Inside Canton/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
The promises which had been made to me, and especially my intimate relations with Callery, conferred upon me the right of free access to the official mansion of Pan-se-Chen, which is situated in the street of Che-pa-Pou; that is, of the eighteenth district at the western extremity of the suburbs of Canton. This house is notably that of a great lord, and is composed of three interior courts surrounded by buildings, which have one storey over the ground-floor. Each court has its proper use: one is surrounded with arches similar to those in our Rue de Rivoli, under which are at work artists and workmen in the pay of the great mandarin. Another opens into the reception-rooms where business is discussed, and where visitors are welcomed; and in the third is the women's quarter, with the dining-rooms and all the domestic offices. This space, lying between four handsome facades, is gaily decorated, being rather a garden than an inner court. There is a little pond in the centre, whose greenish water is covered with lotus-leaves. The edges are shaded by "sighing" willows (as they are called in China), and the variously-shaped garden-plots are crowded with azaleas, chrysanthemums, and peonies. Hither comes the chief wife of the mandarin to take her walks, sheltered from the sun, and attended hy twelve companions. It has been pretended that Pan-se-Chen has a house for every one of his wives, but nothing is more incorrect; wives of the second class, the "tisé," being in reality servants, living in the same house with the wife, and under her authority.
One must have penetrated into this house, or rather have almost lived in it, to comprehend what constitutes luxury and elegance in Chinese domestic life. I went over every section of this mansion, visited every room, from the private cabinet of the master, to the interior apartment of the legitimate wife. The old household gods no doubt trembled with indignation at my presumption, and I was particularly struck with the magnificence of the furniture, the splendour of the decorations, and—the niggardly provision for comfort! The little chamber of Madame Pan-se-Chen, for instance, is an admirable boudoir—sofas, chairs, toilet-tables, and the rest being made of beautiful wood, chiselled with infinite art—but her bed, lying underneath a network of gauze, is fitter for a nun's penance than to rest the soft limbs of a delicate lady. A few strips of bamboo in a nankin palliasse serve for a mattress, and the quilt is attached to the cotton sheet. I might say just the same of a splendid hall which Pan-se-Chen had just got completed. The floor, in wood of different colours, was covered with beautiful devices; the ceilings were gilt like a shrine. The floor, cornices, and walls were brightened with that wonderful varnish which makes the substances to which it is applied look like blocks of marble, porphyry, or other rare stones, cut and polished. But all this luxury was cold and comfortless; our own splendid interiors, overdone as they are with huge floating curtains, seemed preferable. The total absence of anything in the shape of hangings was all the move noticeable at this time of year; the north winds were sometimes very keen, and the Chinese assumed, with an evident consciousness of its comfortableness, their cham which is lined with the soft, silky furs of Astrakan. In the house of Che-pa-Pou, then, Pan-se-Chen had not effected a happy alliance between Chinese magnificence and European comfort; perhaps in order that he might not wound the jealous prejudices of the great officers of state who visit him.
One morning our friend the mandarin begged us—Callery, Rondot, and myself—to take a passing glance at that part of his mansion which is consecrated to science and art; anxious, apparently, to let us see that a Celestial Sybarite could be also a man of learning and taste. We found among other things a regular printing-office—a Chinese printing-office, of course; and Pan-se-Chen, or rather Callery, explained to us that this Cantonese Mæcenas caused to be struck off ancient inscriptions, and old maxims grown scarce, whose reproduction was generally desired among the learned. Three writers, who appeared to us very skilful, were tracing with the pencil ancient characters upon large slabs of marble. They were young men of intelligent appearance; they wore their long blue robes and their caps in student-fashion. Like our law and medical students, they exaggerated the fashion of their country. Their pigtails, absurdly long, trailed at their heels, the fingers of their right hands were armed, not with nails, but with claws; and they wore at the top of the back of the head a circlet of coarse hair, which was not by any means pleasing. As soon as a slab was covered with characters, the engravers took their place, and traced with the graver the hieroglyphic letters. We examined several of these stereotyped plates, and Pan-se-Chen ordered some impressions to be struck off in our presence. The process is very simple: By means of a very flexible brush the printer applies the ink, then with his right hand he spreads out a sheet of damp paper, and passes another brush, dry, across it. The impression was as sharp as we obtain with our finished presses. When we left his printing-office, Pan-se-Chen showed us into a studio for painting, where artists were busy reproducing ancient pictures, which his erudite industry had exhumed from their venerable hiding-places.
