Ad Astra * Index: Letters from a Chinese Official, New York, 1903
In one of your journals I recently read that "the civilization of China" is the ultimate object of the nations of Europe. If so, the methods they adopt to attain their end are singular indeed : but of these I do not trust myself to speak. Looting, wanton destruction, cold-blooded murder, and rape, these are the things which you do not, I know, here in England approve, which you would prevent, I am convinced, if you could, and which I am willing to set down to the license of ill-disciplined troops. It is for another purpose than that of idle deprecation that I refer to them in this place. The question always before my mind when you speak of civilization is this: What kind of men has your civilization produced? And to such a question current events in China seem to suggest an answer not altogether reassuring. But that answer I do not press. It may be that all culture, ours as much as yours, is no more than a veneer; that deep in the den of every human heart lurks the brute, ready to leap on its prey when chance or design has unbarred the gates. We at any rate, in China, lie under the same condemnation as you; and our reproaches, like yours, fly back to the mouths of them that utter them. I pass, therefore, from scenes like these to normal conditions of life. What manner of men, I ask, are we, what manner of men are you, that you should take upon yourselves to call us barbarians ?
What manner of men are we? The question is hard to answer. Turning it over in my thoughts, hour after hour, day after day, I can hit on no better device to bring home to you something of what is in my mind than to endeavor to set down here, as faithfully as 1 can, a picture that never ceases to haunt my memory as I walk in these dreary winter days the streets of your black Metropolis.
Far away in the East, under sunshine such as you never saw (for even such
light as you have you stain and infect with sooty smoke), on the shore of a
broad river stands the house where I was born. It is one among thousands; but
every one stands in its own garden, simply painted in white or gray, modest,
cheerful, and clean. For many miles along the valley, one after the other, they
lift their blue- or red-tiled roofs out of a sea of green; while here and there
glitters out over a clump of trees the gold enamel of some tall pagoda. The
river, crossed by frequent bridges and crowded with barges and junks, bears on
its clear stream the traffic of thriving village-markets. For prosperous
peasants people all the district, owning and tilling the fields their fathers
owned and tilled before them. The soil on which they work, they may say, they
and their ancestors have made. For see! almost to the summit what once were
barren hills are waving green with cotton and rice, sugar, oranges, and tea.
Water drawn from the riverbed girdles the slopes with silver; and falling from
channel to channel in a thousand bright cascades, plashing in cisterns,
chuckling in pipes, soaking and oozing in the soil, distributes freely to all
alike fertility, verdure, and life. Hour after hour you may traverse, by
tortuous paths, over tiny bridges, the works of the generations who have passed,
the labors of their children of to-day; till you reach the point where man
succumbs and Nature has her way, covering the highest crags with a mantle of
azure and gold and rose, gardenia, clematis, azalea, growing luxuriantly wild.
How often here have I sat for hours in a silence so intense that, as one of our
poets has said, "you may hear the shadows of the trees rustling on the
ground"; a silence broken only now and again from far below by voices of
laborers calling across the watercourses, or, at evening or dawn, by the sound
of gongs summoning to worship from the temples in the valley. Such silence! Such
sounds ! Such perfume! Such color! The senses respond to their objects; they
grow exquisite to a degree you cannot well conceive in your northern climate;
and beauty pressing in from without moulds the spirit and mind insensibly to
harmony with herself. If in China we have manners, if we have art, if we have
morals, the reason, to those who can see, is not far to seek. Nature has taught
us; and so far, we are only more fortunate than you. But, also, we have had the
grace to learn her lesson; and that, we think, we may ascribe to our
intelligence. For, consider, here in this lovely valley live thousands of souls
without any law save that of custom, without any rule save that of their own
hearths. Industrious they are, as you hardly know industry in Europe; but it is
the industry of free men working for their kith and kin, on the lands they
received from their fathers, to transmit, enriched by their labors, to their
sons. They have no other ambition; they do not care to amass wealth; and if in
each generation some must needs go out into the world, it is with the hope, not
commonly frustrated, to return to the place of their birth and spend their
declining years among the scenes and faces that were dear to their youth. Among
such a people there is no room for fierce, indecent rivalries. None is master,
none servant; but equality, concrete and real, regulates and sustains their
intercourse. Healthy toil, sufficient leisure, frank hospitality, a content born
of habit and undisturbed by chimerical ambitions, a sense of beauty fostered by
the loveliest Nature in the world, and finding expression in gracious and
dignified manners where it is not embodied in exquisite works of art—such are
the characteristics of the people among whom I was born. Does my memory matter
me? Do I idealize the scenes of my youth? It may be so. But this I know: that
some such life as I have described, reared on the basis of labor on the soil, of
equality and justice, does exist and nourish throughout the length and breadth
of China. What have you to offer in its place, you our would-be civilizers ?
Your religion ? Alas ! it is in the name of that that you are doing un-namable
deeds! Your morals ? Where shall we find them? Your intelligence? Whither has it
led? What counter-picture have you to offer over here in England to this which I
have drawn of life in China? That is the question which I have now to endeavor
to reply.