South China

“ South China is kind to the man who suffers from heat.507 Knowing that he is coolest who can throw away his flesh and move in his bare bones, she provides a damp hot climate that reduces men to the appearance of trained thoroughbreds! There they walk, the thinnest foreigners of the Far East, the Hongkong, Manila, Saigon, Shanghai and Canton men! ”

“ Differently from the cities of South China, many ponies and mules are seen on the street, and man is not here, as in Middle and South China, the beast of burden. The best frozen game, pork and mutton, and fish shops of China are in Mukden. ”

“ In the south there were only peoples in a very low state of civilization, who could offer no serious menace to the Chinese. The trading colonies that gradually extended to Canton and still farther south served as Chinese administrative centres for provinces and prefectures, with small but adequate armies of their own, so that in case of need they could defend themselves. In the north the position was much more difficult. In addition to their conquest within China, the rulers of Ch'in had pushed their frontier far to the north. ”

“ When that time arrives, the Chinese will find the elements of all they are in search of at the foreign settlements in Shanghai, where the schools, the splendid commerce, the merchant palaces, the fleets of steamers, the local foreign government, the opulence of the inhabitants, and the condition of the streets and dwellings, offer an instructive contrast to the condition of the Chinese walled city which lies to the south of the foreign settlements. The labour of centuries has brought this city to its present state, and the result is little to the credit of the authorities who rule there. ”

“ This system, especially in south China, transformed territories formerly inhabited by native tribes or uninhabited, into solidly Chinese areas. In addition to these military colonies, a steady stream of settlers from Central China and the coast continued to move into Kwangtung and Hunan provinces. They felt protected by the army against attacks by natives. Yet Ming texts are full of reports on major and minor clashes with the natives, from Kiangsi and Fukien to Kwangtung and Kwanghsi. ”

“ Expansion of Races from North to South The theory of a southern origin (to which a further serious objection will be stated presently) implies a gradual infiltration of Chinese immigrants through South or Mid-China (as above indicated) toward the north, but there is little doubt that the movement of the races has been from north to south and not vice versa. In what are now the provinces of Western Kansu and Ssŭch’uan there lived a people related to the Chinese (as proved by the study of Indo-Chinese comparative philology) who moved into the present territory of Tibet and are known as Tibetans ”

“ This is the class of Chinese who, emigrating from the thickly-peopled south-eastern provinces of China, already possess a predominant share of the wealth of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Timor, the Celebes and the Philippine Islands, Burma, Siam, Annam and Tonquin, the Straits Settlements, Malay Peninsula, and Cochin China. "There is hardly a tiny islet visited by our naturalists in any part of these seas but Chinamen are found." ”

“ The history of China is so closely connected with that of the nomad tribes that one cannot be given [Pg 229] without the other, and before telling the story of the Mongols a brief outline of the history of these tribes is desirable. China is on three sides abundantly defended from invasion, by the ocean on the east, and by mountains and desert on the south and west. Its only vulnerable quarter is in the north, where it joins on to the vast region of the steppes, a country whose scarcity of rain unfits it for agriculture, but which has sufficient herbage for the pasturage of immense herds. ”

“ The tension was increased by the effect of the influx of Chinese in bringing more land into cultivation, thus producing a boom period such as is produced by the opening up of colonial land. Everyone was in a hurry to grab as much land as possible. There was yet a further difference between the two groups of Chinese: the old settlers had long lost touch with the remainder of their families in the north. They had become South Chinese, and all their interests lay in the south. The new immigrants had left part of their families in the north under alien rule. ”

“ Nor is this all; immense tracts in the north and west of the province have lain waste since the Mohammedan rebellion, and owing to the antipathy of the Chinese to settle on lands which they look upon as the property of people who may still be living, or whose descendants may still be living, it must be many years before the [206] agriculture of the province is properly developed. It will be said that I take a gloomy view of the south-western corner of China ”

“ Was the will of the ruler to prevail and North China to become a country of pasturage, or was the country to keep to the agrarian tradition of the people under this rule? The Turkish and Mongol conquerors had recently given up their old supplementary agriculture and had turned into pure nomads, obtaining the agricultural produce they needed by raiding or trade. The conquerors of North China were now faced with a different question: if they were to remain nomads, they must either drive the peasants into the south, or make them into slave herdsmen, or exterminate them. ”

“ While conditions of a settled existence were in course of attainment within the region which is now known as China Proper, the spectacle of a prosperous civilisation, reacting upon the uncouth instincts of tribes dwelling among the grassy uplands of Mongolia and the plains of Manchuria or amid the ice-clad fastnesses of the mountains and forest-strewn valleys of the farthest north, was presently to be responsible for the rise of predatory races, who, in the zenith of their strength, regarded the teeming cities of the south as lawful prizes. ”

“ Just as the oldest civilizations of the West concentrated themselves along the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile, so the most ancient Chinese civilization is found concentrated along the south bank of the Yellow River. The configuration of the land as shown on a modern map assists us to understand how the industrious cultivators and weavers, finding the flat and so-called loess territory too confined for their ever-increasing numbers, threw out colonies wherever attraction offered, and wherever the riverine systems gave them easy access ”

“ Consider that the eighteen provinces alone, with an area about equal to that part of the United States east of the Mississippi River, have eight times the population of that part of our country.
``There are twice as many people in China as on the four continents— Africa, North and South America and Oceanica. Every third person who toils under the sun and sleeps under God's stars is a Chinese. Every third child born into the world looks into the face of a Chinese mother. Every third pair given in marriage plight their troth in a Chinese cup of wine. ”

