saunter, good for the body and good for the soul. He hates the word "exercise."
Exercise for what? It is a ridiculous Western notion. Why, even the sight of
respectable grown-up men dashing about in a field for a ball now seems ridiculous,
supremely ridiculous; and more ridiculous still, the wrapping oneself up in hot
flannels and woollen sweaters after the game on a hot summer day. Why all the bother?
He reflects. He remembers he used to enjoy it himself, but then he was young and
immature and he was not himself. It was but a passing fancy, and he has not really the
instinct for sport. No, he is born differently; he is born for kowtowing and for quiet
and peace, and not for football and the dog-collar and table napkins and efficiency. He
sometimes thinks of himself as a pig, and the Westerner as a dog, and the dog worries
the pig, but the pig only grunts, and it may even be a grunt of satisfaction. Why, he
even wants to be a pig, a real pig, for it is really so very comfortable, and he does not
envy the dog for his collar and his dog-efficiency and his bitch-goddess success. All
he wants is that the dog leave him alone.
Chapter One
THE CHINESE PEOPLE
I. NORTH AND SOUTH
IN the study of any period of literature or of any epoch of history, the final and
highest effort is always an attempt to gain a close view of the man in that period or
epoch, for behind the creations of literature and the events of history there is always
the individual who is after all of prime interest to us. One thinks of a Marcus Aurelius
or a Lucian in the times of decadent Rome, or of a Frangois Villon in the medieval
ages, and the times seem at once familiar and understandable to us. Names like "the
age of Johnson55 are more suggestive to us than a name like "the eighteenth century/'
for only by recalling how Johnson lived, the inns he frequented, and the friends with
whom he held conversations does the period become real to us. Perhaps the life of a
lesser literary light or of an ordinary Londoner in Johnson5s time would be just as
instructive, but an ordinary Londoner could not be very interesting, because ordinary
people throughout the ages are all alike. Whether ordinary people drink ale or Lipton's
tea is entirely a matter of social accident, and can make no important difference
because they are ordinary men.
That Johnson smoked and that he frequented eighteenth century inns is, however, of
great historical importance. Great souls react in a peculiar way to their social
environment and make it of importance to us. They have that quality of genius which
affects and is affected by the things they touch; they are influenced by the books they
read and by the women with whom they come into contact, which make no impress
on other lesser men. In them is lived to its full the life of their age or generation; they
absorb all there is to absorb and respond with finest and most powerful sensitiveness.
Yet, in dealing with a country the common man cannot be ignored. Ancient Greece
was not entirely peopled by Sophocleses and Elizabethan England was not strewn
with Bacons and Shakespeares. To talk of Greece and only think of Sophocles and
Pericles and Aspasia is to get a wrong picture of the Athenians. One has to supplement
it with an occasional glimpse of the son of Sophocles who sued his father for
incompetency in managing his family affairs, and with characters from Aristophanes,
who were not all in love with beauty and occupied in the pursuit of truth, but who
were often drunk, gluttonous, quarrelsome, venal and fickle, even as were common
Athenians. Perhaps the fickle Athenians help us to .understand the downfall of the
Athenian republic as much as Pericles and Aspasia help us to understand its greatness.
Individually they are naught, but taken in the aggregate they influence to a very large
measure the course of national events. In the past epoch, it may be difficult to
reconstruct them, but in a living country the common man is always with us.
But who is the common man, and what is he? The Chinaman exists only as a general
abstraction in our minds. Apart from the cultural unity which binds the Chinese
people as a nation, the southern Chinese differ probably as much from the northerners,
in temperament, physique and habits, as the Mediterraneans differ from the Nordic peoples in Europe. Happily, within, the orbit of the Chinese culture there has not been
a rise of nationalism, but only of provincialism, which after all was what made peace
within the empire possible for centuries. The common historical tradition, the
written language, which has in a singular way solved the problem of Esperanto in
China, and the cultural homogeneity achieved through centuries of slow, peaceful
penetration of a civilization over comparatively docile aborigines, have achieved for
China the basis of the common brotherhood so much desirable now in Europe. Even
the spoken language presents no difficulty nearly so great as confronts Europe to-day.
A native of Manchuria can, with some difficulty, make himself understood in
south-west Yunnan, a linguistic feat made possible by a slow colonization process and
helped greatly by the system of writing, the visible symbol of China's unity,
This cultural homogeneity sometimes makes us forget that racial differences,
differences of blood, do exist within the country. At close range the abstract notion of
a Chinaman disappears and breaks up into a picture of a variety of races, different in
their stature, temperament and mental make-up. It is only when we try to put a
southern commander over northern soldiers that we are abruptly reminded of the
existing differences. For on the one hand we have the northern Chinese, acclimatized
to simple thinking and hard living, tall and stalwart, hale, hearty and humorous,
onion-eating and fun- loving, children of nature, who are in every way more Mongolic
and more conservative than the conglomeration of peoples near Shanghai and who
suggest nothing of their loss of racial vigour. They are the Honan boxers, the
Shantung bandits and the imperial brigands who have furnished China with all the
native imperial dynasties, the raw material from which the characters of Chinese
novels of wars and adventure are drawn.
Down the south-east coast, south of the Yangtse, one meets a different type, inured to
ease and culture and sophistication, mentally developed but physically retrograde,
loving their poetry and their comforts, sleek undergrown men and slim neurasthenic
women, fed on birds'-nest soup and lotus seeds, shrewd in business, gifted in
belles- lettres, and cowardly in war, ready to roll on the ground and cry for mamma
before the lifted fist descends, offsprings of the cultured Chinese families who crossed
the Yangtse with their books and paintings during the end of the Ch' in Dynasty, when
China was overrun by barbaric invaders.
