulary in the Chinese and Portuguese languages; in the latter of which the letter X is pronounced like our _sh_. But admitting, in its fullest extent, the resemblance of some of the numerals used by the two nations, in the shape of the character, and of others in the sound, it certainly cannot be assumed to prove any thing beyond a mere accidental coincidence.

The earliest accounts of China, after the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, being written by Portuguese missionaries, and the Chinese proper names still remaining to be spelt in the letters of that alphabet, have led several etymologists into great errors, not only with regard to the letter X, but more particularly in the _m_ final, and the _h_ incipient, the former being pronounced _ng_, and the latter with a strong aspirate, as _sh_. Thus the name of the second Emperor of the present dynasty is almost universally written in Europe _Cam-hi_, whereas it is as universally pronounced in China _Caung-shee_.

The learned Doctor seems to be still less happy in his next conjecture, where he observes that, as the Romans expressed their _five_ by simply dividing the X, or ten, so also the ancient character signifying _five_ with the Chinese was X or ten between two lines thus [Illustration] indicating, as it were, that the number ten was divided in two; the Doctor seems to have forgotten that he has here placed his cross in the _Roman_ form, and not as the Chinese write it; and it is certainly a strange way of cutting a thing in two, by enclosing it between two lines; but the learned seldom baulk at an absurdity, when a system is to be established. The Chinese character for five is 五.

Of all deductions, those drawn from etymological comparisons are, perhaps, the most fallacious. Were these allowed to have any weight, the Chinese spoken language is of such a nature, that it would be no difficult task to point out its relationship to that of every nation upon earth. Being entirely monosyllabic, and each word ending in a vowel or a liquid, and being, at the same time, deprived of the sounds of several letters in our alphabet, it becomes necessarily incapable of supplying any great number of distinct syllables. Three hundred are, in fact, nearly as many as an European tongue can articulate, or ear distinguish. It follows, of course, that the same sound must have a great variety of significations. The syllable _ching_, for example, is actually expressed by fifty-one different characters, each having a different, unconnected, and opposite meaning; but it would be the height of absurdity to attempt to prove the coincidence of any other language with the Chinese, because it might happen to possess a word something like the sound of _ching_, which might also bear a signification not very different from one of those fifty-one that it held in the Chinese.

The Greek abounds with Chinese words. κυον, a _dog_, is in Chinese both _keou_ and _keun_, expressive of the same animal; ἐυ, _good_, is not very different from the Chinese _hau_, which signifies the same quality; and the article τὸ is not far remote from _ta_, _he_, or _that_. Both Greeks and Romans might recognise their first personal pronoun έγω or _ego_ in _go_, or as it is sometimes written _ngo_. The Italian affirmative _si_ is sufficiently near the Chinese _shee_, or _zee_, expressing assent. The French _étang_, and the Chinese _tang_, a pond or lake, are nearly the same, and their two negatives _pas_ and _poo_ are not very remote. _Lex_, _loi_, _le_, _law_, compared with _leu_, _lee_, _laws_ and _institutes_, are examples of analogy that would be decisive to the etymological inquirer. The English word _mien_, the countenance, and the Chinese _mien_, expressing the same idea, are nothing different, and we might be supposed to have taken our _goose_ from their _goo_. To _sing_ is _chaung_, which comes very near our _chaunt_. The Chinese call a cat _miau_, and so does the Hottentot. The Malay word _to know_ is _tau_, and the Chinese monosyllable for the same verb is also _tau_, though in conversation they generally use the compound _tchee-tau_, each of which separately have nearly the same meaning. The Sumatrans have _mau_ for mother, the Chinese say _moo_. On grounds equally slight with these have many attempts been made to form conclusions from etymological comparisons. If I mistake not, the very ingenious Mr. Bryant makes the word _gate_ a derivative from the Indian word _ghaut_, a pass between mountains. Surely this is going a great deal too far for our little monosyllable. Might we not with as great a degree of propriety fetch our _shallow_ or _shoal_ from China, where _sha-loo_ signifies a flat sand, occasionally covered with the tide? A noted antiquarian has been led into some comical mistakes in his attempt to establish a resemblance between the Chinese and the Irish languages, frequently by his having considered the letters of the continental alphabets, in which the Chinese vocabulary he consulted was written, to be pronounced in the same manner as his own[14].

