Temple Bar (Volume 92) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891. Excerpt: ... China, we all know, is topsy-turvydom. Every visitor or writer--and every visitor to China is sure to become a writer on China sooner or later--insists on the strange perversity that leads the Chinese to do everything the wrong way. Their men wear petticoats, their women-folk the trews, as Wingrove Cooke announced some thirty years ago; they build their houses from the top downwards, in defiance of all Western laws of gravity. Even in the lesser concerns of life this contrariness of disposition pursues them; their chess manuals give black the lead, and at all card games the cards are dealt niddershins, the way the sun does not go, while the dealer deals to himself first. Perhaps, however, the most convincing proof of perversity is to be found in the fact that the one perfectly delightful month, the month of bright blue skies and balmy breezes, the month in South China wherein it is enough--for any reasonable lazy European--"not to be doing, but to be," is November. Yet all this, when we come to think of it, is slightly unphilosophicaL The Chinese sat at the feet of Confucius in the decorum of embroidered skirts and flowing sleeves, when our doubtless noble, but certainly unlettered, ancestors ran wild in woods, with very little to cover them except a layer or two of woad. What right, then, have we to stigmatise Chinese customs as perverse because they differ from those we borrowed from our more civilised neighbours a mere trifle of a thousand years or so ago? Surely it is the Chinaman who has the right, as first finder, to call his ways and habits orthodox, and to set them up as a standard by which to gauge our own. And this, indeed, is what he has done and will continue to do. Yet it is not easy even for the most philosophical of us to put ourselves in a...