We next went into a chemical laboratory, where, to our great surprise, they were making azotic acid. It is commonly believed that the Chinese themselves make no mineral acid; we had shared in that belief, and were glad to be now undeceived by our own eyes. Rondot made upon the spot a drawing of the furnace and the distilling apparatus, and he has described, in a paper of great interest, the processes in use at the laboratory of Pan-se-Chen. But there is nothing economical about the matter, for the producer maintained that a hundred grammes of this acid cost him over thirty shillings. The acid is used in our friend's establishment for making detonating silver, with which percussion caps are afterwards manufactured. The fact is, China competes too much with the barbarians! Pan-se-Chen carries on all these works from pure love of the arts and sciences. He devotes large sums of money to such undertakings, and generously distributes the products yielded and the different matters wrought under his auspices among the grandees of the empire and the learned among his own friends. Nevertheless, he can have an eye to business upon occasion. The mandarin of the red button—great dignitary as he is—is, like M. Jourdain, the son of a humble merchant, and does not disdain the ancestral vocation. In the Celestial Empire, no one loses caste by moneymaking.
After going over the workshops, we passed into the court of the women's quarter, and Pan-se-Chen showed us over his study and his office. If it had not been for the strangely-shaped furniture, the odd arrangement of all the objects, the foreign character of the paintings, and the whimsical disposition of the books, we might have fancied ourselves suddenly transported into the rooms of a bibliomaniac or antiquarian of our own country. It may be said that the points of difference I have mentioned lie so open to notice that comparison is out of the question; but it is of man, who is the same everywhere, and not of the circumstantials, that I speak. The man himself was as greedy of rare smoke-dried editions and Chinese Elzevirs as the greediest specimen of the class could be, in his own way, among ourselves. The windows of the cabinet of Pan-se-Chen open upon the pretty court which I have described. The graceful bows of the weeping willows find their way almost into the very asylum of learning, and the birds who nest in the gray foliage are not afraid to peck at the furniture and the dusty bookshelves. A table of some very dark wood is set in the middle of the apartment, and upon it are ranged the implements necessary for the labours of the intelligent proprietor: the bamboo pencil of marten's hair, the writing paper, and the inkstand cut out of agate in the shape of a lotus-leaf, upon which rests a stick of Indian ink, gilt in strange characters. Paper-clips of marble and precious stone, representing gods, animals, or fantastic flowers, serve to keep together pencil sketches and scattered notes. Pan-se-Chen told us that there was not one of these beautifully done articles which was of a less antiquity than a hundred years. The capacious easy chair of the studious man is made of a black, shining wood, and no soft cushion covers the elegantly-shaped seat. This cabinet is oblong in form; on one side are the bookshelves; on the other, the walls are covered with magnificent drawings and gigantic hieroglyphics.
We did not find in this sanctuary of Chinese art any of those vulgar paintings which we pointed out in the dwellings of the tradespeople; here, they were executed in silk, and were of a very remote antiquity. We now admired, for the first time, those grand embroidered tableaux which are with us a modern invention, but which have been wrought in China for many centuries. One of the hieroglyphic characters startled us by its gigantic proportions, and Pan-se-Chen told me it was an autograph of the viceroy Ki-in, and meant "Long life"—the expression of a wish of affection from friend to friend.
