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Introduction to the New Edition

The surge of American interest in Chinese culture following the visit of President Nixon to China in 1972 has highlighted the healthy trend of recent years to look at China in a realistic way. Since the thirteenth-century visit of Marco Polo to China, the country has been regarded by the West as an exotic Flowery Land—a Celestial Kingdom, remote and forbidding. Until the sixteenth century it was a land that did not come under strong foreign, then Western, influence. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, followed by the emergence of Chinese communism after World War II, gave the world a sober picture of a vast country intent on asserting its own destiny. The explosion of a Chinese atomic bomb, followed by recognition as a nation in the United Nations Organization, obliged the United States to recognize the Chinese nation of 800,000,000 people.

For ordinary people in Western countries an easy way to comprehend Chinese culture and history is through books on traditional arts, literature, and folklore. American tourists may now visit China in organized groups, yet for most of us China and the Chinese will remain something only to read about or to watch on a television screen. For those interested in ancient Chinese culture, books must remain the principal reference source, supplemented by visits to museum collections.

Outlines of Chinese Symbolism & Art Motives, in the words of the author, C.A.S. Williams, is “a practical handbook of the science of Chinese symbolism as based on the early folklore.”

At the root of Chinese life, art, and literature are certain basic ideas that can and should be grasped by anyone studying China. To achieve a sound knowledge of Chinese art symbolism and primary concepts, there is no better book than this. It is easy to use. Subjects are arranged alphabetically, described in concise essays, and illustrated with crisp line drawings by Chinese artists. All pertinent terms are accompanied by their Chinese writings.

The edition of William’s book chosen for this reprint is the third revised edition, printed in Shanghai in 1941. Mr. Williams, a life member of the Royal Asiatic Society, Examiner in Mandarin at Hong Kong University, Professor of Customs College, and Acting Commissioner in charge of Maritime Customs in Peiping, wrote a number of books on Chinese language and culture. He was one of the band of versatile English scholars who gave the world pioneering works on the Far East.

Through thousands of years of continuous history China produced superb painters, poets, philosophers, potters, bronzesmiths, architects, and gardeners. Many of the artists and literary men were also priests who applied their religion in practical ways and developed such viable sects as Chán (Zen) Buddhism. Williams is remarkably perceptive on the subject of Buddhism, although he does not define Chán specifically. He is, however, far ahead of his time in pointing out the profound influence of imported Indian Buddhism on the ideals and art of China. Buddhist thought pervades Chinese culture in all its classic phases and was transmitted from China to Japan and Korea in an assimulated form to be modified in the creative local adaptations with which most of us are familiar. Almost everything in Williams, whether folklore or art symbolism, is applicable to Korea and Japan as well. For example, the symbolic “year” animals are the same in those countries. If India is the native mother culture of Far Eastern ideals, China is the dynamic intermediary between India and Japan, Korea, and Tibet. Williams’s book is in reality a general guide to Far Eastern art symbolism and folk belief.

Westerners who study China should keep in mind the antiquity of this great country’s civilization, which was already three thousand years old when Titus sacked Jerusalem and Roman legions occupied Britain.

Williams, writing as a scholar and linguist in the China of fifty years ago, could not conceive the vast changes that lay in the immediate future. He lived among Chinese who believed in their folklore and religions. Today we must take a look at the contemporary scene. The simple fact is that China has adopted a system that has required the ousting of old-style Chinese landlords and administrators, who were primarily Confucian-trained. Changes unparalleled in 5,000 years of Chinese history have had disintegrating effects on Chinese art.

Chinese folkways and art symbols survived the perennial ravages of feudal wars and stultifying bureaucracies over a dozen dynasties. Can traditional custom and viable ancient art survive the mass-education programs of modern Chinese communism, which rejects belief in the ancient superstitions of folklore and the teachings of the three classic religions of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism?

Twentieth-century communism is a Western invention of the nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx, who wrote away in the library of the British Museum in London. China has its traditional communism and the common sense to adapt and reform. From the wu, the formless, the Chinese forever strive for yu, the formful. From the nonlogical emerges the logical—a mode of thinking alien to the scientific West that thousands of Westerners are now adopting.

Before World War II the majority of Chinese had great faith in the protective power of amulets or magical symbols and implicit trust in the benevolent influence of ancestor spirits. Social and economic reforms have swept away the old bases of Chinese culture: religions and folklore. Respect for the past remains. Temples have become museums. Archaeological recovery is intense. But communist art employs techniques of Western realism as a medium of instilling political ideals, as in the Soviet Union. Whether such innovations are right or wrong is not the concern of this book. Outlines of Chinese Symbolism & Art Motives is a handbook of traditional modes and art that predate Chinese communism, although common sense suggests that much must survive in modern China.

