Square Seal Calligraphy - Chinese and Kufic

A Chinese calligraphy in the block square seal style

Several posts ago we noted the central place of the octagon in Chinese design. (See here.) It was mentioned there, but only in passing, that the same geometrical figure occurs throughout Islamic designs. This current post explores the matter of common elements in Chinese/Islamic design more thoroughly based, once again, upon observations made during travels through the Sino-Asiatic world. The consonances, similarities and parallels between these two very different traditions only become obvious when you see them first-hand. 

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We tend to experience the world nowadays through abstract media – web logs included - rather than through concrete realities. A key component in this is the so-called ‘research’ undertaken by teams of academics in universities. The world has never been so ‘researched’ and the ‘research’ has never been so tainted by the zeitgeist of the era. The truth is that the world is being ‘researched’ to death. The stream of ‘research’ papers and books is unending, along with theories and counter-theories, and then documentaries and videos and conferences and lecture tours. Very little of it amounts to very much of substance. Most of it concerns ‘deconstructing’ a supposedly evil past. The present author grew weary of all of that and has set out instead upon a journey through two continents and a dozen countries, travelling cheap, leaving theories and conferences behind and observing, as they say, the ‘facts on the ground’, the smells and tastes and textures of the world. The abstractions of the academic life are nebulous and neurotic; there comes a time when it is necessary to put some concrete foundations under the castles in the air.

Certain things become plain when you see them in reality rather than through the medium of books or academic studies. Among the neo-orientalist preoccupations of the author is the historical and on-going encounter between the Mohammadans and the Chinese. This is one of the key themes of the second leg of his sojourn in Asia and accounts for his current trajectory – albeit gradual - overland towards the old silk road. First, though, he has spent time in the Prince of Wales Island, or Pe Nang, where the Malay Muslims live side by side with a very old and illustrious colony of Han Chinese. The two cultures overlap and sometimes clash, but generally they yield to a constructive co-existence. You can read about these Islamic/Chinese encounters, but to witness them first-hand brings an entirely different sense to them. Academic studies pose as objective, but it is an objectivity in service to certain agenda. It is good to put that aside and to see the realities from the street-level.

In this context, the author was able to see numerous examples of two calligraphic traditions – one Islamic and the other Chinese – that, very obviously, and regardless of what academic obfuscators might say, are related. He had read of such before in erudite studies, but encountering it first hand rendered the parallels plain and palpable. Academics quibble over the historical connections, and there is always some deconstructionist professor out to deny the obvious, but there can be little question that the two traditions have, at some point, cross-fertilized. On the one hand we have the so-called ‘Kufic’ style of Arabic calligraphy, named after the city of Kufa, a city at the far end of the silk road. And on the other we have Chinese calligraphies which have developed from the very ancient tradition of block seals by which the Chinese have long signed documents and other official accounts. Related to this, we can also observe the tradition of Islamic geometrical patterning on the one hand, and the tradition of Chinese geometrical screen patterns and latticework on the other. The same or a similar genius seems to work in each of these traditions, regardless of how remote they might be in time and space. They are related, and point to the common ground where the Mohammadan tradition and the Chinese tradition meet.
Some examples:

Here is a typical Kufic Arabic design:

The cursive exuberance of the Arabic script has been tamed and confined into geometrical shapes used to fill the rectilinear space. The very same design strategy is used in certain Chinese calligraphies, such as these which the author photographed at the Western & Oriental Hotel in George Town:

Here the Chinese characters for wisdom and wealth are stylized into a rectilinear geometry. The similarities with the Kufic style known to the Mohammadans should be plain. Some other examples from an old temple gate in George Town:

It is not until seeing these two traditions side by side in situ that their common foundations can be fully appreciated. The Mohammadan and Chinese universes are assuredly very different - the Malays and the Chinese are assuredly very different peoples with starkly different sociologies - and yet there is a deep substrata of common foundations. The present author knows of no academic studies that penetrate that substrata in any meaningful way. 

