Westerners once spread a saying: we can go to China without seeing the three halls, not without seeing gu hongming.

Who is gu hongming? He was born in nanyang, studied in the west, married in the east, and served in the north. Proficient in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, malaya and other 9 languages, obtained 13 doctoral degrees, read the English newspaper ridiculed the British, said that the americans have no culture, the first Chinese "analects", "the mean" in English and German translation to the west.

Gu hongming, the master of Chinese culture, once said, "if the Chinese spirit is one of eternal youth and national immortality, then the secret of immortality is the wonderful combination of soul and reason. But this combination is imbalance, lang in the modern society of China, said: "this generation of China is the only disrespect in five thousand to a generation of ghosts and gods, I am not advocating superstition, but today in a simple economic development as the goal of governing philosophy makes Chinese generation more to look" money ", but has nothing to fear from disrespect spirits, moral codes is unscrupulous, graft without the rule of law."

He used a teapot with N cups to demonstrate the rationality of polygyny and the supposedly high mountain of English. Mr. Gu was not only a man of letters, but also a symbol of his time.

We may regard "the Chinese spirit" as his final struggle as a stubborn "conservative", who, at the end of his country's life, still stubbornly tried to sell Chinese culture and ideals to the western world. No matter how emotional between the lines, that kind of silly cute, but full of love for traditional Chinese culture, still can break through the obstacles.

The following are excerpts from the book

Gentle = sympathy and intelligence. 

It is the possession of this sympathetic and true human intelligence, which gives to the Chinese type of humanity, to the real Chinaman, his inexpressible gentleness. 

The Chinese people, I say, have the power of sympathy because they live wholly a life of the heart a life of emotion or human affection. 

But the wonderful peculiarity of the Chinese people, I want to say here, is that, while living a life of the heart, the life of a child, they yet have a power of mind and rationality 

In short the real Chinaman is a person with the head of a grown-up man and the heart of a child. The Chinese spirit, therefore, is a spirit of perpetual youth, the spirit of national immortality. 

After reading this book, I deeply appreciate Mr. Gu's "faith". His belief is not god-power, not compulsion, not to love because of his faith, but spontaneous passion, the pursuit of honor and the loyalty to love burst out from his heart. This passion has nothing to do with utility, and is the inner demand of "people at the beginning and nature is good". However, he believed too much in traditional culture and truly believed in traditional culture, so that in his understanding of traditional Chinese culture, he did not creatively rebuild the tradition, or expound the tradition from the standpoint of modernization, but criticized modern western culture from the standpoint of tradition. And we know that this is wrong. We have known since childhood that we should take the essence and discard the dregs. However, in the era of Mr. Gu, or in other words, people in that era were not willing to admit that some western cultures were indeed much better than Chinese ones.