1705035225

1705035226 So might I, Standing on this pleasant lea,

1705035227

1705035228 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”

1705035229

1705035230 That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have been wrung from him had he been born in China.

1705035231

1705035232 And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of China—“pro-Chinese,” as they are contemptuously called in the East—assert that China is more civilized than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganized, corrupt, incompetent, even if it were true—and it is far from being true in any unqualified sense—would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western civilization, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers, and police;but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless architectural form. In China, as in all old civilizations I have seen, all the building harmonizes with and adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent æsthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of disease of the soul. It implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the opposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate. Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West will shortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly. Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone, beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the Chinese have written poems in exquisite calligraphy, they will cover the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of temples, each so designed and placed so as to be a new beauty in the landscape, they will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they will, because they have done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment. Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organization, our medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of civilizing China. Would that China could civilize the West!

1705035233

1705035234 Notes

1705035235

1705035236 Taianfu， 泰安府，山东省，a city in Shantung Province, at the foot of Tai Shan（泰山）, the sacred mountain.

1705035237

1705035238 alleys, very narrow streets.

1705035239

1705035240 shimmering, trembling, quivering, or faint, diffused light.

1705035241

1705035242 court, or courtyard, a space inclosed by walls or buildings; quadrangle.

1705035243

1705035244 cypresses， 柏树，straight, coniferous tree with shuttle-shaped mass of dark foliage. In the West, cypresses are usually associated with graves;in our country they grow in temples or around graves.

1705035245

1705035246 veranda, open portico or colonnade along the side of a house with roof supported on pillars.

1705035247

1705035248 T‘ang age， 唐朝，the golden age of Chinese literature and art, under the rule of the T‘ang dynasty （618-907）.

1705035249

1705035250 the Sungs， 宋朝，a later dynasty （960-1126）, note for its philosophers.

1705035251

1705035252 before the Christian era, before the birth of Jesus Christ; any time before Christ, B.C.

1705035253

1705035254 Chien Lung， 乾隆（1736-1796）, perhaps the most illustrious of the emperors of the Ching dynasty （清朝，1644-1911）. Chien Lung was a great patron of the arts; he himself wrote a vigorous calligraphy.

1705035255

1705035256 legendary emperors, emperors who are famous or exist only in legends.

1705035257

1705035258 his native state, the province in which he was born, Shantung.

1705035259

1705035260 Chin Shih Huang， 秦始皇，the founder of the Chin dynasty （246-206 B.C.）.

1705035261

1705035262 pilgrims, persons who journey to sacred places as an act of devotion.

1705035263

1705035264 detours, roundabout ways; roads that depart from and then rejoin the direct route.

1705035265

1705035266 bed of a stream, bottom of a stream; the ground over which a stream flows.

1705035267

1705035268 ravine, deep, narrow gorge; deep, narrow opening between hills; a depression in the ground worn out by running water, larger than a gully and smaller than a valley.

1705035269

1705035270 sinuously mounting, going upward in winding curves.

1705035271

1705035272 precipitous face, cliff or rock-face that is or looks so steep that one could fall headlong from top to bottom.

1705035273

1705035274 daunt, frighten into giving up his purpose.

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