FROM PEKING TO MANDALAY.*
THIS is a book written with learning, authority, and
enthusiasm. The records of travel in Asia have been so numerous in recent years that the " margin of utility " has already been passed, and the subject has lost some of its earlier power to attract. Mr. R. F. Johnston's book, however, is one in a thousand ; and however many others may be dis- regarded, this should be read, at least by those who care for the judgments of a man who has brought to bear in remote parts of the Chinese Empire a full knowledge of Chinese character and the Chinese language. We cannot profess always to agree with his conclusions, but there is not a page on which he does not earn our respect. Such a work may safely be included among the small number of books of travel which are important.
Mr. Johnston is a district officer and Magistrate at Wei-hai- wei. The journey be describes was the result of a long-felt desire to see the various tribes subject to China which inhabit the wild regions of Chinese Tibet and north-western Yunnan.
He went neither as a sportsman nor a political agent, but as a scholar,—an adventurous scholar, which, we may add, is a very admirable character. Boldness is generally rewarded, and Mr. Johnston met with no ill-treatment or even dis- courtesy in districts supposed to be the most " anti-foreign " in the Empire. Perhaps, however, his modesty prevents him from attributing his success sufficiently to his linguistic genius and his penetrating sympathy with the Asiatic. His interest in his travels was a good deal ethnological. At a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, Sir George Scott said that the country north of Tali-fu was the place where we
might find, if we ever did find, the solution of a great many of the puzzling questions about the different races which inhabit the frontier hills. " Those secluded ravines and icy mountains," writes Mr. Johnston, " have served as both the
cradle and the deathbed of nations. From that region have issued vigorous and ambitious tribes, bent on a career of glory and conquest ; and back to it the shattered remnants of decaying races have crept home to die." All his experiences point to the essentially mixed character of the Tibetan people :—
"No one who has come across the people of eastern Tibet and has also read the descriptions of western and central Tibet given us by recent writers and travellers, can fail to see that in spite of all that they possess in common the inhabitants of Tibet are a mixed people. 'Long-heads' and 'broad-heads,' swarthy faces, white faces and yellow faces, long noses and flattened noses, oblique eyes and straight eyes, coal-black hair and brown hair, and many other physical peculiarities differentiate the people of one Tibetan district from those of another, just in the same way as they differentiate the various races of India and Indo-China. Islearly all the people of eastern Tibet have adopted the peculiar form of Buddhism which as Lamaism we have learned to associate with that country, and their languages and customs are saturated with Tibetan influences. In spite of many dialectical peculiarities I found that the people of the Yalung watershed were nearly always able to speak and understand Tibetan. Yet many of them are bi-lingual, and their own languages—as may be seen from the vocabularies in the Appendix—appear to be nearly as distinct from Tibetan as they are from Chinese."
No reader who has the instinct for travel will be able to read this book, we should think, without longing to visit those impressive, yet restful, regions, some of which Mr. Johnston was, so far as he knows, the first European to visit :—
"Nature has carved for herself in indelible letters the story of the world's youth, and gloomy chasms through which rush the mighty rivers that carry to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific snows that melted on the white roof of the world. And amid all this magnificence and desolation there are lovely valleys and Stretches of garden-land that might have been chosen as the Edens of a hundred mythologies, and which in historic times have been the homes of religious recluses and poets, who, like others of their kind in Western lands, found in silence and solitude a refuge from the bitterness and pain of the world, or a hermitage in which, amid scenes of perennial beauty, they could weave their flowers of thought into immortal garlands of human words."
We must refer our readers to the book for the captivating story of the author's journey. Here we can only refer to some of his conclusions which are new and, as it seems to us, arguable. Mr. Johnston is more persistent than any writer we know in his conviction of the essential homogeneity of China. We ourselves should hardly dare to make any political
* From Peking to Mandalay: a Journey from North China to Burma through Tibetan Seto/Alan and Yunnan. By B. F. Johnston, M.A., F.R.O.S. With Map and Illustrations. London: John Murray. [15s. net.]
speculation as to the future of China on the assumption that what is ordained in Peking will necessarily come to pass in the rest of China, because we know full well that life-long inhabitants of China and distinguished sinologues would write forthwith to tell us that the provinces are a law unto themselves, and to remind us that we have ignored the reality of the power and independence of Viceroys ruling at a distance from the central government. Mr. Johnston denies explicitly that China is any longer made up of disunited pieces. "All the different forces that are now at work to make or mar China," he says, "issue from, or converge towards, the capital." That is an important statement, and if Mr. Johnston is not misled we have here one of the most striking symptoms of the much-talked-of regeneration of China. We hope that his intense sympathy with the Chinese is not a false guide. It would be sheer lack of imagination in us if we did not admit that the Chinese have as much right to " anti-foreign " prejudice as our Colonists have to anti. Asiatic prejudice in British Columbia, Australia, or South Africa. But is it not a fact that men with the admirable insight into the Asiatic mind which Mr. Johnston possesses in such an eminent degree sometimes charge Europeans with treating Asiatics as " inferior" when there is no more than an intention to treat them as " different" P We have met few Europeans who know the Chinese intimately who have not a liking, or even an affection, for them; and yet none that we know could accept the suggestion, which Mr. Johnston seems to make, that a complete social mingling of the most cultivated representatives of the races (marriage included, we assume) is ultimately possible. We protested against a similar idea recently when it was expressed in an otherwise noble letter by Bishop Awdiy. Again, we can hardly agree with what Mr. Johnston says on the religious question. His opinion that Christian dogmas will probably never " find general acceptance on Chinese soil " goes in the teeth of a good deal of evidence. True, ancestor-worship is the great principle which survives the shock of religious doubt, and that is " idolatrous " in Christian eyes. But there is no reason why the Chinese, in accordance with their proved mental habit, should not adopt a kind of metaphysical reading of ancestor-worship such as would enjoy the hearty sanction of the Church which preaches the " Communion of Saints." Mr. Johnston's view, however, deserves to be stated. It is that China is more likely eventually to satisfy itself with a neo-Confucianism. Finally, we must mention Mr. Johnston's very interesting interpretation of the " yellow " peril. He believes in it in a sense scarcely contemplated by the originator of the prophecy. There will be no war, no physical conflict; but unless the Western peoples overcome the love of money, luxury, selfishness, and the vices of civilisation, an awakened Asia will beat them in the commercial and intellectual conflict, because the hands of Asia are tied by none of these ligatures. Need we say more than that growing success will at all events bring its temptations to Asiatics no less than to our degenerate selves P In these matters we must differ from Mr. Johnston, but no praise is too high for his descriptions of his journey and his acute ethnographical speculations.
Previous page
