Travels in China Part 13

[Manchu letters]

2d Cla.s.s. ai ei iei oi ui

[Manchu letters]

3d Cla.s.s. ar er ir or ur

[Manchu letters]

4th Cla.s.s. an en in on un

[Manchu letters]

5th Cla.s.s. ang eng ing ong ung

[Manchu letters]

6th Cla.s.s. ak ek ik ok uk

[Manchu letters]

7th Cla.s.s. as es is os us

[Manchu letters]

8th Cla.s.s. at et it ot ut

[Manchu letters]

9th Cla.s.s. ap ep ip op up

[Manchu letters]

10th Cla.s.s. au eu iu ou uu

[Manchu letters]

11th Cla.s.s. al el il ol ul

[Manchu letters]

12th Cla.s.s. am em im om um

[Manchu letters]

The initial characters are represented by respective marks, which being joined to these elementary terminations, generally at the upper extremity, give all the monosyllabic sounds, and the junction of these according to their various combinations all the words in the Mantchoo language. One example will be sufficient to shew the nature of such composition; thus the initials P. T. L. S. F. set before the 12th cla.s.s of radicals, will stand as follows:

Pam Tem Lim Som Fum

[Manchu letters]

And if each of these syllables be respectively added to the 5th cla.s.s, they will stand thus:

Pamang Temeng Liming Somong Fumung

[Manchu letters]

Of the state of their literature, and progress in science, I have little to observe. The nature of the language will almost itself determine these points. With respect to any branch of polite literature, or speculative science, little improvement seems to have been made in the last two thousand years. Indeed, there are no works in the whole empire, modern or ancient, that are so much esteemed, so much studied, and I may perhaps add, so little comprehended, as the five cla.s.sical books collected and commented upon by their great philosopher _Cong-foo-tse_, who lived about 450 years before the Christian aera; and these certainly are very extraordinary productions for the time in which they were written. These works and a few writings of their favourite master, according to the annals of the country, escaped the general destruction of books, when the barbarous _She-whang-te_ ordered all the monuments of learning to be burnt, except such as treated of medicine and agriculture, about 200 years before Christ, for the absurd purpose, as they state, that he might be considered by posterity as the first civilized Emperor which had governed China, and that the records of its history might, by this mean artifice, appear to commence with his reign.

Admitting such an event to have happened which, however, may be considered as doubtful, the supposition involves in it this necessary consequence, that the stock of learning at that time must have been very confined. It is scarcely possible, otherwise, how one person, near the end of his reign, could have contrived to a.s.semble together all the works of art and literature, dispersed through so large a tract of country and so enlightened as it was then supposed to be. There were, besides, other independent sovereigns in the country, over whom he had little or no controul, so that it is very probable the commonwealth of letters suffered no great loss by the burning of the Chinese books. When the Caliph Omar commanded the Alexandrian library to be destroyed, which the pride and the learning of the Ptolemy family had collected from every part of the world, literature sustained an irreparable loss; but, although the tyrant had the power to consign to eternal oblivion the works of science, yet he had no power over the principles upon which these works were constructed. These principles had spread themselves wide over the world. The expedition of Alexander carried the learning of the Egyptians and the Greeks into various countries of Asia, where they continued to flourish. And when the tyranny and oppression of the seventh Ptolemy (Physcon) forced the Alexandrians to abandon a city that was perpetually streaming with the blood of its citizens, they found an asylum in the Grecian states and in different parts of Asia. And as this sanguinary tyrant, in the midst of his cruelties, pretended and indeed shewed a fondness for literature, the arts and the sciences flourished even in his reign: the migrations, therefore, at this time, from the capital of Egypt, were of the greatest importance and use to those nations among whom the refugees settled. Unluckily for China, the wild mountainous forests towards the south, and the wide sandy deserts to the north, that render any communication extremely difficult between this empire and the rest of Asia, together with their dislike for foreigners, seem, at this time, to have checked the progress of those arts and sciences which had long flourished in Europe and in Africa. Their history, at least, is silent as to any communication with India, till a century nearly after the commencement of the Christian aera, when the religion of Budha found its way from Thibet into China.

