The Soul of the Great Bell
Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904)
From Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings
The Yongle Bell, cast in 1403 at the end of the first year of the reign of the Emperor Yongle, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty. Weighing nearly fifty tons, its sound could be heard fifty kilometers away on a clear night. The bell is housed in the Great Bell Temple, located in the Haidian District of Beijing and built in the year 1733. Image courtesy of Cultural China.
One of the journalist Lafcadio Hearn’s earliest books was a collection of adaptations of Chinese legends—which he completed even though he actually knew next to nothing of the Chinese language. While working on the proofs for the book, he corresponded frequently with his friend Elizabeth Bisland, a former colleague at the New Orleans Times Democrat who had moved in 1887 to New York to become an editor at Vogue. (Bisland would became famous two years later, when she raced New York World reporter Nellie Bly around the world, attempting to beat Phileas Fogg's fictitious record in the famous Jules Verne novel. She lost the race, although both women made the trip in less than eighty days.) Hearn’s letters to Bisland included updates about his struggling career as fiction writer and anecdotes about the remarkable characters he continued to meet in New Orleans. In one letter he complained that his latest attempt to learn Chinese had ended in failure. “My last pet was a Chinese doctor, whose name I cannot even pronounce. He tried to teach me Chinese; but I discovered the nasal tones almost impossible to imitate.”
His failure to learn the language didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the “weird beauty” of the six tales included in his book, and he instead relied on the work of various European Sinologists to help him create his own versions and understand the historical and linguistic allusions. “To such great explorers,” he acknowledged in a preface, “the realm of Cathayan story belongs by right of discovery and conquest; yet the humbler traveller who follows wonderingly after them into the vast and mysterious pleasure-grounds of Chinese fancy may surely be permitted to cull a few of the marvellous flowers there growing.”