The history that shaped this common foundation is uncertain, although it seems likely that the Chinese tradition was primary and the Arabic tradition derivative. The roots of Chinese block calligraphy are very ancient. The geometrical style developed from the need to adapt Chinese characters to block seals and stamps for official purposes:

It seems likely that this geometrical style of script then travelled the silk routes from the Far East into Mesopotamia where, for whatever reason, it found a home in the calligraphic schools of Kufa. That is, the Arabs learnt this style from the Chinese, just as they did such technologies as silk-making, with the silk road through Central Asia the connecting historical link. The extent of this debt to the Chinese, which is to say the extent to which Islam absorbed Chinese influences, is rarely appreciated. Academics in an age of deconstruction dwell on differences and downplay similarities. Yet the similarities are what are of interest here: not merely the fact of similar artistic conventions but, more importantly, similar mentalities and mind-sets. In both the Chinese and the Muslims we find a certain sense of the geometric, a Platonic sense of the geometric underpinnings of the dynamic cosmos. In both cases this is expressed via a sacred calligraphy in which world-as-text is implicit. 

Below are some photographs of Chinese geometric seals from a temple in George Town:

Anyone familiar with classical Mohammadan design will see the similarity between these Chinese seals and corresponding designs found throughout the Middle East. But it is not just a matter of historical appropriation and 'influence' - quantifiable 'influences' are a matter of academic 'research'; it is more a matter of a common intellectual core, remarkable because to every outward appearance the Chinese and Mohammadan temperaments and world-views seem so very different or even at odds. At a certain level, then - quite aside from historical encounters on the silk road - the Chinese and Mohammadan traditions meet. 

Regarding the broader question of the sense of the geometric and a shared mentality, consider also the tradition of Chinese lattice designs. Here again we are clearly in a similar intellectual domain to that which created the great heritage of Islamic geometric patterns. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Further Adventures in the Tea Trade

English tea - a neo-colonialist celebration

Tea, apparently, is an evil and disgusting vestige of colonialism, a filthy brew of wickedness emblematic of oppression, racism and exploitation. Leftists and progressives who know imperialism when they see it never touch the stuff. Those that insist on drinking it are reprobates, fascists, villains, and probably homophobes as well.

This is the sort of thing that, as they say, you simply cannot make up. No. In all seriousness, it is a sentiment lifted from an article that appeared in the Guardian – where else? – by a supposed “journalist” Joel Golby written for all those pearl-clutching latte elitists desperately concerned to purge every last trace of colonialism from their miserable, guilt-ridden lives. “Liking tea,” he writes, “has its roots in colonialism…” and we wouldn’t want that, now, would we? The article – no kidding - was a follow up piece to how post-colonial social justice warriors should eliminate HP sauce from their diet! Both items – tea and HP sauce – are – horror of horrors! – British, and in these enlightened times only members of the Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan would even consider keeping such things in their kitchen.

The barking mad absurdity of this is unfortunately not isolated nor even a joke. Several posts ago (see here) these pages featured a restaurant in Portland named Saffron Colonial that had fallen foul of the lunatic self-righteousness of joyless cultural Marxists. In that case, the restaurant in question serves fine teas by local tea suppliers - and they may well serve HP sauce too - to accompany a British Empire themed menu. They have attracted protests and petitions, hatred and tantrums, because they dare to serve British food. This has become a favorite battle-field for contemporary Left-wing bullies. Not content with insisting that men sit down to urinate it seems these tedious busy bodies have decided that we must now eliminate all things British from our diet. 

The present author was therefore amused to be walking along in Muslim post-British Langkowi recently when he saw the following restaurant catering to tourists:

This classy and popular establishment is owned and operated by a young hard working Indian family. Not a social justice warrior in sight. The menu features cuisine from British India and celebrates the great diversity of India brought about by historical waves of invaders: Turkoman, Mughul, Portugese, French, British, etc., a heritage of which the Indian owners are proud. The menu also features a selection of excellent teas from the tea plantations of Malaysia, such as those in the Cameron Highlands, which were established, of course, by the British.

