CHINESE EATING RICE AND DRINKING SAMSHU (WHISKY).

To face p. 9.

A coolie, for example, is engaged by you to do general household work. He comes to you from an inland country where poverty is the prevailing characteristic of the whole population. Sweet potatoes are the staple food three times a day, year in, year out, helped down perhaps by salted turnip, bean curds and pickled beans—for it is only on special occasions that they have the rare happiness of indulging in the luxury of rice.

He has absolutely nothing excepting what he stands in, and so few cash that no sooner have you agreed to employ him than he at once asks for an advance to buy his next meal. The sum you promised him is princely when compared with what he could earn in his own country, and his mode of living is on a most luxurious scale, when contrasted with the meagre food he had in his native village. Now he has rice every day and fish, and luxuries brought from northern seas, no longer a vision of dreams, but realities that he indulges in every day.

Now, judging from an English standpoint, one would imagine that this poverty-stricken Chinaman, whose experience of want has been so real, would hold on like grim death upon a situation where life has been made so easy for him. But here comes in one of the surprises that often makes the Chinese character so inexplicable. A month goes by, and one day with the silent tread of his shoeless feet he sidles up to you, and he says he wants to tell you that he is going to leave you. You are astonished, and you ask him, with a look of wonder on your face, what he means and what he intends doing? He is not going to do anything, he declares, and he gives you nine reasons for his conduct, not one of which is the true one, the tenth and real one being hidden away in that mysterious brain of his, and he leaves you. A few days hence you see him loafing about with no apparent means of livelihood, and he is fast reverting to the original potatoes-fed type that he was when he left his country home.

Another point that is inexplicable in the Chinese is his amazing credulity. His character is naturally a strong one, his common-sense of the broad and robust kind. There is hardly any subject in common life where his opinion is not of a healthy, breezy description. It is one of the mysteries of the inscrutable Chinaman that at times he seems to be as credulous as the most unenlightened African that trembles before the decision of the Obi doctor.

In the early years, when the foreigner was an unknown and dreaded character, the wildest and most improbable stories were circulated amongst the common people, and more believed in. A mandarin in a large city in the northern part of the Empire, where the people were inspired with a dread lest they were going to be attacked by the English, took advantage of their credulity by putting out proclamations all over his district, which informed them that they had no reason whatever to fear the foreigners, because, as they had no knee-joints, when they fell down they could not rise up again. This was at once accepted as a truth, and the agitation and alarm from that time passed entirely away.

About the same time, in a very wide and extended district, a rumour arose that the missionaries, when any of their converts died, took out their eyes and made them into opium. The thing was so utterly absurd and the number of Christians then so very small, that it seemed as though the monstrous report must speedily die a natural death. But this was not the case. It spread with remarkable rapidity through towns and villages and hamlets, and was implicitly believed in not merely by coolies and rough, uncultivated labourers, but also by scholars of high degree and by great mandarins, and for more than twenty years it was a prime article of faith with millions of people.

It is the unexpected that so often happens in Chinese life that has given such an air of mystery to this strange and wonderful people. The very opposite virtues and vices seem to flourish and exist in the same individuals. The Chinese, for example, in ordinary and everyday life have no sense of truth. It is not that they are any worse than other nations of the East. The moment you pass through the Suez Canal and have come upon the confines of the Orient, you realize that truth as it is looked upon in the West does not exist in all the vast and glowing regions beyond.

You are in a new land, and the atmosphere of straightforward honest expression of thought has vanished, and now it seems that, except in the most trivial affairs of life, where concealment is unnecessary, you are in a world where every one has a mask on, and the great aim is to conceal the face that lies behind.

The oblique and angular way by which a Chinese loves to express the intention he has in his mind has no doubt intensified the Oriental disposition to lie, until now he seems to have absolutely no conscience on the subject. A Chinese coolie one day made some statement to me that I knew to be false. I was exceedingly annoyed at this, and so told him, and yet I could not help being amused, for the look of childish simplicity and artlessness that beamed over his face was so real and natural that I could not but admire the perfect acting of this rough, uncultivated fellow. “You are mistaken,” he said to me, “when you accuse me of telling you a falsehood, for I assure you that I never told a lie in all my life.” I instinctively thought of a picture that appeared in Punch many years ago, where two rough miners stood by the roadside, one of them having a kettle in his hand, which was to be given to the one that could tell the greatest lie. A person comes along who asks them what they are talking about? When told, he was shocked, and declared that he had never told a lie in his life, and he was rather taken aback when the kettle was handed to him, and he was told that he rightly earned it. I thought if only I had had a kettle at hand I would have passed it over to him and told him the legend.

