would they have shaken the authority of Confucius to its foundations, but very
possibly would have long ago torn down the political structure and, with the general
spread of knowledge and given the millenniums of leisure, would have forged ahead
in other lines and given the world a few more inventions like printing and gunpowder
which would have likewise affected the history of human civilization on this planet.
III. SCHOLARSHIP
Before we pass on to the non-classical literature, or literature of the imagination,
achieved by obscure or unknown writers who broke through the classical tradition and wrote out of the gladness of their hearts and for the sheer delight of creation?in other
words, before we pass on to those novels and dramas which constitute literature par
excellence in the Western sense, it is perhaps proper to examine the content of
classical literature, the qualities of Chinese scholarship, and the life and education of
that mass of educated men who feed on the people, moralize a lot and create nothing.
What do these scholars write and what is their mental occupation?
China is a land of scholars, where scholars are the ruling class, and in times of peace,
at least, the worship of scholarship has always been sedulously cultivated. This
worship of scholarship has taken the form of a popular superstition that no paper
bearing writing should be thrown about or used for indecent purposes, but should be
collected and burned at schools or temples. In times of war the story is slightly
different, for soldiers used to go into a scholar's house and either burn old rare
editions as fuel, or blow their noses with them, or commit them to a general
conflagration. Yet so stupendous was the literary activity of the nation that the more
books the soldiers burned, the bigger the collections of books became.
In the Sui Dynasty, around the year 600, the imperial dynasty already counted
370,000 volumes. In the T'ang Dynasty the imperial collection numbered 208,000
volumes. In the year 1005, in the Sung Dynasty, the first encyclopaedia, consisting of
1,000 volumes, was compiled. The next great imperial collection, the Tunglo Tatien,
collected under Emperor Yunglo (1403-1424), consisted of 22,877 books, in 11,995
volumes, of selected rare ancient works. In the Manchu Dynasty, the most
statesmanlike act of Emperor Ch' ienlung was to make a thorough overhauling of
extant books for the ostensible purpose of preserving them, but with the equally
important purpose of destroying works that savoured of dissatisfaction with the alien
regime, and he succeeded in collecting 36,275 volumes which were preserved
originally in seven sets in the well-known Ssitffu Cttuanshu. But he also succeeded in
ordering the complete or partial destruction of about 2,000 books, involving about a
score of cases of dismissal from office, imprisonment, flogging or death of the authors,
sometimes including the destruction of their ancestral temples and the selling of their
family as slaves 梐 ll this because of the misuse of a word. The figures of both the
Yunglo Tatien and the Sstitfu CKuanshu represented a selection of works worthy of
preservation according to the orthodox standards. There was a slightly higher number
of works which received honourable mention, with a brief description in the catalogue,
but these were not collected in the Sstik'u CKuanshu for perpetuation. These, of
course, did not include the truly creative works like All Men Are Brothers or the Red
Chamber Dream, although they included a tremendous amount of pichi, or
"notebooks," on odds and ends, from historical researches to notes on tea- leaves and
famous springs and sketches of foxes, water spirits and chaste widows, which were
the delight of the Chinese scholars.
What, then, did these books talk about? A review of the orthodox classification system
of Chinese libraries, handed down from the Ssuk'u CKiianshu> would be of interest. Chinese books are classified into the four big divisions: (a) Classics, (b) History, (c)
Philosophy, and (d) Collected Works or Literature. The Classics Division includes the
classics and classic philology, which waste the greater part of Chinese scholars' time.
The History Divison includes dynastic histories, special histories, biography,
miscellaneous records, geography (including travel sketches and local history of
districts or famous mountains), civil service system, laws and statutes, bibliography,
and historical criticism. The Philosophy Division originally borrowed its name from
the schools of philosophy of the Chou Dynasty, but was made to include all the
special arts and sciences of China (as in the "Faculty of Philosophy" of a Western
university), including military science, agriculture, medicine, astronomy, astrology,
necromancy, fortune-telling, boxing^ calligraphy, painting, music, house decoration,
cuisine, botany, biology, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, reference works, and a
host of the above-mentioned "notebooks," containing a wilderness of promiscuous,
unshifted, unscrutinized and unclassified data on all phenomena of the universe, with
a preference for the weird and the supernatural. In popular bookshops the novels are
also included in this division. The Collected Works Division may be called the
Literature Division, because it includes the collected works of scholars, literary
criticism, and special collections of poetry and drama.
The array of sciences is more imposing than an examination of their contents would
show. Actually, there are no special sciences in China, outside the serious sciences of
classic philology and history, which are truly branches of exact classified knowledge,
and which provide fields for painstaking research. Astronomy, apart from the works of
Jesuit disciples, is very near astrology, and zoology and botany are very near cuisine,
since so many of the animals and fruits and vegetables are eatable. Medicine usually
occupies the same shelf in ordinary book stores as necromancy and fortune-telling.
Psychology, sociology, engineering, and political economy are hidden all over among
the notebooks, and writers whose books get into the classification of botany and
zoology in the Philosophy Division or ^Miscellaneous Records in the History
Division achieve that distinction by the more specialized nature of their notes, but,
with the exception of oustanding works, do not essentially depart from the notebooks
in the Literature Division in spirit and technique.