Inspired by Mr Golby's unhinged rant about the politically incorrectness of tea drinking, this page is duly dedicated to tea. 

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First, a note about coffee. In India - most notably Calcutta - tea (chai) is consumed with milk and sugar. It is more a confection than anything else. It is very milky and very sweet, and taken in small earthen cups. In Pe Nang, where the author has been resident for the last month or so, this mode of consumption is reserved for coffee - the renowned Penang White, a unique local speciality. It too is taken more as a confection than as a beverage. 

A 'Penang White', for those coffee connoisseurs who are unaware of it, is made from beans pan-fried in butter and sugar rather than roasted in the usual way. It is then served with condensed milk. It is enjoyed throughout the Prince of Wales Island and is a feature of many coffee establishments in the old quarters of George Town such as the ramshackle cafe on China Street pictured below: 

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The real joy of George Town, however, is the many Chinese tea houses and tea traders. It will no doubt come as a surprise to the Chinese that tea drinking is a vile colonialist habit to be eschewed and frowned upon by all right-thinking people: the Chinese tradition of tea drinking extends back thousands of years, and even in more recent times the Chinese of George Town (and the wider Malay peninsula) were supporters of the British and enthusiastically embraced British habits. This includes the British manner of preparing tea (the 'Western method'), although the more traditional methods ('Gong Fu') continue as well. 

TWG Tea Salon, Gurney Plaza, George Town.  An up-market store featuring the very finest (and most expensive) teas in the world. 

A traditional Chinese tea house, George Town

Residing in George Town allowed the present writer to explore a full range of fine Chinese teas. There are several categories listed below:

The Chinese character for tea

White Tea - very little processing. More or less fresh tea buds sun dried. Subtle and fresh. Extremely light in flavor. Sometimes with slightly nutty notes.

Yellow Tea - a rare grade of tea once preserved for the Imperial court. A flavor profile in between white and green tea with a lingering sweetness.

Green Tea - young buds and leaves, but unoxidised. Chinese green tea is pan-baked to stop oxyidization. Japanese green tea is steamed. The Japanese style has grassier flavours. The Chinese style is nuttier and more complex, less grassy. Fresh tasting with some astringency and a clean finish on the palette. 

Oolong Tea - semi-oxydized tea with a wide range of flavours depending on the extent of oxidization. Darker grades produce fruity notes. Suitable for serving with food. 

Black Tea - fully (or near fully) oxyidized tea. The Chinese refer to it as "hong cha" = red tea, because the liquor it produces is reddish. The most common grade of tea drunk in the West. Full flavoured. 

Pu Erh Tea - fermented dark teas. Often fermented for ten or more years. Very earthy flavours. These teas are a real joy - hearty with complex flavours - but can be quite expensive. 

Scented Teas - jasmine tea, rose tea, Earl Grey etc. 

The author's tea set with a collection of Chinese teas. Essential equipment when travelling. The small 'buttons' of tea shown are various grades of Pu Erh (fermented) tea. 

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PREPARING TEA

There are two main methods of preparing tea: the traditional oriental method – called Gong Fu (or 'Kung Fu', a term that merely indicates a subject of study that requires ritual and patience) – and the modern Western method. Everyone is familiar with the latter. You put some tea leaves in a tea pot, pour over boiling water, let it sit for a few minutes, then it is ready. This can be refined in several ways, such as by using high-quality loose leaf tea, and by using water at the optimum temperature and steeping for the optimum duration, but it is essentially a straight-forward method that requires little expertise. Gong Fu is rather more elaborate, an art, but it is not a difficult art to master. Below are some notes on preparing tea according to the traditional method:

GONG FU

1. Pour hot (not boiling*) water over the leaf tea to clean it. Dispense with the water immediately. This cleans and softens and activates the leaves.

2. Pour hot (not boiling) water over the leaves a second time. Let stand for about thirty seconds. 

3. Pour into a small cup. Drink. (You should "slurp" tea, taking plenty of air into the mouth when drinking. This maximizes flavour.) 

