Defoe, Daniel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719, Chapter XIV: Arrival In China. (http://www.online-literature.com/defoe/crusoe2/14/).
We were now on shore in China; if I thought myself banished, and remote from my own country at Bengal, where I had many ways to get home for my money, what could I think of myself now, when I was about a thousand leagues farther off from home, and destitute of all manner of prospect of return? All we had for it was this: that in about four months' time there was to be another fair at the place where we were, and then we might be able to purchase various manufactures of the country, and withal might possibly find some Chinese junks from Tonquin for sail, that would carry us and our goods whither we pleased. This I liked very well, and resolved to wait; besides, as our particular persons were not obnoxious, so if any English or Dutch ships came thither, perhaps we might have an opportunity to load our goods, and get passage to some other place in India nearer home. Upon these hopes we resolved to continue here; but, to divert ourselves, we took two or three journeys into the country.
First, we went ten days' journey to Nankin, a city well worth seeing; they say it has a million of people in it: it is regularly built, and the streets are all straight, and cross one another in direct lines. But when I come to compare the miserable people of these countries with ours, their fabrics, their manner of living, their government, their religion, their wealth, and their glory, as some call it, I must confess that I scarcely think it worth my while to mention them here. We wonder at the grandeur, the riches, the pomp, the ceremonies, the government, the manufactures, the commerce, and conduct of these people; not that there is really any matter for wonder, but because, having a true notion of the barbarity of those countries, the rudeness and the ignorance that prevail there, we do not expect to find any such thing so far off. Otherwise, what are their buildings to the palaces and royal buildings of Europe? What their trade to the universal commerce of England, Holland, France, and Spain? What are their cities to ours, for wealth, strength, gaiety of apparel, rich furniture, and infinite variety? What are their ports, supplied with a few junks and barks, to our navigation, our merchant fleets, our large and powerful navies? Our city of London has more trade than half their mighty empire: one English, Dutch, or French man-of-war of eighty guns would be able to fight almost all the shipping belonging to China: but the greatness of their wealth, their trade, the power of their government, and the strength of their armies, may be a little surprising to us, because, as I have said, considering them as a barbarous nation of pagans, little better than savages, we did not expect such things among them. But all the forces of their empire, though they were to bring two millions of men into the field together, would be able to do nothing but ruin the country and starve themselves; a million of their foot could not stand before one embattled body of our infantry, posted so as not to be surrounded, though they were not to be one to twenty in number; nay, I do not boast if I say that thirty thousand German or English foot, and ten thousand horse, well managed, could defeat all the forces of China. Nor is there a fortified town in China that could hold out one month against the batteries and attacks of an European army. They have firearms, it is true, but they are awkward and uncertain in their going off; and their powder has but little strength. Their armies are badly disciplined, and want skill to attack, or temper to retreat; and therefore, I must confess, it seemed strange to me, when I came home, and heard our people say such fine things of the power, glory, magnificence, and trade of the Chinese; because, as far as I saw, they appeared to be a contemptible herd or crowd of ignorant, sordid slaves, subjected to a government qualified only to rule such a people; and were not its distance inconceivably, great from Muscovy, and that empire in a manner as rude, impotent, and ill governed as they, the Czar of Muscovy might with ease drive them all out of their country, and conquer them in one campaign; and had the Czar (who is now a growing prince) fallen this way, instead of attacking the warlike Swedes, and equally improved himself in the art of war, as they say he has done; and if none of the powers of Europe had envied or interrupted him, he might by this time have been Emperor of China, instead of being beaten by the King of Sweden at Narva, when the latter was not one to six in number.
As their strength and their grandeur, so their navigation, commerce, and husbandry are very imperfect, compared to the same things in Europe; also, in their knowledge, their learning, and in their skill in the sciences, they are either very awkward or defective, though they have globes or spheres, and a smattering of the mathematics, and think they know more than all the world besides. But they know little of the motions of the heavenly bodies; and so grossly and absurdly ignorant are their common people, that when the sun is eclipsed, they think a great dragon has assaulted it, and is going to run away with it; and they fall a clattering with all the drums and kettles in the country, to fright the monster away, just as we do to hive a swarm of bees!
