第八十九章《胡适英文论著：中国文学》（1）

  第八十九章《胡适英文论著：中国文学》（1）

  A Literary Revolution in China
  The Peking Leader
  Feb. 12, 1919. pp. 116-118.
  The Literary Revolution in China
  The Chinese Social and Political Science Review
  Feb., 1922. Vol. 6. No. 2. pp. 91-100.
  The Chinese Novel
  Unpublished manuscript
  An address at the Literary Society, Washington D.C., February 15, 1941.
  Ⅰ

  The novel as a fictitious but consciously planned narrative was almost unknown in Ancient China. The earliest literature of Ancient China is factual, lyrical and didactic but rarely indulgent in the free use of imagination. There was no epic, no drama, no novel, no mythology of any elaborate type. Confucius once said: The sole end of speech is to be understood. Such a pragmatic concept of language tended to rule out all imaginative literature as useless and unnecessary.
  Indeed, of all the hundreds of thousands of books written in the classical language, there is not one work which can be called a book written with a preconceived plan. Most ancient works were collected sayings, analects, episodes and at best essays on mostly unrelated subjects. Well-planned works of literature, such as a Greek tragedy or a Platonic dialogue were not found in Ancient China. The two literary forms developed in Ancient China were the lyric poem and the prose essay. The essay which began to take shape in the 4th century B.C. was essentially expository and argumentative. Chinese writers seemed to have felt no need for developing larger architectonic structure beyond the essay form. The novel and the drama which required sustained imagination in the plot and in its unfolding could not be developed in the hands of these ancient writers.
  Story-telling is an irrepressible instinct of mankind. Even as early as the time of Confucius there was arising among the people a class of historical romance which was called history but which was apparently noted for its free and imaginative embellishment rather than for its factual substance or authenticity. Confucius said: Whenever art (wen ) outweighs matter (chih ), there we have history. He was probably referring to those romanticized historical tales of the legendary emperors, founders of dynasties, great generals, and wise men,—tales told with a wealth of such interesting but not always trustworthy details as dreams, oracles, prophecies, and imagined conversations and orations.
  Mencius in the 4th century B.C. often had to rebuke his students for citing these popular tales as if they were parts of authentic history; and he often ridiculed them as tales told by the crude folks on the Eastern Coast of Tsi or as fabricated by those who love to tell tales about others.
  We are now almost certain that a number of ancient historical episodes which have passed as history, originally belong to that class of romanticized historical tales so characterized by Confucius and Mencius. Such was the story of the Odyssey of Duke Wen of Chin (d. 628 B.C.). And such was the romance of the House of Chao which has often been dramatized in later ages and which became the theme of a famous play by Voltaire.
  Thus the Chinese story-teller received his first training in these historical romances which required no invention of plot, but only collecting, fabricating and embroidering incidents and details to be woven around a skeleton structure of what pretended to be biography and chronology.
  Ⅱ

  Then came the introduction of a great religion from India with all its rich imagery, beautiful and captivating ritualism and wonderfully imaginative literature and philosophy. The very simple religion of Ancient China was overwhelmed and speedily conquered by Mahayana Buddhism. Throughout a period of 2000 years, this new religion has fundamentally affected and transformed the religious, philosophical and artistic life of the Chinese people.
  Ancient China knew no heaven or paradise, but India gave us thousands of paradises. Ancient China knew no hell, but India gave us 18 hells of ever-increasing severity and horror. The rich and unbridled imagination of the Indian people seemed inexhaustible in its invention of philosophical schematizations and literary and dramatic tales of grandiose structure. Every Buddhist sutra is a drama with the Buddha and some great disciples as the Dramatis Personae. Some of the sutras, notably the Vimalakirti Sutra, were such effective and fascinating tales that they became the most popular themes for pictorial presentation and literary paraphrase throughout the centuries.
