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Social Media Analytics
for User Behavior
Modeling
A Task Heterogeneity Perspective
Data-Enabled Engineering Series
Series Editor: Nong Ye, Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA

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Data-Enabled-Engineering/book-series/CRCDATENAENG
Social Media Analytics
for User Behavior
Modeling
A Task Heterogeneity Perspective

Arun Reddy Nelakurthi

Jingrui He
CRC Press
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Contents

Preface.......................................................................................................................ix
Acknowledgment ......................................................................................................xi
Authors....................................................................................................................xiii
Contributors ............................................................................................................. xv

Chapter 1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 1

Chapter 2 Literature Survey ............................................................................. 5

2.1 Impact of Social Media........................................................... 5
2.2 Heterogeneous Learning and Social Media............................ 6
2.2.1 Transductive Transfer Learning ................................. 7
2.2.2 Source-free Transfer Learning ................................... 8
2.2.3 Identifying Similar Actors Across Networks............. 8
2.3 Explaining Task Heterogeneity............................................... 9

Chapter 3 Social Media for Diabetes Management .......................................11

3.1 Methodology.........................................................................11
3.2 Results...................................................................................12
3.3 Discussion.............................................................................15
3.4 Challenges in Real-World Applications ...............................16

Chapter 4 Learning from Task Heterogeneity................................................ 19

4.1 Cross-Domain User Behavior Modeling ..............................19
4.1.1 Proposed Approach..................................................20
4.1.1.1 Notation ................................................... 20
4.1.1.2 User-Example-Feature Tripartite
Graph .......................................................21
4.1.1.3 Objective Function .................................. 23
4.1.1.4 User Soft-Score Weights ......................... 24
4.1.1.5 U-Cross Algorithm .................................. 24
4.1.2 Case Study ...............................................................28
4.1.3 Results......................................................................29
4.1.3.1 Data Sets.................................................. 29
4.1.3.2 User Selection.......................................... 30
4.1.3.3 Empirical Analysis .................................. 31

v
vi Contents

4.2 Similar Actor Recommendation ...........................................33

4.2.1 Problem Definition...................................................35
4.2.1.1 Notation and Problem Definition............. 35
4.2.2 Proposed Approach..................................................36
4.2.2.1 Matrix Factorization for Cross
Network Link Recommendation .............36
4.2.2.2 Proposed Framework ...............................38
4.2.2.3 Optimization Algorithm ..........................39
4.2.2.4 Link Recommendation ............................41
4.2.2.5 Complexity Analysis ...............................41
4.2.3 Results......................................................................42
4.2.3.1 Data Sets..................................................42
4.2.3.2 Experiment Setup ....................................43
4.2.3.3 Case Study ...............................................44
4.3 Source-Free Domain Adaptation ..........................................44
4.3.1 Problem Definition...................................................45
4.3.2 Proposed Approach..................................................46
4.3.2.1 Label Deficiency......................................47
4.3.2.2 Distribution Shift .....................................50
4.3.2.3 Convergence of AOT ...............................51
4.3.3 Results......................................................................52
4.3.3.1 Two Stage Analysis .................................58
4.3.3.2 Sensitivity Analysis .................................58
4.3.3.3 Convergence Analysis .............................60
4.3.3.4 Runtime Analysis ....................................61

Chapter 5 Explainable Transfer Learning ......................................................63

5.1 Proposed Approach...............................................................65
5.1.1 Notation....................................................................65
5.1.2 exTL Framework......................................................65
5.1.3 Reweighting the Source Domain Examples ............66
5.1.4 Domain Invariant Representation ............................68
5.1.5 Algorithm.................................................................70
5.1.6 Shallow Neural Network: An Example ...................72
5.2 Results...................................................................................74
5.2.1 Text Data ..................................................................74
5.2.2 Images ......................................................................76

Chapter 6 Conclusion.....................................................................................81
6.1 User Behavior Modeling in Social Media ............................81
6.2 Addressing and Explaining Task Heterogeneity...................82
6.3 Limitations............................................................................83
6.3.1 Addressing Concept Drift ........................................83
6.3.2 Model Fairness.........................................................83
Contents vii

6.3.3 Negative Transfer.....................................................84

6.3.4 Ethical Issues in Healthcare .....................................84
6.3.5 Misinformation and Disinformation
in Healthcare ............................................................85
6.4 Future Work ..........................................................................85

Bibliography ...........................................................................................................87

Index........................................................................................................................97
Preface
User-generated social media content provides an excellent opportunity to mine data
of interest and helps in developing functional data-driven applications. The rise in
the number of healthcare-related social media platforms and the volume of health-
care knowledge available online in the last decade have resulted in increased social
media usage for personal healthcare. In the United States, nearly ninety percent of
adults, in the age group 50-75, have used social media to seek and share health
information. Motivated by the growth of social media usage, this book focuses on
healthcare-related applications, studies various challenges posed by social media
data, and addresses them through novel and effective machine learning algorithms.
The content presented in this book will be of great interest to students and
researchers in the field of Machine Learning with applications to Social Media and
Healthcare. This book assumes the reader has sufficient understanding of the theory
of machine learning and linear algebra. The reader is suggested to refer to the relevant
literature cited for better understanding of proposed frameworks. We are also grate-
ful to collaborators, Dr. Curtiss B. Cook, Dr. Ross Maciejewski and Dr. Hanghang
Tong for their valuable feedback and suggestions. We also thank all the colleagues at
the STAR and DATA labs. Thanks to Dawei Zhou, Yao Zhou, Xu Liu, Xue Hu, Jun
Wu, Lecheng Zheng, Pei Yang, Liangyue Li, Chen Chen, Xing Su, Si Zhang, Boxin
Du, Qinghai Zhou, Jian Jian Kang, Zhe Xu, Scott Freitas, Haichao Yu, Ruiyue Peng,
Rongyu Lin and Xiaoyu Zhang for their support.

ix
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Acknowledgment
This work is partially supported by the United States National Science Foundation
under Grant No. IIS-1552654, and Grant No. IIS-1813464, the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security under Grant Award Number 17STQAC00001-02-00, and an IBM
Faculty Award. The views and conclusions are those of the authors and should not
be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or
implied, of the funding agencies or the government.

xi
Authors
Arun Reddy Nelakurthi is a senior engineer in Machine Learning Research at
Samsung Research America, Mountain View, California. He received his PhD in
Machine Learning from Arizona State University in 2019. His research focuses
on heterogeneous machine learning, transfer learning, user modeling and semi-
supervised learning, with applications in social network analysis, social media analy-
sis and healthcare informatics. He has served on the program committee for The Con-
ference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) and The Pacific-Asia
Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD). He also worked
as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE),
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DMKD) and IEEE Transactions on Neural
Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) journals.

Jingrui He is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD in machine learn-
ing from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010. Her research focuses on heteroge-
neous machine learning, rare category analysis, active learning and semi-supervised
learning, with applications in social network analysis, healthcare, and manufacturing
processes. Dr. He is the recipient of the 2016 NSF CAREER Award and a three-time
recipient of the IBM Faculty Award, in 2018, 2015 and 2014 respectively. She was
selected for an IJCAI 2017 Early Career Spotlight, and was invited to the 24th CNSF
Capitol Hill Science Exhibition. Dr. He has published more than 90 refereed articles,
and is the author of the book, Analysis of Rare Categories (Springer-Verlag, 2011).
Her papers have been selected as “Best of the Conference” by ICDM 2016, ICDM
2010, and SDM 2010. She has served on the senior program committee/program
committee for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), International Joint
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Association for the Advancement
of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), SIAM International Conference on Data Mining
(SDM), and International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