As this is the only excursion of the kind which I have made in all the accounts I have given of my travels, so I shall make no more such. It is none of my business, nor any part of my design; but to give an account of my own adventures through a life of inimitable wanderings, and a long variety of changes, which, perhaps, few that come after me will have heard the like of: I shall, therefore, say very little of all the mighty places, desert countries, and numerous people I have yet to pass through, more than relates to my own story, and which my concern among them will make necessary.
I was now, as near as I can compute, in the heart of China, about thirty degrees north of the line, for we were returned from Nankin. I had indeed a mind to see the city of Pekin, which I had heard so much of, and Father Simon importuned me daily to do it. At length his time of going away being set, and the other missionary who was to go with him being arrived from Macao, it was necessary that we should resolve either to go or not; so I referred it to my partner, and left it wholly to his choice, who at length resolved it in the affirmative, and we prepared for our journey. We set out with very good advantage as to finding the way; for we got leave to travel in the retinue of one of their mandarins, a kind of viceroy or principal magistrate in the province where they reside, and who take great state upon them, travelling with great attendance, and great homage from the people, who are sometimes greatly impoverished by them, being obliged to furnish provisions for them and all their attendants in their journeys. I particularly observed in our travelling with his baggage, that though we received sufficient provisions both for ourselves and our horses from the country, as belonging to the mandarin, yet we were obliged to pay for everything we had, after the market price of the country, and the mandarin's steward collected it duly from us. Thus our travelling in the retinue of the mandarin, though it was a great act of kindness, was not such a mighty favour to us, but was a great advantage to him, considering there were above thirty other people travelled in the same manner besides us, under the protection of his retinue; for the country furnished all the provisions for nothing to him, and yet he took our money for them.
We were twenty-five days travelling to Pekin, through a country exceeding populous, but I think badly cultivated; the husbandry, the economy, and the way of living miserable, though they boast so much of the industry of the people: I say miserable, if compared with our own, but not so to these poor wretches, who know no other. The pride of the poor people is infinitely great, and exceeded by nothing but their poverty, in some parts, which adds to that which I call their misery; and I must needs think the savages of America live much more happy than the poorer sort of these, because as they have nothing, so they desire nothing; whereas these are proud and insolent and in the main are in many parts mere beggars and drudges. Their ostentation is inexpressible; and, if they can, they love to keep multitudes of servants or slaves, which is to the last degree ridiculous, as well as their contempt of all the world but themselves.
I must confess I travelled more pleasantly afterwards in the deserts and vast wildernesses of Grand Tartary than here, and yet the roads here are well paved and well kept, and very convenient for travellers; but nothing was more awkward to me than to see such a haughty, imperious, insolent people, in the midst of the grossest simplicity and ignorance; and my friend Father Simon and I used to be very merry upon these occasions, to see their beggarly pride. For example, coming by the house of a country gentleman, as Father Simon called him, about ten leagues off the city of Nankin, we had first of all the honour to ride with the master of the house about two miles; the state he rode in was a perfect Don Quixotism, being a mixture of pomp and poverty. His habit was very proper for a merry-andrew, being a dirty calico, with hanging sleeves, tassels, and cuts and slashes almost on every side: it covered a taffety vest, so greasy as to testify that his honour must be a most exquisite sloven. His horse was a poor, starved, hobbling creature, and two slaves followed him on foot to drive the poor creature along; he had a whip in his hand, and he belaboured the beast as fast about the head as his slaves did about the tail; and thus he rode by us, with about ten or twelve servants, going from the city to his country seat, about half a league before us. We travelled on gently, but this figure of a gentleman rode away before us; and as we stopped at a village about an hour to refresh us, when we came by the country seat of this great man, we saw him in a little place before his door, eating a repast. It was a kind of garden, but he was easy to be seen; and we were given to understand that the more we looked at him the better he would be pleased. He sat under a tree, something like the palmetto, which effectually shaded him over the head, and on the south side; but under the tree was placed a large umbrella, which made that part look well enough. He sat lolling back in a great elbow-chair, being a heavy corpulent man, and had his meat brought him by two women slaves. He had two more, one of whom fed the squire with a spoon, and the other held the dish with one hand, and scraped off what he let fall upon his worship's beard and taffety vest.