  India thus taught China the unbridled use of the imagination. Many Taoist scriptures were deliberately forged on the model of the Buddhist sutras. Popularized versions of Buddhist tales became part of the work of monasteries and temples in their effort to instruct and edify the masses. There arose in mediaeval China one class of literature known as the pien or pien-wen , meaning transformed versions or paraphrases, which were primarily Buddhistic tales retold in Chinese verse or prose, or partly in verse and partly in prose. Very often a passage of 150 words from the Vimalakirti Sutra was paraphrased into a new recital of 5000 words. Then the term pien-wen was extended to include popular recitals of non-Buddhistic stories. In the mediaeval manuscripts of Tun-huang we find such non-Buddhistic pien-wen as those of the legendary Emperor Shun or of filial piety of Tung Yung or of General Chi Pu or of the famous beauty Wang Chao-chun. Mediaeval China was apparently being schooled by Buddhism in the art of telling imaginative tales.
  It was apparent that the great popularity of the mediaeval story-teller was asserting some powerful influence on the poets and prose writers of the educated class. A contemporary critic pointed out that the style of Po Chu-i's famous Song of the Everlasting Sorrow showed some resemblance to a popular Buddhistic pien-wen . But the most interesting evidence of this influence is the fact that the classical writers of the 7th and 8th and 9th centuries were taking great delight in writing short stories of a fairly well developed form. These short stories have no generic name but are sometimes called Chuan-chi , meaning strange or novel tales. They deal with romantic love, heroic episodes, virtue requited, or strange crimes detached.
  About a hundred of these stories have been preserved. One of the earliest of these, The Cave of the Amorous Fairies (Yu Hsien K'u ) written by Chang Ts'u about the year 700 was lost in China but has been preserved in Japan. This story describes how the author, when on an official journey to the Northwest, met two charming ladies at their home where he spent the night and exchanged with them many little poems of flirtation and courtship. It is said that this story of the 7th century became exceedingly popular in Japan and influenced court life and literary fashion in that country, and that the famous first novel of Japan,—and possibly the first novel in the whole world,—The Tale of Genji , was the result of conscious imitation of The Cave of the Amorous Fairies .
  An examination of these short stories of the T'ang Dynasty shows that the art of fiction writing had already made great progress. The sense of plot, the portrayal of character, the elaboration of minute details were all highly developed. (One of the best specimens, The Story of Miss Li by Po Hsing-chien, was translated by Mr. Arthur Waley.) Centuries of tales of religious edification had created the demand for the fictitious tale as a branch of literature; and the men of letters could no longer resist the temptation to try their hands in this new form of literature. The writers trained in the classical traditions were trying to produce short stories as a form of prose narrative essay or short bibliography. And they introduced into this literature the very important element of artistic form which they had cultivated through their classical training. Their artistic creations were much hampered by the limitations of a dead language but these delightful short stories of T'ang and their successors in later ages have enriched and elevated the art of Chinese fiction by giving it a sense of form, a refinement in taste, and a richness and depth in content.
  Ⅲ

  Further development of the Chinese novel, however, was carried on by the professional story-teller of the street and of the market-place. He had two teachers: the ancient historical romancer and the mediaeval paraphraser of Buddhistic tales. A poet of the 9th century tells us that his children were delighted by the recitals of stories of The Three Kingdoms. Records of the life and customs of the people in the capitals of the Northern and Southern Sung Dynasties tell us that throughout the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries there flourished several rival schools of story-tellers (shuo-hua-jen ). One of these schools was the scriptural or religious story-tellers and another the historical romancers. But these records also tell us that these schools of story-tellers were afraid of a new and most powerful school of story-tellers, known as the School of Hsiao-Shuo, the novelists, who had their separate texts (Hua Peng ) which include four main classes of stories:
  1. The ghost stories.
  2. Stories of heroic adventure.
  3. Tales of rouge and powder, that is, love stories.
  4. Public cases, that is, famous cases of crime and detection.
  These cover almost the whole field of modern fiction.
