A Chinese Library | Lecture 2 | China and the Chinese | Herbert Allen Giles

China and the Chinese by Herbert Alan Giles Lecture 2 A Chinese Library The endowment of a Chinese chair at Columbia University naturally suggests the acquisition of a good Chinese library. At the University of Cambridge, England, there is what I can only characterize as an ideal Chinese library. It was not bought offhand in the market. Such collection indeed would never come into the market but the books were patiently and carefully brought together by my predecessor in the Chinese chair during a period of over 40 years residence in China the result is an admirable selection of representative works always in good and sometimes in rare editions covering the whole field of what is most valuable in Chinese literature i now propose, with your approval, to give a slight sketch of the Cambridge Library, in which I spend a portion of almost every day of my life, and which I further venture to recommend as the type of that collection which Columbia University should endeavour to place upon her shelves. The Chinese Library at Cambridge consists of 4,304 volumes, roughly distributed under seven heads. These volumes, it should be stated, are not the usual thin paper-covered volumes of an ordinary Chinese work, but they consist each of several of the original Chinese volumes bound together in cloth or leather, lettered on the back and standing on the shelves, as our books do, instead of lying flat, as is the custom in China. Division A contains, first of all, the Confucian Canon, which now consists of nine separate works. There is the mystic Book of Changes, that is to say, the eight changes or combinations which can be produced by a line and a broken line, either one of which is repeated twice with the other, or three times by itself. These trigrams are said to have been copied from the back of a tortoise by an ancient monarch who doubled them into hexagrams and so increased the combinations to 64 each one of which represents some active or passive power in nature Confucius said that if he could devote 50 years to the study of this work he might come to be without great faults but neither native nor foreign scholars can really make anything out of it some regard it as a book of fate one erratic genius of the West has gone so far as to say that it is only a vocabulary of the language of some old Central Asian tribe we are on somewhat firmer ground with the book of history which is a collection of very ancient historical documents going back 20 centuries BC arranged and edited by Confucius these documents mere fragments as they are give us glimpses of China's early civilization, centuries before the historical period, to which we shall come later on, can fairly be said to begin. Then we have the Book of Odes, consisting of some 300 ballads, also rescued by Confucius from oblivion, on which, as a basis, the great superstructure of modern Chinese poetry has been raised. Next comes an historical work by Confucius, known as the Spring and autumn. It should be springs and autumns, for the title refers to the yearly records, to the annals, in fact, of the native state of Confucius himself. The fifth in the series is the Book of Rites. This deals, as its title indicates, with ceremonial, and contains an infinite number of rules for the guidance of personal conduct under a variety of conditions and circumstances. It was compiled at a comparatively late date, the close of the second century BC, and scarcely ranks in authority with the other four. The above are called the five classics. They were for many centuries six in number, a book of music being included, and they were engraved on 46 huge stone tablets about the year 170 AD. Only mutilated portions of these tablets still remain. The other four works which make up the Confucian canon are known as the four books. They consist of a short moral treatise entitled The Great Learning, or Learning for Adults, The Doctrine of the Mean, another short philosophical treatise, The Analects, or Conversations of Confucius with his Disciples, and other details of the sage's daily life, and lastly, similar conversations of Mencius with his disciples and with various feudal nobles who sought his advice. These nine works are practically learned by heart by the Chinese undergraduate, but there are, in addition, many commentaries and exegetical works, the best of which stand in the Cambridge Library, designed to elucidate the true purport of the canon, and these must also be studied. They range from the commentary of Kong Anguo of the 2nd century BC, a descendant of Confucius in the 12th degree, down to that of Yuan Yuan, a well-known scholar who only died so recently, as 1849. These commentaries include both of the two great schools of interpretation, the earlier of which was accepted until the 12th century AD, when it was set aside by China's most brilliant scholar Zhu Xi, who substituted the interpretation still in vogue and obligatory at the public competitive examinations which admit to an official career. Archaeological works referring to the canon have been published in great numbers. The very first book in our catalogue is an account of every article mentioned in these old