The Country Where Politeness Killed Business / 君子国：太讲礼貌反而做不成买卖

A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 1

From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapters 11–12 · 第十一、十二回 · 君子国

By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

Off an unmarked coast in the Eastern Sea, in the reign of the Empress Wu Zetian, late seventh century. Three travelers from the Tang court — a disgraced scholar, his merchant brother-in-law, and an old sea captain — step ashore onto a country where the worst insult you can pay a shopkeeper is to accept his asking price. They have come to admire the famously gentle manners of the people. They will leave understanding that the gentlest country in the world is also the one where you cannot get anything done.

The Arrival

The first thing Tang Ao (唐敖, a disgraced explorer-scholar — the former tànhuā third-place laureate of the imperial examinations, stripped of his title for being a friend of the rebel Xu Jingye, now traveling overseas on his brother-in-law's merchant ship to escape the political dust) noticed about the Country of Gentlemen was the gate of the city. Above the gate, four characters were carved in plain stone:

唯善為寶 — "Goodness alone is treasure."

Inside the gate, the streets were not quiet. They were crowded — a normal Eastern Sea port town, full of shoppers and porters and bargaining voices. The clothes were the same as in the Tang capital. The language was mutually intelligible. There were no horns growing out of anyone's head, no third eyes, no scaled tails. From the outside, it looked like the most ordinary country in the entire voyage so far.

So Tang Ao did the natural thing for a Confucian gentleman traveling abroad. He stopped an elderly local on the street, bowed politely, and asked the obvious question: Why do they call your country the Country of Gentlemen?

The old man looked at him blankly. He didn't know. Tang Ao asked another elder. That man didn't know either. Tang Ao asked the famous custom — I have heard that here, people prefer yielding to fighting; why is that the way? The third elder shook his head and said: I have no idea what you are talking about.

By the time the captain, Duo Jiugong (多九公, Duo the Ninth — a retired sea captain in his eighties, ten previous voyages, the only man on the ship who has actually been to most of these countries before; the closest thing the expedition has to a guide), caught up, Tang Ao had collected six denials in a row from six separate elders, and was beginning to wonder whether the famous reputation of the country was a misunderstanding by its neighbors.

"That's exactly what it is," Duo Jiugong said calmly. "The name 'Country of Gentlemen' was given to them by the foreigners next door. They don't think of themselves as anything special. They just live this way. Look around."

Tang Ao looked. Farmers stepped aside in the field-paths so that other farmers could pass. Pedestrians on a narrow road were all walking near the edges, each one trying to give more space than he took. Nobody was raising his voice. Nobody was hurrying. The traffic flowed in a kind of slow choreography, as if everyone in the town were performing the opening scene of a court ritual in which they had each been assigned the deferential role.

"Fair enough," Tang Ao admitted. "But we should look more carefully. There is more to a country than its road manners."

They walked into the market.

The Country (Three Transactions That Run Backwards)

Transaction One: The Bailiff Who Wants to Pay More

The first thing they saw was a county bailiff (隶卒) buying something from a market stall. The bailiff was holding the goods in his hands and saying:

"Sir, your goods are of such high quality, and yet you are asking such a low price. How could I possibly accept this in good conscience? I beg you — raise the price. Otherwise it will look as if you do not really want my business."

Tang Ao stopped walking.

"Duo Jiugong," he whispered, "in our country, the seller asks high, the buyer offers low, and they meet in the middle. Here, the seller has already asked a price, and the buyer — instead of haggling down — is haggling up. This is not in any travel account I have ever read."

The merchant's reply, when it came, was even more disorienting:

"Sir, you do me too much honor. I confess my asking price was already excessive — I am ashamed to have set it so high. And now you tell me the goods are of better quality than my price suggests? You shame me further. The old saying goes: 'Sellers ask for the sky, buyers offer the dust, and you meet at fair ground.' But you, sir, are not even meeting me at fair ground. You insist on overpaying. I cannot in honor accept it. Please — take your business elsewhere, where you can find an honest tradesman."

The bailiff lost his temper. "If you call yourself a Confucian," he said, "you must observe the rule of reciprocity. Trade requires mutual honesty. Do you take me for a fool, that I cannot judge the value of what I am holding?"

The argument escalated. The bailiff, defeated, threw down the full asking price in coin, picked up half the goods, and tried to leave. The merchant blocked his way: "You have paid too much for too little! Take more goods!" The bailiff refused to take more goods. Two passing strangers had to be drafted into arbitration. They eventually ruled that the bailiff would take 80 percent of the goods, leaving 20 percent behind as compensation to the seller for having received the full price. Honor was satisfied. The bailiff left, scowling. The merchant looked vaguely cheated.

Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong stared at each other.

Transaction Two: The Soldier Who Refuses Cheap

A few stalls down, a junior soldier was buying a different item from a different merchant. The merchant had insisted that the buyer name his own price. The soldier had named one. The merchant was now objecting that the named price was too high.