  The term novel (hsiao-shuo ) meant small tale or short narrative. It seems that this new school excelled in telling shorter stories each of which forms a completed unit in itself and could be told in a comparatively short session or sessions. In that sense the novel differed from the formless and interminable historical tales. This new form of fiction was told by men and women who were famous for their vivid descriptions and beautiful enunciation and who were called the silver-tongued (yin-tzu-erh ). It was because of their more perfected artistic form that the other schools were said to be afraid of them.
  These novels or novelettes have a peculiarity of their own which may be called its double-feature form. The story-teller begins by telling a very short story as an introduction, the moral of which is easily understood by the audience. Then he tells his audience that he is going to tell another story which either further illustrates the same moral lessons or is just the opposite of what has been told in the prologue. This double-feature form has been followed in a great many of the stories now preserved.
  In the meantime, the historical romancers, too, were developing a form which marked the beginning of the serial novel. In telling the interminably lengthy stories of the vicissitudes of a dynasty or a historical hero, the serious problem of the story-teller is how to get the audience to come back to the next period recital. Long professional experience has taught these story-tellers that they must end the day's session at a moment of great excitement and psychological suspense. Thus when our beloved hero is being taken away by the lictors to be put to death, or a poisonous arrow is being shot at our beautiful heroine,—then the reciter suddenly beats his drum, recites a rhymed couplet and disperses his audience with this famous formula: If you wish to know what happens to our hero (or heroine), pray hear it told in the next period.
  This professional trick of the story-teller came to be accepted as the formula for chapter division in all lengthy stories. Each chapter, therefore, must not only tell its own part but must also link itself with the following chapters by this device. While this method is artificial and mechanical, it nevertheless has given the story-teller a technique to organize a mass of incoherent incidents into a more or less continuous tale. At any rate, this device has made possible the rise of what may be called the serial novel in China.
  Ⅳ

  These professional story-tellers naturally told their tales in the living language of the people. Their texts were transmitted from teacher to pupil probably only partially in writing, giving the skeleton of the story, its main divisions, its essential details, etc. But it is highly improbable that the texts were fully written out as the stories were actually told by those silver-tongued masters. Much was probably left to verbal transmission and there was probably much freedom for the succeeding generations.
  The greatest difficulty in writing down these popular stories lay in the fact that the living language had not yet achieved a standardized written form. Printing had been invented before 800 A.D. and the movable type came into use in the middle of the 11th century. The greatest popularity of these stories naturally created a demand for their printed copies. The few surviving oldest texts of the 13th and 14th centuries show beyond doubt that these master tellers of stories were not capable of writing them down as they were actually heard and enjoyed by their audiences. They were very crude skeletons with very little artistic embellishment and with the dialogue mostly in a corrupt form of simple classical Chinese.
  Then, some writers who had been trained in the classical tradition were sufficiently attracted by those exceedingly popular and entertaining stories of the market-place to come to their rescue. They were dissatisfied with the written texts which were so much inferior to the verbal versions which had delighted thousands of hearers. So these writers of the educated class took these tales and wrote them as exactly as they could in the living language. Most of the vocabulary was naturally taken over from the classical words. And wherever such borrowing was impossible they invented new words. In that way a number of short novels apparently of the 12th and 13th centuries have come down to us in beautiful prose in the living tongue. The form was that of the professional story-teller; but the language and the style bore traces of retouching by some master hand.
  The use of the living language as a means of exactly recording philosophical conversation and dialogue had long begun with the Buddhistic masters of the Ch'an or Zen school. The procedure proved to be so effective that it was followed by the neo-Confucianist philosophers of the 11th and 12th centuries. It was those records of philosophical discussions of both Buddhist and Confucianist schools that had familiarized the men of letters in the use of the living tongue in writing. It was this style which was adopted by those writers who wrote down or rewrote the stories or novels of the professional reciters.