South in Kwangtung, one meets again a different people, where racial vigour is again
in evidence, where people eat like men and work like men, enterprising, carefree,
spendthrift, pugnacious, adventurous, progressive and quick-tempered, where beneath
the Chinese culture a snake-eating aborigines tradition persists, revealing a strong
admixture of the blood of the ancient Ttteh inhabitants of southern China, North and
south of Hankow, in the middle of China, the loud-swearing and intrigue- loving
Hupeh people exist, who are compared by the people of other provinces to
"nine-headed birds in heaven" because they never say die, and who think pepper not
hot enough to eat until they have fried it in oil, while the Hunan people, noted for their soldiery and their dogged persistence, offer a pleasanter variety of these
descendants of the ancient Ch'u warriors.
Movements of trade and the imperial rule of sending scholars to official posts outside
their native provinces l have brought about some mixture of the peoples and have
smoothed out these provincial differences, but as a whole they continue to exist. For
the significant fact remains that the northerner is essentially a conqueror and the
southerner is essentially a trader, and that of all the imperial brigands who have
founded Chinese dynasties, none have come from south of the Yangtse. The tradition
developed that no rice-eating southerners could mount the dragon throne, and only
noodle-eating northerners could. In fact, with the exception of the founders of the
T'ang and Ghou Dynasties, who emerged from north-east Kansu and were therefore
Turkish-suspect, all the founders of the great dynasties have come from a rather
restricted mountainous area, somewhere around the Lunghai Railway, which includes
eastern Honan, southern Hopei, western Shantung and northern Anhui. It should
not be difficult to determine the mileage of the radius within which imperial babies
were born with a point on the Lunghai Railway as the centre of the area. The founder
of the Han Dynasty came from Peihsien in modern Hsuchow, that of the Ch' in
Dynasty came from Honan, that of the Sung Dynasty came from Ghohsien in southern
Hopei, and Chu Hungwu of the Ming Dynasty came from Fengyang in Honan*
To this day, with the exception of Chiang Kaishek of Ghekiang whose family history
has not been made public, the generals for the most part come from Hopei, Shantung,
Anhui and Honan, also with the Lunghai Railway as the central point. Shantung is
responsible for Wu P'eifu, Chang Tsungch'ang, Sun Ch'uanfang and Lu Yunghsiang.
Hopei gives us Ch' i Hstiehytian, Li Chinglin, Chang Chihchiang and Lu Ghunglin.
Honan produced Ytian Shihk'ai and Anhui produced Feng Yuhsiang and Tuan Ch' ijui.
Kiangsu has produced no great generals, but has given us some very fine hotel boys.
Over half a century ago, Hunan in the middle of China produced Tseng Kuofan, the
exception that proves the rule; for although Tseng was a first-class scholar and general,
being born south of the Yangtse and consequently a rice-eater instead of a
noodle-eater, he was destined to end up by being a highminded official and not by
founding a new dynasty for China. For this latter task, one needed the rawness and
ruggedness of the North, a touch of genuine lovable vagabondage, the gift of loving
war and turmoil for its own sake 梐 nd a contempt for fair play, learning and
Confucian ethics until one is sitting secure on the dragon throne, when Confucian
monarchism can be of extreme usefulness.
* Often the families of these officials settle down in their new homes.
The raw, rugged North and the soft, pliable South——one can see these differences in
their language, music and poetry. Observe the contrast between the Shensi songs, on
the one hand, sung to the metallic rhythm of hard wooden tablets and keyed to a high
pitch like the Swiss mountain songs, suggestive of the howling winds on mountain tops and broad pastures and desert sand-dunes, and on the other, the indolent
Soochow crooning, something that is between a~ sigh and a snore, throaty, nasal, and
highly suggestive of a worn-out patient of asthma whose sighs and groans have by
force of habit become swaying and rhythmic. In language, one sees the difference
between the sonorous, clear-cut rhythm of Pekingese mandarin that pleases by its
alternate light and shade, and the soft and sweet babbling of Soochow women, with
round- lip vowels and circumflex tones, where force of emphasis is not expressed by a
greater explosion but by long-drawn-out and finely nuanced syllables at the end of
sentences.
The story is recounted of a northern colonel who, on reviewing a Soochow company,
could not make the soldiers move by his explosive "Forward March!" The captain
who had stayed a long time in Soochow and who understood the situation asked
permission to give the command in his own way. The permission was granted. Instead
of the usual clearcut "K'aipu chou!" he gave a genuine persuasive Soochow "kebu tser
nyiaaaaaaaah!" and lo and behold! the Soochow company moved.
In poetry, this difference is strikingly illustrated in the poems of the North and the
South during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, when northern China was for the
first time submerged under a Tartar rule, and the cultured Chinese migrated southward.
For it was a time when sentimental love lyrics flourished in the southern courts, and
the southern rulers were many of them great lyric poets, while a peculiar form of love
ditties, the tzityehko, developed among the people. A contrast between this
sentimental poetry and the fresh, naive poetry of the North would be highly
instructive. So sang the anonymous poet of the South in the popular ditties:
Kill the ever-crowing cock!
Shoot the early announcer of the dawn!
That there might be an uninterrupted
Rolling darkness till Next Year's morn!
Or again:
The roads are muddy and forsaken,
Despite the cold I came to thee.
Go and look at the footprints in snow,
If thou wilt not believe me.
During the Southern Sung Dynasty, we saw a peculiar development of a sentimental
lyric in intricate metre, the tz'u, which invariably sang of the sad lady in her boudoir,
and her tearful red candles at night and sweet- flavoured rouge and eyebrow pencils, and silk curtains and beaded window screens and painted rails and .departed springs^