The library itself is certainly one of the most interesting objects in the learned man's boudoir. The wood of which it is constructed is, like that of the furniture, black, shining, and carven, and the books lie flat upon the shelves. The compartments are arranged according to the size and number of the volumes. A work in quarto is in juxtaposition with some diamond edition; an author with a load of sixteen volumes shoulders a comrade who carries only six. The workmen, taking advantage of these irregularities, carve upon the edges of the shelves ornamental excrescences like branches of coral; and these interlacing decorations appear to be executed quite at the fancy of the artist, and independent of all reference to appropriateness. The books are chiefly sewn; those which are ostensibly bound are held together by two pieces of cardboard, or, oftener still, by two pieces of wood; and this covering is fastened by an ivory clasp with a little sheath of silk.
It would be impossible for me to enumerate the multitudinous manuscripts, the ancient writings and paintings, ant-eaten and rat-eaten, which Pan-se-Chen called upon us to admire; only those who have themselves experienced the archæologic fever of our enthusiastic collectors of ancient rarities can conceive them. I took advantage of a discussion started between our mandarin and Callery, about an historian, dead some few thousands of ages before our year one, to go and ferret about in the recesses and corners of the room. My curiosity was rewarded. I discovered in a bye-nook, almost concealed by a frame of European manufacture, a portrait of high ethnological interest. It was evidently that of a man of Asiatic origin; the square forehead was furrowed with wrinkles; the ears, like a bat's wings, looked as if nature had intended them for fly-flappers rather than to finish off the organ of hearing; the eyes, crushed up between the summits of the cheek-bones and the orbital arch, seemed as if they were going to take a turn round the temples; the nose was flat and large; the mouth, which was enormous, was yet half hidden by some gray and black hairs; and the white beard tapered away to the shape of a camel-hair pencil below the pointed chin. The head was bald and shaven, and a yellow cloak fell in wide folds over the shoulders of this worthy, who held in his hand the joueï, which is the symbol of authority. After an attentive study of this painting, I said to my friends:—
"Pan-se-Chen pretended, the other day, that nature could never come up to the sublime conceptions of the artist in the matter of female beauty; and I fancy she would find herself equally distanced in her efforts to realise the types of masculine ugliness invented by the Raphaels of the Flowery Land. Do look at this horrid old baboon!"
Rondot and Callery drew near; but the latter, like a skilful connoisseur, observed:—
"You are mistaken—this portrait is very handsome! Such is our conception of true manly beauty. Pray notice those ears, how they taper off like a flattened cockade on a cap; it is only elephants and Turkish dogs that have such ears! Consider the eyes! Where are they? You can hardly see them—they are so recessed in their fortress of bone. This forehead, too, how majestically bald! It is like a flight of stairs to a temple of the gods!"
"Who is this individual?" said I to Pan-se-chen, pointing with my fingers and eyes.
"It is Tao-Konan," (the Emperor) said he, in an awe-struck whisper.
"He's very ugly," I observed.
The mandarin took the disgust expressed upon my countenance at this imperial deformity for burning admiration, and said to Gallery:—
"Ah! the Doctor is amazed to see a portrait so perfectly beautiful … It is the effect produced on all who behold it!"
"And that," said I, "is really like him, is it?"
"A fac-simile, within two-tenths," replied the mandarin.
"What!" I exclaimed, "do you mean to say we have only eight-tenths of his ugliness there? The man is a monster!"
Pan-se-Chen still obstinately misunderstood me, and observed, "You will, sooner or later, I perceive, coincide with me in my opinion of the beautiful. God creates, but man brings to perfection. Nature made our Emperor as handsome as she could, but art has made him handsomer; and his nose, his ears, and his forehead are not so fine in the copy as in the original."
"Very good," said I to Gallery; "you must get permission to have this portrait copied, and we will make it known all over France."
