His great object may be said to have been the inculcation of duty, setting forth with wondrous iteration the character of his superior or ideal man. Several times he enunciated 'the golden rule' in a negative form, 'What ye would not that men should do to you, do not do to them.' Taoism derives its name from the treatise of Lî Urh, commonly called Lâo-tsze, a contemporary of Confucius, called 'The Tao or Way and its Characteristics.' The Way is the quiet, passionless discharge of all which our nature and relations prompt or require us to do, without striving or crying, and the method of maintaining and preserving life. 'Heaven in this Way' is not a ruler or legislator as in Confucianism, but only a pattern. The system was older than Lâo-tsze, and indigenous in China, but associated with many superstitions; and after the entrance of Buddhism into China it adopted many of its peculiarities. The recognised head of Taoism has his seat on the Lung-hu Mountain in Chiang-hsî. Lâo-tsze has the merit of having formulated the grand principle that good will overcome evil, and should be returned for it. For Buddhism, which was introduced or rather invited to China in our first century, see the article BUDDHISM.

There is no priesthood in Confucianism; but Buddhism has its monks and nuns, and Tâoism its monks. The government, while not interfering with the internal organisation of either of these systems, has established a scheme of gradations of rank and authority in order that it may have the control of them in its own hands. It would no doubt recognise Christianity in the same way, if the different missions could possibly be amalgamated, and would unitedly try to adapt themselves to the bed of Procrustes which it would prepare for them in the various departments and districts. This is not the place in which to speak of the comparative number of the adherents of the three religions' in China. To claim a majority for those of any one of them is very absurd. As a matter of fact, Confucianism represents the intelligence and morality of China; Taoism its superstitions ; and Buddhism its ritualism and idolatry, while yet it acknowledges no God.

The GOVERNMENT of the empire (omitting the regulation of the imperial court and family, or the special Mancha department) is conducted from the capital, supervising, directing, controlling the different provincial administrations, and exercising the power of removing from his post any official whose conduct may be irregular or considered dangerous to the state.

There is the Grand Cabinet, the privy-council of the emperor, in whose presence it meets daily to transact the business of the state, between the hours of four and six A. M.! Its members are few, and hold other substantive offices. There is also the Grand Secretariat, formerly the supreme council, but under the present dynasty very much superseded by the cabinet. It consists of four grand and two assistant-grand secretaries, three of them Manchûs and three Chinese.

The business on which the cabinet deliberates comes before it from the Six Boards-of Civil Office, of Revenue, of Ceremonies (including all matters pertaining to religion), of War, of Punishment, and of Works. Each Board has two presidents and four vice-presidents, three of them again Manchûs and three Chinese. In 1861 the changed relations between the empire and foreign nations led to the formation of what we may call a seventh Board, styled the Ya-man (or court) of Foreign Affairs.' There is also another important department which should be mentioned -the Censorate-members of which exercise a supervision over the Boards, and, distributed

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through the provinces, have it as their duty to memorialise the emperor on all subjects connected with the welfare of the people and the conduct of the government.

In the administration of the provinces, a governorgeneral and governor are for the most part associated as colleagues; though in Chih-lî, Kan-sû, and Sze-ch'wan there is only the governor-general, and in Shan-hsî, Shan-tung, and Ho-nan only the governor. Below these two functionaries there are the lieutenant-governor (commonly called the treasurer), the provincial judge, the salt comptroller, and the grain-intendant. The provinces are further divided for the purposes of administration into fû or prefectures (amounting in all the provinces to 191), cháu or departments (in all, 58 independent of the fu, within which they are comprehended, and 155 subject to it), and hsien or districts, subject to the fû (in all 1288). There are also four fu occupied principally by the aboriginal peoples, twenty-eight chau and four hsien. The rank of the different officials in these provinces is indicated by a knob or button on the top of their caps. In the two highest it is made of red coral; in the third it is clear blue; in the fourth, of lapis lazuli; in the fifth, of crystal; in the sixth, of an opaque white stone; and in the three lowest it is yellow, of gold or gilt. They also wear insignia or badges embroidered on a square patch, in the front or back of their robes, representing birds on the civilians and animals on the military officers.