  As time went on the printed popular stories and other forms of popular literature in the vulgar tongue gradually standardized the written form of the living language. More stories and even lengthy historical romances were written down for printing and sale. A number of first-class writers of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries took up these tales, polished them, rewrote them, and in some cases fundamentally reconstructed them. Some of these rewritten novels, notably the Shui Hu Chuan (translated by Pearl Buck as All Men Are Brothers ), the San Kuo (translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms ) have become best-sellers for many centuries. The popularity of these great novels among the people further enriched the living tongue and further standardized its written form.
  Early in the 17th century two patrons of the short novels, Feng Meng-lung and Ling Meng-ts'u, separately published five collections of short stories, each collection containing forty stories, making a total of two hundred of the novelettes. Many of these stories were old stories some of which date back possibly to the 12th or 13th centuries, but a large number of them belong to much later times including not a few written possibly by the editors themselves, who were writers of no mean standing. These two hundred short novels, printed within the short space of twelve years (1620-1632), represent the greatest store-house of masterpieces of Chinese fiction. They also represent the highest development of the indigenous short story in Chinese literature.
  The 17th century was an age in which the novel, both in its shorter and serial form, first received unreserved recognition by some of the advanced literary critics of the time. Chin Sheng-t'an who was responsible for revising and abridging the Shui Hu Chuan from its 100-chapter and 120-chapter editions to its present form of 71 chapters, openly declared that there was no literature in the world that surpassed the novel Shui Hu Chuan .
  But in spite of such enthusiastic eulogy of the novel, the prejudice among the classical writers against the vulgar literature was still very strong. Most writers or rewriters of the novels were so ashamed of their artistic impulse to write in the vulgar language that they dared not sign their real names to their masterpieces. And most of the people who read them and enjoyed them often refuse to acknowledge that they had anything to do with them. Those masters of Chinese fiction, therefore, deserve all the more credit and homage because they had the courage and artistic sense to brave such deep-rooted prejudice to give the world their great novels.
  V
  Chinese novels, broadly speaking, can be grouped into two classes: the novels of historical evolution and those of original creation.
  Many of the historical romances took centuries of popular invention, elaboration and revision by numberless, anonymous story-tellers before they were finally rewritten or reconstructed by the master writers who made them the masterpieces they are today. The Shui Hu Chuan had its origin in the 12th century, was rewritten by Lo Kuan-chung of the 14th century and was revised by numerous hands throughout the Ming Dynasty, until it was given in its final form by Chin Sheng-t'an who claimed that his edition was based upon an old manuscript in 71 chapters. We now know that there was never such an old manuscript and that his edition was only one of the many revisions. The present form of The Three Kingdoms was revised at even a later date. The Hsi Yu Ki which told the purely imagined travels of the great Monk Hsuan Tsang to India in search of original texts of the Buddhistic scripture, had nine centuries of free evolution until it was completely rewritten by an anonymous master whom we now identify as Wu Ch'eng-en of the 16th century. These and a few other historical novels of literary merit belong to the first class of novels of evolution.
  These great Homeric tales always originated in the popular legends of various localities and various ages. The task of the story-teller and the literary revisionist consisted largely in organizing these unconnected and very often conflicting versions and episodes into one continuous whole. The original story of the Shui Hu Chuan , for example, had thirty-six heroes, but in some versions of the Ming Dynasty the number had increased to almost two hundred. In the standardized version of seventy-one chapters, we still have one hundred and eight heroes. The work of revision was to eliminate the uninteresting and the non-essential as well as to bring the essential characters into special eminence. In general, these historical romances have loose plots somewhat in the fashion of the Buddhistic sutras where a number of events with little inherent relationship were strung together by some artificial grandiose structure. The individual characters and separate episodes were the important things. And these historic romances were most successful in giving to the Chinese people some wonderfully entertaining stories and a number of unforgettable characters who have delighted every man, woman and child and are still being dramatized and enacted on the popular stage throughout the country. These romances have no philosophical thesis to present, no social reform to advocate. Their object was the object of the professional story-teller,—to fascinate and to delight the hearer and the reader. In so doing, they have given us some great classics which have in the last several hundred years not only standardized the living language, but also modeled the national character.
