Table of Contents
From Marco Polo to Richard Nixon, narratives of the encounter between Chinese and Westerners have been defining texts of European cultures and their descendants. Successive but sporadic reports from travellers, missionaries, diplomats, traders and others have provided a model of an alternative way of arranging people, of organizing their lives, of thinking about the state of being human; one that described a government that was, or at least was represented as being, as authoritative as anything at home, with military power that could challenge any other, and with cultural achievements as profound. Traditionally labelled “inscrutable”, China nonetheless possessed a written literature, an esteemed bureaucracy, technological achievements, complex financial systems, codes and courts of law, and religions that had texts, buildings and hierarchies of priests. In other words, though not like us at all, they were exactly like us.
The voluminous literature of the encounter with China is above all, and consistently, a literature of comparison. From eating manners, to the rigging on boats, from city design to imperial customs, reports of the Chinese exotic have been seized on by centuries of eager western readers and, latterly, viewers. But the thrill these stories generate is possible only as a response to a condition where recognition and bafflement are mixed in equal parts, where things are close enough to be familiar but far enough away to be bizarre. This is psychically exciting but it is also discomforting and unstable, and one of the effects of this has been to move the Chinese to the discursive comfort of one extreme or the other; to find a way of welcoming them into the fold or to define the conditions of their exclusion. Neither move is unproblematic: if, fundamentally, the Chinese are like us then their very obvious differences must be accounted for or, less satisfactorily, elided; if they are basically not like us, the reverse is the case. What these two moves have in common, however, is that they have sought the fundamental similarity — or difference — between China and the West in features deemed to lie at the core of what it means, or meant, to be Chinese and whatever it is, or was, that we conceived ourselves to be at that moment in history: early on it was religion; later, language came onto centre stage; now perhaps it is in conceptions of the rights of individuals.
This paper focuses on a largely forgotten chapter in this history in the form of a book that attempts to show, in the words of its subtitle, that the Languages of Europe and Asia have a Common Origin, and in doing so that the people of China and Europe, too, share a common descent. The book is China’s Place in Philology, written by the Reverend Joseph Edkins, Doctor of Divinity, who lived from 1823 until 1905 and was resident in China from 1848 until his death.[1] Edkins left an enormous legacy of work across the whole range of topics in the history, religions, literature, geography, philosophy, and economy of China (as well as its language) in English, apart from his copious translations into Chinese — not least of the Bible — and original works in that language. Published in 1871, China’s Place in Philology did not meet with universal acclaim; indeed, in some quarters it was derided, but his work in this field remained, in Edkins’s own opinion, his most valuable and far-reaching.
Edkins was sent to China by the London Missionary Society or LMS, an evangelical Protestant society based in London established in 1795 as The Missionary Society, changing its name in 1818. This was by no means the only mission society active in China through the nineteenth century: there were representatives of most of the Christian denominations, Roman Catholic and Orthodox as well as Protestant. Among the Protestants were missionaries from across the English-speaking world, usually attached to their own national and denominational groups, and also from many European countries, each with their own goals and emphases. Even amongst the British evangelical societies, there were clear demarcations: not only in the region, or mission field, but in strategy and theology as well.[2]
For many years, mission history was an unfashionable field of research, bedevilled as it was, and to a certain extent still is, by people for whom conversion was not just a phenomenon to be studied but a goal to be prayed for. However, in Chinese Studies at least, to ignore missionary writings is to ignore a vast and valuable archive. And to understand the nature of these writings, the particularities and specific contexts of each author have to be understood: to regard them all as having the same ideologies, the same attitudes to Chinese people, the same project, is much mistaken. From the 1950s to the 1980s, a standard textbook on modern Chinese history was Teng and Fairbanks’s China’s Response to the West.[3] This title reflected the commonly accepted totalizing binary of the time. Fortunately, however, in more recent years a pluralizing tendency has gained ground, with both of the categories “China” and “the West” gradually becoming disaggregated in the scholarly literature. In Edkins’s time, under the category “the West” there existed a web of heterogenous possibilities of involvement with all sorts of different Chinese people. Europeans of many kinds, Americans, Australasians; missionaries as well as traders, customs officials, military personnel and diplomats; and bureaucrats and scholars who worked on China based in western capitals — to aggregate all these into a single entity that had a unified project is to grant, perhaps, more credence to justifications emanating from the metropolitan capitals for foreign adventurism of various kinds than the complex situation on the ground might warrant.