xiii
Contributors

Curtiss B. Cook
Mayo Clinic
Scottsdale, Arizona

Ross Maciejewski
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

Hanghang Tong
University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

xv
 1 Introduction
In recent years, social media has gained significant popularity and become an essen-
tial medium of communication. According to a survey, about 88% of the public in the
United States use some form of social media, a 53% growth in the last decade. Also,
the average number of accounts per user has increased from two in 2012 to seven
in 2016 [Pew Research Center, d]. The rise in social media usage both vertically in
terms of the number of users by platform and horizontally in terms of the number
of platforms per user has led to a data explosion. Popular social media platforms
like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter manage tens of petabytes of information with
daily data flows of hundreds of terabytes and a continually expanding userbase [Pew
Research Center, c]. Such huge volumes of user-generated content provide an excel-
lent opportunity to mine data of interest. We can, thus, look for valuable nuggets of
information by applying diverse search (information retrieval) and mining techniques
(data mining, text mining, web mining, opinion mining).
User-generated content is diverse based on the need the social media platform
caters to. Per one survey, amongst those who use social media roughly 67% stated
staying in touch with current friends and family as a major reason, while 17% felt
social media enabled them to connect with friends they have lost touch with [Pew
Research Center, a]. Other research indicated about 67% of the United States popu-
lation use social media to stay updated on the latest news and seniors are driving that
number up [Pew Research Center, b].
Social media usage has also seen a spike when it comes to personal healthcare.
In the United States, nearly 90% of adults, in the age group 50-75, have used social
media to seek and share health information [Tennant et al., 2015a]. Research demon-
strates that online social support programs like health care forums and social media
websites (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) can help patients gain knowledge about their
diseases and cope better with their daily management routine [Petrovski et al., 2015].
Effectively mining information from these healthcare-related social media plat-
forms can, thus, have a wide range of applications resulting in improved healthcare.
For example, healthcare social networks can connect patients suffering from major
chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus, with physicians as well as other patients.
Compared to generic social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, disease-specific
social networks (e.g., TuDiabetes1 and DiabetesSisters2 ) have a greater concentra-
tion of patients with similar conditions and relevant resources. However, when it
comes to such social networks, the patient is more likely to stick to a single social
network, and would rarely look at other networks, thus limiting their access to online
resources, especially patients with similar questions and concerns. Identifying patient

1 http://www.tudiabetes.org/

2 https://diabetessisters.org/

1
2 Social Media Analytics for User Behavior Modeling

groups with similar conditions can help connect patients across networks, thereby
opening doors for knowledge sharing to help the community as a whole. Addition-
ally, in a world of “fake news”, a lot of health information is misrepresented and
therefore calls for authenticity. Motivated by the immense scope of leveraging social
media information for healthcare and addressing underlying challenges with usage
and reliability, in this book we explore answers to the following questions:

• Can social media serve as a platform for improved healthcare? Specifically,

why would patients leverage social media and how would it impact their
healthcare? Would it equip them to make better choices? And finally, does it
help in communicating effectively with doctors and health care providers?
• How can we efficiently learn and build algorithms to mine knowledge
from these healthcare-dedicated social networks? What are the challenges
involved?
• Finally, how can we provide meaningful explanations to justify the behavior
of algorithms and learning methods?

Unlike traditional mining settings where data is considered to be homogeneous for

most mining tasks, user-generated social media data is intrinsically heterogeneous
and thus poses a set of challenges. It can be both structured (ratings, tags, links) as
well as unstructured (text, audio, video). Similar health-related social media websites
that cater to users from different geographical locations can suffer from a distribu-
tional shift in user-generated data, either features or class labels. This shift could also
be due to user bias or personal preferences. Transfer learning addresses the problem
of distribution shift in data [Pan and Yang, 2010]. In particular, task heterogeneity is
reflected in inconsistent user behaviors across social media platforms, similar actors
across social networks, etc. Therefore, in this book work, we aim to design efficient
models and tools to help us leverage and learn from data heterogeneity in real-world
scenarios that help in improving healthcare.
In scenarios where parts of data in one social network are hidden, missing or
not available, leveraging it partially for mining is very challenging and has not been
well studied. Motivated by the applications of task heterogeneity, in this book, we
present our work on techniques for addressing task heterogeneity and the underlying
challenges in social media analytics.
In lieu of the above questions and challenges for this research, three main research
directions have been investigated:

D1. Social media in healthcare: To study the real-world impact of social media
as a source to seek and offer support to patients with chronic health condi-
tions.
D2. Learning from task heterogeneity: To propose various models and algo-
rithms to learn and model user behaviors on social media platforms, to iden-
tify similar actors across social networks, to adapt and leverage information
from existing black-box models to improve classification accuracy under
domain adaptation settings.
Introduction 3

D3. Model explainability: To provide interpretable explanations for heteroge-

neous predictive models in the presence of task heterogeneity.

The book is organized as follows. The related work, Chapter 2 discusses existing
research and how the proposed methods differ from it. Chapter 3 discusses the impact
of social media on patients with diabetes mellitus. Chapter 4 presents algorithms and
models to learn from task heterogeneity in social media. Chapter 5 discusses methods
to explain task heterogeneity. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes our research.
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 2 Literature Survey
Since 2004, the growth of social media has been near exponential [We Are Social].
According to a survey, about 88% of the public in the United States use some form of
social media, a 53% growth in the last decade [Pew Research Center, d]. This growth
in social media usage led to an information explosion. Mining valuable nuggets of
data from such information generated through social media has immense applica-
tions [Zafarani et al., 2014]. Machine learning techniques have been widely adopted
to mine and analyze the large social media data to address many real-world problems.
Mining from social media platforms has many applications, (1) Event detection -
Social networks enable users to freely communicate with each other and share their
recent news, ongoing activities or views about different topics. As a result, they can
be seen as a potentially viable source of information to understand the current emerg-
ing topics/events [Nurwidyantoro and Winarko, 2013]; (2) Community detection -
identifying communities on social networks, how they evolve, and evaluating identi-
fied communities, often without ground truth [Zafarani et al., 2014]; (3) Recommen-
dation in social media - recommending friends or items on social media sites [Ricci
et al., 2011]; (4) Sentiment and opinion mining - identifying collectively subjective
information, e.g. positive and negative, from social media data [Liu, 2012]; (5) Net-
work embedding - assigning nodes in a network to low-dimensional representations
and effectively preserving the network structure [Cui et al., 2017].
As mentioned earlier in the introduction chapter, the intrinsic property of data het-
erogeneity in social media data poses a set of challenges. In this chapter, we present
the existing research on handling data heterogeneity and study the impact of social
media. In this chapter, we present existing work on impact of social media and its
implications in Section 2.1, Section 2.2 presents existing research addressing data
heterogeneity with a focus on task heterogeneity. Finally, we discuss the existing
research on explaining models under task heterogeneity in Section 2.3.

2.1 IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The growing popularity in the usage of social media platforms and applications has
an impact on the individuals and society as a whole [Bishop, 2017]. These plat-
forms have revolutionized the way we view ourselves, the way we see others and the
way we interact with the world around us. Social media has many positive implica-
tions. Khurana [2015] studied the impact of social networking sites on the youth; it
was shown that social media enables connecting with people all across the globe by
not hampering their work hours and schedules and it also helps in education. Hudson
and Thal [2013] studied the impact of social media on the consumer decision process
and its implications for tourism marketing. Pew Research Center [b], showed that
about 67% of the United States population uses social media to stay updated on the
latest news. Also, the use of social media in politics including Twitter, Facebook, and

5
6 Social Media Analytics for User Behavior Modeling

YouTube has dramatically changed the way campaigns are run and how Americans
interact with their elected officials [Bonilla and Rosa, 2015]. Social media usage has
also seen a spike when it comes to personal healthcare. Tennant et al. [2015b] showed
that nearly 90% of adults who use the internet and social media platforms like Face-
book and Twitter used these platforms to find and share healthcare information. With
a lot of growing interest and immense benefits from healthcare applications to soci-
ety, we are motivated to work on addressing challenges in healthcare-related social
media platforms.
Research demonstrates that online social support programs like health care forums
and social media websites (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) can help patients gain knowl-
edge about their diseases and cope better with their daily management routine [Petro-
vski et al., 2015]. Patel et al. [2015] studied the impact of social networks on per-
ceived social support (e.g., of patients with chronic diseases). Researchers also stud-
ied how social media users gather and exchange health-related information and share
personal experiences [Naslund et al., 2016, Shepherd et al., 2015]. Fung et al. [2016]
researched the spread of misinformation about disease outbreaks to inform public
health communication strategies.