"My goods are not fresh," the merchant insisted. "They are ordinary. Compared to other shops, they are inferior. Whatever price you have offered, please cut it in half. Even half is too much. I cannot accept what you propose."

The soldier was equally firm. "Sir, I may be a junior man, but I am not blind. I can see what I am holding. To call good merchandise bad merchandise — even out of modesty — is to insult both of us. Half-price would be a robbery. Public commerce requires honesty."

The soldier, defeated, paid half-price. Then, conceding the merchant's earlier point that he had taken inferior goods at a discount, he chose only the highest-quality items from the stall and tried to walk away. The merchant chased after him: "You're taking only the best pieces and leaving me with the worst! What kind of dealer can survive customers like you?" The soldier explained that he genuinely needed the lower-quality versions for his actual purpose. The merchant relented but insisted, again, that the price was wrong. They compromised: the soldier took an equal mix of best and worst quality, paid the discounted price, and left under the disapproving eyes of two more passing arbiters who clearly thought he had not been generous enough.

Transaction Three: The Farmer Who Cannot Give Away His Excess

The third scene Tang Ao witnessed was an ordinary farmer paying for goods with silver ingots. The transaction was complete; the goods were already in the farmer's arms; he was walking away. The merchant, who had been weighing the silver after the fact, suddenly ran after him calling: "Sir! Wait! The silver is too good!"

The farmer's silver, it turned out, was both higher in purity (色, sè) than local market standard and slightly heavier on the scale (戥头过高) than the merchant required. The merchant insisted on returning the surplus. The farmer waved him off: "It's nothing. A few grains of pure silver. Next time I come, you can credit me."

The merchant refused. "Last year another customer said exactly that. He never came back. I have been trying to find him to return his silver ever since. If you also never come back, I will be in debt to two strangers in the next life, and I have only one life left to repay it. Take the surplus now, sir, or take more goods to its value. I beg you."

The farmer, finally cornered, took two extra items off the stall to settle the surplus and fled. The merchant stood on the street muttering that he had still cheated the man — the silver was worth more than two items, the trade was off-balance, the karma was unsound — and when a beggar wandered past a moment later, the merchant weighed out the remaining surplus to the last grain and pressed it into the beggar's hand, on the grounds that it was the only way to make the books balance.

Tang Ao watched the silver change hands and turned slowly to Duo Jiugong.

"This," he said, "is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

Duo Jiugong, who had been watching the same scene with the trained eye of a man who has bought and sold cargo in twenty foreign ports, said nothing for a moment. Then he said:

"It is also the most useless market I have ever stood in."

The House of Wu (The Twist)

It was at this point that two old gentlemen approached them on the street, white-haired and ruddy-cheeked, dressed simply but with the unmistakable air of provincial scholars who had retired well. They introduced themselves as the brothers Wu — Wu Zhihe (吴之和, the elder brother, a retired imperial scholar of Junzi Guo, formally a "minister of the realm" with a court-granted residence plaque) and Wu Zhixiang (吴之祥, the younger brother, also a retired scholar with court honors; together the two brothers are referred to in the original as 双宰辅 — "the twin ministers" — among the most senior intellectuals of the country). They invited Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong home for tea.

The Wu residence was almost a parody of scholarly modesty. Two wooden gates, a hedge of climbing vines, a lotus pond in front, a small grove of bamboo behind. A plaque hung in the hall: Wèichuān Villa (渭川别墅) — a literary reference to the bamboo groves of the Wei River where the recluse-poets of the Tang were said to have hidden from court politics. The plaque had been granted to the brothers personally by the king of the country, in recognition of their public service.

Tang Ao opened the conversation with the standard tourist's compliment. Your country lives up to its name. The manners are exemplary. The people are truly worthy of being called gentlemen.

The elder brother Wu bowed and demurred politely — We are merely a remote sea-coast people, lucky to receive moral instruction from the great Tang court; we hardly deserve such a name. Then, having dispatched the courtesy, he leaned forward.

"Our humble country has long admired the great Tang. We hear of the Emperor's wisdom, the perfection of the rituals, the prosperity of the empire. The state of our two nations need not be discussed; what I would ask you about, if I may, is the customs of your country. We have heard certain things — practices among the common people — that we, in our ignorance, find difficult to understand. May we ask?"

Tang Ao said yes, please ask.

