There are people who believe that “Henry” may again be a real emperor of China, that he has proved himself so strong by some of his recent actions as to suggest that had he been born twenty years earlier China would not now be trying to pose as a republic. Even as modern a young man as our Chinese teacher thinks that a constitutional monarchy is the only feasible relief from the present anarchistic chaos of theoretical republicanism. He puts at ten years, others at from a generation to a century, the time required under such a restraining form of government to prepare for a real republic. Who knows? Perhaps even if the monarchy returns it will not be “Henry” who will head it; soothsayers have been making strange prophecies recently about an entirely new emperor to come out of the provinces. Besides, “Henry” is a Manchu, and China has reverted after nearly three centuries to the misrule of her own people. But he is already on the spot, sitting on the vacant throne as it were, and that is seldom a disadvantage.
One of the first obligations of the foreigner coming to China for any length of time is to get a Chinese name. In other countries the people do the best they can, vocally and stelographically, to reproduce the names we already possess; even Japan, by using one of her modern scripts, can write all the but the more L-ish Western patronymics so that they read noticeably like the original. But the Chinese have always insisted that the outside barbarian adapt himself to Chinese ways, rather than the topsyturvy reverse. Besides, Chinese is a monosyllabic language, and naturally any stranger who comes to the country must be translated into words of one syllable. Unfortunately, even syllables are limited among the ideographs available to the Celestial brush-wielder, and names which to our notion are obviously of one become polysyllabic, to say the least, before the Chinese translator gets through with them. The result is that they seldom bear even a family resemblance to the original, and the foreigner who can recognize his own Chinese name, whether written or spoken, is already in a fair way to become an accomplished Oriental philologist.
Let me take my own name as an example. Except that it may be racially misleading, I have always considered it quite a tolerable name, not particularly difficult to pronounce, or to remember, by those who choose to do so, and unquestionably monosyllabic. Yet the Chinese scholar to whom it was submitted divided it at once into three syllables, like an expert taking apart an instrument one had always believed to be of one piece and returned it as “Feh Lan-kuh.” The first character stands for “extravagance,” but all the sting is taken out of that false and unjust start by the other two, which mean “orchid” and “self-control” respectively. Only three names are allowed in Chinese; therefore my given names in my own language were crowded into the discard. To the Chinese I am “Feh _Hsien-sheng_”—Mr. Extravagance; if they wish to go further and find out what particular form my wastefulness takes they respectfully inquire my honorable _ming-tze_, and are informed that my unworthy personal names are “Lan-kuh,” the Orchid with Self-control. The trouble is that almost any foreigner whose name begins with an F, or even with a Ph, is also Mr. Feh. There are a dozen of them within gunshot of us, surely a thousand in China, most of whose English names are not in the least like our own.