2.2 HETEROGENEOUS LEARNING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Mining from healthcare-related social media platforms is challenging. The key to
building applications from social media data is user-behavior modeling. Social media
data is intrinsically heterogeneous - generated by users from different demographi-
cal locations, who speak different languages and have different cultural backgrounds.
This makes user-behavior modeling under heterogeneity very challenging. Further,
to mine across multiple social media platforms, the likelihood of the same user hav-
ing multiple accounts is very low. Often they stick to one or two platforms that are
popular based on the geographical location or demographics. To efficiently design
applications that serve across multiple platforms, it is essential to identify similar
users across the networks. Finally, it is very costly to collect labels for data from mul-
tiple platforms. A more practical approach would be to leverage knowledge from one
platform to another. Motivated by this we identified three major problems: (1) mod-
eling user-behavior; (2) identifying similar actors and (3) adapting to new domains.
In this section, we discuss existing research on each of the problems.
In traditional machine learning models, it is considered that the training data on
which the model is trained has similar data distributions to the data at the test time.
Due to data heterogeneity and the dynamic nature of social media platforms, it is
not possible to use traditional machine learning models. In the past, researchers have
addressed these issues through a new branch of machine learning called Transfer
Learning. In transfer learning, given data from the source domain and target domain,
models are trained on a source domain and the underlying knowledge is transferred
to target domain [Pan and Yang, 2010]. Different supervised, unsupervised and semi-
supervised methods have been proposed for a wide variety of applications such as
image classification [Tan et al., 2015], WiFi-localization on time variant data [Pan
et al., 2008], and web document classification [He et al., 2009, Pan et al., 2010].
Literature Survey 7

Transfer learning is broadly classified into inductive, transductive and unsupervised

transfer learning [Pan and Yang, 2010]. In inductive transfer learning, the distri-
butions of the data in the source domain and target domain are considered to be
similar, but the machine learning task varies from the source domain to the target
domain. Self-taught learning [Raina et al., 2007] and multi-task learning [Zhang and
Yang, 2017] are a few examples of inductive transfer learning, whereas in transduc-
tive transfer learning, the tasks are the same but the data distributions vary from the
source domain to the target domain. Domain adaptation based methods [Jiang, 2008],
correcting co-variate bias, cross-domain sentiment classification [Blitzer et al., 2007]
and cross-domain recommendation are a few examples of transductive learning. In
unsupervised transfer learning, the labels in the source domain and target domain
are not observable. Self-taught clustering (STC) [Dai et al., 2008] and transferred
discriminative analysis (TDA) [Wang et al., 2008] algorithms are proposed to trans-
fer clustering and transfer dimensionality reduction problems, respectively. Given
the heterogeneous nature of the data on social media platforms, we are interested in
transductive learning in this research work.

2.2.1 TRANSDUCTIVE TRANSFER LEARNING

In transductive transfer learning, the data distributions vary across the source and
target domains, but the learning task, sentiment analysis, is the same in both the
domains. Sentiment classification in a cross-domain set up is a well-studied prob-
lem. For example, structural correspondence learning (SCL) generates a set of pivots
using common features in both the source and target domains using mutual informa-
tion and a set of classifiers on the common features [Blitzer et al., 2007]; spectral
feature alignment (SFA) splits the feature space into domain independent features
and domain-specific features, then aligns the domain-specific features into unified
clusters by using domain independent features as a bridge through spectral feature
clustering [Pan et al., 2010]; transfer component analysis (TCA) utilizes both the
shared and the mapped domain-specific topics to span a new shared feature space for
knowledge transfer [Li et al., 2012]; the labeled-unlabeled-feature tripartite graph-
based approach called TRITER was proposed to transfer sentiment knowledge from
labeled examples in both the source and target domains to unlabeled examples in the
target domain He et al. [2009].
Prior research has shown that user information combined with linguistic features
improved sentiment classification. Li et al. [2014] proposed a user-item based topic
model which can simultaneously utilize the textual topic and latent user-item fac-
tors for sentiment analysis; Tang et al. [2015b] incorporated user- and product-level
information using vector space models into a neural network approach for document-
level sentiment classification. Motivated by prior work which demonstrated the use-
fulness of user information in single-domain sentiment classification, we propose
U-Cross to explicitly model the user behaviors by borrowing information from the
source domain to help construct the prediction model in the target domain. Tan et al.
[2011] used a factor-graph model for user labels in a transductive learning setting
for a short-text sentiment classification task. It is likely that the user behavior can
8 Social Media Analytics for User Behavior Modeling

vary across the source and target domains; if not handled well it can lead to the nega-
tive transfer of knowledge. Our work on cross-domain sentiment classification varies
from Tan et al. [2011] as we carefully model the user behavior based on the related-
ness between the source and target domains, which prevents the ‘negative transfer’.

2.2.2 SOURCE-FREE TRANSFER LEARNING

Source-free transfer learning is a special case of transductive transfer learning, where
there is limited to no knowledge of labeled examples and also the feature distribu-
tion of the examples from one or more source domains. Yang et al. [2007] proposed
the Adaptive-SVM framework where the goal is to learn the target classification
function by adapting the pre-trained classifiers to the labeled examples in the tar-
get domain. Duan et al. [2012] and Xiang et al. [2011] proposed the variants of the
“Domain Adaptation Machine” (DAM) to learn the target classification function.
They assume that there exists multiple source classifiers (black box), and access to
a few labeled examples and all the unlabeled examples in the target domain. They
extend the Adaptive SVM by introducing a data dependent regularizer on all the
examples in the target domain and the labeled examples in the target domain. Our
work is significantly different from the DAM, as we consider only one off-the-shelf
classifier compared to multiple SVM classifiers used in DAM and also provide a
drift correction framework to adapt the off-the-shelf classifier to labeled examples.
Lu et al. [2014] proposed a source domain free approach by leveraging the informa-
tion from existing knowledge sources like WWW or Wikipedia. They build a large
label knowledge base with 50,000 category pairs and train classifiers for each of
the category pair. The goal is to compute the latent features on the labels, which is
further used to compute the target labels from unlabeled examples. The problem of
“Source-free transfer learning” in Lu et al. [2014] and Xiang et al. [2011] is different
from the problem of off-the-shelf classifier adaptation; instead of building a knowl-
edge base we simply make use of an existing off-the-shelf black-box classifier to
improve accuracy on the set of unlabeled examples. In the paper Chidlovskii et al.
[2016], authors consider three different scenarios, (1) The parameters of the source
classifiers are known; (2) Source classifiers as a black box; (3) Class distribution of
the source classifier is known. The case 2 is very relevant to our work. They employ
marginalized denoising auto-encoders to denoise the source classifier labels using
unlabeled data in the target domain. Our approach is semi-supervised and leverages
the similarity between the examples which varies from Chidlovskii et al. [2016] as it
is an unsupervised setting.

2.2.3 IDENTIFYING SIMILAR ACTORS ACROSS NETWORKS

Identifying similar actors across networks can be considered as a cross-network
link prediction problem. Link prediction is a widely studied problem in the field
of social network analysis [Liben-Nowell and Kleinberg, 2007, Al Hasan and Zaki,
2011, Wang et al., 2015]. Link prediction can be broadly classified into two types:
(1) Classical link prediction which aims at predicting the missing links in a given
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statues, taller than life, and of a surprising girth. We must not,
however, make fun of them, for each one represents some Celestial
who has made his mark in art, science, or philosophy. In France
such a temple would be called a Pantheon, and that is what it really
is, a place set apart for the commemoration of the great ones of the
past.
In the Temple of the five hundred genii lived a beautiful little
water-snake, which a bonze of venerable appearance tended with
reverent care, feeding it on green frogs and cantharides. I tried to
find out why he set such store upon it, and the following story was
told to me:
The river, from the banks of which rises the great city of Canton,
often overflows, and the inundations caused by the excess of water
do a great deal of mischief to the rice plantations. A young engineer
was ordered to construct an embankment, but he must have done
his work badly, for only a year after its completion the river again
burst its bounds, and the engineer in despair drowned himself in the
waters he had failed to control. Yet another inundation took place
after his death, and in the mud cast up by it upon the shore was
found a little snake. By order of the Viceroy the reptile was taken to
the Temple of the five hundred genii, and a miracle at once took
place, for it had no sooner entered the sacred precincts than the
waters subsided. Every one attributed their fall to gratitude for the
kind welcome given to the little snake, and a long memorial on the
subject was addressed by the Viceroy to the Emperor, which was at
once published by the Pekin Gazette. An explanation of the
phenomenon was added, to the effect that the little snake was really
none other than the engineer who had committed suicide. There
was really nothing surprising in the matter, for of course by his death
the unfortunate young man had become a Chen-Ching-tung-Chang-
chan, or divinity of the river, and was anxious to repair the mistake
made in his life-time on earth, by exercising a benevolent influence
over its waters now that he had the power to do so.
 After the miracle which had taken place on the entrance into the
Temple of the little snake, the people had proclaimed it to be the
genius of the water, and as such they venerated and cherished it!
 CHAPTER III
General Tcheng-Ki-Tong and his book on China—The monuments of China—
Those the Chinese delight to honour—A Chinese heroine—Ingredients of the "Cup
of Immortality"—Avenues of colossal statues and monsters in cemeteries—
Imperial edict in honour of K'wo-Fan—Proclamation of the eighteenth century—
The Emperor takes his people's sins upon himself—Reasons for Chinese
indifference to matters of faith—Lao-Tsze, or the old philosopher—His early life—
His book, the Tao-Teh-King—His theory of the creation—Affinity of his doctrine
with Christianity—Quotations from his book.