Now the contradictory element in the Chinaman’s character comes out particularly strong in connection with this national defect of untruthfulness. A lie to him has no moral side, it is simply a display of cleverness, and the more perfectly it succeeds the greater is the applause it elicits; and yet there are occasions when the Chinaman’s word is as good as his bond, and is as much to be relied upon as that of an Englishman who may have gained a reputation for integrity and honour.

A Chinese merchant, for example, makes a contract months before to deliver so many chests of tea at a certain rate. The market in the meanwhile rises, a dearth has suddenly occurred in the foreign trade, and the buyer finds that if he keeps his engagements he will lose thousands of dollars. He never for a moment hesitates as to what he shall do; he does not even attempt to get the purchaser to make an advance upon the terms agreed to. The tea comes down the river from the mountain side on which it is grown, over rapids and down through whirling gorges, and away from the pure breezes of the hillside, and it is brought to the city where the merchant lives, and is handed over to him with as scrupulous a care as though he were being paid the advanced price that the later teas are getting.

It is no uncommon thing for foreign merchants to bear testimony to the perfect honesty of the Chinese with whom they may have large business transactions, and one manager of a banking concern even declared in public that, though business extending over hundreds of millions of taels had been transacted with Chinese, the bank had never suffered by one single defaulter. This is all the more extraordinary, and is one of the startling perplexities in the Chinese character, since we know that in ordinary business life one has to keep one’s weather eye open or he will find himself cheated most unmercifully.

In spite of the complex nature of the Chinese, and the veiled way in which that mysterious brain of his works, there is no doubt but that there is a fascination about him to the men of the West such as none of the other nations of the East possesses. It is not because he is handsome, for, taking the ordinary run of Chinese that one sees in the streets, they are entirely wanting in all the elements of beauty that constitute the standard of the West.

The features of the face, with the exception of the eyes, have not a single good one amongst them. The cheek-bones of the typical Chinaman are high and protruding; the nose is flat, as though the original progenitor had had his bruised by falling on a fender and had transmitted it flattened and disfigured through successive generations, and the mouth, too, is large and sensuous looking. In addition to all this there is a yellow strain that lies as a foundation colour through all the others that nature or the burning sun lays on, and the effect is not at all a pleasing one. That there are really handsome women in common life and amongst the more refined classes, and that there are good-looking men in all grades of society is undoubtedly true, but they are by no means common. The great mass of the people are exceedingly plain-featured and unattractive, and they are wanting, too, in those delicate and refined graces that of themselves are sufficient to give a charm even to a personality that is otherwise anything but pleasing.

The attraction lies in the people themselves, and without any effort on their side the foreigner feels himself drawn by a kind of hypnotism towards them. You cannot explain this and you cannot tell the reason why. A rude, rough-looking coolie comes in, and you do not feel repelled by him as you would were the person a countryman of your own who had suddenly appeared out of the slums. A man has cheated you, and you know that he has, and though you may at first feel indignant, it is not long ere you are laughing at the whole affair because of the grotesque side that almost invariably accompanies such a transaction. A person comes to see you about whom you are suspicious. You stand on your guard, and you put on your coldest and most reserved air, as you ask him to be seated. The Chinaman acts as though he were quite oblivious of your state of mind. There is a smile upon his face that travels over the rough hollows of his expansive countenance, and spreads to the back of his neck, and seems in some mysterious way to vanish down his long tail. No amount of coldness can long resist the eyes that are flashing with good humour and the features that are lighted up with such a pleasant look. Insensibly you begin to thaw, and before you are aware of it you are talking with him on the most friendly terms. You laugh and chat with him, and when he leaves, you accompany him to the door, and with the usual polite phrase to the parting guest, you entreat him “to walk slowly, and come again as soon as he can.” Ten minutes after he has gone, your old suspicions revive, and you wonder at yourself in being such an egregious fool as to give yourself away as you have done. The fact is, it was the nameless something about the man that worked the miracle, and now that the bright black eyes have gone, and the moorland of smile has vanished, and the hypnotism no longer works, you come back to the old thoughts that you had before, which you are certain after all are right.