Leaving the poor wretch to please himself with our looking at him, as if we admired his idle pomp, we pursued our journey. Father Simon had the curiosity to stay to inform himself what dainties the country justice had to feed on in all his state, which he had the honour to taste of, and which was, I think, a mess of boiled rice, with a great piece of garlic in it, and a little bag filled with green pepper, and another plant which they have there, something like our ginger, but smelling like musk, and tasting like mustard; all this was put together, and a small piece of lean mutton boiled in it, and this was his worship's repast. Four or five servants more attended at a distance, who we supposed were to eat of the same after their master. As for our mandarin with whom we travelled, he was respected as a king, surrounded always with his gentlemen, and attended in all his appearances with such pomp, that I saw little of him but at a distance. I observed that there was not a horse in his retinue but that our carrier's packhorses in England seemed to me to look much better; though it was hard to judge rightly, for they were so covered with equipage, mantles, trappings, &c., that we could scarce see anything but their feet and their heads as they went along.
Defoe, Daniel, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, 1720 (http://home.znet.com/mshroud/texts/1720%20DEFOE%20Crusoe%20III%20Serious%20Reflections.htm), CHAPTER FOUR: An Essay on the Present State of Religion in the World
China is famous for wisdom, that is to say, that they, having such a boundless conceit of their own wisdom, we are obliged to allow them more than they have; the truth is, they are justly said to be a wise nation among the foolish ones, and may as justly be called a nation of fools among the wise ones.
As to their religion, it is all summed up in Confucius's maxims, whose theology I take to be a rhapsody of moral conclusions; a foundation, or what we may call elements of polity, morality, and superstition, huddled together in a rhapsody of words, without consistency, and, indeed, with very little reasoning in it; then 'tis really not so much as a refined paganism, for there are, in my opinion, much more regular doings among some of the Indians that are pagans, in America, than there are in China; and if I may believe the account given of the government of Montezuma in Mexico, and of the Uncas of Cusco in Peru, their worship and religion, such as it was, was carried on with more regularity than these in China. As to the human ingenuity, as they call it, of the Chinese, I shall account for it by itself. The utmost discoveries of it to me appeared in the mechanics, and even in them infinitely short of what is found among the European nations.
But let us take these people to pieces a little, and examine into the great penetration they are so famed for. First of all, their knowledge has not led them that length in religious matters which the common notions of philosophy would have done, and to which they did lead the wise heathens of old among the Grecian and Roman Empires, for they, having not the knowledge of the true God, preserved, notwithstanding, the notion of a God to be something immortal, omnipotent, sublime; exalted above in place as well as authority, and therefore made heaven to be the seat of their gods, and the images by which they represented their gods and goddesses had always some perfections that were really to be admired as the attendants of their gods, as Jupiter was called the Thunderer for his power, father of gods and men, for his seniority; Venus, adored for her beauty; Mercury for swiftness; Apollo for wit, poetry, music; Mars for terror and gallantry in arms, and the like. But when we come to these polite nations of China, which yet we cry up for sense and greatness of genius, we see them grovelling in the very sink and filth of idolatry; their idols are the most frightful monstrous shapes, not the form of any real creature, much less the images of virtue, of chastity, of literature, but horrid shapes, of their priests' invention; neither hellish or human monsters, composed of invented forms, with neither face or figure, but with the utmost distortions, formed neither to walk, stand, fly, or go, neither to hear, see, or speak, but merely to instil horrible ideas of something nauseous and abominable into the minds of men that adored them.
If I may be allowed to give my notions of worship, I mean as it relates to the objects of natural homage, where the name and nature of God is not revealed, as in the Christian religion, I must acknowledge the sun, the moon, the stars, the elements, as in the pagan and heathen nations of old; and above all these, the representations of superior virtues and excellences among men, such as valour, fortitude, chastity, patience, beauty, strength, love, learning, wisdom, and the like -- the objects of worship in the Grecian and Roman times -- were far more eligible and more rational objects of Divine rights than the idols of China and Japan, where, with all the economy of their State maxims and rules of civil government, which we insist so much on as tests of their wisdom, their great capacities and understandings, their worship is the most brutish, and the objects of their worship the coarsest, the most unmanly, inconsistent with reason or the nature of religion, of any the world can show; bowing down to a mere hobgoblin, and doing their reverence not to the work of men's hands only, but the ugliest, basest, frightfullest things that man could make; images so far from being lovely and amiable, as in the nature of worship is implied, that they are the most detestable and nauseous, even to nature.