What followed, in Chapter 12, is the most concentrated piece of social satire in all of nineteenth-century Chinese fiction. The two Wu brothers, taking turns, listed eleven specific customs of the Tang Empire that they could not understand — and asked Tang Ao to explain them. The eleven customs (paraphrased):

1. Funerals delayed for feng-shui. Coffins kept above ground for years — sometimes two or three generations — while families search for an auspicious burial plot. Temple yards and outskirts piled with unburied dead. The brothers point out that feng-shui masters' own parents are usually buried in ordinary plots; if good geomancy worked, the masters would use it themselves.
2. Lavish birth-celebration banquets. A child's first month, hundred-day, and first-birthday occasioning slaughter of dozens of animals — to bring the infant good fortune by killing other living things. The brothers note the contradiction with Buddhist and Confucian merit.
3. Sending children to become monks and nuns as insurance against illness. If a sick child is "given to the Buddha," the family hopes for protection. The brothers point out the social cost: temples overrun with reluctant clergy; population eventually destabilized.
4. Litigiousness. Filing lawsuits over trivial disputes for sport or revenge.
5. Slaughtering plow-oxen for meat. The animal that feeds the realm being eaten by the realm.
6. Extravagant banquets for guests — rare delicacies piled up for display, most of it thrown away. The brothers single out the absurdity of bird's-nest soup, which they note is bland and tasteless but expensive, therefore considered a luxury — a textbook case of confusing price with quality.
7. The "three aunties and six grannies." The category of itinerant women — fortune-tellers, matchmakers, midwives, sellers of cosmetics, female monks, female doctors — who serve as gossip-conduits and household disruptors in respectable families.
8. Cruel stepmothers.
9. Female footbinding. The brothers' single most direct denunciation: "To take a healthy girl, in the name of beauty, and bind her feet until the bones break and the flesh festers — this is no different from torture. How can a people who teach Confucian benevolence permit it?"
10. Astrological matchmaking ("eight characters" horoscope-matching) determining marriages that two people would otherwise be perfectly suited for.
11. General extravagance in weddings, funerals, food, clothing, housing — debt for show, debt for face, debt for nothing.

Tang Ao, the tànhuā scholar, the man who knows the Confucian classics by heart, the proud son of the Tang empire — listens to all eleven items in silence. He has no good rebuttal. He bows. He thanks the brothers. He leaves.

Translator's Travel Log

I want to be clear about what the joke is. It is not the joke you think it is.

If you read the Country of Gentlemen chapter casually, it reads as a sweet parable: "What if everyone were too polite? Then the market wouldn't work, ha ha." That is the version that gets quoted in Chinese textbooks, and it is the version most modern Anglophone summaries of Flowers in the Mirror present. It is also a misreading.

Li Ruzhen is not satirizing politeness. He is doing something cleverer, and much more cutting. He is showing you a country where the people actually live by the values you claim to believe in — Confucian deference, mutual yielding, contempt for personal gain, complete trust in another's good will — and he is showing you that in such a country, ordinary commerce becomes a comedy of mutual humiliation. The market grinds. The bailiff goes home angry. The farmer flees with extra goods he didn't want. The merchants end up giving silver to beggars to balance their conscience.

That is the setup. The punchline is in the next room.

The two Wu brothers, the most senior gentlemen of the most gentlemanly country in the world, the men who have built their lives on these Confucian principles — turn around and ask the visiting Tang scholar to please explain to them how his own country, the great and civilized Tang, manages to leave its parents' coffins above ground for three generations, butcher its plow oxen, break the feet of its little girls, and confuse expensive bird's-nest soup with good food. They ask this politely. They ask this very politely. They ask it with the bottomless courtesy of people who genuinely cannot understand why anyone would do these things.

Tang Ao, who came here to admire them, has no answer. None of his Confucian training prepared him for the moment when a foreigner, taking the doctrine seriously, would calmly enumerate the eleven specific ways in which his home country fails to live up to it.

The joke is that the Country of Gentlemen is not paradise. It is the reductio ad absurdum of Confucianism applied honestly. It is what China would look like if China actually did what China kept telling itself to do. Li Ruzhen knows this is impossible. He also knows that the failure mode of the real China is much worse than a comically polite marketplace — and he uses the imaginary one to roast the real one with the most savage straight face in nineteenth-century fiction.

This is what Jonathan Swift was doing in Gulliver's Travels. Li Ruzhen, in coastal Jiangsu in 1818, was doing it independently and very well. He had probably never heard of Swift. They reached the same trick across a century and ten thousand miles, and they reached it for the same reason: both of them lived in countries whose stated values and actual behavior had drifted so far apart that the only honest way to point it out was to invent a foreign land that took the values seriously and watch what happened.

Li Ruzhen, by the way, was himself a failed examination candidate. He gave up the civil service ladder in his thirties, retired to a small house in coastal Jiangsu, and spent fifteen years writing this novel and a treatise on Chinese phonology nobody read. He was not a successful man in the eyes of his society. He was, however, paying close attention to it. The Country of Gentlemen chapter is what happens when a clever, frustrated, deeply learned man with no career left to lose decides to write down what he actually thinks of his country's habits. It came out funny. It also came out, four hundred years from now, completely intact.

Next port: The Land of Giants — where men stand thirty feet tall and walk on five-colored clouds whose color depends entirely on the moral worth of the walker. Tang Ao discovers that lying produces visibly black clouds, and that fashion in this country is therefore very difficult. → [Coming soon]