records, accompanied in all cases by woodcuts. Thus the foreign student may see not only the robes and caps in which ancient worthies of the Confucian epoch appeared, but their chariots, their banners, their weapons, and general paraphernalia of everyday life. Side by side with the sacred books of Confucianism stand the heterodox writings of the Taoist philosophers, the nominal founder of which school, known as Lao Tzu, flourished at an unknown date before Confucius. some of these are deeply interesting others have not escaped the suspicion of forgery a suspicion which attaches more or less to any works produced before the famous burning of the books in BC 211 from which the confucian canon was preserved almost by a miracle an emperor at that date made an attempt to destroy all literature so that a fresh start might be made from himself but i do not intend to detain you at present over taoism about which i hope to say more on a subsequent occasion still less shall i have anything to say on the few Buddhist works which are also to be found in the Cambridge collection it is rather along less well-beaten paths that i shall ask you to accompany me now in Division B the first thing which catches the eye is a long line of two hundred and seventeen thick volumes about a foot in height These are the dynastic histories of China, in a uniform edition, published in the year 1747, under the auspices of the famous Emperor Qianlong, who himself contributed a preface. The first of this series, known as the Historical Record, was produced by a very remarkable man, named Sima Qian, sometimes called the father of history, the Herodotus of China, who died nearly 100 years BC, and over his most notable work, it may not be unprofitable, to linger a while. Starting with the five legendary emperors, some 2,700 years BC, the historian begins by giving the annals of each reign, under the various more or less legendary dynasties which succeeded, and thence onward right down to his own times, the last five or six hundred years, i.e. from about 700 BC, belonging to a genuinely historical period. These annals form part one of the five parts into which the historian divides his scheme. Part two is occupied by chronological tables of the emperors and their reigns, of the suzerains and vassal nobles under the feudal system, which was introduced about 1100 BC, and also of the nobles created to form an aristocracy after the feudal system had been swept away and replaced by the old imperial rule about 200 BC part three consists of eight important and interesting chapters one on the rites and ceremonies of the period covered two on music three on the pitch pipes a series of 12 bamboo tubes of varying lengths the notes from which were supposed to be bound up in some mysterious way with the good and bad fortunes of mankind four on the calendar five on the stars six on the imperial sacrifices to heaven and earth seven on the waterways of the empire and lastly eight on commerce coinage etc part four deals with the reigns so to speak of the vassal nobles under the feudal system the reigns of the suzerains having been already included in part one part v consists of biographies of the most eminent men who came to the front during the whole period covered these biographies are by no means confined to virtuous statesmen or heroic generals as we might very reasonably have expected the chinese historian took a much broader view of his responsibilities to future ages and along with the above virtuous statesmen and heroic generals he included lives of famous assassins of tyrannical officials of courtiers of flatterers of men with nothing beyond the gift of the gab of politicians of fortune-tellers and the like this principle seems now to be widely recognised in the compilation of biographical collections it was initiated by a chinese historian one hundred years b c his great work has come down to us as near as possible intact to the chinese it is and always has been a priceless treasure so much so that every succeeding dynastic history has been modelled pretty much upon the same lines the custom has always been for the incoming dynasty to issue the history of the dynasty it has overthrown based upon materials which have been gathered daily during the latter's lease of power at this moment the historiographers department in peking should be noting down current events for the use of posterity in the established belief that all dynasties even the most powerful come to an end some day In addition to the dynastic history proper, a custom has grown up of compiling what is called the veritable record of the life of the reigning emperor. This is supposed to be written up every day, and with an absolute fidelity which it is unnecessary to suspect, since the emperors are never allowed, under any circumstances, to cast an eye over their own records. When the Hanlin When college was burnt down in 1900, some said that the veritable records of the present dynasty were destroyed, others alleged that they had been carted away several days previously. However this may be, the veritable records of the great Ming dynasty, which came to a close in 1644 after 300 years of power, are safe in Division B of the Cambridge Library, filling 84 