Thus, it is important to place Joseph Edkins in his place and time, to grant him his individuality and idiosyncrasy, and to allow him his disputes with colleagues, fellow nationals and co-religionists. Edkins, along with most of his colleagues — with the major exception of James Legge — has received only passing scholarly attention.[4] One of the goals of this paper, and the larger project of which it is a part, is to rescue Edkins and his scholarly colleagues from the academic obscurity into which they have fallen. It is my contention that this notable group of scholar-missionaries — not that they would have seen themselves as a group — laid down the analytical categories for understanding aspects of Chinese society that stood for decades in the West and in various Chinese societies across the world, including the People’s Republic, and indeed to some extent still stand. Before moving on to a detailed discussion of Edkins, his work and its reception, and Edkins’s conception of his own position in relation to the Chinese people amongst whom he lived most of his adult life, it may be useful to review and discuss some of the vocabulary of encounter.
While we may judge that what Edkins was doing in China’s Place in Philology — which was completed in 1870, the year Tylor’s Primitive Culture appeared in London — was what we would call “cross-cultural research”, the word “culture” in its common usage does not appear in his book. Indeed it was not until 1912 that the title of a book in English about China used the word “culture” in this sense — in Ernst Boerschmann’s pamphlet Chinese Architecture and its Relation to Chinese Culture.[5] Boerschmann was a German photographer resident in China who is not generally recognized as a writer in English and this sense of culture is of German derivation, so Boerschmann’s case is complicated. The first clear case of a work by an English native speaker is Maurice Price’s Christian Missions and Oriental Civilizations, a Study in Culture Contact; the Reactions of Non-Christian Peoples to Protestant Missions from the Standpoint of Individual and Group Behaviour: Outline, Materials, Problems, and Tentative Interpretations, privately printed in Shanghai in 1924.[6]
What word — what category — did Edkins and his colleagues use instead of “culture”? Or did they simply get by without one? One candidate for this task was “civilization”, but if culture is complicated, civilization is perhaps even more so, in this context at least. Raymond Williams' Keywords proves a useful starting point. Starting life as a term that described a process, originally “to make a criminal matter into a civil matter, and thence, by extension, to bring within a form of social organization”, by the latter part of the eighteenth century “civilization” had acquired the sense of “a state of social order and refinement, especially in conscious historical or cultural contrast with barbarism”.[7] This sense of civilization places it at one end of a unilinear scale against which all societies, and activities, can be placed and compared. The fact that this unilinear scale was generally accepted at the time did not mean that there was general acceptance of what societies occupied what positions on the scale. In the case of China, it managed to occupy positions corresponding to both barbarism and to civilization according to different people at different times. Thus, while its criminal justice system with its public executions, torture and physical punishments like the cangue was deemed barbaric in the extreme by some outraged expatriates, its court and ritual code could equally be held up at the same time as the epitome of civil human relations.[8] The sense of civilization as “an achieved condition of refinement and order” finds its way into discussion of China by at least the early-nineteenth century. In 1804 Sir John Barrow, Secretary to the Admiralty and founder of the Royal Geographical Society, published his account of Britain’s first embassy to China of 1793, on which he accompanied Earl Macartney, the appointed envoy. This book is called Travels in China: Containing Descriptions, Observations and Comparisons Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-min-yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey from Pekin to Canton. In which it is Attempted to Appreciate the Rank that this Extraordinary Empire may be Considered to Hold in the Scale of Civilized Nations. In this book, Barrow claims to show the Chinese as they really were, as opposed to the view of them commonly held on the basis of reports from the Jesuit missionaries which had held sway for decades. Thus, he writes:
The voluminous communications of the missionaries are by no means satisfactory; and some of their defects will be noticed and accounted for in the course of this work; the chief aim of which is to show this extraordinary people in their proper colours, not as their own moral maxims would represent them, but as they really are…and to endeavour to draw from such a sketch…as may enable the reader to settle, in his own mind, the point of rank which China may be considered to hold in the scale of civilized nations.[9]
Barrow’s discussions of China’s position in this scale of civilization begin by asserting that “civilization” depends to a large extent on material progress: science, arts, manufactures, the conveniences and luxuries of life, to use his measures. On this scale he judges China “greatly superior” to Europe “from the middle to the end of the sixteenth century”. Indeed, “when the King of France introduced the luxury of silk stockings, which, about eighteen years afterwards, was adopted by Elizabeth of England, the peasantry of China were clothed in silks from head to foot.”
