The Accidental Ethnographer (4b)—A Yankee on the Yangtze II

One year ago on Round and Square (14 June 2011)—The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa.
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts in from A Yankee on the Yangtze:

Yankee 1          Yankee 2          Yankee 3          Yankee 4          Yankee 5

[a] Shang-today RF

I gave a lecture at the Doylestown Historical Society on June 1st, as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The subject was the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil (1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I am working on this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for another lecture (on another subject), I am posting some of Geil's own writings. This was enormously helpful to me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. I will, over the course of my summer research, post my lecture and some of the early results of the research Megan and I are doing. In the meantime, though, I want to start the "Accidental Ethnographer" series with William Geil's own words. I will post several readings from each of Geil's dozen books over the course of the summer months.

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. 

[b] Plopped 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.

 ***  ***

After reflecting upon William Edgar Geil's introduction to A Yankee on the Yangtze, we dip into chapter one of the book. It is a roller-coaster, to be sure. We start with a pellucid paragraph describing the slow erosion of western China as it moves eastward in the form of yellow mud before being plopped into the Pacific Ocean. Dr. Geil covers a great deal of territory here, and he is all over the conceptual map. It is hard to characterize, which is why I believe in reading the words of the writers (even if abridged...and you owe it to yourself to read the whole book if you are intrigued). 

To be sure, A Yankee on the Yangtze is dated. Well-dated. It was published in 1904, and many parts of it were out of relevance in 1912. This is a long story, but suffice it to say right now that imperial China was on its last legs in 1904. It would become a republic in late-1911, and the next century would be, well, full of interest. Geil had no idea, in many respects. If you don't wince at some of his rhetoric here, you are just skimming. On the one hand, you should give him a break for living a century ago. On the other hand, you should realize that plenty of people a century ago said things a little bit differently. Here's the challenge with understanding our "Accidental Ethnographer." He is far more nuanced than most of his peers in the world of 1904. On the other hand, he was a human being living in 1904. It's complicated.

Life is like that. Read on.

A Yankee on the Yangtze[1] 
William Edgar Geil (1904)

人心用怕單事難無下天

There is no difficulty in the world that cannot be 

overcome by the man who hustles.—Current Proverb.
 

CHAPTER I.

TO THE YELLOW FROM THE BLUE—SHANGHAI—

WOMEN IN CHINA—SUPERSTITIONS—OPIUM—

CHINESE LEARNING.

[c] Old Street RF

The Yangtze River colours the Pacific Ocean for a distance of thirty miles from the China coast. The amount of earth carried down this mighty stream and deposited on the sloping sea-floor is incalculable. As a land-maker, this Chinese Mississippi cannot be excelled. It has brought down a considerable portion of the Province of Kiangsu from the west, and gradually dropped it piecemeal as mud. Large tracts of land on which many natives now contentedly live and cultivate their fields of rice, cotton and wheat, were known to their forefathers as "The Sea." To-day the river is still engaged in the manufacture of territory, robbing the West to enrich the East, and roiling the brine of the oft-times unpacific deep. The traveller to China discovers the saffron and chocolate long before he sights the low-lying coast. Sometimes it s a plunge in medias res when the sea is calm and the blue and yellow refuse to mix; then the ship glides over a distinct line from sea blue to river yellow. 

The draught of the big Pacific liners is too heavy to admit of their ascending 

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the little tidal river Hwangpu, on which the "Model Settlement of Shanghai" is situated, so our ship drops anchor some miles off the Chinese village Woosung, twelve miles from the Settlement, where the mouth of the Hwangpu kisses the Yangtze sea-shore. The passenger is transferred from the ship to a tug, which carries him and his baggage up the river, over the "Heaven-sent Barrier" near the mouth. This barrier menaces navigation. The tides are high and the waters of the Hwangpu run like a mill-race; many unwary junks and steamers which have incautiously ventured too much, have been wrecked on the Barrier, which sea captains have sworn as not heaven-sent.

Shanghai is the great metropolis of the East, and everybody who visits the Far Orient, at some time or other, turns up at this city, where not two, but a dozen, seas meet: Americans, English, Germans, French, Russians, Portuguese, Dutch, Italians, Japanese, Koreans, and all the rest. Says Henry Norman: "Among the many surprises of a journey to the Far East one of the greatest is certainly the first sight of Shanghai...I could hardly believe my eyes. There lay a magnificent city surrounding a broad and crowded river, though the magnificence is only skin-deep, all the architectural beauty and solidity of Shanghai being along the river; but I am speaking of first impressions of Shanghai, and in this respect it is superior to New York, far ahead of San Francisco, and almost as imposing as Liverpool itself. A broad and beautifully kept boulevard, called of course, the Bund, runs around the river, with rows of well-grown trees and and broad grassplat at the water's edge; and this Bund is lined on the other side from one end to the other with mercantile buildings second to none of their kind in the world..."

[d] Road RF

But Shanghai has made rapid advances since Norman wrote. The American, English, and French Settlements have been extended far beyond their original limits, and imposing buildings and terraces have been carried back for miles from the Bund. Large factories are in full operation making silk fabrics, thread, matches, and, we are sorry to hear, beer. It is interesting to see the varied humanity which emerges from these mills and the business houses of this cosmopolitan port when the two hands on the big Customs Clock press the button on the XII spot. Carriages, dogcarts, traps, motors, bicycles, rickshas, wheelbarrows, and even sedan chairs come pouring down the Bund and up the "Roads," or streets with geographical names—Nanking Road, Pekin Road—off across the creek called Yangkingpang, into the French Settlement, dubbed by the Chinese "France," or, in the other direction, across the Garden Bridge by the Astor House, up Broadway or Seward Road and through the American Settlement, whose native name is Honkew, or "Rainbow Mouth." 

