must recognise the necessity for progress in space in the sense of a
widening out of the historical ground, and a progressive increase of
the population of this ground; further, a development toward the goal
of higher forms of life together with an uninterrupted struggle for
space between the older and newer life-forms. Yet, for all this, the
definite bounds set to the scene of life by the limited area of our
planet always remain.
Finally, all development on earth is dependent on the universe, of
which our world is but a grain of sand, and to the time of which
what we call universal history is but a moment. There must be other
connections, definite roads upon which to travel, and distant goals,
far beyond. We surmise an eternal law of all things; but in order to
_know_, we should need to be God himself. To us only the belief in it
is given.
FREDERICK RATZEL
[Illustration: THE FAR EAST DIVISION OF THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
This History begins with the East and comes westward round the
world. Japan is therefore the first country to come into its
survey, and from Japan we travel to Siberia, which, though
extending far west, must be treated as one. After Siberia come
China and Korea; and Australia, Oceania, and Malaysia all come into
the “Far East” when thus treated geographically. The whole of the
white portion of this map is treated in the Grand Division which
now opens.
]
[Illustration: HISTORY OF THE WORLD
SECOND GRAND DIVISION
THE FAR EAST
STEPHEN REID
]
[Illustration]
SECOND GRAND DIVISION
THE FAR EAST
The Far East falls into two sections, Asiatic and Oceanic. The Asiatic
comprises the insular empire of Japan; and, on the continent, China,
Korea, and Siberia, the extreme northern territory which, though
extending far westward, must be treated as one.
The Oceanic division includes the Australian continent, with the island
of Tasmania; the Pacific islands grouped under the names of Melanesia,
Micronesia, and Polynesia, to which last New Zealand is attached, the
whole being conveniently associated under the name of Oceania; and the
Malay Archipelago, or Malaysia, lying between Australia and the Asiatic
continent.
Of these three sections of Oceanic Far East only Malaysia has a
record extending over centuries. The history of the other two, till
the white sea-going races began to settle among them, is inferential,
conjectural. A doubt was suggested whether New Zealand should be
attached rather to Australia than to Oceania, for the reason that it
has developed into one of the group of autonomous states which make up
so large a portion of the British Empire; but this consideration must
clearly yield to those based on geography and ethnology.
PLAN
THE INTEREST & IMPORTANCE OF THE FAR EAST
Angus Hamilton
JAPAN
Arthur Diósy and Max von Brandt
SIBERIA
Dr. E. J. Dillon and other writers
CHINA
Sir Robert K. Douglas, W. R. Carles, C.M.G., and other writers
KOREA
Angus Hamilton
AUSTRALIA & OCEANIA
Hon. Bernhard R. Wise and Professor Weule
MALAYSIA
Basil Thomson and other writers
INFLUENCE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN IN HISTORY
* * * * *
For full contents and page numbers see Index
[Illustration]
[Illustration: LANDS & PEOPLES OF THE FAR EAST]
THE INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE OF THE FAR EAST
BY ANGUS HAMILTON
The influence of environment upon a people is seldom shown more
prominently than in the high degree of civilisation attained by the
early Chinese.
Although the records are shrouded in mystery and marred by
discrepancies, a consensus of scientific opinion traces the origin of
the Chinese to a nomad tribe who, setting out from the shores of the
Caspian, continued to wander until it found a home on the banks of the
Yellow River and in the plains of Shansi. Under the influence of these
immigrants, the rude manners of the aboriginals gave way to conditions
in which a knowledge of the smelting of iron and the resources of
agriculture was acquired. In the upward process of development, the
weaving of flax into garments and the spinning of silk from cocoons
followed; then, with primeval chaos reduced to order and the faculties
quickened by habits of industry, the beginnings of government were
made in the separation of the tribes from one another under their own
leaders.
