Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
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| [a] Like water RF |
William Edgar Geil was a world famous figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame. Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese (or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities, William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I "met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia, visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of China.
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| [b] Long river RF |
He wrote about it all, and he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little from each of his published books.
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We are moving right along in this series, and have found our way to William Edgar Geil's third "big" book—a Yankee on the Yangtze. If you have learned Mandarin Chinese, you are probably pronouncing the title "wrong." You are probably saying to yourself "A Yeah-nkee on the "Yawn-gtze" (or something close to it). Let's get one thing very straight, and there is plenty of evidence of this in the book and in Geil's notes at the Doylestown Historical Society. He wanted a particular kind of alliteration that would be destroyed by Mandarin language study. This is Yeah-nkee on the Yeah-ngtze. Just sayin'.I have started us off with the introduction to this 312 page book. All of his books are long, except when they aren't (more on that later). This is a hard introduction to interpret, and that is one of the biggest reasons why I have started to expand these Round and Square posts to four or five readings instead of one or two. You see, William Edgar Geil was complicated. Most of us are. If I only posted the introduction to this book, you would likely be puzzled (at best). Although the work is not a particularly "sensitive" account of Chinese history and culture, it has—as the chapters wear on—the strong benefit of showing a big, open, traveler in a big, open, territory. Good things pop up here and there...and sometimes in profusion.
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| [c] Big, open RF |
So why am I damning with faint praise here? Yes, I know that I am. It is because, like many introductions in varied literary efforts, an introduction written after the fact sometimes has just the wrong "feel" for the work as a whole. Some people have said that of the opening (dozens of) pages of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It can confuse as much as clarify, and this bothers some readers more than others. Geil isn't Kant, but he shares with the German polymath and many lesser thinkers the problem of how to introduce a big book with many themes...in just a thousand words or so.
This is not Geil's best effort, and you might be surprised to hear me say that I don't find the reason for that in his plainly un-twenty-first-century language with regard to East Asia. For one thing, just read the papers these days. You might see that our surface smugness about cultural understanding might just be a little more problematic than we think. Yes, I wince at "yellow" and "white." That stuff is a little difficult to read these days. Keep on reading, though, if only to test your historical perspicacity. People who lived a hundred years ago are not just like us...but with bad teeth. Culture is historical, and history is cultural. Above all, William Edgar Geil traveled the world in an age before we had departments of anthropology or cultural studies. Take a look at what he has to say, and then (in the days that follow) see how it compares to his account of his travels.
Geil wasn't simple. More than occasionally, he wasn't deep. Sometimes he was, though, and we'll keep looking for the network of ideas that hold this "accidental ethnographer" together. If you had forgotten that Geil was an unwavering Christian, even as he sought to learn from and about others, this introduction will set you straight. Geil, like many others in the past and today, saw no contradiction in those things. Just read, and see what you think.
A Yankee on the Yangtze[1]
William Edgar Geil (1904)
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| [d] Westward RF |
INTRODUCTION
"Westward, the course of Empire holds its way." But westward from where? Shall it be a land movement or a sea movement? Shall the all-pervading white man surge across the Pacific Ocean out of the Golden Gate, and imbue with his ideals Japan of the Golden Chrysanthemum and the Flowery Kingdom of China? Or shall the philosophers of China rise in slow wrath against the foreign devils who have yapped at their heels, and sweep them resistlessly with their mushroom civilization away back out of Asia and out of Europe into the Atlantic, or into the useless parts of the earth?No long ago we were warned that the Yellow man with the white money was likely, by his industrial methods, to squeeze out the white man with the yellow money. British Columbia, California, and Australia fear this, and would fain keep him out; but they do not always keep out his goods. And apart from commercial rivalry, military observers have wondered whether the Asiatic hordes may not once again realize their latent strength, and whether aroused China, inspired by the example of Japan, might not submerge the Western nations. Not once or twice only has the East menaced the very existence of Europe. The names of Zinghiz Khan and Tamerlane may be hardly remembered to-day, but once they were spoken of with bated breath, and their track was marked by ruined cities and pyramids of human heads. And even now barbarians who have planted on the Bosphorous these methods of Turkestan trample on and massacre thousands of miserable Europeans.
Men have sometimes wondered whether, before the Easterners move, they can be conciliated or indoctrinated with Western ideals. The experiment has failed twice. More than 1000 years ago the Persian Christians sent overland a few ardent propagandists. They won the Emperor's favour, translated and printed the scriptures in Chinese, trained their native converts to carry on their work. But they could not let it be purely Chinese, and maintained some sort of subjection to a dignitary on the Euphrates. And when there came a great Mongol invasion that crushed China to the ground, the exotic perished; when Chinese elasticity asserted itself again, this rose not. The tablet of Si Ngan remains as a monument of this movement that failed.
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| [e] Absolutely gorges RF |
The Roman Christians tried next, Franciscans and Jesuits both innoculating the East. They were only too complaisant to native ideas, the Jesuits, at least, wire-drawing their doctrines to an unprecedented tenuity. Yet they too failed, and their work was cut short.
Protestants have not renewed the attempt. It seemed indeed as if the Boxers would for a third time repel the foreign influence. But this time the movement seems to have more vitality; it bowed before the storm, and arose with new vigour when the flash had spent itself. Men like Woodbridge have won the confidence of officials; natives are themselves spreading Christianity. The third failure is not yet. Why should there be a third failure? Jesus of Nazareth was an Asiatic and Asiatics ought to understand him better than we do. If they will, then will East and West understand one another better, and no yellow peril need be feared.
But the hope for
Peace upon earth,
Goodwill among men
is likely to be idle unless the nations accept Him who was born at Bethlehem, as their Saviour, their Ideal, their Lord.
WILLIAM EDGAR GEIL.
DOYLESTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA [2]
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Notes
[1] Even though it should not be necessary for me to point out that some of Geil's language from 108 years ago will jar...I will anyway. I am not one to take either interpretive extreme in these cases. Some consider any language we would not use today to be offensive. On the other extreme would be those who say "everyone talked that way back then." I disagree with both extremes—language changes, yet not everyone did talk "that way back then." I prefer to let all of us develop ever-deeper historical sophistication. History is complicated; Geil is complicated. Period.
[2] William Edgar Geil, A Yankee on the Yangtze (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1904), xiii-xv.
Bibliography
Geil, William Edgar. A Yankee on the Yangtze. New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1904. |
| [f] Charting RF |
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