[14] For the curiosity of those who may be inclined to speculate in etymological comparisons between the Chinese and other languages, I here subjoin a short list of words in the former, expressing some of the most striking objects in the creation, a few subjects of natural history, and of such articles as from their general use are familiar to most nations, these being of all others the most likely to have retained their primitive names. The orthography I have used is that of the English language.

The Earth _tee_ The Air _kee_ Fire _ho_ Water _swee_ The Sea _hai_ A River _ho_ A Lake _tang_ A Mountain _shan_ A Wilderness _ye-tee_ The Sun _jee-to_ The Moon _yué_ The Stars _sing_ The Clouds _yun_ Rain _yeu_ Hail _swee-tan_ Snow _swé_ Ice _ping_ Thunder _luie_ Lightning _shan-tien_ The Wind _fung_ The Day _jee_ or _tien_ The Night _ye_ or _van shang_ The Sky or Heaven _tien_ The East _tung_ The West _see_ The North _pee_ The South _nan_ Man _jin_ Woman _foo-jin_ A Quadruped _shoo_ A Bird _kin_ A Fish _eu_ An Insect _tchong_ A Plant _tsau_ A Tree _shoo_ A Fruit _ko-ste_ A Flower _wha_ A Stone _shee_ Gold _tchin_ Silver _in tse_ Copper _tung_ Lead _yuen_ Iron _tié_ The Head _too_ The Hand _shoo_ The Heart _sin_ The Leg _koo_ The Foot _tchiau_ The Face _mien_ The Eyes _yen-shing_ The Ears _cul-to_ The Hair _too fa_ An ox _nieu_ A Camel _loo-too_ A Horse _ma_ An Ass _loo-tse_ A Dog _kioon_ A Frog _tchoo_ A Sheep _yang_ A Goat, or mountain Sheep _shan-yang_ A Cat _miau_ A Stag _shan loo_ A Pidgeon _koo-tse_ Poultry _kee_ An Egg _kee-tan_ A Goose _goo_ Oil _yeo_ Rice _mee_ Milk _nai_ Vinegar _tsoo_ Tobacco _yen_ Salt _yen_ Silk _tsoo_ Cotton _mien-wha_ Flax Plant _ma_ Hemp _ma_ Wool (Sheep's Hair) _yangmau_ Coals _tan_ Sugar _tang_ Cheese, they have none but thick Milk _nai-ping_, or iced milk A House _shia_ A Temple _miau_ A Bed _tchuang_ A Door _men_ A Table _tai_ A Chair _ye-tzé_ A Knife _tau_ A Pitcher _ping_ A Plough _lee_ An Anchor _mau_ A Ship _tchuan_ Money _tsien_

I must observe, however, for the information of these philologists, that scarcely two provinces in China have the same oral language. The officers and their attendants who came with us from the capital could converse only with the boatmen of the southern provinces, through the medium of an interpreter. The character of the language is universal, but the name or sound of the character is arbitrary. If a _convention of sounds_ could have been settled like a convention of marks, one would suppose that a commercial intercourse would have effected it, at least in the numeral sounds, that must necessarily be interchanged from place to place and myriads of times repeated from one corner of the empire to the other. Let us compare then the numerals of Pekin with those of Canton, the two greatest cities in China.

Pekin. Canton. 1. Ye yat 2. ul ye 3. san saam 4. soo see 5. ou um 6. leu lok 7. tchee tsat 8. pas pat 9. tcheu kow 10. shee shap 11. shee-ye shap-yat 12. shee-ul shap-ye 20. ul-shee ye-shap 30. san-shee saam-shap 31. san-shee-ye saam-shap-yat 32. san-shee-ul saam-shap-ye 100. pe paak 1000. tsien tseen 10,000. van man 100,000. she-van shap-man