Classic Set in a Place You'd Like to Visit. A long time ago I visited Hong Kong around Christmas when they would put cool lights on the tall buildings. What a place! It breaks my heart nowadays Hong Kong is just another Chinese city. I'd like to visit Taiwan again actually.
China and the Chinese – Herbert Allen Giles (1845 - 1935)
Giles worked as a British diplomat in China from 1880 to 1893. Then he spent 35 years at Cambridge as its only professor of Chinese. He published both scholarly items and articles and books for the general public. This book collects lectures that he gave in 1902 at the inauguration of the Chinese studies program at Columbia University.
Chapter 1 kicks off with an interesting primer on the language. He touches on the Sinitic languages of the coast from Canton to Shanghai, but gives special emphasis on the language of government, Mandarin. He argues that the four tones of Mandarin are easily mastered and explains the absence of grammar in terms of conjugations or case or gender, which is lucky considering reading and writing take serious commitments of time, effort, and focus. He explains how the written language works, with its indicators of pronunciation and meaning in the same character.
Chapter 2 is an admirable overview of important Chinese written works in the Cambridge library. This chapter is worth reading for students looking for a quick summary of important books in traditional China. To gain true insight, he recommended reading everything – almanacs, ghost stories, joke books, etc.
There is a story of a doctor who had mismanaged a case, and was seized by the patient's family and tied up. In the night he managed to free himself, and escaped by swimming across a river. When he got home, he found his son, who had just begun to study medicine, and he said to him, "Don't be in a hurry with your books; the first and most important thing is to learn to swim!"
Giles says, “…the fact is that a successful study of the Chinese people cannot possibly be confined to their classics and higher literature …. … It must embrace the lesser, not to say meaner, details of their everyday life, if we are ever to pierce the mystery which still to a great extent surrounds them.
Chapter 3 is about how the Chinese organized national government from the Gate of Heavenly Peace all the way down to the village level. He argues that the Chinese are more democratic than the stereotype of “Oriental despotism” would suggest. He tells many stories of riots and demonstrations that quelled official action to impose taxes. He claims
Nowhere on earth can be found such perfect cohesion of units against forces which would crush each unit, taken individually, beyond recognition. Every trade, every calling, even the meanest, has its guild, or association, the members of which are ever ready to protect one another with perfect unanimity, and often great self-sacrifice. And combination is the weapon with which the people resist, and successfully resist, any attempt on the part of the governing classes to lay upon them loads greater than they can or will bear. The Chinese are withal an exceptionally law-abiding people, and entertain a deep-seated respect for authority. But their obedience and their deference have pecuniary limits.
Chapter 4 goes over surprising similarities between ancient Greece and traditional China. He speculates if Greco-Bactria, a kingdom in 250 BCE, might have been the meeting point: south of the Oxus River and north of the mountains of the Hindu Kush, i.e. much of present-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Chapter 5 is a readable overview of Taoism, a topic that must have particularly interested Giles.
The last chapter is the inevitable explanations of popular images of China at the time for the lay audience. Topics include the queue, the status of women, infanticide, ancestor worship, foot-binding, Chinese medicine, and Chinaman as Other. Giles was deeply interested in the people and wanted to explain their ways to the west so foreigners could have a more nuanced view of roughly 20% of the world’s population.
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