Callery having explained our wish, Pan-se-Chen acceded, under the express condition that we should have the painting copied without disclosing who it was that gave us the permission. This reservation on the part of Pan-se-Chen surprised us, as he was usually so free in all his communications with us. Callery inquired the reason, and the mandarin replied:—
"It is forbidden to possess a portrait of the Emperor. This one was made clandestinely during a religious ceremony, and I doubt if you will find any painter who will dare to copy it for you."
Pan-se-Chen was right. When Rondot proposed the reproduction of this sacred effigy to several artists of Tsin-Youèn and Toung-Wan, he found their scruples invincible. "It is not worth while," said they all, "to run the risk of twenty blows with the bamboo for the sake of a few piastres." At last, however, a painter, bolder than the rest, agreed to make us the three copies required, upon condition that he might come to work in the French hong, in a double-locked room; and every time we went to have a look at him, this sequestered man of the brush said to us, with a lugubrious face, in Anglo-Chino-Portuguese:—
"How can jou thus expose yourselves to the danger of being scourged in the market-place? Shall you get much for these pictures in France that you run this risk so lightly?"
At last, however, we got our copies, and the portrait is one of those which Rondot has given to the world in one of our collections of engravings. But does not the embargo placed by the Emperors of China upon the circulation of their likenesses prove that they are quite aware how ugly they are?
Pan-se-Chen was quite up in the stirrups at having to do with such connoisseurs as we were; his pride in the situation was so excessive that he determined to show us all his treasures in a single day. So we crossed the garden, and went up to his bedroom. This is, at Canton, what the celebrated room of M. Sauvageot is at Paris—an apartment I have not had an opportunity of admiring. To have the entrée of this sanctuary is a positive initiation; it is penetrating into a new China, or rather into ancient China, ruled by the extinct dynasties of Soung and Han. Not a thing, not a chair, of a pattern younger than several ages. Looking at that limping footstool, well-worn in the service of former generations, one begins to understand better the principle upon which the learned Chinaman goes about to stock his feminine dove-cot; it is no wonder that a man, who chooses the furniture that he uses daily on the principle of "the oftener handled by others, the better I like it," should resort to the flower-boats for his taié? In other respects, this bed-chamber presented a tout-ensemble which was harmonious enough; the old-fashioned bed, the old-fashioned easy-chairs, the old-fashioned tables, were covered with equally old-fashioned ornaments and curiosities, costly and pretty, and covered with a dust that smacked of the erudite and the venerable.
Pan-se-Chen impressed upon us, surrounded by this chaos, that he never allowed anybody to touch anything, giving as his reason that he never knew where to find things after they had been meddled with. In this sacred horror of the intervention of an untaught hand in the arrangement of his precious curiosities, what Gallic antiquarian will not recognise our dear mandarin for a man and a brother! I shall say no more of furniture in general, than that fashion is not more stationary in these matters in China than it is elsewhere; fresh forms and kinds of ornament are always coming into use.
The antiquarian treasures amassed in the chamber of Pan-se-Chen consisted chiefly of ancient porcelains, of bronzes, of carven bamboos, of rare jewels, and mounted stones. All these objects, large and small, were supported upon brackets wrought with indescribable elegance and beauty. They represented, according to the character of the object they were destined to bear, knotted and twisted roots, flexile and blossoming boughs, a piece of rock, or the base of a column—the support contributing to unity of effect with the article supported, whether of bronze, stone, or what not. In China there is no object too small to have allotted to it some sort of pedestal, and very frequency the latter is of more intrinsic and artistic value than the thing it sustains. I am very much surprised that our French artists have not imitated, for our ornamental clocks, Sèvres vases and charming statuettes, these admirable little pedestals or brackets, which are really among the happiest inventions of Chinese artistry.