Whether the burning of the works of the learned in China did or did not happen, appears, as already observed, to admit of some doubt; but the antiquity, and the authenticity, of the five _king_, or cla.s.sics, seem to be sufficiently established. And considering the early periods in which they were written, they certainly demonstrate a very superior degree of civilization. It has been observed that, in this country, the arts, the sciences, and literature, are not progressive; and the five _king_ would lead one to conclude, that they have rather even been retrograde than stationary. The names of these works are:

1. _Shoo-king._ A collection of records and annals of various princes, commencing more than 2000 years before Christ.

2. _Shee-king._ Odes, sonnets, and maxims; most of them so abundant in metaphor, and so obscure, that much of the sense is to be made out by the translator.

3. _Ye-king._ The perfect and the broken lines of _Fo-shee_; the most ancient relict in China, and perhaps the first attempt at written language: now perfectly incomprehensible.

4. _Chung-choo._ Spring and autumn. The history of some of the kings of _Loo_: the work princ.i.p.ally of _Cong-foo-tse_.

5. _Lee-kee._ Ceremonies and moral duties. A compilation of _Cong-foo-tse_.

The lines of _Fo-shee_ puzzled even the great philosopher of the country, who declared himself dissatisfied with all the explanations of the commentators. The learned and ingenious Leibnitz fancied he discovered in them a system of binary arithmetic, by which all the operations and results of numbers might be performed, with the help of two figures only, the cypher or zero 0, and an unit 1, the former being considered as the constant multiple of the latter, as 10 is of the unit.

Thus 1 would stand for 1, 10 for two, 11 for three, 100 for four, and so on. It is unnecessary to observe, with how many inconveniences such a system would be attended when reduced to practice. This discovery of the binary series, which the mathematician, in all probability, considered only as a philosophical plaything, was communicated to Father Bouvet the Jesuit who, happening at that time to be engaged in decyphering the lines of _Fo-shee_, caught the idea and in an extacy of joy proclaimed to the world that Leibnitz had solved the _Fo-sheean_ riddle.

The missionaries of the Romish church are so accustomed to the mysteries with which their religion abounds, that every thing they meet with, and do not understand, among a strange people, is also resolved into a mystery. Thus, the following figure, which the Chinese, in allusion to the regular lines described on the back-sh.e.l.l of some of the tortoises, metaphorically call the mystic tortoise, has been supposed by some of these gentlemen to contain the most sublime doctrines of Chinese philosophy; that they embrace a summary of all that is perfect and imperfect, represent the numbers of heaven and earth, and such like jargon, which, it obviously appears, is no less unintelligible to themselves than to their readers.

These famous lines, supposed to be found on the back of a tortoise, are the following:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Who does not perceive, at a single glance, in this figure the common schoolboy's trick of the magic square, or placing the nine digits so that they shall make the sum of fifteen every way, thus,

+---+---+---+ | 2 | 9 | 4 | +---+---+---+ | 7 | 5 | 3 | +---+---+---+ | 6 | 1 | 8 | +---+---+---+

and what are the perfect and imperfect numbers, but the odd and even digits distinguished by open and close points? In like manner, I am inclined to believe, the several ways of placing these open and close points that occur in Chinese books are literally nothing more than the different combinations of the nine numerical figures, for which they are subst.i.tuted.

Most of the other _king_ have been translated, wholly or in part, and published in France. It may be observed, however, that all the Chinese writings, translated by the missionaries, have undergone so great a change in their European dress, that they ought rather to be looked upon as originals than translations. It is true, a literal translation would be nonsense, but there is a great difference between giving the meaning of an author, and writing a commentary upon him. Sir William Jones observes that the only method of doing justice to the poetical compositions of the Asiatics, is to give first a verbal and then a metrical version. The most barren subject, under his elegant pen, becomes replete with beauties. The following stanza, from one of the odes of the _Shee-king_, is an instance of this remark. It is calculated to have been written about the age of Homer; and it consists of fifteen characters.

1 2 3 4 5 6 The peach-tree, how fair, how graceful, its leaves, how blooming

7 8 9 10 11 how pleasant; such is a bride, when she enters her bridegroom's