Of

As regards the revenue of the empire we need more information than we possess at present. Each province is required to support itself and to furnish a certain surplusage for the imperial government; but both the provinces and the court are constantly finding their income insufficient. the income of the several provinces for local purposes we cannot speak; but we take the following estimate of the imperial revenue from a series of carefully prepared articles contributed to the China Mail of Hong-kong in 1885:

The tael at present has fallen to little more or even less than five shillings, but however we stretch its value we do not obtain the amount of £20,000,000; surely a very small imperial revenue for so great an empire with so vast a population. It has been increased at times by sales of office and by forced contributions, such as were once in England mistermed benevolences, both dangerous expedients; but the former was put a stop to by an edict in 1879. China had no foreign debt till 1874; in 1888 the foreign loans had amounted to about $5,000,000.

The imperial army proper consists of Manchûs, Mongols, and the descendants of Chinese who revolted from the Ming dynasty and joined the Manchûs on their invasion of the empire, the first defection taking place in 1621. These are divided each into eight corps with different coloured banners, and as a whole are styled 'The Eight Banners.' Their headquarters are in Peking, and they are distributed in garrisons in most of the provinces, and also in Turkestan and I-lî. Their number available for actual service amounts to nearly 350,000, of whom 100,000 are supposed to be

reviewed by the emperor at Peking once a year. In addition to this there is the national army, distributed in more than one thousand camps throughout the provinces, nearly twice as numerous as the imperial, and called The Army of the Green Standard, being in fact little more than a vast militia or gendarmerie. These forces may in times of emergency be added to considerably by patriotic gentlemen calling out bands of braves,' effective enough to cope with insurgents, but all unfit to encounter the disciplined forces of any foreign power. Of this character at first were the troops of the T'ai-p'ing rebellion, which, till its suppression in 1867, for about twenty years proved a match for the imperial and national forces, and threatened the overthrow of the Manchû dynasty. See T'AIP'INGS, and GORDON (CHARLES GEORGE). The navy is divided into a northern and a southern fleet the former comprising four turret-ships, seven armoured rams, and twenty-three gunboats, besides torpedo boats; the latter, seven cruisers, sixteen gunboats (some of them armoured), besides floating batteries and torpedo boats. Most of the armoured ships have been built in Germany or in England, but several of the most powerful have been built in China.

Intercourse with Western Nations and Commerce. -It was not till after the Cape of Good Hope was doubled, and the passage to India discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1497, that intercourse between any

of the European nations and China was possible by sea. It was in 1516 that the Portuguese first made their appearance at Canton; and they were followed at intervals of time by the Spaniards, the Dutch, and the English in 1635. The Chinese received none of them cordially; and their dislike of them was increased by their mutual jealousies and collisions with one another. The Manchu sovereignty of the empire, moreover, was then in the throes of its birth, and its rulers were the more disposed to assert their own superiority to all other potentates. They would not acknowledge them as their equals, but only as their vassals. They felt the power of the foreigners whenever they made an attempt to restrict their operations by force, and began to fear them. As they became aware of their conquests in the Philippines, Java, and India, they would gladly have prohibited their approach to their territories altogether. In the meantime trade gradually increased, and there grew up the importation of opium (see OPIUM TRAFFIC) from India, and the wonderful eagerness of multitudes to purchase and smoke it. Before 1767 the import rarely exceeded 200 chests, but that year it amounted to 1000. In 1792 the British government wisely sent an embassy under Lord Macartney to Peking with presents to the emperor, to place the relations between the two countries on a secure and proper footing; but though the ambassador and members of his suite were courteously treated, the main objects were not accomplished. In 1800 an imperial edict expressly prohibited the importation of opium, and threatened all Chinese who smoked it with condign punishment. It had been before a smuggling traffic, and henceforth there could be no doubt of its real character. Still it went on, and increased from year to year. A second embassy from Great Britain in 1816 was dismissed from Peking suddenly and contumeliously because the ambassador would not perform the ceremony of San kwei chiú k'au ('the repeated prostrations'), and thereby acknowledge his own sovereign to be but a vassal of the empire.

