Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China, and on the Chinese Language: Illustrated with a Sketch of the Province of Kwang-Tûng, Shewing Its Division Into Departments and Districts

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W. H. Allen and Company, 1847 - 250 sider
 

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Side vi - It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries of the world, in North America, in Europe, and in China; which renders it rapidly progressive in the first, slow and gradual in the second, and altogether stationary in the last.
Side 235 - LANGUAGE, with Exercises on its more Prominent Peculiarities, together with a Selection of Useful Phrases, Dialogues, and Subjects for Translation into Persian. PART II. — A VOCABULARY OP USEPUL WORDB, ENGLISH AND PERSIAN, showing at the same time the difference of idiom between the two Languages.
Side 235 - Grammar of the Hindustani Language, in the Oriental and Roman Characters: with numerous Copperplate Illustrations of the Persian and Devanagari Systems of Alphabetic Writing. To which is added, a copious Selection of Easy Extracts for Reading in the PersiArabic and Devanagari Characters, forming a complete Introduction to the Bagh-o-Bahar; together with a Vocabulary and explanatory Notes.
Side 217 - ... of civilization. All this the Chinaman, having never compared the various states of different nations, is not only quite unable to perceive of himself, but often not even when it is pointed out to him at great length. We have, it is true, the power to do some great and extraordinary things, but so have the elephants and other wild animals, he occasionally sees and hears of; in his eyes, therefore, we are all barbarians, possessing perhaps some good qualities, congregated perhaps together in some...
Side 211 - ... the Emperor to make them certain concessions. Nearly all they know of the fighting and of the character of the invading forces they must have learned from the mandarins' reports to the Emperor, and his answers to them, published in the "Pekin Gazette," and from copies of local proclamations which may have reached them. We may easily imagine, from the tone of these papers, that the Chinese, who from want of experience, would be unable to form sound judgments on such matters from correct data,...
Side 216 - ... it suits your fancy. But how do you manage to read it?" When you, however, explain to him at length, that there is no natural way for the lines to run, and no absolutely proper place for books to begin; that there can scarcely be said to be any natural order for the succession of words in sentences, but that it is fixed by custom, and differs in every language, and that the uneducated Englishman would consider the Chinese method as quite absurd; when you explain this to him, and he begins to...
Side 100 - ... Government business. The judges alone investigate, and decide in all causes and trials ; there are no counsel for the prisoner, and of course nothing corresponding to juries. Threats, and torture, too, are of daily occurrence. The interior of a yamun is said to present a very strange and bustling scene. " The almost unceasing flail-like sounds of beating with the bamboo, either as a punishment for ascertained guilt, or to extort confessions and evidence — the cries of the sufferers — the...
Side 215 - Chinese with a single instance of any want of candour in regard to this subject; whenever their minds once acknowledge anything foreign as superior to the Chinese article of the like sort, they at once admit it to be so. For instance, when a mandarin who has never spoken to a barbarian, and never seen one of their books, who, perhaps, has hitherto always doubted that they had anything deserving of the name, is first shown one, he admires the decided superiority of the paper at once; but when he finds...
Side 215 - Chinese on natural law, on the principles of political economy, and on European national and international policy, then (after such works shall have obtained a wide circulation) when they perceive how much more deeply metaphysics have been explored by us than by them, and how studiously the best established principles of the sciences included under that term have been brought into practical operation by us, then, but not till then, will the Chinese bow before the moral power of the civilized West....

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