General Tcheng-Ki-Tong, who lived so long in France and married a

French lady, although rumour says he already had a wife in China,
wrote a very interesting but far from exhaustive book, with the title,
The Chinese described by themselves. He said nothing in it of the
worship of great men and of certain animals in his native land, nor
did he refer to the way in which acts of virtue and of courage are
rewarded there.
I will now endeavour to supplement the information given us by
the learned general. In addition to the statues erected in China, as in
the chief cities of Europe, to every man who has in any way
distinguished himself, triumphal arches are set up in memory of
those who have done heroic deeds, whether in the privacy of home
life or in public. These arches are known as Pai-lans, or Honorary
Portals, and as a rule they have three arcades, sometimes made of
very fine stone worked with considerable skill, and surmounted by a
roof of varnished canvas with the corners gracefully turned upwards
as is the fashion in China. There are two kinds of monuments in the
Celestial Empire, one of very ornate, the other of simple
construction.
Widows who refuse to marry again; virgins who have kept their
vows of chastity till their death; men who have distinguished
 themselves in science, literature,
or philosophy; diplomatists who
by their skill in deception have
mystified their colleagues as well
as foreign ministers, and thus won
a reputation for great wisdom;
soldiers who have fought valiantly
for their country; women who
have committed suicide after a
lost battle; wealthy men who have
given much away in charity;
families who have lived for many
generations in one house; old
men who can assemble in the
FIG. 22.—GENERAL TCHENG-KI- home of their ancestors four living
TONG.
and healthy representatives of
four generations, are honoured by
the erection of Honorary Portals, which are also set up in general
commemoration of any victory or series of victories in war.
In the centre of the larger and grander monuments are inscribed
three words, signifying Faith, Submission, and Justice.
The Imperial Government of China goes out of its MONUMENTSWIDOWS
TO

way to honour certain acts of abstinence, such as the

refusal of a widow to marry again, erecting a monument to her
when she has been true to her resolve till she is fifty years old, and
has lived alone for at least twenty years. I must add that the
Emperor himself contributes forty piastres, or about eight English
pounds, to the expense of erecting monuments in honour of women
who have been true to the memory of their husbands; he also gives
a roll of silk to each inconsolable widow, and what is more, he has
written a poem on widowhood. Who shall say after all this that the
Chinese are not jealous of marital faithfulness? Monuments to
widows are more imposing than any others, and bear an inscription
signifying Chastity and Purity.
 An affianced couple, who, though engaged in early childhood,
have been prevented through some local rebellion, or through a
foreign war, from accomplishing their union before they are fifty
years old, are honoured in a similar manner.
A monument with the inscription "Chastity and Filial Piety" may
be erected to glorify a Chinese mother, who having borne one child,
takes a vow never to have another, in order to be free to devote
herself to the needs of her poor parents. Similar honour may be
done to young boys or girls who allow a piece of flesh to be taken
from their arms or thighs, under the belief that this flesh mixed with
certain ingredients will do their suffering parents good. The Imperial
Government both approves and rewards the bloody sacrifice, the
motive of which is that filial love held in such high esteem
throughout the whole Celestial Empire.
On certain monuments with three arcades an inscription maybe
read, signifying, "Joy and Gladness to the Benevolent." Monuments
such as these are erected in honour of some Chinese who has
brought up orphans as if they were his own children, or of some rich
man who has given a large sum of money towards the making of
roads or bridges. A kind-hearted employer who pays poor men for
collecting the bones scattered about the cemeteries and giving them
reverent burial, is also often rewarded by the erection of a
monument to his memory.
Those of the Celestials who distinguish themselves by charity, but
who do not spend large sums of money, receive tablets of wood, on
which are inscribed pious sentences composed by the Son of
Heaven, that is to say, the Emperor. Many of these tablets, which
answer the same purpose as did the Greek stelæ, are to be seen in
the rooms known as the Halls of the Ancestors in the houses of the
Chinese, especially those of the wealthy mandarins. They constitute
regular patents of nobility, and are not won by favour or intrigue, as
are so many titles in Europe, but by real acts of charity performed by
their owners.
 Three brothers, who have all passed their eightieth year and are
still in good health, can have a monument erected announcing this
fact, and so can husbands or wives who attain the age of one
hundred.
At Amoy, in the province of Pecheli, are two AHEROINE CHINESE

monuments with arcades erected to the memory of the

Chinese women who flung themselves into the wells of their houses
when they heard the shouts of the English soldiers and sailors
entering the town.
This act of despair is explained by the fact that the Chinese
themselves give no quarter when they enter any place as victors;
the men are strangled, and the women become the slaves of those
who take them prisoners. In the very centre of Canton is a temple
remarkable alike for its size and beauty. It was built in honour of the
memory of a great Chinese lady, who in December 1857 committed
suicide when the English and French took the city. This heroine, the
wife of Pun-Yu, one of the chief magistrates at Canton, learning that
the allies already occupied the northern portion of the town, put on
her most magnificent apparel, and summoning all her servants, gave
to each a parting present. She then killed herself by drinking what
the bonzes call the "cup of immortality," a very strong poison,
containing amongst other ingredients opium and the droppings of
peacocks. This potent poison has often been given to emperors
under pretext of making them immortal, but really with a view to
getting rid of them.
There is yet another mode of honouring the illustrious departed.
The children of civil and military officers have the right of erecting
avenues of colossal figures opposite the tombs of their parents;
these figures representing giants or monsters. The length of the
avenues and the size of the figures is regulated by law, according to
the grade of those they are intended to honour. The state itself pays
for these quaint memorials, unless the necessary sum has been
raised by voluntary subscriptions.
 On the death of any illustrious soldier or politician whose
firmness has added to the stability of the throne, the Emperor
always hastens to give publicity to his grief at the public loss, and his
gratitude for the services rendered by the deceased. Here is a
specimen of an Imperial proclamation such as is frequently issued:
Imperial Edict. AN IMPERIAL
EDICT

"The deceased K'wo-Fan was a man of great knowledge, of

varied talent, of profound penetration, of stainless morality, and of
incorruptible honesty. He left the schools with the title of doctor; his
merits were discovered by the Emperor Tao-K'an, who promoted him
to the rank of Chingerh (colonel).
"In the reign of Hsien-Feng, he was commissioned to raise an
army in Hunan, and after the battles in which he was victorious over
the Tai-Ping rebels, he received the praises of the Emperor and the
thanks of the whole country. It was then that my predecessor
appointed him to the vice-royalty of the two Kiangs, and named him
Generalissimo of the Imperial forces. During my own reign I made
him chief Secretary of State. He became to me a second self; he was
my life, my heart, and my backbone. I therefore bestowed on him
the title of hereditary count, and I authorized him to wear the
double peacock's feather. I had hoped that he would live long for me
to heap fresh favours upon him, so that the news of his death has
filled me with sorrow and dismay. I wish that according to custom
three thousand taëls[1] should be spent on his funeral. A jarful of
wine shall also be poured out on his tomb by General Mutengah,
chief of the Manchu garrison at Nanking. Two tablets of stone,
bearing his name, shall be erected, one at Nanking in the Temple of
the Loyal and the Illustrious, the other in Pekin in the Pantheon of
the Wise and Good.
[1] A taël is worth about five shillings.