The porcelains of Pan-se-Chen bore little resemblance to those with which we have been inundated for some years past; they were, for the most part, white vases, upon which were displayed green bamboo branches and lovely flowers, clouds flying before the wind, and old-fashioned individuals running before the same. Some of these works of art were executed in relief in the manner of those wondrous inventions of Bernard de Palissy. Among such specimens, we were particularly pleased with one upon a large jar—a flight of cranes sailing with spread wings over a forest of leafless trees. This scene of aerial pilgrimage forcibly recalled to us the departure of migrating birds at the approach of our winter.
If we had not seen the carven bamboos of Pan-se-Chen, we could never have supposed it possible for this monocotyledonous plant to acquire a development resembling that of our firs and poplars. Our friend the mandarin had in his collection a joint of this gigantic reed, the circumference of which was as great as that of a common-sized pail; and upon this natural cylindric vase were sculptured human beings, trees, flowers, fruits, and rocks; while every separate object was so cleanly projected, that the people might walk at your bidding, and the trees wave to the breath of the wind. Callery is now the possessor of this valuable curiosity.
I have already indicated the strange tastes of the Chinese, their love of the grotesque and the abnormal. This tendency of their minds is manifested very strikingly in their choice of certain stones of whimsical shapes. Their collections of choice pebbles have nothing in common with our mineralogical and geological museums. Here, bits of rock are sought after for the accidental quality of having assumed the form of some fantastic animal, a time-hollowed ravine, or a beetling cliff. I have called these mounted stones for lack of a better name, and because they are generally distinguished by a magnificent sculptured pedestal. Pan-se-Chen had a series of these bits of rock, of very curious configuration. If he was asked what he found to admire in them, what made them valuable, he used to reply,—"Their shape first; and secondly, their antiquity." However, when Callery explained to him that in Europe we made collections of a similar character, with the view of studying the uses of the objects and determining their respective ages and the epochs in the earth's history to which they belonged, the mandarin was astounded. He would have gone into ecstacies if we could have handed him the register of birth of every stone in his museum.
Every one has heard something of the famous Chinese mirrors—those magic mirrors which have exercised so much the sagacity of men of science. They are metallic disks, exquisitely polished, and reflecting objects with entire distinctness. Those of Pan-se-Ghen were borne up by pedestals in the form of a crescent, whose limbs supported the reflector. Generally, Chinese mirrors have drawings or hieroglyphics graven on the side which is not polished; and the curious part of the story is, that when the sun's rays fall on the polished side, the reflected light, thrown upon the wall or the ceiling, projects the figures drawn upon the graven side! This phenomenon seemed for a long time utterly inexplicable. Here, according to Pan-se-Chen, is the keyword of this feat of metallurgic sorcery:—
"The artist," said he, "cuts deeply with the graver into the smooth surface the same images which are executed in relief behind, and then fills up the hollows with an alloy of a density about equal to that of the metal used for the mirror itself, and polishes the whole. After this process it is impossible to detect, look as closely as you will, the spaces which have been cut away, and restored with alloy; but I do not know how it is that the image is reflected when the disk is exposed to the sun."
In France, a schoolboy in physical science could have told the savant, the man of letters, the great dignitary of the Flowery Land, that it is because the mirror and the alloy which has been employed to fill in the drawings in bas-relief, do not reflect the light in the same manner. The mirrors which possess this singular property are very rare in China, and very expensive. I do not know if the explanation which was given by our friend, is sanctioned by the Institute, but, while awaiting the orthodox decision of that learned body, I content myself with the above solution—because it is Chinese.
