Customer Reviews

Chinese Symbolism & Art Motifs

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There ~are~ reasons to commend this book, like the bountiful illustrations, the charts showing the evolution of Chinese characters, etc. What I fault is that at many points the author departs from accuracy and injects over-Europeanized interpretations of Chinese mythology and symbols (for instance, characterizing Tibetan Lamas as "devil-worshippers" and calling the Chinese place of the dead and its god, "Hades" - repeatedly). To be truthful, some of the illustrations are so poorly drawn that you cannot really make out what they are. The text is easy to read and the topics covered numerous. I would use this book with caution, however, checking Williams' interpretations against other, more recent sources. For the record, I am giving this book a two because the only other reviewer to write about it gave it a five and that is far too high for it. I think this should yield an average of three, which is about right for this book.

This book is an A-Z listing of hundreds of Chinese names and symbols, with a brief explanation of the items relevance and importance in Chinese culture and history. Want to know the symbolism behind a bat, or a peach, or a mandarin duck, or other more abstract concepts, this book is for you. A very valuable reference tool for those interested in things Chinese.

"Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs" by C.A.S. Williams is listed as a "third edition" and dated 1989 (Tuttle paperback) and 2000 (Castle Books hardcover, apparently with a "new" introduction by Terence Barrow which seems to have been included in a Tuttle edition in the 1970s). This suggests that it is a fairly recent book. In fact these editions reproduce the 1941 Shanghai edition of a book published in 1931 in Peking (now officially romanized as Beijing), as "Outlines of Chinese Symbolism," and previously revised in 1932.

The full title of Williams' final version was "Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives: an alphabetical compendium of antique legends and beliefs, as reflected in the manners and customs of the Chinese." Dover Publications issued it as "Outlines of Chinese and Art Motives" (note the old-fashioned spelling) in 1976 (with correction of "obvious printing errors"); under which title I have also reviewed it. There have been other editions available as well, from a variety of publishers, some of which have slightly varying titles, such as "Encyclopedia of Chinese symbolism and art motives." (The Tuttle paperback seems the only one listed by Amazon to get personal, identifying Williams as Charles Alfred Speed instead of sticking with initials, so C.A.S. Williams is the name to search under.)

With 401 illustrations (including color plates on the inside covers, jacket flaps, or elsewhere, depending on the edition), it is an extremely attractive volume, packed with information, and reasonably well arranged. Williams' compendium looks like everything an ordinary curious reader could want; and I have found nothing quite comparable to it, at least in English, although there are now excellent studies of particular symbols and concepts. (Wolfram Eberhard's "Dictionary of Chinese Symbols" has a different focus, with different strengths and weaknesses.) It is still cited in reputable works by professional Sinologists, along with Williams' "Manual of Chinese Metaphor" (1920).

It should, however, be used with caution; a useful resource to someone with the necessary background can be a snare for the rest of us. Described by Dover as the "work of a scholarly English resident of China," it does not seem to reflect professional skills as a Sinologist, and frequently reports information at second or third hand, some of it already antiquated in 1921. Williams' own observations are interesting, but largely restricted to North China, mainly Peking and its vicinity (to Williams, very properly for the time, Peiping), and various Western enclaves on the coast. It is to Williams' credit, however, that he at least tries to include some Chinese popular culture, rather than just the idealized official versions. It is a reflection of the time that he actually rather apologizes for including Buddhist (therefore "foreign") and Taoist (to the elite as well as the missionaries, "superstitious") as well as Confucian symbols and concepts.

Those who have read much about China will soon notice that the transliterations are inconsistent, and sometimes very odd, at times corresponding to no system that is readily apparent. This is particularly common in Williams' quotations from his sources. I suspect that a mixture of the use of spoken vernaculars and "classical" pronunciation in those sources, alongside differing transliteration systems themselves, is responsible; Williams doesn't seem to have made a clear statement of his approach to this problem (or I missed it). Apparently he used the Wade-Giles himself, but didn't try to impose it on quotations. In a world of books then already littered with German, French, Dutch, English, and other systems for alphabetical renderings of Chinese, and now with the continuing use of the old Wade-Giles system alongside the "official" Pinyin, both with variants, this is a real nuisance, although usually not more than that. (It would be nice if, in some future edition, a qualified person supplied current Romanized renderings for the Chinese characters; and possibly the modern, simplified form; but it doesn't seem likely. Everyone seems to prefer reproducing the old book as-is.)

More serious is Williams' sometimes free-and-easy use of materials without, apparently, checking their ultimate origin, so that his impressive citations can't always be taken at face value. (In addition, his references to nineteenth-century academic journals are of little practical help today, although inevitable when the book was first published.) In one extreme case, the result is rather amusing. Williams mentions that the standard version of the "Willow Pattern" design on porcelain was invented in England in the eighteenth century, and copied for the foreign market by Chinese manufacturers. But he then reproduces a long, romantic, story explaining it, without making it quite clear that the story is also a Western concoction, containing only a few Chinese elements, which he does identify. This leaves the impression that it is, at whatever remove, and however freely, translated from a Chinese source. Robert H. van Gulik, diplomat, scholar, and novelist, later incorporated the main points of the tale into his Judge Dee mystery, "The Willow Pattern," explaining the situation in a Postscript, which cites Williams as a readily available source for the story. The Chinese translation of his novel, he pointed out, would introduce the supposedly Chinese story to the Chinese language....

Wherever there is overlap in coverage, I try to check Williams against Wolfram Eberhard's "A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols" (referred to earlier), which, among its other merits, often mentions whether a particular concept is common Chinese, regional, local, or associated mainly with minority cultures; an issue often ignored by Williams and his sources, including missionaries and merchants who took the groups they were working with as perfect representatives of Chinese culture. Of course, the same problem was found among serious scholars, who often described everything about the better-educated Chinese they came in contact with as "typical" until told that it wasn't; and tended to regard it at as in any case more genuine than the beliefs of the vast majority of Chinese. Williams' industry was admirable; one wishes the product of it had gone through further revision.