So things went on till the charter of the East India Company expired in 1834, and the head of its factory was superseded by a representative of the sovereign of Great Britain who could not con

duct his intercourse with the Hong merchants as the others had done. The two nations were brought defiantly face to face. On the one side was a resistless force, determined to prosecute its enterprise for the enlargement of its trade, and the conduct of it as with an equal nation; on the other side was the old empire seeming to be unconscious of its weakness, determined not to acknowledge the claim of equality, and confident of its power to suppress the import of opium. The government of China made its grand and final effort in 1839, and in the spring of that year the famous Lin Tsêh-hsü was appointed to the governor-generalship of the Kwang provinces, and to bring the barbarians to reason. Out of his measures came our first war, which was declared by Great Britain against China in 1840. There could be no doubt as to the result in so unequal a contest; and we hurry to its close at Nanking, the old capital of the empire, where a treaty of peace was signed on the 29th August 1842 on board Her Majesty's ship Cornwallis. The principal articles were that the island of Hongkong should be ceded to Great Britain; that the ports of Canton, Amoy and Fu-Châu (in Fûchien), Ning-po (in Cheh-chiang), and Shang-hai (in Chiang-su) should be opened to British trade and residence; and that thereafter official correspondence should be conducted on terms of equality according to the standing of the parties. Nothing was said in the treaty on the subject of opium, the smuggling traffic in which went on as before.

Before fifteen years had passed away, because of troubles at Canton not all creditable to Great Britain, and the obstinacy of the governor-general Yeh Ming-chin in refusing to meet Sir John Bowring, it was thought necessary by the British government that war should be commenced against China again. In this undertaking France joined as our ally. Canton was taken on the 29th December 1857, when Yeh was captured and sent a prisoner to Calcutta. Canton being now in the possession of the allies, arrangements were made for its government by a joint commission; and in February 1858 the allied plenipotentiaries, accompanied by the commissioners of the United States and Russia as non-combatants, proceeded to the north to lay their demands before the emperor at Peking. There was not so much fighting as there had been in 1842, and on June 26 a second treaty was concluded at T'ien-tsin, renewing and confirming the former, but with many important additional stipulations, the most important of which were that the sovereigns of Great Britain and China might, if they saw fit, appoint ambassadors, ministers, or other diplomatic agents to their respective courts; and that the British representative should not be required to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the sovereign of an independent nation on an equality with China. Other stipulations provided for the protection of Christian missionaries and their converts; for liberty for British subjects to travel, for their pleasure or for purposes of trade, under passports, into all parts of the interior of the country; for the opening of five additional ports for commerce-Nin-chwang (in Shing-king, the chief province of Manchuria), Tăng-châu (with port of Chefoo, in Shan-tung), Tâi-wan (Formosa, several ports), Ch'ao-châu (with port of Swa-t'au, in Kwang-tung), and Ch'iung (Kiung-châu, in Hâi-nan) and for authority for merchant-ships to trade on the Yangtsze River, ports on which would be opened when rebellion should have been put down and peace and order restored. (The river was not opened to steamer traffic till 1888.) Treaties on the same lines were concluded also with the United States, France, and Russia. A revision of the tariff regulations of 1842 was to take place subsequently in the year at

But

Shang-hâi. This was done in October, and then opium was entered among the legitimate articles of import, and the arrangement confirmed that the government should employ a foreign official in the collection of all maritime duties. It might seem that these treaties secured everything which foreign nations could require, and that the humiliation of the Chinese government was complete. they were nearly wrecked by one concluding stipulation in all of them but that of the United States, that the ratifications of them should be exchanged at Peking within a year. The emperor and his advisers, when the pressure of the force at T'ien-tsin was removed, could not bear the thought of the embassies entering the sacred capital, and foolishly cast about to escape from the condition. The forts at Ta-ku, guarding the entrance to the Pei-ho, and the approach to T'ien-tsin and thence to Peking, were rebuilt and strongly fortified. When the English, French, and American ministers returned to Shang-hâi with the ratified treaties in 1859, the Chinese commissioners who had signed them at T'ien-tsin were waiting for them, and urged that the ratifications should be exchanged there. The French and English ministers then insisted on proceeding to Peking as the place nominated for the exchange. But when they arrived at the mouth of the river, with the gunboats under their command, they were unable to force the defences. A severe engagement ensued, and the allied forces sustained a repulse with heavy loss. It was the one victory gained by the Chinese. The British and French governments took immediate action. A third expedition under the same plenipotentiaries as before, with a force of nearly 20,000 men, was at the same place in little more than a year. The forts were taken on August 21, and on the 25th the plenipotentiaries were again established in T'ien-tsin. We can only refer to their march in September on Peking, with all its exciting details. The emperor (Hsien-fung) fled to Jeh-ho in the north of Chih-lî, the imperial summer-retreat; and his brother, Prince Kung, whose name is well known, came to the front in the management of affairs. On the 13th October he surrendered the north-east gate of the city; and on the 24th the treaties were exchanged, and an additional convention signed, by which of course an additional indemnity was exacted from the Chinese, and an arrangement made about the emigration of coolies, which had become a crying scandal, while a small piece of the continent of the empire, lying opposite to Hong-kong, was ceded to that colony. So it was that the attempt of China to keep itself aloof from the rest of the world came to an end, and a new era in the history of the empire was initiated.