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. While the northern heights of Asia were producing a race that
was to leave an indelible impression on the whole of the Asiatic
Continent, the evolution of a no less specific type was proceeding in
the islands off the coast. Carried by a wave of migration from India,
which lapped the coast of Malaysia, Indo-China and Polynesia, and
mingled in the islands of the Yellow Sea with a stream from New Guinea
so that separate ethnographic identities were lost, were tribes who
looked to the ocean for their existence much as the earlier Chinese
relied upon the proceeds of their husbandry and the northern nomads
upon their flocks.
Glancing at the people living amid the plains, the uplands, and the
islands, it will be seen that an irresistible force was enveloping the
several races, moulding their instincts and idiosyncrasies in accord
with the nature of their environment. Thus, while the Chinese, under
the incentive of a knowledge of arts and crafts, had already produced,
in 2356 B.C., a system of civilisation destined to endure to
our time, the nomads and the islanders, unqualified by knowledge and
controlled by climate, were hardly removed from a state of savagery a
few centuries before the Christian era.
If the passage of 4,000 years has affected the Chinese no more than
the gliding of an hour, the existence of this great impassive people
has not been without its effect upon the nations of Europe as upon the
races of the Farthest East.
[Sidenote: Eternal Mystery of China]
A point of ancient contact between Christendom and the world of
Confucius, reflecting, in contemporary Japan to-day the more permanent
qualities of its teaching, China has stirred the spirits of the
adventurous in all ages by its singular graces of refinement, its
hidden wealth and the exquisiteness of its artistic perceptions.
Arousing the curiosity of the Arab traders as early as the eighth
century, it was known to the ancients, if they journeyed by the
Southern Sea, as the kingdom of Sin, Chin, Sinæ, or China, in
corruption, perhaps, of the word Tzin--under which dynasty occurred,
in 250 B.C., the fusion of several petty kingdoms into an organic
empire; or by the name of Seres if, traversing the longitude of Asia,
they came by the overland route. Known to the Middle Ages by the name
of Cathay--corrupted from Kitai, the name by which China is still
described by Russia and by the races of Central Asia, but which itself
sprang from the Khitans, the first of the northern dynasties--it
represented to European commerce of the thirteenth century the
embodiment of wealth, romance, and mystery; much as its position,
maintained unchanged through long centuries, had made it the actual
repository of the records of Central, as well as Southern, Asia.
[Sidenote: Korea, the Middle Kingdom]
Contemporary with the early Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Hebrews,
and comprising an empire that in 241 B.C. represented as nearly as
possible the present limits of the Eighteen Provinces, the Middle
Kingdom has been affected by the great upheavals of the Western world
as little as she herself has troubled to impress her methods and manner
of government upon the aboriginal races beyond her borders. Indeed,
filled with a lofty disdain of the outer barbarians, it was not until
the chance migration to Korea of some five thousand Chinese under
Ki-tze, in 1122 B.C., that the ethical, social, and political systems
in vogue in China were carried further afield. Once transplanted,
however, the aboriginal life of the cave-dwellers of the peninsula
gave way before the superior culture of Ki-tze’s followers, and within
the course of the succeeding thousand years a cluster of independent
states, fashioned upon the parental model, was firmly established.
Although in the centuries just before the Christian era there was
a constant interchange of communications with these states of the
Eastern Peninsula, the classic conservatism of the Middle Kingdom was
unabated by any expression of curiosity or interest in the welfare of
the unknown islands. Yet the islanders, confronted with a struggle for
existence, had risked the perils of many voyages to the neighbouring
coasts, spreading wonderful stories of their own land and returning
with ample evidences of the power and importance of the Korean kingdom.
Unconscious of this intercourse, but by reason of it, China, the tutor
of Korea, became through the agency of her pupil a determining factor
in the upward progression of the islanders when, between 290 B.C. and
215 B.C., in consequence of dynastic difficulties, a steady stream of
inhabitants from the peninsula passed from the Land of Morning Radiance
eastwards with the intention of settling on the coasts of Japan, with
whose inhabitants, in fact, they at once merged.