  After the 16th century, Chinese writers began to produce original novels of their own. The popular romance had taught them the art of story-telling and the use of the living language. Many of the stories of this class were written to entertain. They usually follow the fashion of the times, glorifying the life of the flesh, eulogizing the talented beautiful women, idolizing the successful candidates in the civil services and usually ending in happy marriages of the successful literary hero with more than one beautiful and faithful wife. One of these stories, Hao Ch'iu Chuan (The Story of a Perfect Couple ) has been translated into almost every European language and was still being played on the stage when I was a student in Shanghai thirty-five years ago. This story tells of a very clever and self-reliant girl of great beauty and virtue who successfully protected herself against the many intrigues of a powerful but unacceptable suitor. In one of the intrigues she was rescued by a young man of exalted character and great courage. This young man then became the object of attack by her enemies. The most delightful feature of this story lies in the fact that the heroine was courageous enough to defy all social convention and censure to go out of the way to rescue this young man from a perilous plot of their common enemies, and invited him to be her house guest so that she might give him the necessary medication and nursing during his illness resulting from poisoning by the plotters.
  But the few great novels of this class have been more than entertainers. They were written by men who had come to recognize the novel as the most satisfactory form of literary expression, or who had a message to communicate to the readers through what they considered as the most effective channel to reach the public. Of these, four in particular deserve special mention:
  1. A Marriage that Should Awaken the World (Hsing Shih Yin Yuan ) by P'u Sung-ling of the 17th century.
  2. An Unauthorized History of the Intellectual Class (Ju Lin Wai Shih ) by Wu Ching-tzu of the 18th century.
  3. A Dream of the Red Chamber (Hung Lou Meng ) by Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in of the 18th century.
  4. Flowers in the Mirror (Ching Hua Yuan ) by Li Ju-chen of the early years of the 19th century.
  The first of these, The Marriage that Should Awaken the World , is a novel on a terribly hen-pecked husband who suffers almost unbelievable cruelties at the hands of an impossible woman. The book is about one million words in length. Throughout these million words on a most unhappy marriage, no one seemed to think of resorting to divorce as a solution. And when divorce by official decree was actually proposed toward the end of the book, the idea was speedily dismissed because Chinese religion, morals and social usage, all conspired to make divorce impossible. Finally it was decided that all this cruel suffering must have been the result of a great causal chain going back to the previous existence of the husband and wife and that the best thing for the poor man to do was to abide by his fate and await its natural absolution.
  The author, P'u Sung-ling, was a great writer of classical prose and poetry. He wrote a large collection of delightful short stories in the classical style which achieved wide circulation among the literary class and a selection of these stories was translated by Professor Herbert A. Giles under the title Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio . The author was apparently deeply interested in the problem of marriage and especially of unhappy marriage. One of the short stories dealt with the same theme as his great novel, but this first version in the classical language contains only 2,900 words. He was not satisfied, so he used the same theme and rewrote it in the form of a poetic drama, or, more exactly, a popular dramatic recital with singing parts written to the popular melodies of the age. This dramatic version consists of 33 scenes, containing about 70,000 words. Again he was not satisfied, so in his old age he wrote this great novel on the same theme in one million words. This experimentation by one author in three different literary media is most interesting to the historian of Chinese literature as the best evidence of the preeminence of the novel in the living tongue as the most effective medium of literature.