Circumstances of this kind are of exceedingly frequent occurrence. You go into a bank that has a large business. The manager is an energetic, shrewd business man. He is full of schemes and plans to promote the interests of the establishment, and people speak of him as being the cause of the prosperity that is now giving it a golden reputation. The real man who lies at the back of all this success is the Chinese compradore. He is a most unpretentious man, and if you visit him in the little room that he uses as an office, you would be anything but struck by him. His clothes are of a very common description, rather slovenly and untidy, and his shoes are slipshod. He is perhaps smoking a long bamboo pipe of vile-smelling native tobacco, but this quiet, unassuming Chinaman is the force that lies behind the business that brings in such large dividends to the shareholders. He has the whole of the markets in his brain, he knows which of the clients of the bank are prosperous and which are tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. He finds out to whom amongst his countrymen loans may be made with safety, and he will know by a single glance at documents that have been drawn up in the hieroglyphic language of the Chinese of what value they are for the purpose of negotiating large monetary transactions. No bank in China, and no large business firm could exist for a month without its compradore.

The hypnotic influence of the Chinaman is seen in almost any direction in which you like to turn. The mistress of a home is as wax in the hands of her cook, whose words, as far as the table is concerned, are a law that even she would be very chary of opposing. A foreigner engages a Chinese teacher, and ere long he comes so thoroughly under his influence that he will accept every word that he says about Chinese subjects, will repeat his very mistakes, and will refuse to listen to any criticism that outsiders may make either regarding his scholarship or his methods of teaching.

Perhaps the most conspicuous instance of the dominating influence of the Chinaman is seen in the foreign Consulates. In each of these there is a Chinese official employed that is called a writer. He is a gentleman and a member of the literary class. His duties are to write dispatches in Chinese to the mandarins and to be the one connecting link between the native authorities and the particular foreign Consul in whose service he happens to be. All petitions or complaints from the Chinese have to go through his hands, so that his position is one of great responsibility and power.

If the Consul happens to be a man of strong, independent character he will hold his own, and the business of the Consulate will be in a large measure under his own control. If he is, however, easy-going or of average intellectual ability, he comes at once under the hypnotizing influence of the wily self-contained Chinaman, who before long becomes the master spirit in the office. This fact is so far realized by the leading mandarin of the place that he actually subsidizes him to influence the policy of the Consul to be favourable to him. A hostile writer could so easily influence his mind against the former, and cause such strained diplomatic relations, that he would incur the resentment of his superiors and be dismissed from his office.

I have known a case where the whole policy of a Consulate was dictated by the writer, who was a clever, intriguing scamp. All Chinese documents had to pass through his hands, and it depended upon the amount of the bribes received whether any of them got a dispassionate investigation at the hands of the Consul. His reputation became so bad that he was finally asked to resign, but he did so with a very comfortable fortune that enabled him to take a commanding position amongst the leading men in his neighbourhood.

A JOKE.

To face p. 17.

In whatever direction one likes to take the Chinaman, he seems to have an hypnotic power that secures, if not favour, at least attention. An English mother takes her little girl, a delicate, fragile little morsel, with blue eyes and golden hair, and she puts her into the arms of one of her coolies to amuse and care for her. He is about as ugly-looking a specimen as you could pick out. He has large, uncouth features and hair unkempt, and the general air of a rowdy. You would naturally suppose that the refined-looking little mortal would shrink from him, but nothing of the kind happens. Her eyes glisten, and she jumps into his arms with alacrity, and by and by you will see her with one arm round his neck and looking with pleasure into his face, full of the most perfect content.

There is no doubt but that one secret of the extraordinary power that the Chinese undoubtedly have is the very large amount of genuine human nature with which as a race they are endowed. The Chinaman is a person that is full of fun. It would seem as though a sense of humour lay at the basis of his character and tinged everything with its subtle influence. A joke with the Chinaman is a solvent that disperses anger and drives away passion from the heart, and makes the broad, uncouth faces shine with a light, like sunbeams playing upon the rugged sides of a hill. If the Chinese had been a nation of sombre, gloomy people, without a gleam of humour in their natures, they would have been a positive peril to the world. As it is, the genial strain that is the woof and warp of the Celestial’s being makes him a person that can win his way into the hearts of strangers, and slowly dissipate the prejudice that they at first have, because of his homely and unattractive features, and the yellow hue that tinges his skin with a most inartistic colour.