[Sidenote: Japan at the Dawn of Our Era]
Though at the other end of the pole of human endeavour in comparison
with the Chinese, and familiar only with the elemental accessories
to life, the islanders, under the influence of this alien strain, at
the dawn of our era had emerged from a state of tribal control to
the recognition of the authority of a single and supreme ruler. Two
centuries later Japanese arms were strong enough to invade Korea,
where several victories were gained; but even then the Middle Kingdom
maintained no communication with the islands of the Yellow Sea, and
was more or less indifferent to the rise of over-sea relations between
her vassal and the mariners from the East. It is possible to trace
to this obliquity in the political vision of the Celestial Empire of
the day much of the subsequent havoc that the self-same race were to
inflict upon the coasts of Asia. Impressed with no consideration for
the interests of the mainland, and troubled by no sense of material
responsibility, Japanese corsairs harried the Chinese and Korean coasts
unmercifully, finding in the occupation an outlet for that primitive
but inherited instinct for aggression that stimulates the race to-day.
Disturbed less by the appearance of an island Power than by a
confederacy of barbarian clans that, by 1000 A.D., had exerted a
mastery over Mongolia, Tartary, and Manchuria, and a century later
served as a menace to the safety of the dynasty itself, the Celestial
Empire was beset on two sides by enemies who were attracted by the
prosperity of its people. Unmindful to a great degree of the dangers
which were accumulating, an instinct for and an interest in trade,
confirmed by the revelation of the self-supporting character of an
empire that reached to Cochin-China in one direction and the Pamirs
in another, prompted the Chinese to neglect the arts of war in their
preference for the triumphs of peace.
[Sidenote: The Peaceful Path of the Chinese]
Characterised by a capacity for infinite pains, and possessed of
a complete understanding of the varied resources of agriculture,
the Chinese insensibly pursued a path leading always in a contrary
direction to those marked out by Nature for the islanders, as for
the fierce nomads of the steppe. Thus innately addicted to habits of
peace, centuries upon centuries of undisturbed prosperity chastened
natures that were never very warlike; whereas the exact inversion of
this existence propelled those hordes of Tartars, Huns, Turks, Khitans,
Kins, Mongols, and Manchus to leave the Far North in a disfiguring
passage through Asia, and bade the islanders release their sails in
expeditions against Korea. It was not enough for the founder of the
Tzin dynasty to fortify his northern frontiers by the construction of
the Great Wall, or for that great warrior Panchow to drive the Huns
before him to the Oxus itself, or for the rulers in the long period of
disunion which unites the fall of the Han dynasty to the rise of the
Sung to compromise with the leaders of successive rushes of barbarian
horsemen by matrimonial alliances with their families. The cause lay
in the foundations of the race itself. Yet, such was the insidious
character of the land against which these mounted hordes so often flung
themselves that, although the imminence of attack ultimately became
a thing with which the Government of China was wont to conjure the
peaceful, well-contented lower classes and the luxury-loving upper
classes, the effect of each invasion was dissipated so soon as the
invaders experienced the subtle blandishments of Chinese civilisation.
[Sidenote: Swift-moving History in Little Known Lands]
Presented with remarkable clearness, we have an array of devastating
invasions, the one following the other in rapid succession and
occasionally assuming such dimensions that the operations riveted
the attention of Europe upon the little-known lands of Asia, which
in most instances required only the passage of a few centuries for
the minutest vestige to be obliterated. Thus the Kins, who left no
trace, displaced the Khitans, equally irrecoverable, and were in turn
dispossessed by the Mongols, whose wide dominion embraced so much of
the earth’s surface that in 1227 A.D. the whole of High Asia, from the
Caspian to Korea, and from the Indus to the Yellow Sea, recognised
its sway--always excepting the strong but still despised sea-state of
Japan, whose lusty inhabitants threw back the allied hosts of China,
Korea, and the Mongol monarch in 1274 and 1281.