  The second great novel, An Unauthorized History of the Intellectual Class , is to my mind the greatest of all Chinese novels. It is a satire of the intelligentsia. The author, according to my researches, was a follower of a school of philosophy known as The Yen School, which was a philosophical revolt against the prevailing systems of orthodox Confucianism. In this novel, the author, with delightful humor, portrayed the men of letters, the candidates for civil service examinations, the pedantic scholars and the officials who were the products of the classical education and the literary examination system. He tells of their eccentricities, their ridiculous ignorance of actual affairs, their pettiness, their miserliness, their inhumanity and their corruption and incompetence in official life. In the midst of these characters our author also gave us some delightful and lovable characters, some of whom he found in the educated class but others he found in the lowly and unlettered folks. It was a severe criticism of a social and educational system as well as a delightful satire.
  A Dream of the Red Chamber has often been rated as the best Chinese novel. We now know that the author of this novel, Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in, died young and left it unfinished. The current edition has one hundred and twenty chapters, of which the last forty were written by another man many years after the author's death and without knowledge of the author's original plan. At the beginning of the book, the author announces that he is going to tell a real story with fictitious names and events, and that he wants, in particular, to preserve in writing the memory of several women whom he had known and regarded as superior to men in intellect, charm, and ability. The book describes a great family gradually going to ruins by extravagance, debt, mismanagement and internal intrigue. The big trees are fallen, and the monkeys are scattered. Even in its unfinished form, the author has shown most remarkable power of observation and characterization, and some of his feminine characters have stood out as highest attainments in realistic portrayal.
  The last named of these novels, Flowers in the Mirror , was completed in the first decade of the 19th century and was published in 1828, nine years before Queen Victoria came to the throne. The author, Li Ju-chen, was a native of Peking and spent the major portion of his life in Haichow on the northern coast of Kiangsu. This novel was written essentially as a declaration of the rights of women. The author was dissatisfied with many a social custom and institution of his time, which he freely criticized in his novel. But he seemed to be chiefly interested in the problem of the inequality of the sexes and the injustice to women. He attacked the double standard of sex morality which justifies polygamy but condemns the re-marrying of young widows. He purposely laid the story under the reign of Empress Wu of the T'ang Dynasty, who was the only Chinese woman who proclaimed herself not as an empress nor as a dowager regent, but as an emperor by her own right and ruled China as such for fifteen years (A.D. 690-705). Our novelist made this great woman-emperor proclaim complete equality of the sexes in education and in civil service examination. Throughout the book, he frequently advocates the higher education for women and the active participation of the fair sex in the affairs of government.
  Part of the book was in the form of travels by three Chinese gentlemen to many strange lands. One of the countries visited by them was the Kingdom of Women in which the men are dressed in petticoats and have their feet bound as the ladies of the Celestial Empire, while the women, decked in tall hats and high boots, carry on the business and run the government. On the first day of their arrival, one of the Chinese gentlemen, Lin Chih-yang, goes to the royal palace on business and meets the king who is a woman of exceptional beauty and not without the frailties of the sex. She falls in love with Lin and causes him to be detained in the palace and a decree is issued to make him queen in the Kingdom of Women.
  Thus begins a long and laborious process of the womanization of a man. Lin is now dressed in skirts and petticoats; his hair is perfumed and re-done in feminine fashion; jewels are given to decorate his royal person. Four ladies come up and hold him fast. An old lady with white beard advances and measures his ear-lobe which is then immediately pierced in the same way in spite of the loud cries of the queen-elect.
  The most difficult work is the binding of the feet which ordinarily takes years but which is now telescoped into a few weeks. No reader can forget the description of Lin Chih-yang's terrible suffering in this accelerated process of foot-binding, his many rebellions against the tyranny of the women, and the many punishments for his rebellion, and his final submission after severe penalties. On the morning of the royal wedding, he, or now more correctly she, is powdered and rouged and dressed in all richness proper to the first lady in the Kingdom of Women. Her feet are not very small indeed, but with the aid of high wooden soles, they appear to be of a respectable size. She is now carried to the wedding hall, where, amidst the glorious wedding candlelights and wedding music, the new queen is even capable of holding her flowing sleeves, bowing very low and kneeling down properly as only highly refined women know how to do. Glory to the wonderful process of womanizing the man which is now completed!