He can be very cruel when the passion is upon him, but under ordinary circumstances he is full of kindness and sympathy, and he will exercise these qualities in such a genial way that one’s heart feels drawn out towards him. When one gets beyond the outside formalities and into the inner life of the people, and beyond the crust of selfishness that heathenism has caused to gather round their hearts, one discovers a fund of possible human virtues that under the influence of Christianity will expand and develop so that the nation that the world has been accustomed to look upon with a smile, and as simply an ingenious puzzle that the West has never been able to put together, will turn out to be amongst the most fascinating and most attractive of the peoples of the earth.

There is one feature about the Chinaman that, from a Western point of view, is a most disappointing one, and that is his apparent inability to be thorough. The watchword of the West is “thorough,” and in every department of life the aim is to do everything as perfectly as human hands or brains can make them. Now in China there is no such ideal motive anywhere to be found. A workman, for example, will make some exquisite work of art, and yet he will finish off some part that is not obvious to the eye in the most slovenly and inartistic manner. You order a hardwood table, to be inlaid with pearl, and after weeks of patient toil and most elaborate workmanship, that will bear the keenest investigation, you find the legs, or perhaps the underside of the table, finished off in a slovenly, careless way, more suited to an article that was intended to be used in the kitchen. One is being continually provoked by Chinese workmen bringing in things, that have been ordered, without proper finish. You remonstrate with them, and they look at you with amazement. They are amused at your being annoyed at something which the turbidity of the Yellow brain never discovers as being at all wrong. A broad smile illumines their faces, and they say, “Oh, well, never mind, for after all it is a matter of no importance; let it go.”

This tendency of the Chinese mind is visible in every direction. You arrange with a builder for some work to be done. You impress upon him that the matter is urgent. You give him your reason for thinking this, and he agrees with you, and you finally settle with him a near day when he will have his workmen assembled and operations will be begun. As the Chinaman’s brain is apt to work slowly, and it is difficult to get him to grasp a consecutive statement of any length, you go over the whole thing to him once more, and finally you make him repeat in his own words the ideas you wish him to carry out. Everything now seems plain, and although doubts will flash through your brain, you dismiss them at once as unreasonable, and you look with certainty to the contract being carried out.

The day arrives and you proceed to the spot, expecting to see a hive of busy workmen, but not a soul turns up. You send for the builder, and you ask him how it is that he has broken his agreement with you. He smiles and looks amused that you should be in such a hurry. He cannot understand it, for the difference of a day or two, or a week even, is such a trivial matter in this land, that the Chinese are constantly wondering why a foreigner gets excited if a thing is not done at the precise time that has been agreed upon.

The fact is the great Eastern Sun is in his eyes, and his rays have entered into his blood, and the languor of the Orient is upon him, so that time marches by and he feels that he dare not attempt to keep step with it. To be efficient and thorough means intensity, but that the Chinese race will not attempt. Some writers have predicted that a day may come when, inspired by a spirit of war, they will flash their swords in a wild conquest of the West. This is a dream that will never be realized. Both by instinct and by ages of training, the Chinese are essentially a peace-loving people. The glory of war is something that does not appeal to them. Trade, and commerce, and money-making, and peaceful lives are the ideals of the race. No sooner is a clan fight begun, or a war with another nation, than the air at once resounds with the cry, “Mediate,” “Mediate.” Mediation is in the very blood of the nation, and the man who is a successful mediator is one that wins a golden reputation for himself.

What the West has to fear is not the warlike spirit of the Chinese, which has never been a very important factor in their past history, but their numbers. They are a people that multiply rapidly, but through the operation of Fung-Shuy and other endless superstitions, the resources of China have never been allowed to be developed so as to support the huge population. Large numbers of people have consequently been compelled to go abroad to earn a living.

These, as far as the native populations have been concerned, have rarely been desirable immigrants, but this is especially the case with the great nations of the West. The Chinese are a strong race, and can live in comfort, and even luxury, on incomes that would mean starvation to American or Australian workmen. The battle of the future with the Yellow race will not be fought on any battlefield, but in the labour markets of the nations that they would invade.