Let us then turn to the basis of Chinese art symbolism. What is the foundation of Chinese thought that gave existence to these fascinating forms? The answer is best found in the evolution of human thought in the ancient Asian and Pacific world. We know that animism prevailed for thousands of years in Asia, that all natural things whether organic or inorganic were believed to possess an independent spirit. Often these spirits inhabited rocks, trees, or animals and were regarded as the souls of dead ancestors who actively cared for their living descendants. Some of the spirits were fabulous creatures, but all supernatural entites influenced the affairs of living mortals. Natural phenomena such as rainbows or mists also acted as vehicles for ancestral spirits or the gods themselves. These concepts engendered a great respect for nature that has survived intact in some Oriental religions, such as Japanese Shintoism.

Reverence for birds is a special characteristic of Oriental animism, for birds suggest the free soul. Supernatural creatures, such as the dragon, were as real in the imaginations of the ancient Chinese as were the living creatures before their eyes.

The sophisticated religions modified ancient animisms. Five hundred years before Christ the teachings of Lâo Zî, Confucius, and latterly the Indian doctrine of Buddha gave to the East its enduring ideals of life and death. Oriental art is thus both philosphical and religious, founded on a primitive animism that became submerged. And thus Chinese art has two distinct phases—that of animism in the ages of stone or bronze, followed by that of the historical dynasties based on the classic religions. The transitional dynasty is conventionally the Táng (A.D. 618–906), but overlaps are many. The pre-Táng period is especially characterized by motifs that are strongly animistic, employing dragons and “demon” ancestral masks in abundance.

The second phase is richer in religious symbols of a complicated kind that are mostly inspired by the concepts of Buddhism: Bodhisattvas, angels, gate guardians, devils, and saints. In this second era, classic art reached its highest point in the achievements of the Sòng Dynasty (A.D. 960–1279), notably in painting and ceramics. Sòng painting abounds in naturalistic birds, fish, flowers, plants and mountains. Man is seen contemplating nature as an inconspicuous yet unique part of nature.

As a general rule the symbols of Chinese art become less ritualistic or magical as the dynasties proceed in time; yet, as we see in Williams, the basic animistic motifs such as the dragon persist through all epochs of Chinese art. In fact there is a persistent unity in Chinese art. The fabulous dragon seen in Shāng art one or two thousand years before Christ still looks out at us from the walls of Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong, Honolulu, London, New York and San Francisco.

The fashionable European taste for “Chinoiserie” has a history of at least three hundred years, over which time the Chinese, ever good businessmen, exploited the market by producing the exotic curiosities the Western barbarians wanted. Some of the Chinese exports are beautiful yet far from typical. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, scholars got to the principles of real Chinese art. Private collectors and museums then acquired the vast collections now to be seen in America and Europe. America has superb collections of Chinese art in institutions from Boston and Washington in the East to San Francisco and Honolulu in the West.

Archaeological finds in China are now protected by the Chinese communist government, a happy change from the times prior to World War II, when tomb robbing was a profession made lucrative by Western demand for Chinese art objects. Such thievery today would bring swift retribution in the form of a prison sentence.

When and where did Chinese art have its beginning? The answer is far from simple. Environmental changes over thousands of years as well as racial and ethnic complexities in what we now call China, from its frigid north to its subtropical south, gave rise to many Chinese cultures. Before the rise of the Shāng and Zhōu Dynasties, which mark the “modern” beginning of Chinese art, with their kuï or fabulous dragons and the tāotiè ancestral mask, there is a lengthy prehistoric art. Half a million years before the dynastic eras in the Lower Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, Peking man roamed the plains and hills of Chinese Asia. About 40,000 B.C., at the onset of the Upper Paleolithic Age, modern man emerged. Distinctive Chinese art symbols first made their appearance in the Chinese Neolithic (polished stone tool age) in the Yangshao culture, which emerged about 2,500 B.C. to endure a thousand years. The pottery of the early Yangshao exhibits patterns in red pigments that proceed in time through simple linear motifs to “primitive” conventionalized renderings of men and animals. From these early pictographic symbols, Chinese written characters evolved to highly abstract ideographic writing.

An astonishing fact of Chinese art is the sudden appearance in the Shāng Dynasty (c. 1766–1121 B.C.) of sophisticated bronze vessels bearing art motifs that are typically “Chinese” and are the progenitors of certain Chinese art symbols that have persisted for three or four thousand years. The Zhōu Dynasty (c. 1122–256 B.C.) developed the superb bronze art of the Shāng in such forms as time and circumstances required. These vessels were made for use in rituals performed to gain the favor of ancestral or other spirits. The archaic written Chinese characters inscribed on them provide information both on the development of writing and on their use as ritual offering vessels.