Chinese scholars have briefly three lines in which to develop their peculiar genius:
real scholarly research, political candidacy, and literature in the classical sense, and
we may accordingly classify Chinese scholars into the three types, scholars, the gentry,
and writers. The training for the scholar and the candidate of official examinations is
so different that there must be an early choice between the two. There was a chujen,
or candidate of the second rank, who had never heard of Kungyangchuan, one of the
"Thirteen Confucian Classics'* and there were many learned scholars who for their
life could not have written an "eight-legged essay** to pass the official examinations.
But the spirit of old Chinese scholarship was admirable. The best of the scholars
corresponded to the scientist type of Europe, with the same scientific devotion to learning and capacity for drudgery, although often without the scientific technique,
and their works lacked the Western lucidity of style and cogent reasoning. For
old Chinese scholarship meant immense drudgery, a prodigious learning
and an almost superhuman memory, made possible only by a lifelong devotion to
learning. There were scholars who could repeat Ssuma Ch' ien's voluminous History
from beginning to end, for without an index system man had to trust to his store of
memory. In fact, easily located knowledge which could be found in any
encyclopaedia was rather looked down upon, and good scholars did not need
encyclopaedias. We had many such walking encyclopaedias in flesh and blood.
And after all, when it came to digging up original sources, it did not matter in the old
scheme of life whether one found them at a moment's notice or after wasting a whole
day. The English nobility used to spend a whole day on a fox-hunt, and did not
enjoy it the less, and Chinese scholars found the same excitement in "scenting" their
game, the same disappointment after finding a red herring and the same joy when they
had tracked the fox to its lair. In this spirit, monumental works were produced by
individual scholars, like the encyclopaedias of Ma Tuanlin or Cheng Gh' iao, or the
etymological dictionary of Chu Chiinsheng, or the Shuowen Commentary of Tuan
Yiits'ai. In the beginning of the Manchu Period, the scholar Ku Yenwu, in his research
on Chinese cultural geography, used to travel with three carts of books, and
whenever he found discrepancies in material evidences or contradicting stories
from old people from whom he collected first-hand data, he would check them in his
books. Such quest for knowledge was in spirit no different from the labours of
Western scientists. There were certain fields in Chinese learning which offered an
opportunity for painstaking and disciplined research. Such fields were, for instance,
the evolution of the Chinese script (shuowen), the history of Chinese sounds, the
emendation of ancient texts, the restoration of lost texts from quotations, the study of
ancient rites, customs, ceremonials, architecture and costumes, the verification of
names of animals and fishes in the classics, the study of bronze, stone and bone
inscriptions, the study of foreign names in the history of the Mongol Dynasty. Others
had as their hobbies the ancient non-Confucian philosophers, the Yuan dramas, the
Book of Changes (Yiking), Sung philosophy (lihsiiefi), history of Chinese painting,
ancient coins, Chinese Turkestan, the Mongol dialects, etc. So much depended on the
teachers with whom they came in contact and on the fashion of academic studies of
the period. In the middle of the Manchu regime, when Chinese philologic scholarship
had reached its summit, there were collected in the HuangcKing Chingchieh and Shu
HuangcKing Chingchieh about four hundred works running to over a thousand
volumes, consisting of scholarly treatises on extremely specialized topics, very similar
in nature and spirit to the doctorate dissertations of modern universities, only with a
maturer scholarship and involving much longer years of labour, one of which I know
took the author thirty years.
IV. THE COLLEGE
But true scientists are as rare in China as they are in the West. On the other hand, we
have as many political candidates as there are Ph.D.s in America, men who need a
rank to earn their own bread and other people's respect. Perhaps the Chinese official
candidates are a greater pest to society than the American Ph.D.s. Both of them pass
an examination which means no more or less than that the candidate has done a
certain amount of drudgery with a mediocre intelligence, both of them want the rank
for purely commercial reasons, and both of them have received an education which
totally unfits them for anything except the handling of books and the peddling of
knowledge.
The Chinese Ph.D.s, however, had a distinctly official favour about them. There were
among them real talents, who took these degrees for no earthly reason except the fun
and ease of taking them, and who climbed very high, reaching the last stage of
imperial examinations, becoming a chinshih or hanlin* These went out as magistrates
or became officials in the capital. The great majority of them sunk in the first or
second grades, called hsiuts'ai (B.A.) and chiijen (M.A.) respectively. Still a greater
majority never reached even the first grade, and they were called the "students" or
chusheng. There were many such "students" (men of mature age) fed by their districts
from official or municipal foundations, and these swarmed in the countryside like so
many unemployed.
Among the first two grades or those of no grade at all, the better type became
schoolmasters, while the worse ones became the "local gentry." They were ama teur
lawyers who handled lawsuits for a living, working hand in hand with the yamen
bureaucrats, or bought out "tax monopolies,9' working hand in hand with the local
rich. They did not know anything about scholarship except that they could repeat the
texts of the Five Classics by rote, and in most cases also the official commentaxies by
Ghu Hsi, which were for them the one and only correct interpretation of Confucian
truths. They could not write good poetry, and their training for the official
examinations was so limited in scope and the eight- legged essay style they had
learned was so conventional that they could not write either a correct newspaper
report of events or a simple business note involving rather vulgar names of
commodities, in which experienced business men easily surpassed them. But their
power was not to be despised. They had a class consciousness, a class organization,