Hsien-fung died at Jeh-ho in August 1861, leaving the empire to his young son only six years old. A cabal at Jeh-ho tried to keep the boy in their possession, but his uncle, Prince Kung, succeeded in getting him to Peking, and along with the young emperor's mother and the empressdowager, by whom Hsien-fung had had no child, loyally and successfully administered a regency in accordance with the new conditions of the government. The style of the reign was T'ung-chi, or 'Government in Union;' and on February 23, 1873, the emperor announced publicly, and specially to the foreign ministers, that he had taken the government into his own hands. This brought up the question of an audience, but, after a good deal of protocolling and negotiation, it was finally settled on June 29 by the emperor receiving all the ministers then in Peking without the ceremony of prostration. His reign did not last long, for he died in January 1875. As he left no son, and had designated no successor, the members of the im

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perial house, according to the rules in such a case, appointed as his successor Tsai-t'ien, the son of Prince Shun, a younger brother of Prince Kung. The new sovereign was a child of four years old, and began to reign under the style of Kwang Hsü, or 'The Illustrious Succession. He assumed the government in March 1887.

Since the ratification of the treaties of T'ientsin, the ports on the Great Chiang, the opening of which was promised in them, have, with the exception of Nan-king, been opened—namely, Han-k'au (in Hû-pei), Chiû-chiang (Kit-kiang, in Chiang-hsî), and Chin-chiang (Kin-kiang, in Chiangsû). In addition to these, I-chang (in Ha-pei) and Wû-hû (in An-hui), also both on the Chiang, have been opened, with Wău-châu (in Cheh-chiang), and Pih-hai (Pak-hoi, in Kwang-tun'g), through the convention at Chefoo in 1876 between Sir Thomas F. Wade and Li Hung-chang. By the same convention certain concessions regarding the opium traffic were also stipulated for by the Chinese commissioner, and agreed to after various delays, with some modifications not unfavourable to the Chinese, by the British government.

According to the returns of trade and trade reports of the Imperial Maritime Customs for the year 1887, the vessels entered and cleared at the various treaty ports were 28,381, of which 14,337 were British. There were also among them 6402 vessels of foreign type, owned by Chinese, and sailing under the Chinese flag, and 1996 Chinese junks sailing under special licenses issued by the superintendents of customs at Shang-hâi and Ning-po. The value of the whole trade, net foreign and net native imports and exports, was 246,172,053 taels. The revenue accruing from this immense trade (including import, export, and coast-trade duties, tonnage, and transit dues, and opium li-kin) was 20,541,997,402 taels, the average value of the tael during the year being 4s. 104d. (having fallen from 5s. 84d. in 1882).

The import of opium was 73,877 piculs, as against 67,801 in 1886. But it would be a mistake to assume that the demand for foreign opium increased in 1887. The taste for it is languishing, a preference being given to the opium produced in Manchuria and some provinces of China Proper.' The greatest increase of imports in 1887 was in cotton yarn. "The yarn from Bombay is gradually taking the place of that from Manchester, it being a better wearing article.' Of the two principal exports of tea and silk, the quantities exported were rather less in 1887 than in 1886.