"I wish the life of K'wo-Fan to be written and given into the care
of the Imperial historiographers, that the memory of a life so
beautiful may be preserved in the national annals. His son will inherit
the title of count, and I give him dispensation from an audience.
"I appoint Ho-Ching, lieutenant-general of Kiang-Su, to be
instructor of the children and grand-children of the deceased. A
token of my munificence will be given to them, that they may know
how my throne remembers and honours a loyal servant.
"Let this edict be respected!"
The homage rendered to heroes, wise men, and philanthropists,
has its origin in the religious principles inculcated by Chinese
philosophers. These philosophers were very numerous in China in
past days, and it is only possible to give an account here of the most
celebrated of them.
Some twenty-three centuries before the Christian era the Chinese
simply worshipped one Supreme Being, first under the vague name
of Thian, or Heaven; later under the more personal title of Ti Shang,
or the Great One.
Gradually, however, this monotheism was succeeded by the
deification of the heavenly bodies, each with a priest of its own,
whose business it was to advise those responsible for the
government of China. These priests, who became in course of time
extremely powerful, won their influence through the study of
astronomy; but as that influence sometimes ran counter to the
wishes of the emperors and bid fair to supersede their power, they
eventually suppressed the entire hierarchy. In Europe this
interference with the spiritual guides of the people would have
aroused a passion of fanaticism, and have resulted in massacres and
religious wars, but nothing of the kind occurred in China, for there
the martyr's palm and crown are never coveted, and religious zeal
never produces the terrible results with which the student of
European history is familiar. Truly, the Celestials are to be
congratulated on the calmness with which they accept what they
consider the inevitable.
 The following characteristic epitome of the religious EMPEROR
A WISE

ideas in vogue amongst the Chinese in B.C. 1760, is

taken from a proclamation issued to his people by the Emperor then
on the throne:
"Shang-Ti, the supreme ruler, has given reason to man, and if he
listens to its dictates his spirit will exist for ever, but if he does not
he will revert to nothingness."
"The ruler of Hia," continues this old-world proclamation,
"extinguished in his soul the light of reason, and inflicted a thousand
ills upon the people in all the States of the Empire. Oppressed and
unable longer to endure such tyranny, the people made known to
the spirits of high and low degree, that they were unjustly dealt
with. The eternal reason of Heaven gives happiness to the virtuous,
and misery to the vicious and depraved, and this is why Heaven has
visited Hia with all manner of calamities to make his crimes manifest
to all.
"As a result of this, all unworthy though I be, I have felt it my
duty to conform to the unmistakable and terrible decrees of Heaven.
I dared not leave such great crimes unpunished, but I did dare to
take a black bullock to serve as the sacrifice I felt bound to offer. I
ventured to appeal to the august Heaven and to the divine ruler of
the earth.... To each of you I have assigned the States he is to
govern. Beware of obeying unjust laws or adopting unjust customs.
Do not fall into the mistakes which result from idleness, nor yield to
love of pleasure. By observing and obeying wise and equitable laws,
you will be following the commands of Heaven.... All is sifted in the
heart of Shang-Ti. The crimes any or all of you commit will be visited
on me alone, but if I do evil you will have no part in it."
In this quaint address is shadowed forth the beautiful idea that
the Emperor is responsible to God for his people, though they are
not responsible for him. A similar thought is apparent in the
following quotation from a kind of penitential psalm which the same
Emperor is said to have composed on the occasion of a famine
which decimated China during his reign. Feeling that he must have
done something to arouse the wrath of Heaven, he cut off the long
hair and nails which are the special pride of highly-born Celestials,
and laying aside his Imperial robes, wrapped himself in the skins of
beasts. Thus disguised he went forth alone to a mountain and
vented his grief and remorse for having:
1. Neglected to instruct his subjects as he ought to have done.
2. For failing to win them back to their duty when they had
departed from it.
3. For having built grand palaces, and incurred other expenses by
unnecessary building.
4. For having too many wives, and loving them too much.
5. For caring too much for the delicacies of the table.
6. And lastly, for having lent too ready an ear to the flattery of
his favourites, and of certain high officials of his court.
LAO-TSZE
 FIG. 23.—LAO-TSZE.
(Univers Pittoresque.)

Another significant and noteworthy fact brought out alike in the

proclamation and confession of this enlightened ruler is, that there is
no idea of any intermediary being necessary between him and God.
It is the same to this day, no priest intervenes between the Emperor
and Shang-Ti, and the bonzes who spend their lives studying the
moral precepts of Lao-Tsze and Confucius are merely thinkers who
never interfere in affairs of State or with the religious teaching of the
people. Hence the total indifference of the Chinese to matters of
faith; they believe in free-will, and act in accordance with that belief.
In the sixth and seventh centuries before our era the Chinese
Empire was in a condition little short of anarchy. The wealthy were
depraved, the poor were steeped in misery, and everywhere injustice
and oppression were the rule. The emperors frittered away their
lives in their harems, giving no thought to the welfare of their
people. It was time indeed for a reformer to arise, and the first to
appear was the great Lao-Tsze, who is supposed to have been born
about 604 B.C., fifty years before the yet greater Kung-Fu-tze, or, as
he is called by Europeans, Confucius.
The state of the Celestial Empire when Lao-Tsze first LIFETSZE
OF LAO-

began to inculcate his peculiar doctrines was corrupt in

the extreme, greatly resembling that of the Roman Empire in the
time of Nero, when the disciples of Christ preached equality and
contempt for riches, striving to win souls from the awful depravity
and sensuality of the heathen world, and to teach them to aspire to
an ideal and divine love and to the immaterial joys of the Christian
heaven. Lao-Tsze, who was to inaugurate the great reform
completed later by Confucius, began his public career as curator of
the library of the King of the Tcheou, in what was then the city of
Lob, not far from that of Lob-yang in the present province of Honan.
His real name is supposed to have been Erh-Li, but that of Lao-Tsze,
signifying the old philosopher, has entirely superseded it. Whilst
keeper of the royal books he is said to have read many of the works
of Indian philosophers, and from them to have imbibed the
principles embodied in his own immortal work, called the Tao-Teh-
King, the exact meaning of the title of which has been so much
discussed, but is generally translated the "Book of Supreme reason
and virtue." If, as may well be, the word Tao is identical with the
Greek Θεος and with the Latin Deos, both of which mean God, then
the proper rendering of Tao-Teh-King is the "Book of God and of
reason." However that may be, it is certain that its author was a true
theist, rightly considered the founder of Theism, which is one of the
three doctrines held in equal honour by the Celestials, the other two
being Confucianism and Buddhism.
Many legends have gathered about the memory of Lao-Tsze, and
the young Confucius is said to have met the old philosopher more
than once. The former is reported to have said after an interview in
Pekin with his forerunner: "To-day I have seen Lao-Tsze, and can
only liken him to a dragon who mounts aloft in the clouds, I cannot
tell how, and rises to heaven." Another story is that the older
Chinese philosopher travelled in India and there met Pythagoras, the
great mathematician and believer in the transmigration of souls; but
if so, there is no trace of the influence of the Greek in the Tao-Teh-
King, which must have been written before its author left China. As a
matter of fact, very little is really known of the life of Lao-Tsze, but
some idea of his peculiar views can be obtained from the following
quotations from his book:
"God," he says, "is spiritual and material, so that He has two
kinds of existence. We emanate in the first instance from the former
or spiritual nature, to enter later into the second. Our aim upon
earth should be to return to the first, or spiritual nature. To succeed
in this we must refrain from the pleasures of the world, control our
passions, and practise boundless charity."
It is the advocacy of this boundless charity which justifies us in
comparing the doctrine of Lao-Tsze with primitive Christianity.
Before, however, we give proofs of this affinity it will be interesting
to note how the old philosopher proves his assertion, that all the
material forms of nature are but emanations from the divine.
In the twenty-fifth section of the Tao-Teh-King we THE TAO-TEH-
KING
read:
"Beings of corporeal form were made from matter which was at first in a chaotic
condition.
 "Before the heaven and the earth came into being, there was nothing but a profound
silence, a boundless void, without any perceptible form.
"It[2] existed alone, infinite, immutable.
"It moved about in the illimitable space without undergoing any change.
"It may be looked upon as the mother of the Universe.
"I am ignorant of its name, but I call it the Tao, by which I mean supreme and universal
Reason.
"Constrained to make a name for it, I designate it by its attributes, and call it grand,
lofty.
"Having recognized that it is grand and lofty, I add that it is all-embracing.
"Having recognized that it is infinite, I designate it as unlike myself....
"The earth is ruled by Heaven.
"Heaven is ruled by the Tao or universal Reason.
"Universal Reason is a law unto itself"

[2] Lao-Tsze speaks of the Supreme Being as "it," not "he,"

and implies that his Tao, whatever he signified by it, may have
existed even before God.—Trans.