4. Repeat steps 2. and 3. for a second cup. 

Most good teas can be used for six or seven or more infusions. Each infusion will be slightly different. The idea is to taste the tea in small cups over many infusions to extract and experience the full flavour profile of the tea. 

In the 'Western method' the tea is left to infuse for two minutes or more and all of the flavours are extracted at once. In the 'Gong Fu Method' the flavours are extracted in a series of short infusions which are sampled from small tasting cups.

* = most grades of tea should be infused in water at about 80-90 deg.C., which is to say just under boiling point.  

Note: One of the surest ways to improve enjoyment of any tea is to purchase loose leaf tea from a single tea estate rather than a blend of teas from many estates. This will cost extra and only speciality stores will be able to oblige, but it makes a great difference. Tea from one location differs in flavour from tea from other locations. 'Blends' even out these differences are produce a uniform product. 

* * * 

The secret of tea is this: that while a stimulant, it is – quite unlike coffee – internalizing. It both stimulates and relaxes. This is the attribute of tea first discovered by the Chinese and adapted to the typical temperament of oriental spirituality. Coffee, by contrast, is an externalizing stimulant. It was, accordingly, adapted to the quite different spiritual temperament of the Saracens, namely an outward-looking and active mode of contemplation compared to the more quietist internalizing contemplation of the Far East. 

This is to generalize, certainly, but everything the present author has seen on his long journeys both recent and past confirm it. In the Sino-Asiatic world in which he is currently travelling, tea has historically been regarded as a spiritual adjunct, aside from its social roles. In the Near East and other parts of the Muhammadan world by extension, coffee tends to play this part; it has historically been used as a stimulant by the Soofis and the Irfans and assorted Islamic mystics. As a stimulant it is better adapted to the typical modes of Muhammadan spiritual life. These modes are externalist. The Muhammadans, for instance, do not have an institution of monasticism and world-renunciation, nor practices of internalizing meditation. As a stimulant – paradoxical though this seems – tea is better suited to the internalized modes of oriental spiritual life. It was for this reason that tea was revered as the fabled “celestial drink” of legend - a sacred drink - before it became a common beverage. The remarkable property of the drink is that it both stimulates and elevates.

We might compare the different modes of stimulation of coffee and tea, Islamic and oriental, with, say, the different narcotic properties of hashish on the one hand and opium on the other, where hashish is 'externalizing' (exciting the senses) and opium is 'internalizing' (dreamy, sleep-inducing). The differences are not absolute, but they are real enough. In general terms we can say that coffee is best adapted to Islamic modes of spiritual practice. Tea, on the other hand, goes naturally with the practices of Taoism, Boodhism and related oriental modes of spirituality. These are not merely historical accidents. The two stimulants, tea and coffee, have different effects upon the human sensorium and upon consciousness itself and so are each adapted to different temperaments. 

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Yours,

Harper Mc Alpine Black

The Goddess of Mercy: Tea and Temples

Temple of the Goddess of Mercy

Of all the many Chinese temples in George Town and throughout the Prince of Wales Island, the central temple, the oldest, and the acknowledged spiritual centre of the Straits Chinese is the temple of the Goddess of Mercy on Pitt Street. It is not as splendid as many of the more lavish temples - in fact it is small and humble - but it is regarded as the most auspicious and the most blessed. 

As is the usual practice, its location was chosen according to the requirements of sacred geomancy (feng sui); it was made to open onto a long vista towards the sea. Originally, it was sacred to seafarers, the temple of sailors and traders from South China who travelled to and from the Malacca Straits. 

At a certain juncture, however, Arab traders constructed a building in the line of sight of the temple, for which the Chinese put a curse on the building. Then, at much the same time, a large area of sea was reclaimed so that what is now Beach Street, which was once the foreshore, has ended up being further inland from the dock. In this process the entire feng sui of the Pitt street temple has been lost. 