large volumes of manuscript. The next historical epoch is that of Sima Guang, a leading statesman and scholar of the 11th century AD, who, after 19 years of continuous labour, produced a general history of China in the form of a chronological narrative, beginning with the 4th century BC and ending with the middle of the 10th century AD. work, which is popularly known as the Mirror of History, and is quite independent of the dynastic histories, fills thirty-three of our large bound-up volumes. There is a quaint passage in the Old Man's Preface, dated 1084, and addressed to the Emperor. Your servant's physical strength is now relaxed. His eyes are short-sighted and dim. Of his teeth but a few remain. His memory is so impaired that the events of the moment are forgotten as he turns away from them, his energies having been wholly exhausted in the production of this book. He therefore hopes that your majesty will pardon his vain attempt for the sake of his loyal intention, and in moments of leisure will deign to cast the sacred glance over this work, so as to learn from the rise and fall of former dynasties, the secret of the successes and failures of the present hour. Then, if such knowledge shall be applied for the advantage of the empire, even though your servant may lay his bones in the yellow springs, the aim and ambition of his life will be fulfilled. Biography, as we have already seen, is to some extent provided for under the dynastic histories. Its scope, however, has been limited in later times, so far as the historiographer's department is concerned, to such officials as have been named by imperial edict for inclusion in the national records. Consequently, there has always been a vast output of private biographical literature, dealing with the lives of poets, painters, priests, hermits, villains and others, whose good and evil deeds would have been long since forgotten, like those of the heroes before Agamemnon, but for the care of some enthusiastic biographer. Among our eight or ten collections of this kind, there is one which deserves a special notice. This work is entitled Biographies of Eminent Women, and it fills four extra-large volumes, containing 310 lives in all. The idea of thus immortalising the most deserving of his countrymen first occurred to a writer named Liu Xiang, who flourished just before the Christian era. I am not aware that his original work is still procurable. The present work was based upon one by another writer of the 3rd century AD, and is brought down to modern times, being published in 1779. Each biography is accompanied by a full-page illustration of some scene in which the lady distinguished herself, all from the pencil of a well-known artist. Three good-sized encyclopedias, uniformly bound up in 98 large volumes may fairly claim a moment's notice not only as evidencing the persistent literary industry of the Chinese but because they are all three perfect mines of information on subjects of interest to the foreign student. The first dates from the very beginning of the 9th century and deals chiefly with the administration of government political economy and national defences besides rites, music and subordinate questions. The second dates from the 12th century and deals with the same subjects, having additional sections on history and chronology, writing, pronunciation, astronomy, bibliography, prodigies, fauna and flora, foreign nations, etc. The third and best known to foreign scholars is the Encyclopedia of Ma Duanlin of the 14th century. It is on much the same lines as the other two, being actually based upon the first, but has of course the advantage of being some centuries later. The above three works are in a uniform edition, published in the middle of the 18th century under orders from the Emperor Qianlong. There are also several other encyclopedias of information on general topics, extending to a good many volumes in each case. One of these contains interesting extracts on all manner of subjects, taken from the lighter literature of China such as dreams palmistry reminiscences of a previous state of existence and even resurrection after death it was cut on blocks for printing in AD 981 only fifty years after the first edition of the Confucian canon was printed the Cambridge copy cannot claim to date from 981 but it does date from 1566 another work of the same kind was the San Tai Tu Hui published in 1609 which is bound up in seventeen thick volumes it is especially interesting for the variety of topics on which information is given and also because it is profusely illustrated with full-page woodcuts it has chapters on geography with maps on ethnology language the arts and sciences and even on various forms of athletics including the feats of rope dancers and acrobats sword play boxing wrestling and football under tricks and magic we see a man swallowing a sword or walking through fire while hard by an acrobat is bending backward and drinking from cups arranged upon the ground the chapters on drawing are exceptionally good they contain some specimen landscapes of almost faultless perspective and also clever examples of free-hand drawing portrait painting is dealt with and ten illustrations are given of the ten angles at which a