China has in the past been mainly a self-contained nation, but of late the Chinese have shown an increasing tendency to seek a livelihood abroad, especially in California, British Columbia, the Straits Settlements and Eastern Archipelago, and Australia. More than half the population of Singapore is Chinese; and in 1880 there were 200,000 Chinese in Java. In the Australian colonies there have never been more than 60,000. From 1855 to 1867 the immigration of Chinese into the United States varied from 3000 to 7000; from 1868 to 1881 it was usually between 10,000 and 20,000; in 1882 it was 33,614. But the imposition of prohibitory taxes on Chinese immigrants reduced this to 381 in 1883, and 17 in 1886. And in 1888 the immigration of Chinese workmen was absolutely forbidden for twenty-one years, though merchants and students with means are permitted to travel or reside in the Union. British Columbia and some of the Australian colonies have also sought to restrict Chinese immigration by imposing a heavy poll-tax on immigrant Chinese.

The government of the empire has in the meanwhile been on the whole eminently fortunate and successful. There is now peace within its borders and in its dependent territories. From

its hostilities with France about Annam, it came forth with more credit than in its former collisions with western powers, and the complications that might have arisen between it and Britain from the extension of the latter's eastern empire over Upper Burma were wisely arrested by the concession to it on the part of Lord Rosebery. It has its legations at the courts of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. The advice of the foreign ministers at its court has been of important service to it in threatening emergencies. The collection of its maritime duties under foreign superintendence has materially added to its revenue. It has wisely employed the services of foreigners in its army and arsenals. Machinery for cotton manufacture and paper-making has been imported. Telegraphic communication has been established extensively, and in 1888 a railway 81 miles in length was opened from T'ien-tsin to Tongshan. The government has commenced the proper training of its troops. It has acquired a considerable and powerful navy. It has founded schools and other institutions for the education of its young men in the knowledge of other languages, and in the various applications of western science. It has shown much sympathy with the sufferings of its people under unavoidable calamity. The one element of dissatisfaction with the present condition of China is the increasing growth of the poppy in its own provinces, and the increasing consumption of opium among the people. To set against this there is the accelerating diffusion of Christianity; nor is there reason to anticipate any but a great and good future for the empire.

See J. B. du Helde, Description Géographique, &c., de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise (4 vols. fol. Paris, 1735); Histoire Générale de la Chine, ou Annales de cet Empire, traduites du Tong-kien Kang-muh, par le feu Père Joseph Annie-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (12 vols. 4to, Paris, 1776-85); Demetrius C. Boulger, History of China (3 vols. 8vo, Lond. 1881-84); China: a History of the Laws, Manners, and Customs of the People, by William John Henry Gray (2 vols. Lond. 1877); Sir John F. Davis, China: a General Description of that Empire and its Inhabitants, &c. (2 vols. Lond. 1857); S. Wells Williams, LL.D., The Middle Kingdom: a Survey of the Geography, Government, &c., of the Chinese Empire and its Inhabitants, revised edition (2 vols. Lond. 1883); Ferd. Freiherr von Richthofen, China Ergebnisse eigener Reisen und darauf gegrundeter Studien (Berlin, 1877-85); E. Simon, China: Religious, Political, and Social (Lond. 1887); W. F. Mayers, The Chinese Government (Shanghai, 1877); Rev. Dr W. A. P. Martin, The Chinese their Education, Philosophy, and Letters (Lond. 1881); Rev. Justus Doolittle, The Social Life of the Chinese (2 vols. Lond. 1887); Rev. Dr A. Williamson, Journeys in North China, Manchuria, and Eastern Mongolia, with some Account of Corea (2 vols. Lond. 1870); Rev. John Ross, The Manchus, or the Reigning Dynasty of China: their Rise and Progress (Paisley, 1830); Rev. Dr J. Legge, The Chinese Classics (vols. i to v. Hong-kong, vols. vi. and vii. Oxford); China, Prof. R. K. Douglas (Lond. 1887); Chinese Sketches, H. A. Giles (Lond. 1876), and other works by the same author.

CHINESE LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND LITERATURE. The speech and the written composition of the Chinese differ more than those of any other people. The former addresses itself, like all other languages, to the mind through the ear; the latter speaks to the mind through the eye, not as words, but as symbols of ideas. All Chinese literature might be understood and translated though the student of it could not name a single character. The words and the names of the written characters are all monosyllabic, and are inconjugable and indeclinable, without inflection or change of any kind, and at the same time so versatile that there are few of them which may not perform the rôle indifferently, according to their position in a

sentence, of most of what we call Parts of Speech. That the speech has never advanced to anything like agglutination even (see PHILOLOGY), can be owing only to the early origin and cultivation of the written characters. These demand our chief attention.