The river is crowded with craft-junks, lorches, sampans, bit P. and O. boats and "French Mail," foreign-rigged schooners, tugs and men-of-war. What a medley! The sight is enough to make the Chinese countryman "turn up his pigtail," which is their equivalent for our "kicking the bucket"; or to astonish even a nil admirari Englishman. Instead of "civilising" the native, it only seems to confirm his opinion that these barbarians who hitch up the lightning and build houses so high are indeed veritable devils. You might as well try to sink one of the American gunboats in the Hwangpu with a pop-gun as to attempt to eliminate superstition or idolatry with what we call "Western learning" or "Civilization."

Many superficial globe-trotters have based generalisations on Shanghai. This is a gross blunder, for the port, while in China, is not China. The people of this Empire are judiciously slow to accept a new and upstart civilization for their own, which has, until these high-nosed Europeans came, withstood the tests of chiliads; but, with twentieth-century conditions, some innovations have been inevitable, and the adoption of these in China to-day represents tragedy and comedy ludicrously mixed. Shanghai is a hard field for missionary work, but, like every other enterprise, that activity centres here...

[e] Old street (not that long ago) RF

I was gladdened by my visit to Shanghai, but Shanghai is only an infinitesimal part of this great Empire. Look Westward along the great journey I am about to make—look at the men: eighty millions of them! Let this stupendous statement sink well into your mind. Sophocles said, "Many things are wonderful, but none so wonderful as man;" or, as the Chinese proverb declares, "Ren Shi Wan Wu Chih Ling," "Man is the Mind of Creation." And what record has this might nation that we treat so contemptuously? The Chinese invented the art of printing one thousand years before the birth of Caxton. They possessed libraries before we had learned the art of expressing ourselves by charcoal hieroglyphics on birch-bark. They made it possible for our progenitors to give up the use of hollow stone plates and gourd dishes by placing chinaware on the market. Silks! [D]id your eyes ever feast on more beautiful fabrics than those now seen in a Chinese silk store? 

But you ask, Are the Chinese such men as we are? It is a simple question to answer because in some respects they are our betters. In courtesy they are Chesterfields, we are troglodytes; as artisans their endurance and patience are as remarkable as their inability to invent new machinery. As farmers they raise three fairly good crops a year, but they do it with the aid only of a wooden-handed plough and by hand-planting and hand-reaping. A reaper, a threshing-machine, or a cotton gin would scare them off the field. As scholars they are giants of memory, repeating whole volumes without trouble, but when we come to applied knowledge or to practical science, they are mere babes. Engineering, for example, would strike them not as a profession but as "labour," and no gentleman in China can "labour." And yet look at the Imperial Canal, one hundred and twenty geographical leagues in length, and without a parallel in the world's history! And the Great Wall whose cubic content, Hegel computes, exceeds the mass of stone used in all the buildings in England and Scotland!...

You may say, "Oh, but they are a peculiar lot." I don't see it. You are quite mistaken in your conclusion in regard to the matter of looks. Not one in ten as oblique eyes. They walk and laugh and love and learn much as we do. As to the colour—well, remember that beauty is relative. Is the ashen, consumptive look of the European as beautiful as a good healthy yellow? You ask where they live. They live in the country; they are congregated in the cities; they dwell upon the mountains and on the plains. They are living, and dying too, in accessible places! There are fanatics among them, but there are fanatics everywhere, and it is not a bad sign. They have the qualities which, if rightly used, will make them eminently Christian...Apart from the awful predisposition for opium, the Celestial has no craze for ardent spirits. He drinks a very light wine made of rice, but he takes his liquor temperately. Outside the ports opened by the white man there is little whiskey. There is little public drunkenness in China. But opium is everywhere. It thrusts itself on the nostrils throughout the length and breadth of the country...

[f] Nearby RF

That the Chinese are men of strong passions is shown by their love of literature. This is a nation of scholars, and the founders of literature are worshipped as gods. The final authorities on all questions are the national classics. The writing of poems and essays, both poetry and prose, is the quintessence of art. The theatre has its place next to literature, and serves to hand down the manners, customs, and history of antiquity by histrionic representations. It is on the whole a respectable place. Go into a theatre seating two thousand people. many are sipping tea from little cups placed on tables before them! All have their hats on except the women. Hear the continuous sounds of laughter, but no applause, as hour after hour the spectators hang on the words of the actors illustrating the story of how China defeated the hosts of enemies arrayed against her in the early days. Here you have ample proof of the vivacity of the Chinaman. The two chief events in the average village in China are the great feast or parade of the gods and the theatre festival. The acting is almost entirely done by men. The better qualities of the Chinese are also shown by their efforts to do good. There were great charities and benevolent institutions in China before Columbus discovered America! Their books, written a thousand years before Christ, advocate philanthropy. 

Still they have never learned how to practise true benevolence. But our point is to show they have a passion for doing good; albeit this is perhaps not because of the good it does to the other man, but because of the merit which is laid up thereby for the doer. The Chinaman is a family man, which speaks well for him. It is scarcely decent for a man to live out a bachelor's life. The family is the unit of society, and not the individual. The government is patriarchal. The head of the family rules the various members, and each Chinaman is an emperor in his own domestic circle, unless his wife happens to be stronger of the two. Eighty millions of hale, energetic, strong-minded men who are walking with their backs to the future, pushing on to the past![2]

Click below for other posts in from A Yankee on the Yangtze:

Yankee 1          Yankee 2          Yankee 3          Yankee 4          Yankee 5 

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), 1-11.

Bibliography

Geil, William Edgar. A Yankee on the Yangtze. New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1904.

[g] Wow...now RF