These quotations cannot fail to give an exalted idea of the

principles advocated by the Chinese sage. They even shadow forth,
to some extent, the doctrine of the Gospel, which was not preached
until 600 years after the death of the author of the Tao-Teh-King;
but the extract I give now from the forty-ninth section of the book
on Supreme Reason is yet more strikingly significant:
"The heart of a holy man is not inexorable.
"His heart is in sympathy with the hearts of all other men.
"A virtuous man should be treated according to his virtue.
"A vicious man should be treated as if he also were virtuous. Herein is wisdom and
virtue."

Again in the sixteenth section we read:

"To be just, and equitable to all, is to have the attributes of God.
"Having the attributes of God is to be of the divine nature.
"To be of the divine nature is to succeed in becoming identified with the Tao or the
supreme and universal Reason.
"To be identified with the supreme Reason is to win eternal life.
"Even when the body is put to death, there is no need to have any fear of annihilation."

So much for Lao-Tsze's belief in the immortality of the soul; now

note in what touching terms he expresses his compassion for the
unhappy and unfortunate:
 "If the people suffer from hunger, it is because they are weighed down by taxes too
heavy for them.
"This is the cause of their misery. . . .
"If the people are difficult to govern, it is because they are oppressed by work too hard
for them. . . .
"This is the cause of their insubordination.
"If the people are indifferent to the approach of death, it is because they find it too
difficult to obtain sufficient nourishment.
"That is why they die with so little regret."
 CHAPTER IV
Lao-Tsze and Confucius compared—The appearance of Kilin, the fabulous
dragon, to the father of Confucius—Early life of the Philosopher—The death and
funeral of his mother—His views on funeral ceremonies—His visit to the King of Lu
and discourse on the nature of man—Confucius advocates gymnasium exercises—
His love of music—His summary of the whole duty of woman—He describes the
life of a widow—He gives a list of the classes of men to be avoided in marriage—
The seven legitimate reasons for the divorce of a wife—The three exceptions
rendering divorce illegal—The missionary Gutzlaff's opinion of Confucius' view of
woman's position—The Philosopher meets a man about to commit suicide—He
rescues him from despair—He loses thirteen of his own followers.

Under the continued influence of Lao-Tsze, China would probably

have become in course of time crowded with monasteries, in which
numerous bonzes would have devoted their lives to sterile
contemplation, which would have profited their country not at all.
Fortunately, however, the old philosopher was succeeded by the
more practical Confucius, who made China what he meant it to be
during his life-time, enforcing respect for tradition with the strict
observance of the worship of ancestors. Devoted to agriculture, he
did much to promote its scientific practice; an inexorable lover of
justice, he had no mercy on the abuses and peculations of the
mandarins. He knew how to turn to account every incident which
could redound to his fame, and about his name gathered many
romantic legends such as serve to fix on their hero the love and
admiration of the populace. In this he differed, as did all the other
great leaders of thought in the East, from Lao-Tsze, who owed his
celebrity to the culte of pure reason alone, a doctrine too abstract
for the apprehension of the general public, who ever delight in the
marvellous. The earlier philosopher appeared and disappeared with
absolutely no éclat, and his most ardent admirers never associated
his birth or death with anything supernatural. It was far otherwise
with Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, and our Saviour, who one and all
were credited with the power of working miracles, though those of
Christ alone have been authenticated.
It could only detract from the real glory of Confucius to dwell on
the many extraordinary phenomena which are said by his disciples to
have accompanied his entrance into the world. The great Chinese
dragon called Kilin, who never comes down to earth from his home
in heaven except to foretell marvellous events, failed not to appear
in the garden of the house of the future hero's father, where he
vomited forth a stone of jade bearing the following inscription:
"A child as pure as the crystalline wave will be born when the
dynasty of Tcheu is in its decline; he will be king, but without any
kingdom."
 FIG. 24.—THE HOUSE IN WHICH
CONFUCIUS WAS BORN.
(Univers Pittoresque.)

According to the most trustworthy accounts Confucius was CONFUCIUS

BIRTH OF

born in the village of Ch'ieh in the present province of

Shantung in B.C. 551. The only child of his parents, he lost his father when
he was but three years old, and was brought up by his mother, who was
left with very little money. To quote the philosopher's own words, he could
from the first "do whatever his heart prompted, and his mind was set on
learning from the age of fifteen."
 FIG. 25.—PORTRAIT OF CONFUCIUS.
(Univers Pittoresque.)

Before he was twenty he had attracted the general attention of his

neighbours through the skill with which he rendered fertile districts which
had long been considered barren. He was equally successful in the
breeding of flocks, and the land under his care supported thousands of
animals, so that the farmers who before could scarcely eke out a miserable
subsistence, now found themselves rich and well-to-do.
QUOTATION
FROM
CONFUCIUS
 FIG. 26.—A FUNERAL PROCESSION IN CHINA.

On the death of his mother he had her body transported to the grave of
his father, saying: "Those who were united in life should not be separated
after death." The two were therefore buried together with their heads
towards the north and their feet towards the south. The remains were
protected from wild beasts by being placed in strongly constructed wooden
coffins, made of planks four inches thick and smeared with oil and varnish.
To ensure their preservation as long as possible mounds of earth forming
regular little hills were piled up above them.
During the three years of mourning which succeeded his sad loss,
when, according to a custom still observed, he could do no public work,
Confucius devoted himself to the study of ancient usage in everything
connected with the death of a father or a mother.
"As man," he wrote, "is the A CHINESE TOMB

most perfect being under FIG. 27.—CHINESE TOMBS.

