Chinese Sketches | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] and Dagny,
[email protected]

CHINESE SKETCHES
by HERBERT A. GILES

"The institutions of a despised people cannot be judged with fairness."
Spencer's Sociology: The Bias of Patriotism.

DEDICATION
To Warren William de la Rue, "As a mark of friendship."

PREFACE
The following /Sketches/ owe their existence chiefly to frequent
peregrinations in Chinese cities, with pencil and note-book in hand.
Some of them were written for my friend Mr. F. H. Balfour of
Shanghai, and by him published in the columns of the /Celestial
Empire/. These have been revised and partly re-written; others appear
now for the first time.
It seems to be generally believed that the Chinese, as a nation, are an
immoral, degraded race; that they are utterly dishonest, cruel, and in
every way depraved; that opium, a more terrible scourge than gin, is
now working frightful ravages in their midst; and that only the forcible

diffusion of Christianity can save the Empire from speedy and
overwhelming ruin. An experience of eight years has taught me that,
with all their faults, the Chinese are a hardworking, sober, and happy
people, occupying an intermediate place between the wealth and
culture, the vice and misery of the West.
H. A. G.
Sutton, Surrey, 1st November 1875.

CHINESE SKETCHES

THE DEATH OF AN EMPEROR
His Imperial Majesty, Tsai-Shun, deputed by Heaven to reign over all
within the four seas, expired on the evening of Tuesday the 13th
January 1875, aged eighteen years and nine months. He was
erroneously known to foreigners as the Emperor T'ung Chih; but T'ung
Chih was merely the style of his reign, adopted in order that the people
should not profane by vulgar utterance a name they are not even
permitted to write.[*] Until the new monarch, the late Emperor's cousin,
had been duly installed, no word of what had taken place was breathed
beyond the walls of the palace; for dangerous thoughts might have
arisen had it been known that the State was drifting rudderless, a prey
to the wild waves of sedition and lawless outbreak. The accession of a
child to reign under the style of Kuang Hsu was proclaimed before it
was publicly made known that his predecessor had passed away.
[*] Either one or all of the characters composing an emperor's name are
altered by the addition or omission of certain component parts; as if, for
instance, we were to write an Alb/a/rt chain merely because Alb/e/rt is
the name of the heir-apparent. Similarly, a child will never utter or
write its father's name; and the names of Confucius and Mencius are
forbidden to all alike.

Of the personal history of the ill-fated boy who has thus been
prematurely cut off just as he was entering upon manhood and the
actual government of four hundred million souls, we know next to
nothing. His accession as an infant to