Moreover, its function as a temple for seafarers has ceased to be relevant and instead it has become a temple for the great Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin. She is the patron goddess of seafarers, but her broader attributes as goddess of universal mercy have come to the fore and the whole Chinese community – not just sailors and traders – today see the temple as their spiritual home. Chinese come from far and wide to visit the temple. On any given day it is a busy hub of pilgrims and devotees. 

Cast-iron censors in the temple forecourt 

The site of the Goddess of Mercy temple in George Town is marked by two wells, known as the two 'Dragon Eyes' (although it is said there is a third well under the main altar, a third eye.) This is a picture of one of the wells in the forecourt of the temple, accessed from Pitt Street. 

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A few notes on this goddess:

*Guanyin is one of the major deities of Chinese religious practice in South Asia. She is extremely popular and widely venerated.

*In Boodhist reckonings this deity is the male boddhisatva Avalokiteśvara who appears in the Lotus Sutra in a masculine form but who may take other forms according to the requirements of ‘skilful means’. In China, the deity is feminine.

*The Chinese tradition gives many accounts of the origins of this goddess aside from the accepted derivation from Boodhist sources.

*The twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra, the chapter concerning Guanyin, is often treated as a separate sutra by the Chinese. It is read, chanted and recited throughout the Sino-Asiatic world.

*The names of Guanyin in various languages refer to “he/she who hears crying” or similar. That is, the deity who hears human suffering.

*This goddess is known as Kannon to the Japanese (after whom the camera brand was named.)

*The goddess is assimilated into Taoism as one of the immortals, Cihang Zhenren, a woman who lived in the Shang Dynasty.

*The resemblance between Guanyin and the Christian Virgin Mary has often been noted and is sometimes made explicit in iconography. She is often depicted as a mother nursing an infant. When Christianity was banned in Japan, on pain of death, Christians would use statues of Guanyin as a substitute object of veneration.

*She is known as the ‘Guide to the Pureland’. Many believe she guides the souls of her adherents to the western Pureland after death. 

* * * 

IRON GODDESS OF MERCY TEA

There is a very fine Chinese tea called Tieguanyin, a name meaning 'Iron Goddess of Mercy' - Iron Goddess of Mercy Tea or Tea of the Iron Boddhisatva. It is an expensive premium variety of oolong tea from the Fujian province prepared by a complex curing process and is widely sought among tea connoisseurs. The present author was fortunate to find and sample some in a tea house in Cintra Street in George Town. Regarding the origins of the tea there are several legends. Here is one:

There was once a peasant farmer named Wei who every day would pass by a derelict temple containing an iron statue of the goddess Guanyin. Over the years he watched its condition deteriorate and felt very sorry that, being poor, he did not have the means to restore the temple. One day, though, he went to the temple, swept it out and lit candles, thinking it was the least he could do. That night the goddess came to him in a dream. She told him of a cave behind the temple and promised him that a treasure awaited him in return for his devotion. The next day he went to the cave and found a shoot of a tea plant. He took it, planted it in his field and nurtured it into a bush. Then he gave cuttings of the plant to his neighbours and they planted them out. Soon they began selling the rare tea as "Tieguanyin", the tea of the Iron Goddess of Mercy. They all prospered and grew rich and at length the temple was restored.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Shanghai Women - 1920s and 30s

Love Lane in central George Town is so called, they say, because in former times it was the district in which Chinese businessmen were inclined to keep their mistresses. Today it is a fashionable street of terraced ‘link’ houses full of boutiques, tea houses and coffee shops, many with a nostalgic theme invoking the romance of this former era. The present author is staying in a cheap hotel just around the corner and not far from the Sunrise Sweetheart Café, a venue famous for ladies of easy virtue. It is in many of these shops and cafes on Love Lane - such as the very commodious number 41, the entrance of which is pictured below - that one can find reproductions of posters, advertisements and calendars from the golden era of Shanghai fashion, the 1920s and 30s – Chinese nostalgia. This ‘Out of Phase’ post is accordingly dedicated to the same. George Town is not all Chinese temples.