The Chinese fathers spoke of course before they wrote, and when they had formed symbols to indicate their conceptions, they naturally called them by the names which they were accustomed to give to the objects of their perception and to their inward ideas. The time when they began to form those symbols cannot be exactly determined. Everywhere throughout China we find altars to Ts'ang Chieh, where paper with writing on it, often picked up from the ground, is burned in acknowledgment of his service to mankind as the inventor of written characters. Some authorities say that he was a sovereign prior to Fû Hsi; others that he was a minister of Hwang Ti, several centuries later. Fa Hsi's reign, according to the least unlikely of the chronological schemes, must be assigned to the 34th century B.C. We may safely say that the written characters of the Chinese existed, it may be in a rudimentary condition, more than 5000 years ago.

These characters are divided into six classes, according to the principle regulating their formation: (I) Pictorial characters (Hsiang hsing), being originally rude pictures of objects; (2) Indicative characters (Chih shih), intended by their form and the relation of their parts to suggest to the reader the idea in the mind of their makers; (3) Composite characters (Hui i), made up of two or more characters, the meanings of which blend in the meaning of the compound; (4) Inverted characters (Chwan chú), formed from others by the inversion of the whole, or of parts, of them; (5) Borrowed characters (Chia tsieh), used in other than their proper signification; and (6) Phonetical characters (Hsieh shang), of which one part has a phonetic use, and indicates, exactly or approxipart the category of meaning which it conveys. mately, the name of the compound, and the other

The first three classes may be called origines scripturae Sinica, but do not comprehend 2000 characters; the next two are unimportant. The sixth class is beyond comparison the most numerous, and embraces well on to 40,000 of the 43,000 characters, or thereabouts, found in the K'ang-hst dictionary of 1704. The third class is the most interesting, bringing us mind to mind abreast of their framers, and showing us their ideas of the things represented by the characters. For example, a wife (called fû, is denoted by nü,, female,' and ch'au,, 'a broom:' she was the woman that used the broom. And, again, a male child (called nan, ) is denoted by t'ien, H, ‘a field,' and lî,, strength:' his birth was welcomed as new strength for the work of the field.

a

The phonetical characters arose from the impossibility of framing a sufficient number of characters on the other five principles of formation to serve the purpose of a written medium. A certain number of characters, which has varied from 554 to 214 (employed in the dictionaries of the last and present dynasties), were set apart as ideograms' or mothers of meaning,' and a larger and more indefinite number were chosen, which in connection with them might express the name or sound of the compounds, and be called 'mothers of sound.' Their number altogether is large, but many are derivatives of others, and not a few of the ideograms themselves are among them. Dr Chalmers, of

Hong-kong, published in 1878 a 'Concise Chinese Dictionary' in which the phonetic constituents are reduced to 884. These, with the 214 ideograms, having been learned, 1098 characters in all, the student has mastered the elements of all the Chinese characters. Pronunciation is constantly varying, and his reading will often be far from giving the present truth' of the names of many characters; but a knowledge of these phonetic constituents does much to lighten the strain upon the memory in learning Chinese.

The monosyllabic utterances, however, available to name the 43,000 characters are few indeed. In Pekinese they are only 426. Even if there were as many as 1000 different syllables in the language, equally divided among the characters, more than forty meanings would belong to each. In the 'Syllabic Dictionary' of the late Dr Williams, containing only 12,527 characters, placed under 552 syllables, there are about 150 characters placed under the monosyllable (=ee in see). To the eye there is no difficulty in distinguishing all these î's; but to the ear such discrimination, unassisted other wise, is impossible. To assist it, there is a system of tones, the number of which varies in different dialects. According to the tone in which the monosyllable is pronounced, its meaning is different; and this renders what we call a good ear' desirable in learning the speech of China. There are other devices by which the difficulty occasioned by the slender syllabary of Chinese speech is overcome, such as the combination of synonyms, and the multiplication of particles hardly to be found in the dictionaries. As a consequence, while conciseness is a characteristic of good Chinese composition, the spoken language is verbose-e.g. the fable of The Fox and the Grapes,' told in 131 English words, is rendered in good Chinese by 85 characters, while a version of it in Cantonese colloquial contains 163 words. Still the colloquial speech is not difficult of acquisition. The writer had often occasion to remark that the children of English families resident in China, who were not restricted from intercourse with the Chinese, spoke the colloquial more fluently and readily than the English which was spoken by their parents.