However, “the Chinese were, at that period, pretty much in the same state in which they still are; and in which they are likely to continue”; that is, they had not developed further in the previous two centuries and had been overtaken by Europe during that time.[10]
For Barrow, this civilization is a matter of social attainment rather than being defined or limited by descent. Thus, he asserts that while the Chinese and those he calls “Malays” were both “unquestionably descended from the ancient inhabitants of Scythia or Tartary,” the Malays’ conversion to Islam “first inspired, then rendered habitual, that cruel and sanguinary disposition for which they are remarkable”.[11] Thus while the Chinese have bettered themselves on the scale of civilization, people of the same ancestry, the Malays, have regressed.[12] For Barrow, then, civilization is a state that societies achieve or lose, and on the basis of which societies can be compared, like to like, favourably or unfavourably on a single scale, taking into account attributes such as material progress or the propensity to spill blood.[13]
In 1840, some 36 years after Barrow’s book had appeared and, importantly, after the first wave of British Protestant missionaries had made their way to China, the Reverend W.H. Medhurst, who had arrived in Malacca in 1817 to work on the mission to the Chinese — moving to Shanghai after the First Opium War — and who was, like Edkins, employed by the London Missionary Society, published his China: its State and Prospects, with Especial Reference to the Spread of the Gospel, Containing Allusions to the Antiquity, Extent, Population, Civilization, Literature, and Religion of the Chinese.[14]
Medhurst begins his chapter on “The Civilization of China” in this way:
In seeking to evangelize the heathen world, two descriptions of people claim our attention: namely, the barbarous and the civilized. China belongs to the latter class. Instead of a savage and untutored people — without a settled government, or written laws, — roaming the desert, and living in caves, — dressed in skins, and sitting on the ground, — knowing nothing of fashion, nor tasting luxuries; we behold in the Chinese a quiet, orderly, well-behaved nation, exhibiting many traces of civilization, and displaying them at a period when the rest of mankind were for the most part sunk in barbarism.
We see here the same evaluation of China as a civilized nation, familiar from Barrow but, unlike him, Medhurst tempers his enthusiasm with an explicit appeal to religion: “Of course we must not look for that high degree of improvement, and those well-defined civil rights, which are in great measure the effects of Christianity.”[15]
With Medhurst, then, the categories “civilization” and “barbarism” are overlayed with another set, namely “heathen” and “Christian”. That these categories do not necessarily map onto each other is clear from the evaluation of China as both civilized and heathen — distinguishing it from much of the mission field where “heathen” and “barbarism” collocated comfortably. Indeed, China stood as the exemplum, if not the only case, of a civilized and heathen nation of the present though it had precursors in the ancient world in pre-Christian Greece and Rome. “Christian” and “barbarism”, needless to say, is not a possible combination.
Williams notes, in his article on “civilization”, that “there was a critical moment when civilization was used in the plural”, noting that the English use is later than the French.[16] This use of “civilizations” approaches the contemporary meaning of “cultures”, at least insofar as it implies that different places have distinctive ways of life and thought that are organically whole. What distinguishes this meaning of “civilization” from the comparable meaning of “culture” — as in “Chinese civilization” and “Chinese culture” — is a question of register: discussions of “Chinese civilization” usually begin with the ancient philosophical systems and include examples of artistic and technological achievements arranged in historical sequence. “Chinese culture” on the other hand tends to be less historical and more concerned with the lives of ordinary people. Of course, there are no firm lines of demarcation between civilization and culture, as there equally are not between the senses of civilization in the singular and the plural. It is worth stressing that such changes in meaning are gradual and uneven and single authors may shift almost imperceptibly from one sense to another; indeed, we should acknowledge that the use of the singular form “civilization” and the plural “civilizations” sometimes overlaps.