“ In the north and east the realm was also protected by difficult mountain country. The south lay relatively open, but at that time there were few Chinese living there, but only natives with a relatively low civilization. The kingdom could only be seriously attacked from two corners—through the north-west, where there was a negotiable plateau, between the Ch'in-ling mountains in the north and the Tibetan mountains in the west, a plateau inhabited by fairly highly developed Tibetan tribes; and secondly through the south-east corner, where it would be possible to penetrate up the Yangtze. ”

“ CHINA, a country of eastern Asia, the principal division of the Chinese empire. In addition to China proper the Chinese Empire includes Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Sin-kiang (East Turkestan, Kulja, Dzungaria, &c., i.e. all the Chinese dependencies lying between Mongolia on the north and Tibet on the south) . Its most southern point is in 18° 50′ N.; its most northern in 53° 25′ N.; its most western in 74° E., and its most eastern in 135° E. It lies, however, mainly between 20° and 50° N. and 80° and 130° E. It is considerably larger than the whole of Europe. ”

“ Urga the Sacred City, the home of the Gigin, [276] the Living God, third in the Buddhist hierarchy, is not so much one city as three, all located on a high ridge above the Tola. Each is distinct, separate, entrenched. Arriving from the south, the one you reach first is Mai-ma-chin, the Chinese trading settlement, a tangle of small houses and narrow lanes hemmed in by stockades of wooden slabs and unbarked fir trees. Here are the eight or ten thousand Chinese who control the trade of North Mongolia. ”

“ The entire population of China, excepting a few obscure mountain tribes, the remainder, possibly, of the autochthones of the South, whatever their origin, have for centuries moulded themselves on a civilization that penetrates far deeper into the details of every-day life than any known in Europe. ”

“ Thus, to sum up, we may say that, quite roughly, in the middle of the third millennium we meet in the north and west of present-day China with a number of herdsmen cultures. In the south there were a number of agrarian cultures, of which the Tai was the most powerful, becoming of most importance to the later China. We must assume that these cultures were as yet undifferentiated in their social composition, that is to say that as yet there was no distinct social stratification, but at most beginnings of class-formation, especially among the nomad herdsmen. ”

“ Despite the fact that China's history has always had a decidedly inland character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been comparable with that toward the east and south. ”

“ The Chinese Government agree, in the interest of trade and for the residence of foreigners, to open by China herself certain suitable places in that part of Eastern Inner Mongolia under the jurisdiction of South Manchurian and the Jehol Intendency, as Commercial Marts. ”

“ Across the Yellow River, whose course northwards, as already stated, lay considerably to the west of the present channel, was the extensive state of Tsin; and south was the highly ritual and literary Weimar of China, the unwarlike principality of Lu, destined in future times to be glorified by Confucius.
Scarcely anything is recorded of a nature to throw specific light upon the international development of these far-eastern parts. ”

“ The expansion of China towards the south and south-west seems most probable, because there is here most natural wealth to develop, and because the circumstances are specially favourable: administrations guided by commercial principles, and populations too weak to resist immigration. [14] Nothing but the vigilant opposition of the Australian democracies has kept the Chinese from becoming a power on that more remote continent; and at one time within the last forty years the Chinamen actually in Victoria numbered something like 13 per cent of the adult male population. ”

“ During the first two thousand years of their known history the boundaries of this region were not greatly enlarged, but beyond the more or less undefined borderland to the south were chou or colonies, nuclei of Chinese population, which continually increased in size through conquest of the neighbouring territory. ”

“ From these mountains and plateaus the ground sinks gradually toward the north into the lowlands of West Turkestan and Siberia, toward the east and south into the plains of China and India.
CHINA The fertile territory of central China, watered by the two streams, Yangtse and Hoangho, was settled at a remote period by barbarous tribes. The civilization which they slowly developed in antiquity has endured with little change until the present day. The inhabitants of neighboring countries, Korea, Japan, and Indo-China, owe much to this civilization. ”

“ The place of China in the past and future is not that which it was long supposed to be. Recent researches have disclosed that its civilization, like ours, was variously derived from the same old focus of culture of south-western Asia. ”

“ The skilled staff needed for the business of administration came into the new capital from the surrounding districts, for the conquerors and new rulers of the territory of the two southern dynasties had brought with them from the north only uneducated soldiers and almost equally uneducated officers. The influx of scholars and administrators into the chief cities produced cultural and economic centres in the south, a circumstance of great importance to China's later development. ”

“ Amidst these three mountain ranges lies155 a vast and fertile plain drained by three rivers—the Nonni on the north, the Sungari on the northeast, and the Liaoho on the south. This part of China was once regarded as a desert, but since the completion of the Chinese Eastern Railway it has been found to be the most productive soil in China. It supplies the whole of Japan and a part of China with nitrogenous food in the form of soya bean. ”

“ In all probability, the outbreak in Susiana of, possibly, some political disturbance, in about the 24th or 23rd century B. C., drove the Chinese from the land of their adoption, and that they wandered eastward until they finally settled in China and the countries south of it. ... It would appear also that the Chinese came into China possessed of the resources of Western Asian culture. They brought with them a knowledge of writing and astronomy, as well as of the arts which primarily minister to the wants and comfort of mankind. ”