face may be drawn the first shows one-tenth of the face from the right side the second two-tenths and so on waxing to full face five-tenths then waning sets in on the left side four three and two-tenths until ten-tenths shows nothing more than the back of the sitter's head there is a well-known Chinese story which tells how a very stingy man took a paltry sum of money to an artist payment is always exacted in advance and asked him to paint his portrait the artist at once complied with his request but in an hour or so when the portrait was finished nothing was visible save the back of the sitter's head what does this mean cried the latter indignantly oh replied the artist i thought a man who paid so little as you wouldn't care to show his face Perhaps someone may wonder how it is possible to arrange an encyclopedia for reference when the language in which it is written happens to possess no alphabet. Arrangement under categories is the favourite method, and it is employed in the following way. A number of such words as heaven, earth, time, man, plants, beasts, birds, fishes, minerals and others are chosen, and the subjects are grouped under these headings. Thus, eclipses would come under heaven, geomancy under earth, the passions under man, though all classification is not quite so simple as these specimens, and search is often prolonged by failing to hit upon the right category. Even when the category is the right one, many pages of index have frequently to be turned over, but once fix the reference in the index and the rest is easy, the catchword, in each case, being printed on the margin of each page, just where the finger comes when turning the pages rapidly over. The Chinese are very fond of collections of reprints, published in uniform editions and often extending to several hundred volumes. My earliest acquaintance with literature is associated with such a collection in English. It was called the Family Library, and ran to over a hundred volumes, if I recollect rightly, and included the works of Washington Irving. and the immortal story of Rip Van Winkle, there is also a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, a tale of a man who wandering one day in the mountains came upon two boys playing checkers and after watching them for some time and eating some dates they gave him, he discovered that the handle of an axe he was carrying had mouldered into dust returning home he found, as the Chinese poet puts it city and suburb as of old but hearts that loved him long since cold, seven generations had passed away in the interim the Cambridge Library possesses several of these collections of reprints, one of them is perhaps extra valuable because the wooden blocks from which it was printed were destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion some 40 years ago. I may mention here, though not properly belonging to this section, that we possess a good collection of the curious pamphlets issued by the Taiping rebels. Other interesting works to be found in Division B are the statutes of the present dynasty, which began in 1644, and even those of the previous dynasty, the latter being an edition of 1576. Then there is the penal code of this dynasty. in several editions various collections of precedents, handbooks for magistrates with recorded decisions and illustrative cases, a magistrate or judge in China is not expected to know anything about law attached to the office of every official who may be called upon to try criminal cases is a law expert to whom the judge or magistrate may refer when he has any doubt in private, just as our unpaid justices of the peace in England refer for guidance to the qualified official attached to the court before passing on to the next section one last volume taken at haphazard bears the weird title A Record in Dark Blood, this work contains notices of eminent statesmen and others who met violent deaths each accompanied by a telling illustration of the tragic scene, some of the incidents go far to dispose of the belief that patriotism is quite unknown to the Chinese division, C is devoted to geography and to topography here stands the imperial geography of the empire in twenty-four large volumes with maps in the edition of seventeen forty five, here too stand many of the topographies for which China is justly celebrated every prefecture and every district or department and the latter number about fifteen hundred has its topography a kind of local history with all the noticeable features of the district its bridges temples and like buildings duly described together with biographies of all natives of the district who have risen to distinction in any way, each topography would occupy about two feet of shelf consequently a complete collection of all the topographies of China piled one upon the other would form a vertical column as high as the Eiffel Tower yet topography is only an outlying branch of Chinese literature Division C further contains the oldest printed book in the Cambridge University Library and a very interesting one to boot it is entitled An Account of Strange Nations and was published between 1368 and 1398 its contents consist of short notices of about a hundred and fifty nationalities known more or less to the