heaven, that of which he is
made up is worthy of the very
greatest respect; as he is by
nature the king of the earth,
every other creature upon that
earth is subject to his laws
and bound to do him homage;
to be indifferent to what
becomes of his remains when
the breath of life no longer
animates those remains, is to
a certain extent to degrade him from his dignity, and
to reduce him to the level of the brutes. The honours
you render to those you replace upon the earth will be
rendered to you in your turn by those who succeed
you."
During a long sojourn in the Philippine CUSTOMS
BURIAL
IN
Islands, which have recently been so very CHINA
much before the public in consequence of the results
of the war between America and Spain, I was surprised to notice that the
cemeteries were as a rule situated in the most barren and uncultivated
districts. Once a year plates of rice were brought and placed upon the
graves by the relatives of those interred in them. When I arrived in China,
however, I found the same peculiarity the fashion there, and the last
resting-places of the dead who had once resided in Canton, Macao, and
other large Chinese towns were far away from the haunts of the living. The
reason was explained by the sentence quoted below from the books of the
great philosopher which is translated from Father Amiot's version.
It appears that some agents of Confucius had been sent by him to
survey certain districts in the kingdom of Lu, and on their return they
reported to him that wealthy inhabitants were in the habit of erecting
sepulchres on lands which might be made very fertile.
"That is a strange abuse," cried Confucius, "and one which I mean to
remedy. Burial-places should not resemble gardens of pleasure and
amusement, they should be the scene of sobs and tears; it was thus that
they were regarded by the ancients. To enjoy magnificent and sumptuous
repasts where everything is suggestive of luxury and joy, near the tombs
containing the bones of those to whom we owe our lives, is a kind of insult
to the dead. These tombs must no longer be surrounded by walls, they
must no longer be encircled by trees symmetrically planted. When deprived
of all these frivolous ornaments, the homage which all will hasten to pay to
those who have ceased to live will be sincere and pure. If, then, we desire
to perform funeral rites in the spirit of their first founders we must remain
true to the traditions of the sages of the remote past."
For the twenty-three centuries which have elapsed since this protest
was written, Chinese sepulchres have always been placed on high ground
of a dreary, desolate aspect, with nothing to mark them but a plain
unsculptured slab of stone.
Philosophers very seldom become real friends, and the more they are
thrown together the less cordial become their relations. The story goes that
Confucius as a young man went to pay his respects to Lao-Tsze, but that
the latter gave his visitor very haughtily to understand that he considered
him wanting in humility, by which he probably meant that Confucius was
too much occupied with the things of this world, and not enough with
those of heaven. The fact is, that the younger reformer was interested in
everything that was going on wherever he happened to be, and was ready
to talk to everybody. For all that, however, he studied the most abstruse
psychological problems, and I do not suppose that even Lao-Tsze himself
 could have made a better answer than
Confucius did to the King of Lu when he
asked the difficult question quoted below.
It must be remembered THE KING OF LU
that in the time of Confucius, China was
divided into little kingdoms, all of which
the sage, who was fond of travelling,
visited in turn. When he arrived at Lu, the
king, who was already an old man,
received him at once, and is reported to
have thus addressed him:
"I have been expecting you with
impatience, for I want you to explain
FIG. 28.—A CHINESE CEMETERY. certain things to me about nature and
man. Man, our sages tell us, is
distinguished from all other visible beings
by the intellectual faculty which renders him capable of reasoning, and all
our wise men agree in adding that man derives this valuable faculty direct
from Heaven. Now is it not true that we derive our whole nature from our
parents, even as other beings are reproduced by generation? I entreat you
to enlighten me on this point."
"It is not easy," replied Confucius, "to explain clearly to you a matter of
which so little is really known. To obey you, however, I will give you in a
few words a résumé of all I know on the subject, and your own
penetration will find out the rest.
"A portion of the substance of the father and the mother placed in the
organ formed for its reception is the cause of our existence and the germ
of our being. This germ would, however, remain inert and dead without the
help of the two contrary principles of the Yang and the Yin.[3]—These two
universal agents of nature, which are in all things and everywhere, act
reciprocally on it, developing it, insensibly extending and continuing it, and
causing it to assume definite form.
[3] "In the order of living beings," says M. G. Pauthier, in the section
on China of L'Univers Pittoresque, "the Yang and the Yin are the male
and female principles; in the order of the elements they are the
 luminous and the dark principles; in the order of natural substances the
strong and the weak principles."

"The germ has now become a living being, but this living being is not
yet promoted to the dignity of a man; it does not become one until it is
united with that intellectual substance which Heaven bestows on it to
enable it to understand, to compare, and to judge. So long as this being,
thus animated and endowed with intelligence, continues to combine the
two principles necessary to the development, extension, the growth and
the perfection of its form, it will enjoy life; it ceases to live as soon as these
two principles cease to combine. It does not attain to the fulness of life
except by degrees, and by means of expansion; in the same way it is only
finally destroyed by gradual decay. Its destruction is not, however,
destruction properly so called, it is a decomposition into its original
elements; the intellectual substance returns to the heaven whence it came;
the animal breath, or the Khi, becomes united with the aërial fluid, whilst
the earthly and liquid substances become once more earth and water.
"Man, say our ancient sages, is a unique being, in whom are THE NATURE
MAN
OF

united the attributes of all other beings. He is endowed with

intelligence, with the power of attaining perfection, with liberty, and with
social qualities; he is able to discriminate, to compare, to work for a
definite aim, and to take the necessary measures for the attainment of that
aim. He may become perfect or depraved according to the good or evil use
he makes of his liberty; he is acquainted alike with virtue and vice, and
feels that he has duties to perform towards Heaven, himself, and his fellow-
men. If he acquit himself of these various duties, he is virtuous and worthy
of recompense; he is culpable and merits punishment if he neglects them.
This is a very short résumé of all I can tell you of the nature of man."
The King of Lu, it is said, was delighted with this reply, as how could he
fail to be? Some years later the monarch made his sage adviser prime
minister of his realm, and the philosopher remained in power for three
years, administering justice so rigorously that, says one of his biographers,
"if gold or jewels were dropped on the highway they would remain
untouched until the rightful owner appeared to claim them." The story goes
that under Confucius, Lu became so prosperous as to arouse the jealousy
of the neighbouring King of Tse, who, with a wonderful insight into human
nature, sent not an army, but a troop of beautiful dancing-girls to the court
of the rival monarch. The manœuvre was successful; the King of Lu
neglected the affairs of state to watch the posturing of the sirens, and
Confucius fell into disgrace. When he proudly told his sovereign to choose
between him and the dancers, the old king promptly replied that he
preferred the latter; so Confucius went forth with his followers to seek his
fortunes elsewhere.
Many are the anecdotes told of the wanderings of the sage CONFUCIUS
THE ARTS
ON

