may be seen on the trail carrying sticks and yellow bags, travelling nights and days to
the sacred temple. Among them the spirit of jollity prevails as it did in Chaucer's
times, and tales are told on the way like those Chaucer recorded.
PART TWO LIFE
PROLOGUE TO PART TWO
WE have now surveyed the mental and moral constitution of the Chinese people, and
the ideals of life which influence the fundamental pattern of Chinese life. It remains to
make a study of Chinese life itself in its sexual, social, political, literary and artistic
aspects. Stated briefly, these will cover Chinese women, society, governments,
literature and art, together with a special chapter devoted to the art of living as the
Chinese have conceived and practised it. These arrange themselves aga in into two
groups. The first three are necessarily connected, for an understanding of the life of
women and the home will lead to a consideration of the Chinese social life, and only
from a true understanding of the Chinese social life will it be possible to understand
the administration of justice and government in China. The study of these visible
aspects of Chinese life will naturally lead to an inquiry into the subtler and less known
problems of Chinese culture, especially in the field of art, with an outlook and a
history of development peculiar to the Chinese people and totally different from the
West The Chinese culture is one of the truly indigenous cultures of the world, and as
such will be found to offer many interesting points of comparison with Western culture.
For culture is a product of leisure, and the Chinese have had the immense leisure of
three thousand years to develop it. In these three thousand years they have had plenty
of time to drink tea and look at life quietly over their teacups, and from the gossip
over the teacups they have boiled life down to its essence. They have had plenty of
time, too, to discuss their forefathers, to ponder over their achievements and to review
the successive changes of the modes of art and of life, and to see their own in the light
of the long past. And from this gossiping and pondering history came to have a great
meaning: it came to be spoken of as the "mirror" which reflects human experience for
the benefit of the present and which is like a gathering s tream, uninterrupted,
continuous. The writing of history then became the most serious form of literature and
the writing of poetry became its highest and most refined emotional outlet.
Sometimes, when the "wine was fragrant and the tea wellbrewed," amidst the singing
of the kettle and the gurgling of the spring, a happy thought came to the Chinese, and
at intervals of about five hundred years, or under the forces of changed circumstances,
their minds became creative and a new discovery was made either in the metre of
poetry or in the improvement of porcelain, or in the art of grafting pear-trees, and the
nation moved on. They gave up speculation about immortality as something for ever
unknowable but for ever to be conjectured and gossiped about, half seriously and half
playfully. Equally they gave up the mysteries of nature, thunderstorms and lightning
and hail and snow, and the mysteries of their own bodily functions, such as the
connection between salival flow and hunger. They did not use the testtube or the
scalpel. So sometimes it seemed to them as if the whole sphere of the knowable had
been exhausted by their ancient forefathers, and the last word on human philosophy
said, and the last rhythm in calligraphy discovered.
Chapter Five
WOMAN'S LIFE
I. THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
SOMETHING in the Chinese blood never quite gave woman her due from primeval
times. The fundamental dualistic outlook, with the differentiation of the yang (male)
and the yin (female) principles, went back to the Book of Changes, which was later
formulated by Confucius. The respect for women, a certain tenderness toward the
female sex, which was characteristic of the Teutonic races already in their barbaric days, was absent in the early pages of Chinese History. As early as the time of the
folk-songs, collected in the Book of Poems, there was a sexual inequality, for "when a
baby boy was born he was laid on the bed and given jade to play with, and when a
baby girl was born she was laid on the floor and given a tile to play with.5' (This song
must have been centuries older than Confucius.) But woman was not subjected until
she was civilized. The progressive subjection of women followed pace by pace the
increasing development of Confucianism.
The original social system was a matriarchal system, and this is important, for
something of this spirit still survives in Chinese womanhood to the present day. The
Chinese woman is, on the whole, a constitutionally sounder animal than her male
companion, and we still have plenty of matriarchs even in the Confucian households.
Traces of this matriarchy were still clearly visible in the Chou Dynasty, when the
family name, or hsing, was the woman's name, and man had only a personal name, or
shift, after his place of birth or his official position. Throughout the folk-songs of the
Book of Poems we fail to see any traces of the seclusion of women. Something of
thefreedom in the choice of mates, like what still prevails among the southern
aborigines of Kwangsi, must have prevailed in the ancient times. It was raw and it
was free. One folk-song from the Book of Poems runs thus:
If thou thinkest of me,
I will lift my petticoat
And cross the river Ts'en.1
If thou thinkest not of me,
Why, are there not other men?
桹h, thou silly boy!
If thou thinkest of me,
I will lift my petticoat
And cross the River Wo.
If thou thinkest not of me,
Why, are there not other beaux?
桹h, thou silly boy!
The Book of Poems also has many examples of songs of women who ran away with
their lovers. The marriage system had not yet become the severe bondage of women
that it was in later days. The sexual relations of men in the times of Confucius,
especially those prevailing in the upper classesj had something analogous to those in
the days of decadent Rome, with numerous cases of incest with stepmothers, with
daughtersin- law, with sisters- in- law, the presentation of one's wife to a neighbouring
ruler, the marrying of a son's wife for one's own benefit, illicit relations between the
queen and the prime minister, etc., with which the Chochilan abounds. Woman, who
is always powerful in China, was powerful then. The Queen of Wei made the King
summon the handsomest man in the country to her boudoir. Divorce was still easy and
divorcees could remarry. The cult of feminine chastity had not yet become an
obsession with men.