It was the fashion designers of Shanghai who transformed female attire and the Chinese female image under the Chinese nationalist Republic during the 1920s and 30s. After the turmoil of the revolution in the 1940s these same designers shifted to Hong Kong and Singapore and other outposts of Chinese culture, such as George Town, but by then the transformation they started had been complete. The attire of the Chinese woman had been changed forever. Chinese women were brought into modernity. The communists tended to regard the new fashions as ‘Western imperialism’ and, ironically, female attire after the revolution reverted to older, utilitarian, and hence more conservative styles. This regression into dowdiness reached its peak during the catastrophic Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s. In more recent times, the increasingly open policies of the People's Republic have re-embraced the fashion revolution of the early XXth century, which is to say they have rediscovered style and good taste and the great sartorial revolution of the 1920s and 30s is at last widely acknowledged in mainland China.

At the centre of the Shanghai style is the garment called the cheongsam. This is a single-piece, tight-fitting full-body dress that became the characteristic garment of the modern Chinese woman. Contrary to claims that it was an importation of Western styles, its roots are in older Chinese garments and so is a continuation, or a modern adaptation, of distinctly Chinese traditions. The genius of the Shanghai design houses was to create a modern garment that is as Chinese as it is modern. Either way, the Moaists frowned upon it as bourgeois while, conversely, it has been a symbol of the anti-communist pro-capitalist Chinese, a badge of modernity and liberation. Here is a picture of the typical modern cheongsam:

Here is a picture of traditional women's attire - the forerunner to the modern cheongsam - from the period immediately before the Shanghai design houses reinvented the garment in its modern form:   

As still prevails in Islamic attire, the traditional Chinese garment was designed to completely obscure the female form and allowed no naked skin to be visible at all. The modern cheongsam, in contrast, is tighter fitting, accentuates the waist, makes a virtue of the feminine form, celebrating female beauty, and shows bare arms. The original Shanghai cheongsam is full length and goes down to the feet; later versions became knee length or three-quarter length.

The liberation of the female form from the dowdy sacks of past styles was then embraced and celebrated in Chinese popular culture. Women in the cheongsam began to appear in advertising and in items of popular visual culture such as wall calendars. Some examples:

Images from that golden era - China in the 1920s and 30s - are now highly collectible and are regarded as the finest fruits of early Chinese modernity. The blossoming of China, later interupted by the Moaist revolution, is on display in these images. They show the Chinese creating their own distinctive modernity. A similar blossoming occured in Japan too. These were closed societies, long insulated from modernity. Then - often with trauma and upheaval - they belatedly decided to embrace modernity on their own terms. This, finally, is what such images as these are really about. They are not just 'nostalgia' and even less are they 'soft porn'. They are a record of how the oriental genius came to terms with the realities of the modern mode, and even more so, confidently set out to forge a modernity of its own. 

There are many modernities. In some cases it is a mode imposed by European civilization upon others. The Chinese, like the Japanese, were never going to be content to receive modernity passively like that. After resisting modernity for a long while, when they finally opened their societies to the new modern world they were determined to do so in their own way, with their own aesthetic values. They were never going to be mere imitators. They were going to appropriate and transform. Insofar as these images show a Westernized sensibility, it has been appropriated and transformed.

Below readers can find a selection of pictures from the Shanghai golden era - advertising posters, calander girls, erotica - images that adorn the shops and tea houses of George Town, setting the high-point and standard of modern style in Chinese women's attire and conventions of beauty.

It is worth adding here that the Chinese (Asians in general) continue to have fine taste and that Asian women are undoubtedly among the best dressed in the world. This has been very noticeable to this present writer on his travels. The Indian/Hindoostani world has been nowhere near as succesful in creating its own modern aesthetic. Hindoo women remain beautiful in traditional attire but on the whole have not made a succesful transition to modern dress. There has been no equivalent to the modern cheongsam in India. (And Indian men, let it be said, are almost uniformly badly dressed, whereas the Asian gentleman's appropriation of the business suit has been entirely succesful.)

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black