In writings on China in English the plural sense of civilization seems to appear in the latter part of the 1880s, well after Edkins’s cogitations on the nature and origins of the Chinese language, and his understanding of the meaning of civilization seems close to Medhurst’s. It is interesting, though, given Williams’s observation on the earlier French use of the plural form “civilizations”, that perhaps its first clear use in relation to China is in a translation from that language: Pierre Laffitte’s A General View of Chinese Civilization and of the Relations of the West with China, published in French in 1861, and in English translation not until 1887. Laffitte, who revelled in the wonderful title “Director of Positivism”, was Auguste Comte’s direct disciple but was no specialist on China. This did not stop him in his ambitious undertaking, in three lectures:
Gentlemen, We are to enter to-day upon a survey of the whole field of Chinese civilization. In view of the importance of such a study, both in itself and in its bearings on the problems of the science of society, we shall devote to it three lectures…At the base of the farthest East is a noteworthy civilization, which, say what we may about it, is in constant development and in full activity, and is being brought day by day into closer contact with the West. This civilization, in so many respects so much misunderstood, is that of China.[17]
In these lectures, Laffitte treats “Chinese civilization” as a discrete entity that possesses certain distinctive features, has specific traits and manifests a particular pattern of development. A civilization, for Laffitte, is a kind of entity made up of selected elements of a nation’s lifeways, rather than an attribute a nation has more or less of, as it was for Barrow and Medhurst. Civilizations, so conceived, can still be judged against each other in terms of their attainments or levels, but Laffitte’s approach also pointed to the possibility of a model of human development that moved away, potentially at least, from an uncompromising unilinearity. With this model, the possibility is raised of the ways of life and systems of thought of different places developing along their own tracks to equally civilized points but remaining thoroughly distinct. That such a possibility was conceived in the middle of the nineteenth century is, of course, no accident, parallel as it is to the rise of nationalist movements across Europe with their conceptions of specific national essences and peculiarities. Aligned to this distinction, though different from it, are discussions related to whether humankind — or particular features of people’s lives — had a single origin or multiple origins. Arguments about monogenetic and polygenetic theories, as they are called, featured crucially in the study of the origins of language and the history of specific languages, as will be discussed below.
Along with the two models of development, leading respectively to “civilization” and to “civilizations”, a third story should be considered. Specifically Christian, and, in relation to studies of China, usually Protestant, this story is found most explicitly in works of those highly educated and thoroughly modern scholar-missionaries (including Edkins) who we would now also refer to as scriptural literalists; that is, people who took the words of the Bible as literally true. So with the book of Genesis in one hand and a knowledge of recent scientific advances in the other, these scholars set about to demonstrate as well as they could that the ultimate monogenetic hypothesis, namely that we all derive from Adam and Eve, was not only compatible with the state of knowledge of the time but could be proved with academic rigour. In Edkins’s words — about language but it could equally apply in many other fields — this work was “for the vindication of Scripture and the progress of knowledge”.[18]
Positing Adam and Eve at the root of the tree of humanity, as this position did, the process of change that produced human diversity often became understood as one of degeneration, as moving away, step-by-step from the point of our common origin and God’s first revelation, both literally in geography and metaphorically in culture. From this point of view, however savage or barbaric the people you might meet in your travels, their origins were the same as yours and, though subject to different conditions since the original revelation, you and they were all part of a common brotherhood and their forebears had, therefore, received the same revelation from God as had yours. One attraction, then, for the study of ancient societies and languages in the nineteenth century — Egyptian, Accadian, Sanskrit, Chinese — was to try to recover those remnant parts of the original revelation preserved in non-Semitic textual traditions. As Max Müller, Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, editor of the Sacred Books of the East series and doyen of comparative philology, wrote in 1878: “The more I see of the so-called heathen religions, the more I feel convinced that they contain germs of the highest truth.”[19]
Yet the fact remained that European civilization was only made possible, in some versions of this theory at least, by its Christian character. The revelation of Jesus reversed the degenerative process and not only granted salvation to humanity but also a civilized character to society. As Medhurst wrote: “Of course we must not look for that high degree of improvement, and those well-defined civil rights, which are in great measure the effects of Christianity.”
It was on this theoretical terrain that Edkins produced his work that attempted to demonstrate that “the Languages of Europe and Asia have a Common Origin”. To understand this work — its motivations and its methodologies — we must walk this ideological landscape with him, following the same scholarly maps, observing what lay at his horizon. Setting aside the arrogance of hindsight, we can approach an understanding of how Edkins and his colleagues saw themselves and their work among Chinese people only by allowing argument from a literal reading of Genesis to stand as the unassailable foundation of theory.