Then came Confucianism with its seclusion of women. The separation of men and
women was soon pushed by the Confucianists to such extremes that married sisters
could not eat at the same table with their brothers> according to the Book of Rites. To
what extent such ceremonial "rites" in the books were observed in practice it is
impossible to ascertain. It is easy to understand this seclusion from the viewpoint of
the whole Confucian social philosophy. It stood for a society with emphasis on
distinction between superiority and inferiority. It stood for obedience, for recognition
of authority in a family as in a state, and for the division of labour between man's
duties outside and women's duties in the home. It encouraged the womanly woman,
and naturally taught such feminine virtues as quietness, obedience, good manners,
personal neatness, industry, ability in cooking and spinning, respect for the husband's
parents, kindness to the husband's brothers, courtesy to the husband's friends, and all
those virtues desirable from the male point of view. Nothing was radically wrong in
these moral instructions, and with their economic dependence and their love of
conventions, women accepted them. Perhaps the women desired to be good, or
perhaps they desired to please the men.
1 The spellings of these river names have been slightly altered to suit the rhyme*
Confucianism saw that this sexual differentiation was necessary for social harmony,
and perhaps Confucianism was quite near the truth. Then Confucianism also gave the
wife an "equal" position with the husband, somewhat below the husband, but still an
equal helpmate, like the two fish in the Taoist symbol of yin and yang> necessarily
complementing each other. It also gave the mother an honoured position in the home.
In the best spirit of Confucianism, this differentiation was interpreted, not as a
subjection but as a harmony of relationships. Women who could rule their husbands
knew that dependence on this sexual arrangement was their best and most effective
weapon for power, and women who could not were too dull to raise feminist
problems.
This was the Confucian attitude toward women and women's position in society before it came under the influence of the later men scholars. It had not yet developed
that curiously and perversely selfish aspect characteristic of the later attitudes, but the
basic notions of woman's inferiority were there. One flagrant instance was the rule
that while the husband's mourning period for the wife was only one year, the wife's
mourning period for the husband was three years, and while the normal mourning
period for one's parents was three years, that of the wife for her own father was only
one year, if the husband's father was still living. Typically feminine virtues, like
obedience and loyalty, were codified by Liu Hsiang in the Han Dynasty, into
something like a feminine ethics, quite distinct from that for the men, and Pan Ch'ao,
the woman author of Women's Guide, was the great exponent of the "three obediences
and four virtues" of women. The three obediences were: when a woman is in her
maiden home she obeys her father; when married she obeys her husband; and when
her husband dies she obeys her son." The last was of course never carried out, owing
to the superior position of the mother in the Confucian scheme. In this Dynasty
women who died for their chastity were already officially honoured with stone pailou
or with official titles from the court. But women could still marry a second time. .
In tracing the development of the theory of chaste widowhood, it would be dangerous
to lend too much weight to academic theory, for the Chinese are always a realistic
people and have a way of withering theories with a laugh. Practice must have lagged
behind theory, and even as late as the Manchu times chaste widowhood was expected
of the wife of a scholar with official titles but not of the common women. Even in tlie
T'ang Dynasty the daughter of the great scholar Han Yii married a second time. Of the
T'ang princesses, twenty-three married a second time and four of them married a third
time. But the tradition started in the Han Dynasty centuries before was there at work,
reinforcing the early tradition that men could remarry but women could not.
After this came the Sung scholars, who imposed a secluded life on women and made
the remarrying of widows a moral crime. Worship of chastity, which they so highly
prized in women, became something of a psychological obsession and women were
henceforth to be responsible for social morals, from which the men were exempt.
More than that, women were to be responsible for courage and strength of character
also, which curiously the men so admired in the gentle sex, for the emphasis had
shifted from women's ordinary routine domestic virtues to female heroism and
self-sacrifice. Already in the ninth century a widow was gready praised by the
Confucian males for cutting off her arm because a hotel-keeper had dragged her by it,
when she was refused entrance on her way home accompanying her husband's coffin.
In the Mongol Dynasty another widow was greatly honoured for refusing to show her
ulcered breast to the doctor and heroically dying of it1
In the Ming Dynasty this doctrine of chaste widowhood became an official institution.
Women who kept their widowhood from any age under thirty to the age of fifty were
officially honoured with pailou, and their families were exempt from official labour
service. It became then not only highly moral to admire purity of character in women, but also highly convenient for the male relatives to do so. Chaste widowhood became
not only popular with the men and the widows3 relatives, but also became one of the
easiest ways for women to distinguish themselves. They lent honour, not only to their
own families but to their whole village or clan. In this sense it had truly become a
popular obsession, with just a few occasional protests from independent minds. It was
this doctrine of chaste widowhood that caused Confucianism to be denounced during
the "Renaissance" of 1917 as a "maneating religion.'*
Along with the development of Confucian theory a stream of real life was going on,
based on social conventions, and still more on economic pressure. More important
than the influence of Confucianism was the fact that men controlled the purse. For