After the Buddhist missionaries came to China, and scholars got some acquaintance with the use of the Sanskrit alphabet, they began to devise a method of spelling (so to speak) their characters, dividing each monosyllable into an initial and a final sound, and then joining two other characters together, one to give the initial, and the other, always in the same tone as the character thus spelled, to give its final sound. This method, though cumbrous, might have been of use to the student if the same characters had always been employed for the same initial and the same final sounds, as in Chalmers's Concise Dictionary.' But every lexicographer adopted his own characters at his pleasure -e.g. the character E (1 = 1 + 2) is spelled in one dictionary by (-iang) and (ch + ); in a second by (l'iang) and (érh, anciently called 1); and in a third by (l-iang) and (î). The K'ang-hsî lexicon, after reciting these three spellings, adds that the sound is the same as 里,which

is the phonetic element, li. This spelling only distracts the student; the Chinese scholars failed to apprehend the nature of the alphabetic signs or letters.

From the analysis of the characters which has been given, their inconjugable and indeclinable character, and their versatility such that one of them may perform the rôle of most of our parts of

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speech,' it is evident that the attempt to apply to them the categories and rules of grammar on the model of our Aryan languages must be very much 'love's labour lost; yet composition with them has its own rules, which are not difficult to learn. As Dr Marshman expressed it in his grammar of 1814, the whole of Chinese grammar depends on position.' Under the skilful application of this principle, the Chinese characters weave the web of thought with the rapidity of engine-driven shuttles; and there has grown up an immense Chinese literature.

Dr

Before entering on a brief description of that literature, a paragraph may be allowed to what is called pidgin English,' a sort of lingua franca, which grew up between Chinese on the seaboard and foreigners, for the purpose of intercommunication, while neither party had the means or the wish to acquire an accurate knowledge of the language of the other. 'Pidgin' is a Chinese attempt to pronounce our word business;' and the materials of the lingo are nearly all English words similarly represented or misrepresented, and called 'broken English.' The idiom, on the other hand, is entirely that of colloquial Chinese. Foreigners get to master it in a short time, so as to carry on long conversations by means of it, and to transact important affairs of business. Williams (vol. i. p. 832) gives the following example of it, taken from the Chinese Repository, vol. x.: A gentleman meets a Chinese acquaintance, accompanying a coffin which is being conveyed along the street, and asks him who is dead ('who hab die?'). 'No man hab catchee die,' is the answer. This one piecy coffin I just now give my olo fader. He likee too much counta my numba one ploper; s'pose he someteem catchee die, can usee he.'-'So fashion, eh? How muchee plice (price) can catchee one alla same same?'I tinky can get one alla same so fashion one tousan dolla, so; this hab first chop hansom, lo!' There is often a charming raciness about such conversations, and one occasionally sees in his Chinese interlocutor the working of the mind which has been described in the formation of the third or composite class of characters. For instance, a Chinese boy (all servants are called boys) once came to ask the writer to intercede for him with his master, who was treating him, he thought, unjustly. He one sarcee (saucy bad) man,' he said; he no hab topside pidgin;' meaning that his master had no religion, no dealing with the powers above. This jargon is passing away. Chinese who know English, and English who know Chinese, are increasing from year to year. See C. G. Leland's Pidgin-English Sing-song (1876).

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How vast and varied the Chinese literature is may be seen from a very brief and imperfect analysis of the contents of the catalogue raisonné of the works collected by an order of the K'ien-lung reign in 1722, to be printed or reprinted as a great national library. The catalogue is arranged in four divisions under the name of K', 'Arsenals,' or 'Magazines the first, in 44 chapters, containing works on the classics and dictionaries necessary in the study of them; the second, in 46 chapters, works of history; the third, in 57 chapters, works on philosophy and the arts; and the fourth, in 53 chapters, works of poetry and belles-lettres.

The classics are the Confucian books, and a few others, on which an amount of commentary has been expended certainly not inferior either in voluminousness or in patient care to what has been put forth on our sacred Scriptures; and it still goes on without abatement. A collection of books on them by a multitude of scholars of the present dynasty was published at Canton in 1829 in 1400 chapters. The histories are