Yet if the Mongols, in an effort to wreak their vengeance on the
Chinese, razed to the ground the cities of the vanquished so that their
horsemen could ride over their deserted sites without stumbling, none
the less they earned the acclamations of posterity by the facilities
that the Mongol domination of Central Asia offered to communications
between the West and Cathay. Marco Polo was not alone in his knowledge
of the Court of the Great Khan, although doubtless he was the first
to visit it. But this liberty of intercourse, existing only by the
land route to Asia, was measured solely by the duration of the Mongol
rule; freedom of action along the high-road from West to East stopped
prematurely when the sway of Islam settled once again over Central
Asia. Two centuries elapsed before, under the banners of the Manchus,
bold horsemen of the North, in 1644, flashed once again through the
plains of China, imposing, by a change of costume and of coiffure,
perhaps the most striking effect of any that has followed in the train
of these invasions.
[Sidenote: Opening the Gates of the East]
[Sidenote: Lifting the Veil in Japan]
But if the exclusiveness of the Mohammedan conquerors closed the route
to Cathay so effectually that for two hundred years nothing more was
heard of the country, Columbus, Cabot and others set themselves the
task of opening up communications by water. But it was not Cathay
that they reached. That was left to the Portuguese Raphael Perestralo
to accomplish by sailing, in 1511, from Malacca to Canton, and thus
winning the coveted distinction of first approaching China by sea.
Fifty years later (1560) the same race succeeded in obtaining a
settlement at Macao, while the Spaniards gazed with longing eyes from
their strongholds in the Philippine Islands upon the rich junks
on the China seas. Such was the effect of these trading visits from
the West that the Chinese in their turn were emboldened to visit for
themselves these outlying centres of Western traffic. But it was more
usually vessels from Japan that were seen, for the Chinese were still
without any special appetite for Western trade. With the islanders,
on the other hand, a love of barter, acting on the native instincts
of a maritime people, caused them to traverse these more distant
waters; although occasionally the scantiness of the resources in their
own country moved them, so that they were propelled as much by stern
necessity as by the lust of war and loot or a passion for trade. At
first Polynesia, then Malaysia and India were visited. Again, trips
were made to the remote coasts of Mexico. Still later, a colony founded
at Goa became the centre of an important trading connection throughout
the Indian hemisphere. In these voyages we see the attractive influence
exercised by the Pacific and the Indian Oceans on an island people,
who, fitted by temperament no less than by position, played in Eastern
waters the rôle filled by the Elizabethan explorers on the coasts of
the New World.
[Sidenote: Raising the Curtain]
As yet the distinctive call of the East had been heard only along the
byways of Turkestan, and even those who had responded had ventured no
further than the provinces of Cathay. Thus the isles of the Yellow Sea
were to the Western mariner at the dawn of the sixteenth century as
much a terra incognita as the Arctic and Antarctic regions are to the
sailor of to-day. The spectacle of Japanese junks sailing gaily across
the heaving waters of the Spanish Main and rounding the heel of India
aroused the interest of the Western traders, who at once embarked for
the fortunate lands of the East, arranging relations there even before
they had been welcomed by the Chinese.
With the arrival of Portuguese traders off Japan in 1542, a curtain was
raised which was never quite to descend. In the interval a commercial
entrepôt was established on the island of Hirado, and an intercourse
set afoot that encouraged a visit from a Spanish squadron towards the
close of the sixteenth century. This visit was returned in 1602 by
the despatch of a ceremonial embassy to the Governor-General of the
Philippines.