Numismatics are not neglected by the lettered sons of the Flowery Land, any more than the other sciences; but they cultivate this branch after their own fashion, and keep to their own coins. The moneys coined in China, as all the world knows, are small round coins, made of copper and zinc, with a square hole in the middle. This copper medium, called sapecs by Europeans, and tsien by the Celestials, has only a nominal value, each coin being worth about a half-centime. They are cast, and not struck. In former times, the tsien were not always of the same shape. Certain dynasties took strange fancies, and issued money in the shape of knives, clocks, tortoises! One very curious fact is, that the moulds of the ancient moneys wore really much better graven than those of modern times, and especially of the most modern; this, too, although coiners of base money have multiplied, and the right policy of the Government would have been to make imitation more difficut by increasing the excellence of the mint manufacture. Of all the coins shown us by Pan-se-Chen, the most original was one bearing the device—"Money may circulate, but it all comes back to the Emperor at last!" Some outspoken Emperor had caused this inscription to be graven upon the tsien. This facetious sovereign had fallen upon the well-known sentiment of some Béranger or other:—
"Pauvres moutons, ah! vous avez beau faire;"
but the reader probably knows the second line of this not too consolatory couplet.[1]
Thus, then, in the midst of this Chinese civilisation, full as it seems to be of absurdity, we see how sensualists, men of taste, and men of learning, all find scope for the employment of their wealth. The Chinese are, like ourselves, quite capable of appreciating the refinements of learning and the pleasures of the intellect; only—and in their eyes this is a merit—they measure both by their own standards. One of the real curses of wealth in China lies in a feature of their domestic organisation. There is not a petty merchant or insignificant mandarin around whom does not crawl a swarm of lazy servants—parasitic maggots, and nothing better. The humblest official cannot step across the street without being escorted by a legion of flunkeys—chair-bearers, flag-bearers, kettle-drummers, footmen, valets-de-chambre, and other valetry ad libitum. And when the master pays a visit to a friend, or to his official superior, every one of these gentry is received in his train, so that welcoming a visitor is like opening the gates to an invading army. I was one day at Pan-se-Chen's when ten of the highest functionaries of the vice-royalty paid him a visit. In an instant the beautiful mansion of Che-pa-Pou was in the military occupation of a regiment of beggars, more or less ragged. Some strutted about under the arcades of the inner courts; others coolly installed themselves in retired corners, and took their ease; while a still greater number, making themselves at home in the reception-room, assisted at the conference, as if it were a public show. The democratic side of Chinese manners is shown in nothing so much as in this life-in-common of master and servants. And, strange to say, the familiarity does not appear to diminish at all the veneration of the inferior for his superior. What is more, this incessant contact keeps up in the mind of the subordinate a feeling of respectful dread, which manifests itself every moment. This vigorous observance of the laws of their social hierarchy, results from those rules of exacting courtesy which may be said to govern China. Certain habits of deference and respect are never deviated from, whether by equals, among equals, or by subordinates, in the company of their superiors. Pan-se-Chen received his visitors in a hall upon the ground floor; a semicircle of those massive easy chairs I have described being ranged around the door. The noisy gong announced the arrivals, and very likely their titles and dignities, for, at the sound of that instrument, our mandarin rose from his seat, and, according to the rank of the new-comer, either went out to meet him or awaited him on the threshold. The moment the visitor set foot inside, the whole company rose, and remained standing until the host had conducted his guest to a seat. The same etiquette was observed when any one took leave. Pan-se-Chen thought it sufficient to salute an officer of lower rank by crossing his hands and bowing; but to the Viceroy and the Tartar General he exhausted the whole formulary of Chinese etiquette. He met them upon the outer threshold, and bowed low; he raised his joined hands over his head, and bowed again twice, and lower than before; then, having covered his left hand with the lappet of his coat, he presented it to the exalted individual, and conducted him to the sofa placed in front of the door in the centre of the semicircle. When he had reached the sofa, Pan-se-Chen made another bow to his visitor—and also to his visitor's seat!—and made a feint of wiping the dust off the hard, shining wood, with his sleeve; after which he retired to his own chair,with a final reverence to his guest, who was now comfortably settled. Such was the ceremonial I witnessed, and at that moment I thought these Chinese really resembled the conventional Chinamen of chintzes and screens.
- ↑ Few English readers, "probably," have that felicity; but it must be some strongly-worded, popular version of the Sic vos non vobis, we suppose.—T.