How is it possible these people can have any claim to the character of wise, ingenious, polite, that could suffer themselves to be overwhelmed in an idolatry repugnant to common-sense, even to nature, and be brought to choose to adore that which was in itself the most odious and contemptible to nature; not merely terrible, that so their worship might proceed from fear, but a complication of nature's aversions?
I cannot omit, that being in one of their temples, or rather in a kind of oratory or chapel, annexed to one part of the great palace at Peking, there appeared a mandarin with his attendants, or, as we may say, a great lord and his retinue, prostrate before the image, not of any one of God's creatures, but a creature of mere human forming, such as neither was alive, nor was like anything that had life, or had ever been seen or heard of in the world.
The like image, or something worse, if I could give it a true representation, may be found in a garden chapel, if not defaced by wiser heads, of a great Tartarian mandarin, at a small distance from Nanking, and to which the poor abandoned creatures pay their most blinded devotions.
It had a thing instead of a head, but no head; it had a mouth distorted out of all manner of shape, and not to be described for a mouth, being only an unshapen chasm, neither representing the mouth of a man, beast, fowl, or fish; the thing was neither any of the four, but an incongruous monster; it had feet, hands, fingers, claws, legs, arms, wings, ears, horns, everything mixed one among another, neither in the shape or place that Nature appointed, but blended together and fixed to a bulk, not a body, formed of no just parts, but a shapeless trunk or log, whether of wood or stone, I know not; a thing that might have stood with any side forward, or any side backward, any end upward, or any end downward, that had as much veneration due to it on one side as on the other a kind of celestial hedgehog, that was rolled up within itself, and was everything every way; that to a Christian could not have been worthy to have represented even the devil, and to men of common-sense must have been their very soul's aversion. In a word, if I have not represented their monstrous deities right, let imagination supply anything that can make a misshapen image horrid, frightful, and surprising; and you may with justice suppose those sagacious people called the Chinese, whom, forsooth, we must admire I say, you may suppose them prostrate on the ground, with all their pomp and pageantry, which is in itself not a little, worshipping such a mangled, promiscuous-gendered creature.
Shall we call these a wise nation who represent God in such hideous, monstrous figures as these, and can prostrate themselves to things ten thousand times more disfigured than the devil? Had these images been contrived in the Romans' time, and been set up for the god of ugliness, as they had their god of beauty, they might, indeed, have been thought exquisite, but the Romans would have spurned such an image out of their temples.
Nothing can render a nation so completely foolish and simple as such an extravagance in matters of religious worship; for if gross ignorance in the notion of a God, which is so extremely natural, will not demonstrate a nation unpolished, foolish, and weak, even next to idiotism, I know nothing that will.
But let me trace this wise nation that we talk so much of, and who not only think themselves wise, but have drawn us in to pay a kind of homage to their low-prized wit.
Government and the mechanic arts are the two main things in which our people in England, who have admired them so much, pretend they excel. As to their government, which consists in an absolute tyranny, which, by the way, is the easiest way of ruling in the world where the people are disposed to obey as blindly as the mandarin commands or governs imperiously, what policy is required in governing a people of whom it is said, that if you command them to hang themselves, they will only cry a little, and then submit immediately? Their maxims of government may do well enough among themselves, but with us they would be all confusion. In their country it is not so, only because whatever the mandarin says is a law, and God Himself has no power or interest among them to contradict it, unless He pleases to execute it brevi manu from heaven.
Most of their laws consist in immediate judgment, swift executions, just retaliations, and fair protection from injuries. Their punishments are cruel and exorbitant, such as cutting the hands and the feet off for theft, at the same time releasing murders and other flagrant crimes. Their mandarins are their judges in very many cases, like our justices of the peace; but then they judge by customs, oral tradition, or immediate opinion, and execute the sentence immediately, without room or time to reflect upon the justice of it, or to consider of mitigations, as in all Christian countries is practised, and as the sense of human frailty would direct.