Chinese and the value of these is much enhanced by the woodcuts which accompany each notice among the rest we find Koreans Japanese Xiongnu the forefathers of the Huns Khitan Tartars tribes of Central Asia Arabs Persians and even Portuguese John de Monte Corvino who had been appointed Archbishop of Peking in thirteen o eight having died there in thirteen thirty of course there are a few pictures of legendary peoples such as the long-armed nation the one-eyed nation the dog-headed nation and anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders there is also an account of Fusang the country where grew the famous plant which some have tried to identify with the Mexican aloe thus securing the discovery of America for the Chinese the existence of many of these nations is duly recorded by Pliny in his Natural History in words curiously identical with those we find in the Chinese records some strange birds and animals are given at the end of this book the most interesting of all being an accurate picture of the zebra here called the fulu which means deer of happiness but which is undoubtedly a rough attempt at farah an old Arabic term for the wild ass now the zebra being quite unknown in Asia the puzzle is how the chinese came to be so well acquainted with it at that early date the condition of the book is as good as could be expected after six hundred years of wear and tear each leaf here and there defective is carefully mounted on sheets of stiff paper and altogether very few characters are really illegible though sometimes the paper has slipped upon the printing block and has thus given in several cases a double outline alongside of this stands the modern work of the kind published in seventeen sixty one with an introductory poem from the pen of the emperor Qianlong it contains a much longer list of nations including the british french spanish dutch russians swedes and others and the illustrations a man and a woman of each country are perfect triumphs of the block-cutter's art the lines being inconceivably fine division d contains poetry novels and plays under poetry in addition to collections of the works of this or that writer there are numerous anthologies to which the chinese are very partial the mass of chinese poetry is so vast that it is hopeless for the general reader to do much more than familiarize himself with the best specimens of the greatest poets it is interesting to note that all the more extensive anthologies include a considerable number of poems by women some of quite a high order two years ago an eminent scientist at cambridge said to me have the chinese anything in the nature of poetry in their language in reply to this i told him of a question once put to me by a friendly mandarin in china have you foreigners got books in your honourable country we are apt to smile at chinese ignorance of western institutions but if we were chinamen the smile perhaps would sometimes be the other way about such novels as we have in our library belong entirely to what may be called the classical school and may from many points of view be regarded as genuine works of art besides these there is in the market a huge quantity of fiction which appeals to the less highly educated classes and even to those who are absolutely unable to read for the latter there are professional readers and storytellers who may often be seen at some convenient point in a chinese town delighting large audiences of coolies with tales of love and war and heroism and self sacrifice. These readers do not read the actual words of the book, which no coolie would understand, but transpose the book language into the colloquial as they go along. Apropos of novels, I should like just to mention one, a romantic novel of war and adventure, based upon the history of the Three Kingdoms, 3rd century AD, an epoch when China was split up under three separate sovereigns, who fought one another very much after the style of the Wars of the Roses in English history. This novel, a very long one, occupies perhaps the warmest corner in the hearts of the Chinese people. They never tire of listening to its stirring episodes, its hair-breadth escapes, its successful ruses and its appalling combats. Some twelve years ago, a friend of mine undertook to translate it into English. After writing out a complete translation, a gigantic task, he rewrote the whole from beginning to end, revising every page thoroughly. In the spring of 1900, after ten years of toil, it was ready for the press. Three months later, it had been reduced to ashes by the Boxers at Peking. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum. Chinese plays in the acting editions may be bought singly at street stalls for less than a centre-piece. For the library, many good collections have been made and published in handsome editions. This class of literature, however, does not stand upon a high level, but corresponds with the low social status of the actor. And it is a curious fact, true also of novels, that many of the best efforts are anonymous. Plays by women are also to be found. But I have never yet come across, either on the stage or in literature, any of those remarkable dramas which are supposed to run on month after month, even into years. Division E is a very important one for students of the Chinese language. Here we find a number of works of reference, most of which may be characterized as indispensable, and the great majority of which are easily procurable at the present day. Beginning with dictionaries, we have the famous work of Xu Shen, who died about A.D. 120. There was at that date no such thing as a Chinese dictionary, although the language had already been for some centuries ripe for such a production, and accordingly Xu Shen set to work to fill the void. He collected 9,353 written characters, presumably all that were in existence at the time, to which he added 1,163 duplicates, i.e. various forms of writing the same character, and then arranged them in groups under those parts which, as we have already seen in the preceding lecture, are indicators of the direction in which the sense of the character is to be looked for. thus all characters containing the element dog were brought together all those containing vegetation disease etc so far as we know this system originated with him and we are therefore not surprised to find that in his hands it was on a clumsier scale than that in vogue today Xu Shen uses no fewer than 540 of these indicators and even when the indicator to a character is satisfactorily ascertained it still remains to search through all the characters under that particular group printing from movable types would have been impossible under such a system in the modern standard dictionary published in 1716 under the direction of the Emperor Kangxi there are only 214 indicators employed and there is a further sub-arrangement of these groups according to the number of strokes in the other, the phonetic portion of the character. Thus, the indicators hand, wood, fire, water, or whatever it may be, settle the group in which a given character will be found, and the number of strokes in the remaining portion will refer it to a comparatively small subgroup from which it can be readily picked out. For example, song, a fir tree, will be found under the indicator mu, tree. subgroup number four because the remaining portion gong consists of four strokes in writing good copies of this dictionary are not too easily obtained nowadays the palace edition as it is called is on beautifully white paper and is a splendid specimen of typography a most wonderful literary feat was achieved under the direction of the before-mentioned Emperor Kangxi when a general concordance to the phraseology of all literature was compiled and published for general use. Word concordances to the Bible and to Shakespeare are generally looked upon as no small undertakings. But what about a phrase concordance to all literature? Well, in 1711 this was successfully carried out, and remains today as a monument of the literary enterprise of the great Manchu Tartar monarch, with whose name it is inseparably associated. The term literature here means serious literature, the classics, histories, poetry, and the work of philosophers, of recognised authorities, and of brilliant writers generally. It was not possible, for obvious reasons, to arrange this collection of phrases according to the 214 indicators, as in a dictionary of words. it is arranged according to the tones and rhymes let me try to express all this in terms of english literature reading a famous poem i come across the lines and every shepherd tells his tale under the hawthorn in the dale now suppose that i do not know the meaning of tells his tale i recollect perfectly that as a boy i thought it meant whispered the old story into the ear of a shepherdess. I determine to hunt it up in the concordance. First of all, I find out from the dictionary, if I do not know, to what tone tail, always the last word of the phrase, belongs. Under that tone will be found various groups of words, each with a key word which is called the rhyme, that is to say, a key word with which all the words in this group rhyme. There are only 106 of these key words, altogether distributed over the tones, and every word in the Chinese language must rhyme with one of them. The question of rhyme in Chinese is a curious one, and before going any farther, it may be as well to try to clear it up a little. All Chinese poetry is in rhyme. There is no such thing as blank verse. The odes, collected and edited by Confucius, provide the standard of rhyme. Any words which are found to rhyme there may be used as rhymes anywhere else, and no others. The result is that the number of rhyme groups is restricted to 106, and not only that, but of course words which rhymed to the year 500 years BC do so no longer, in 1902. Yet such are the only authorised rhymes to be used in poetry, and any attempt to ignore the rule would ensure disastrous failure at the public examinations. This point may to some extent be illustrated in English. The first two lines of the Canterbury Tales, which I will take to represent the odes, run thus in modern speech. When that April is with his showers sweet, the drought of March hath pierced to the root. No one nowadays rhymes sweet with root, neither did Chaucer. The two words, sote and rote, were in his days perfect rhymes. But if we were Chinese, we should now rhyme sweet with root, because, so