after this tragic end to his work of reformation in his native

state. In some districts he was gladly welcomed; in others he was often in
danger of his life. At the court of Yen, where the king questioned him much
as the monarch of Lu had done, he held forth less on abstruse doctrine
than on education. "Young men," he is reported to have said, "should travel
and become acquainted with many lands, so as to be able to judge the
customs of different nations, and the peculiar characteristics of various
races. I am so penetrated by this truth," he added, "that I will not fail to
put it in practice whenever I get the opportunity. I would recommend the
exercises of the gymnasium to all adolescents, and the study of what are
called the liberal arts: Music, civil and religious ceremonial, arithmetic,
fencing, and the art (sic) of managing skilfully a carriage of any kind drawn
by horses or oxen." To his son, who asked him if he ought to devote
himself to poetry, he replied: "You will never know how to speak or write
well unless you make verses."
One day he met a party of hunters, and, to the great surprise of his
own followers, he asked to be allowed to join them, explaining that the first
inhabitants of the earth lived by the chase alone, and adding that the
reason he wished to be a hunter was to impress upon those about him
once more how great a respect he had for the traditions of olden times.
He learnt music when very young, and found in it a rest and recreation
after his arduous and varied avocations. He became, it is said, so
wonderfully skilful in the art of music, that when he had once heard the
work of a composer, he could draw a faithful portrait of him, bringing out
alike his physical and moral characteristics, which was indeed going to the
very root of the matter. As for me, I do not think it is by any means
necessary to be able to perform on an instrument in order to form a very
good idea of the character of such composers as Rossini, Berlioz, and
Wagner, after hearing Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Les Troyens, or Die
Meistersinger; but as for giving portraits of their personal appearance, that
would truly be difficult!
 Confucius, who took to himself a wife at the age of nineteen, was in
favour of early marriages, and placed the limit of age for a woman at
twenty, and for a man at thirty. He founded his arguments on the fact that
in China a boy is considered to have become a man directly he enters his
twentieth year, and that as soon as a girl is fifteen the management of the
house is entrusted to her during the winter, whilst in the spring, when
ploughing begins, she is sent to look after the mulberry trees. At the
respective ages of twenty and fifteen, a boy and girl may become the head
of a family, "if," discreetly adds the sage, "the parents give permission."
I take a real pleasure in recalling the kindly sayings of this MEANING OF THE
PHŒNIX
old-world sage, who, it must be remembered, lived 600 years
before the birth of our Lord, a fact which ought to silence those who are
accustomed to speak flippantly of the barbarism of past centuries.
Moreover, the laws and customs advocated by Confucius had really been in
force, in what was then called the "Middle State," for no less than 2500
years before the Christian era, but they had fallen into abeyance. The great
philosopher was not so much an innovator as a restorer, for so lofty was
the morality of the ancient laws that the Chinese people never dreamt of
modifying them. Hence the extraordinary immobility of the manners and
customs of the Orient, which contrasts so forcibly with the constant
eagerness in the West for meaningless novelties. To give an account of the
doctrines of Confucius is really to revive the traditions of the remote past,
for which the Celestials have so deep a reverence. To give but one case in
point: noticing that all mandarins have a phœnix with outspread wings
embroidered on their robes, I inquired what it meant, and learnt to my
astonishment that in the year 500 B.C. an Emperor had ordered this design
to be worn by his chief officers on their breasts. The fabulous phœnix, the
herald of good fortune so often seen in China, had appeared to this
Emperor on his ascent to the throne; a sure symbol in the eyes of the
Chinese of a prosperous reign, and the conservative Mandarins have kept
up the custom of wearing a representation of the bird with outstretched
wings ever since.
For the benefit of those who do not rightly reverence antiquity, I will
quote a speech on the subject of marriage, addressed by Confucius to the
King of Lu before the great philosopher was exiled from the kingdom he
had ruled over so wisely.
 "Marriage," said the sage, "is the right state for man, because it is only
through marriage that he can fulfil his destiny upon earth; there is
therefore nothing more honourable, nothing more worthy of his serious
consideration than his power of fulfilling exactly all duties. Amongst these
are some shared in common by both sexes, others which are to be
performed by each sex in particular. The man is the head, it is for him to
command; the woman is subject to him, it is for her to obey. It is the
function of both together to imitate those operations of the heaven and the
earth which combine in the production, the support, and the preservation
of all things. Reciprocal tenderness, mutual confidence, truthfulness and
respect, should form the foundation of their conduct; instruction and
direction on the part of the husband, docility and complaisance on the part
of the woman, in everything which does not interfere with the requirements
of justice, propriety, and honour.
"As society is now constituted, the CHINESE
WIDOWS
woman owes all that she is to her
husband. If death takes him from her, it does not
make her her own mistress. As a daughter, she was
under the authority of her father and mother, or
failing them of the brothers older than herself; as a
wife she was ruled by her husband as long as he
lived; as a widow she is under the surveillance of her
son, or if she has several sons, of the eldest of them,
and this son, whilst ministering to her with all
possible affection and respect, will shield her from all
the dangers to which the weakness of her sex might
expose her. Custom does not permit second marriage
to a widow, but prescribes on the contrary that she
should seclude herself within the precincts of her own
house, and never leave it again all the rest of her life.
FIG. 29.—A YOUNG She is forbidden to attend to any business, no matter
CHINESE
MARRIED LADY.
what, outside her home. As a result she ought not to
understand any such business; she will not even
meddle in domestic matters unless compelled to do
so by necessity, that is to say, whilst her children are still young. During the
day she should avoid showing herself, by refraining from going from room
to room, unless obliged to do so. And during the night the room in which
she sleeps should always be lit up. Only by leading a retired life such as this
will she win amongst her descendants the glory of having fulfilled the
duties of a virtuous woman."
It would indeed be difficult for a widow to live up to such an ideal as
this, and that the Chinese themselves realize the fact, is proved by their
raising monuments to the memory of those who succeed.
"I have already said," adds Confucius, "that between fifteen and twenty
is the age at which a girl should change her state by marriage. As on this
change of state depends the happiness or misery in which she will pass the
rest of her days, nothing should be neglected to procure for her a proper
establishment, and the most advantageous one permitted by
circumstances. Special care should be taken not to allow her to enter a
family which has taken part in any conspiracy against the State, or in any
open revolt, or into one whose affairs are in disorder, or which is agitated
by internal dissensions. She should not have a husband chosen for her who
has been publicly dishonoured by any crime bringing him under the notice
of the law; to a man suffering from any chronic complaint, any mental
eccentricity, any bodily deformity, such as would make it difficult to get on
with him, or render him repulsive or disagreeable, or to a man who is the
eldest of a family but has neither father nor mother. With the exception of
these five classes of men, a husband may be chosen for her from any rank
of society, with whom it will depend on herself alone whether she passes
her life happily or not. She has but to fulfil exactly all the duties of her new
state to enjoy the portion of bliss destined for her."
It is the parents who decide who their children shall marry, and a young
Chinaman does not know his fiancée until the day of his wedding. This
explains why Confucius thought it necessary to go into all these details on
the subject of suitable husbands.
"A husband," he adds, "has the right to put away his wife, REASONS FOR
DIVORCE
but he must not use this right in an arbitrary manner; he must
have some legitimate cause for enforcing it. The legitimate causes of
repudiation reduce themselves to seven: The first when a woman cannot
live in harmony with her father- or mother-in-law; the second, if she is
unable to perpetuate the race because of her recognized sterility; the third,
if she be justly suspected of having violated conjugal fidelity, or if she gives
any proof of unchastity; the fourth, if she bring trouble into her home by
calumnious or indiscreet reports; the fifth, if she have; any infirmity such as
every man would naturally shrink from; the sixth, if it is difficult to correct
her of the use of intemperate language; the seventh, if unknown to her
husband she steals anything secretly in the house, no matter from what
motive.
"Although any one of these reasons is sufficient to authorize a husband
to put away his wife, there are three circumstances which forbid him to use
his right: the first, when his wife has neither father nor mother, and would
have nowhere to go to; the second, when she is in mourning for her father-
or mother-in-law, for three years after the death of either of them; the
third, when her husband, having been poor when he married her, has
subsequently become rich."

FIG. 30.—A MARRIAGE PROCESSION.

Truly there is much wisdom in the counsels of Confucius on the vexed

subject of marriage, but it is impossible to help feeling that the very low
view he took of the position of women detracts greatly from the merit of
the discourse quoted above. We are, in fact, inclined to endorse the opinion
of the missionary Gutzlaff, who, speaking of the revered sage, remarks: "By
not giving a proper rank in society to females, by denying to them the
privileges which are their due as sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters ...
he has marred the harmony of social life, and put a barrier against the
improvement of society. The regeneration of China will, in fact, never take
place, unless the females be raised from the degraded state which
Confucius assigned to them."
On yet another exciting topic, that of suicide, it will perhaps SUICIDE

be salutary to relate one anecdote illustrating the view the reformer took of
the matter, now that so many despairing souls have lost the aids and
consolations of religious faith in struggling with the difficulties of their life
on earth; when followers of the stoical and heroic Zeno are becoming rarer
and rarer, and so many young men and women resort to the fumes of
charcoal, or to the waters of the nearest river, to put an end to the woes
they have not the courage to face. We must premise, however, that there is
really far more excuse for an Asiatic to take his own life than for a
European, there being nothing unreasonable about it according to the
doctrine of Buddha, whose disciples believe firmly in the transmigration of
souls. They do not, it is true, profess to know whether, if they commit
suicide they will become animals, but they are firmly convinced that they
will continue to live, whereas the atheist has faith in nothingness alone.
In one of his many journeys Confucius and his
disciples met a man who was trying to strangle
himself with a rope. When asked what his motives
were for wishing to commit suicide, he replied that
he had been a bad son, a bad father, and a bad
citizen. The remorse he felt for the terrible
character his self-examination revealed him to be
from all these three points of view, had made his
life odious to him, and he had come out to a lonely
place to put an end to it.
Greatly shocked, Confucius reproved him,
addressing him in the following terms: "However
great the crimes you have committed, the worst of
all of them is yielding to despair. All the others may
FIG. 31.—A DESPERATE be allowed, but that is irremediable. You have, no
MAN. doubt, gone astray from the very first steps you
took upon earth. You should have begun by being
a man of ordinary worth before attempting to
distinguish yourself You cannot attain to being an eminent person until you
have strictly fulfilled the duty imposed by nature on every human creature.
You ought to have begun by being a good son; to love and serve those to
whom you owed your being was the most essential of your obligations; you
neglected to do so, and from that negligence have resulted all your
misfortunes.
SPEECH OF
CONFUCIUS

FIG. 32.—THE TOMB OF CONFUCIUS.

(Univers Pittoresque.)

"Do not, however, suppose that all is lost; take courage again, and try
to become convinced of a truth which all past centuries have proved to be
incontestable. This is the truth I refer to; treasure it up in your mind, and
never lose hold of it: As long as a man has life, there is no reason to
despair of him; he may pass suddenly from the greatest trouble to the
greatest joy, from the greatest misfortune to the greatest felicity. Take
courage once more, return home, and strive to turn to account every
instant, as if you began to-day for the first time to realize the value of life."
Then turning to the younger of his disciples, Confucius said to them:
"What you have heard from the lips of this man is an excellent lesson for