[Sidenote: Untold Wealth of Asia]
Throughout the first half of that century Japan continued to attract
the adventurous, and the Dutch now followed in the wake of the
Portuguese and Spanish ships. The reception of the bold spirits was
unequal, and in 1624 all foreigners except the Dutch and the English
were banished. By 1641 no traders were allowed but Dutch, who, in spite
of being restricted to the island of Deshima, enjoyed a monopoly of the
trade with Japan until 1867. In the meantime, abroad, rumours of the
untold wealth of Asia had brought the Indies, together with Cathay and
Japan, into distinct prominence. Under the Chinese Emperor Kien-Lung,
whose reign of sixty years, 1735-1795, was remarkable for its conquests
and successful administration, commercial intercourse with the West
was regularised, and the founding of recognised trading settlements
on the China coast ended the era of furtive attempts to open trade
relations with this exclusive people. From these early trading stations
have sprung the several commercial capitals that now grace the China
coast. Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, Tientsin, and Newchang are the
links existing to-day between the magnificence of the merchant princes
and the sway of the “John Company.” Of course conditions are now much
altered, yet the memories of the past find a very splendid setting
in the size, dignity, and importance of the modern treaty ports.
Although the Far East was already manifesting its powers of holding the
attention of the civilised world, the centres of interest there were
concerned for many years solely with the kingdoms of China and Japan.
[Illustration: CALM IN THE FAR EAST: THE SETTING OF THE SUN IN THE
MONGOLIAN DESERT]
[Sidenote: China on the Western Horizon]
Australasia was a great unknown when the high latitudes of Asia were
the fount of many conquering races. Obviously, therefore, the magnet
of acquisitiveness pointed to the value of investigating the bleak
northern steppes. Once started, the Pacific and the Amur were reached
within eighty years under the impetus of an unrelenting progress which
swept from west to east across the regions of North Asia. Begun at
the instigation of Stroganoff, who pushed the hesitating footsteps of
Yermak across the Urals in 1580, by 1584 this gallant freebooter was
offering to Ivan IV. with no uncertain voice the wide dominions of
Siberia as the price of pardon. Khan after khan was unseated, tribe
after tribe dispossessed, for neither Tartar nor Turk, Buriat nor
Tunguse, could offer effective resistance to the Cossacks from the
Don. In the end this all-conquering advance was stayed by the Chinese,
who, in the treaty of Nertchinsk, 1689, contracted their first formal
convention with a foreign Power. For nearly two centuries Russia
faithfully observed the terms of this engagement, apprehensive of
endangering the Kiachta trade if she continued her encroachments upon
Manchu territory. By this action the trade of China, which has now made
the problem of the Far East of dominating importance, became of more
than passing interest to a Western Government. As generations passed,
however, the advance of Russia, to the Pacific in one direction, and
in search of a warm-water harbour in another, was resumed. First
Eastern Siberia and then Northern Manchuria were added to her Asiatic
satrapy, and the Amur ceased to be the containing line. Ultimately her
frontier rested on the ocean to the north, the east, and the south;
Vladivostock, Port Arthur, Harbin, and Mukden becoming the centres from
which her Far Eastern dominions were administered.
[Sidenote: The English Find Australia]
The spirit of adventure, now inspiring all ranks of society as well as
most of the civilised races of the world, was by no means satisfied by
territorial conquest. The wide dominions of the sea, as yet untraced
and all unknown, embraced an empire which appealed as strikingly to the
sympathies of geographers as did the prospects of Far Eastern trade to
the feelings of the East India merchants. Much the same ceaseless quest
carried the Cossack Dejneff, in 1648, round the north-eastern extremity
of Asia; Torres, a Spaniard commissioned by the Spanish Government
of Peru, in 1606 negotiated the strait between New Guinea and the
mainland; and various Dutch expeditions in 1606, 1616, 1618, 1627 and
1642 endured the dangers of the reef-bound coasts. But it was not until
1688 that the English first made their appearance on the Australian
coast. In some measure the situation was awaiting the man. The
voyages of Captain Cook (1769-1777) took up the work of geographical
exploration in the Southern Hemisphere in a style quite befitting the
records already elsewhere accomplished.
[Sidenote: Pacific and the Destinies of Peoples]