to speak, Chaucer did so. When the tone of a word is known, it is also known in which quarter of the whole work to look, and when the rhyme is known, it is also known in which part of that quarter the key word or rhyme will be found. Suppose the key word to be gale. It might be necessary to turn over a good many pages before finding, neatly printed in the margin, The required word, tale. Under tale, I should first of all find phrases of two words, for example, traveller's tale, fairy tale, and I should have to look on until I came to groups of three characters, for example, old wife's tale, tells his tale, and so forth. finally under tells his tale i should still not find what all students would like so much a plain explanation of what the phrase means but only a collection of the chief passages in literature in which tells his tale occurs in one of these there would probably be some allusion to sheep and in another to counting and so it would become pretty plain that when a shepherd tells his tale he does not whisper soft nothings into the ear of a shepherdess but is much more prosaically engaged in counting the number of his sheep Our Cambridge copy of the Concordance is bound up in 44 thick volumes. Each volume contains on an average 840 pages, and each page about 400 characters. This gives a sum total of about 37,000 pages, and about 15 million characters. Translated into English, this work would be one-third as large again, 100 pages of Chinese text being equal to about 130 of English. In the year 1772, the enlightened Emperor Qianlong, who then sat upon the throne, gave orders that a descriptive catalogue should be prepared of the works in the Imperial Library, and in order to enhance its literary value, His Majesty issued invitations to the leading provincial officials to take part in the enterprise by securing and forwarding to Peking any rare books they might be able to come across. The scheme proved in every way successful. Many old works were rescued from oblivion and ultimate destruction, and in 1795 a very wonderful catalogue was laid before the world in print. It fills 26 octavo volumes of about 500 pages to each, the works enumerated being divided into four classes, the Confucian Canon, History, Philosophy and General Literature. Under each work we have first of all an historical sketch of its origin, with date of publication, etc., when known, and secondly, a careful critique dealing with its merits and defects. Altogether, some 8,000 to 10,000 works are entered and examined as above, and the names of those officials who responded to the imperial call are always scrupulously recorded in connection with the books they supplied. Among many illustrated books, there is a curious volume in the library published about 25 years ago, which contains short notices of all the senior classics of the Ming dynasty, A.D. 1368-1644. They number only 76 in all, because the triennial examination had not then come into force, whereas during the present dynasty, between 1644 and 25 years ago, a shorter period, there have been no fewer than 100 senior classics. books, whose names are all duly recorded in a supplement. The pictures which accompany the letter-press are sometimes of quite pathetic interest. In one instance, the candidate, after his journey to Peking, where the examination is held, had gone home to await the result, and is sitting at dinner with his friends, when suddenly the much-longed-for messenger bursts in with the astounding news. In the old days this news was carried to all parts of the country by trained runners. Nowadays the telegraph wires do the business at a great saving of time and muscle, with the usual sacrifice of romance. Another student has gone home and settled down to work again, not daring even to hope for success. But overcome with fatigue and anxiety, he falls asleep over his books. In the accompanying picture we see his dream, a thin curl, as it were, of vapour, coming forth from the top of his head, and broadening out as it goes, until wide enough to contain the representation of a man, in feature like himself, surrounded by an admiring crowd who acclaim him senior classic. With the start, the illusion is dispelled, and the dreamer awakes to find himself famous. To those who have followed me so far, it must, I hope, be clear that, whatever else the Chinese may be, they are, above all, a literary people. They have cultivated literature, as no other people ever has done, and they cultivate it still. Literary merit leads to an official career, the only career worth anything in the eyes of the Chinese nation. From his earliest school days, the Chinese boy is taught that men without education are but horses or cows in coats and trousers, and that success at the public examinations is the greatest prize this world has to offer. To be among the fortunate 300 out of about 12,000 candidates, who contend once every three years for the highest degree, is to be enrolled among the immortals forever, while the senior classic at a final competition before the emperor not only covers himself, but even his remote ancestors, his native village, his district, his prefecture, even his province, with a glory almost of celestial splendor. End of Lecture 2