But let me come to their mechanics, in which their ingenuity is so much cried up. I affirm there is little or nothing sufficient to build the mighty opinion we have of them upon, but what is founded upon the comparisons which we make between them and other pagan nations, or proceeds from the wonder which we make that they should have any knowledge of mechanic arts, because we find the remote inhabitants of Africa and America so grossly ignorant and so entirely destitute in such things; whereas we do not consider that the Chinese inhabit the continent of Asia, and though they are separated by deserts and wildernesses, yet they are a continuous continent of land with the parts of the world once inhabited by the politer Medes, Persians, and Grecians; that the first ideas of mechanic arts were probably received by them from the Persians, Assyrians, and the banished transplanted Israelites, who are said to be carried into the regions of Parthia and the borders of Karakathie, from whence they are also said to have communicated arts, and especially handicraft, in which the Israelites excelled, to the inhabitants of all those countries, and, consequently, in time to those beyond them.
But let them be received from whom they will, and how long ago soever, let us but compare the improvement they have made with what others have made; and, except in things peculiar to themselves, by their climate, we shall find the utmost of their ingenuity amounts but to a very trifle, and that they are outdone even in the best of their works by our ordinary artists, whose imitations exceed their originals beyond all comparison.
For example, they have gunpowder and guns, whether they have learned to make them by direction of Europeans, which is most likely, or that they found it out by mere strength of invention, as some would advance, though without certainty, in their favour -- be it which it will, as I say, it matters not much, their powder is of no strength for the needful operations of sieges, mines, batteries, no, nor for shooting of birds, as ours is, without great quantities put together; their guns are rather an ostentation than for execution, clumsy, heavy, and ill-made; neither have they arrived to any tolerable degree of knowledge in the art of gunnery or engineering. They have no bombs, carcasses, hand-grenades; their artificial fireworks are in no degree comparable or to be named with ours; nor have they arrived to anything in the military skill in marshalling armies, handling arms, discipline, and the exercise in the field as the Europeans have; all which is depending on the improvement of firearms, &c., in which, if they have had the use of gunpowder so many ages as some dream, they must be unaccountable blockheads that they have made no farther improvement; and if it is but lately, they are yet apparently dull enough in the managing of it, at least compared to what ought to be expected of an ingenious people, such as our people cry them up to be.
I might go from this to their navigation, in which it is true they outdo most of their neighbours; but what is all their skill in sailing compared to ours? Whither do they go? and how manage the little and foolish barks and junks they have? What would they do with them to traverse the great Indian, American, or Atlantic oceans? What ships, what sailors, what poor, awkward, and ignorant doings are there among them at sea! And when our people hire any of them, as sometimes they are obliged to do, how do our sailors kick them about, as a parcel of clumsy, ignorant, unhandy fellows!
Then for building of ships, what are they? and what are they able to do towards the glorious art of building a large man-of-war? It is out of doubt with me, that all the people of China could not build such a ship as the "Royal Sovereign" in a hundred years; no, not though she was there for them to look at and take pattern by.
I might go on to abundance more things, such as painting, making glasses, making clocks and watches, making bone-lace, frame- work knitting; all of which, except the two first, they know little or nothing; and of the two first nothing compared to what is done in Europe.
The height of their ingenuity, and for which we admire them with more colour of cause than in other things, is their porcelain or earthenware work, which, in a word, is more due to the excellent composition of the earth they make them of, and which is their peculiar, than to the workmanship; in which, if we had the same clay, we should soon outdo them as much as we do in other things. The next art is their manufacturing in fine silks, cotton, herbs, gold, and silver, in which they have nothing but what is in common with our ordinary poor weavers.
The next mechanic art is their lacquering, which is just, as in their China ware, a peculiar to their country, in the materials, not at all in the workmanship; and as for the cabinet-work of it they are manifestly outdone by us; and abundance is every year sent thither framed and made in England, and only lacquered in China, to be returned to us.
I might run the like parallel through most of the things these people excel in, which would all appear to be so deficient as would render all their famed wisdom and capacity most scandalously imperfect. But I am not so much upon their cunning in arts as upon their absurdity and ridiculous folly in religious matters, and in which I think the rudest barbarians outdo them.
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