  This is the story of the evolution of the Chinese novel. It came from the people and was developed by the people but despised by the conservative men of letters. But when it had achieved sufficient popularity and intrinsic beauty, it forced itself upon the attention of some of the great minds of the educated class, who then took up these great Homeric tales of the unlettered people, polished them, retouched them, in some cases reconstructed them, and made them the great classics of Chinese fiction. These retouched masterpieces of popular origin in turn became the teachers of a new art, a new language and a new literature. Under their tutorship, first-class Chinese minds have learned to produce their original novels, not merely as literary entertainment, but also as a social satire, as an instrumentality of social criticism and reform.
  The Tz'u-T'ung: A New Dictionary of Classical Polysyllabic Words and Phrases
  Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography
  June, 1934. Vol. 1. No. 2. pp. 55-58.
  Essay in I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time
  Clifton Fadiman ed., I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time.
  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. pp. 375-378.
  Intellectual Preparedness
  Unpublished manuscript
  A commencement address at Union College, June 10, 1940. Also the commencement address before Perdue University in 1941.
  A Historian Looks at Chinese Painting
  Asia
  May, 1941. Vol. 41. No. 5.pp. 215-218.
  The Chinese Art Society
  Pamphlet
  New York: Chinese Art Society of America, 1944. 10 pages.
  Inaugural address delivered at the Chinese Art Society of America, November 17, 1944.
  Foreword to How to Cook and Eat in Chinese
  Buwei Yang Chao, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.
  New York: John Day, 1945. pp. vii-ix.
  Chang Poling: A Biographical Tribute
  China Magazine
  June, 1946. pp. 14-26.
  I have no special talent, nor have I acquired advanced skill in any particular field. The little measure of success I have had in my life-long endeavors is entirely due to the simple fact that I have faith and interest in education.
  This is Chang Poling's description of himself. He often quotes, apparently with relish, the observations made by a Korean friend who once said: Chang Poling is a very simple man who cannot emulate the clever manipulations of his brilliant contemporaries but who by standing on solid soil and working very hard, achieves success in his own work.
  Starting with five pupils in a private school when he was only twenty-two years old, his middle school had a thousand students in 1917, when he was forty-one. In 1936, when he was sixty, the Nankai Schools—now comprising the middle schools for boys and girls, a primary school, the university and graduate school—had 3,000 students.
  When, in 1937, the Japanese destroyed his schools in Tientsin, he had already started a new middle school in Chungking, which in the course of a few years, has grown to be once more the greatest middle school in China with an enrollment of 1,600.
  A Naval Cadet
  Chang Poling was born in Tientsin on April 5, 1876. His father was a talented scholar who loved music and enjoyed life. He was an accomplished player on the pipa and a master of archery on horseback. Having spent a fair family fortune on the pleasures of life, the elder Chang was forced to earn his living by teaching young children. Poling, his eldest son by a second marriage, was born in poverty. The father who considered his own life a complete failure, was determined to give his son a good Chinese education and a strict moral discipline.
  At the age of 13, Chang Poling, thanks to his father's good teaching of written Chinese, passed the entrance examination at the Peiyang Naval School which was then in the hands of a remarkable group of English-educated men, including Yen Fu, the future translator of Adam Smith, Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer; and Wu Kuang-chien, the future writer of a number of scientific textbooks and translator of Dumas and Gibbon. Because of his youth and his good record in Chinese, Chang was admitted to the Navigation Class. He worked hard and always took first place in the examinations. Among his favorite teachers was a Scotchman named MacLeish, whose thoroughness in teaching coupled with a personal interest in his pupils left a lasting impression on him.
  After five years in the Naval School, Chang Poling graduated in 1894 at the head of his class. He was only 18.