Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 1.pdf/6

 gains of a preceding age were being conserved and consolidated, there was rising a new spirit of doubt which seriously questioned the soundness and the utility of the learning and scholarship of the entire Ch'ing period, and which groped for newer and more useful ways of knowledge and action that might better serve the country in the days of imminent internal collapse and external aggression.

This I suggest as one of the possible and very interesting ways of using this book as a source of historical information. There are, of course, other equally interesting ways of using it. For instance, the hundreds of biographies of Manchu emperors, empresses, princes, nobles, generals and officials in this series may be systematically studied from the standpoint of a historian who seeks to understand the historical process of a conquering nation rapidly yielding to and being absorbed by the cultural life of the conquered people. The process began with such men as Erdeni and Dahai who, long before the Manchus came into China proper, were busy translating into the newly-written Manchu tongue Chinese works on penal law, military tactics and general literature. Of the grandsons of Nurhaci, the founder of the Manchu Empire, Gose became a Chinese poet and Fu-lin, the first Manchu Emperor in China, who began to study Chinese in his teens, was a devotee of Chinese literature and of Chinese Ch'an Buddhism. Fu-lin left many works in Chinese, including a number of commentaries on Confucian and Taoist texts. The second emperor, Hsuan-yeh, was a great patron of Chinese arts and letters, and a large collection of Chinese prose and poetry was published in his name. At least two of his sons, Yin-li and Yin-hsi, wrote readable poetry in Chinese; Yin-hsi was also known as a Chinese painter and calligrapher. A grandson of Hsüan-yeh, named Hung-li, who became the fourth emperor, wrote frightfully had poems—a fact which proves that they were not retouched by his courtiers. Nevertheless, he wrote and published over 42,000 Chinese poems, far exceeding the number ever composed by any Chinese poet before or after him!

The same rapid process of cultural assimilation can be read in the history of many Manchu families. The powerful Mingju, who descended from the Nara clan of the Yehe tribe conquered by Nurhaci in 1619, was only nine years old at the time of the Manchu conquest of Peking and north China. Under Emperor Hsüan-yeh, he became a great patron of Chinese literature and scholarship. His son, Singde, was undoubtedly one of the best and most popular poets of the Ch'ing period. Singde died in 1685, only forty years after the conquest!

I need not multiply such instances, which are overwhelmingly numerous. I wish only to indicate that a student interested in the problem of "acculturation" can find no better source material than these biographical records of powerful Manchu ruling families of the last three hundred years. Starting with these brief but suggestive sketches and following up with such authentic collections of Chinese prose and poetry by Manchu authors as the Pa-ch'i wên-ching, the Hsi-ch'ao ya-sung chi and Yang Chung-hsi's Hsüeh-ch'iao shih-hua, the student of acculturation will soon realize that military conquest, long and powerful political domination, and explicit prohibition of intermarriage and adoption of Chinese customs were powerless to stem the irresistible process of voluntary cultural absorption. He will then understand that it was no accident that, when the Chinese revolution succeeded in overthrowing the reigning dynasty in 1912, the Manchu people simply took up Chinese family names and became overnight indistinguishable from the Chinese population.