Diversity is characteristic of all Chinese art, both dynastic and pre-dynastic. Stylistic changes emerge from technical inventions or cultural preference. Basic media included stone, bronze, jade, shell, ceramics, silver, gold, silk, wood, and lacquer. The Hàn Dynasty (202 B.C. to A.D. 221) exhibited many of the cultural refinements of life that we regard today as typical of classic Chinese life. Silk, lacquer, and the writing brush appeared. We know much about the Hàn Chinese because of their custom of burying with their dead an abundance of personal goods, domestic articles, and little ceramic models portraying daily life. Hàn decoration is rich in geometric motifs, such as the zigzag, bands and lozenges. Bronze mirrors of the period have luxuriant designs on their reverse sides. Also in Hàn times the tiger, the tortoise, and other animals not used as art motifs in earlier periods make their appearance. It is the Hàn dragon that takes on all the features of the “typical” Chinese dragon with horns, a long tail, wings, a jagged spine, and plate-like scales. The phoenix also assumes its well-known form in the Hàn Dynasty.

Indian Buddhist teachings were known in Hàn times, yet it was not until the Táng Dynasty that Buddhism became well established in China. Buddhist teachings were opposed by the rulers, an opposition peacefully overcome as Buddhism merged with native Taoism and Chinese folk culture. The result was the emergence of one of the finest regional cultures the world has ever seen.

The greatest single achievement of Buddhism was the formation of the Dhyana meditation school, or Chán Buddhism, which was founded by the Indian “blue-eyed Brahmin” Bodhidharma (Japanese: Daruma), who is described by Williams under the subject of “tea.” Bodhidharma is said to have arrived in China in 527. His mystical teachings mingled Chinese practicality with Indian mysticism to produce Chán. Chán or Zen, to use the Japanese word, permeates the best Chinese art, and, along with paper, is China’s special gift to world civilization.

Chán influence reached its height in the Sòng Dynasty and thereafter declined in China. Huineng (Japanese: Eno), who lived from 638 to 713 in the Táng period, was one of Zen’s greatest exponents. The tea ceremony, flower arrangement, architecture, painting, and calligraphy owe much to Chán. The traditions withered in China but survived in Japan even into modern times in art and scholarship. Dr. Daisetz Suzuki (1870–1966), prophet of Zen to the West, has written much on the Chinese masters and their Japanese successors.

The ancient philosophical basis of Chinese lore and art symbolism is that the world and the heavens have polarity, namely a positive or male yáng and a negative or female yïn. This principle is one suggesting counterbalancing parts, one side giving energy to the other. When yáng and yïn work in society, the outcome is egalitarian and democratic, while in art the work is dynamic and creative. Symbolically yáng and yïn are depicted as a swirling S set in an “egg” or circle, each division having within itself a small circle or dot. It is usual to see one half of the design blocked in with a colour while the opposing side is either left plain or colored, red and black being a favorite contrast.

Another feature of Chinese artistic culture is the use of jade as a material believed to possess supernatural power. In neolithic times, copies of tools and weapons cut in jade were used ritually and are among the most beautiful products of Chinese culture. The bì, or disc of jade, and the bronze tripod, or three-footed vessel, represent the essence of traditional Chinese culture.

It is generally agreed among scholars and connoisseurs that the high point of Chinese civilization was reached in the Sòng Dynasty. Sòng painting and ceramic art reached a perfection never surpassed in any subsequent dynasty. A strong yet refined delicacy marks the age. Beautiful images of fishes, rocks, trees, and flowers pervade Sòng paintings. Man emerges into the natural world as a poetic creature content with his lot.

Certain flowers, fruits, and plants assumed persuasive symbolic power in Sòng times. The pine inspired thoughts of longevity, the bamboo of supple bending before life’s troubles, the mulberry of calm filial piety. Depicting seasons, the tree peony indicated the delights of spring, the chrysanthemum the charm of autumn, and the wild plum austere winter. Of all flowers the lotus is symbolically supreme, being the symbol of friendly summer, spiritual purity, creative power, and the blessing of immortal gods. Lotus leaves at the base of an image of Far Eastern iconography indicate that the figure depicted is of divine character.

There have been many developments in the study of Chinese art and culture since Williams wrote Outlines of Chinese Symbols & Art Motives, yet his book is still useful because of his uncluttered treatment of the timeless subject matter he presents. It remains a unique reference work. There are aspects of Chinese studies pursued today that Williams probably never dreamed of, such as the body of evidence linking the decorative arts of South Sea Island cultures of Polynesia and Melanesia to the Asian mainland, and notably to Shāng and Zhōu China. Yet that is of little relevance. Williams gives basic information in his book, making it a treasure house where layman and expert can find the facts of folklore and the art symbols of China.

TERENCE BARROW, Ph. D.