LANDS & PEOPLESLands and Peoples of the Far EastOF THE FAR EAST
LANDS & PEOPLES
Lands and Peoples of the Far East
OF THE FAR EAST
BY ANGUS HAMILTON
T
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 2356B.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 thisgreat impassive people has not been without its effect upon the nations of Europe as upon the races of the Farthest East.
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 250B.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.
Korea, the Middle Kingdom
Contemporary with the early Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Hebrews, and comprising an empire that in 241B.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 1122B.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 290B.C.and 215B.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.
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 1000A.D., hadexerted 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.
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.
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 1227A.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.
Opening the Gates of the EastLifting 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 approachingChina 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.
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.
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.
CALM IN THE FAR EAST: THE SETTING OF THE SUN IN THE MONGOLIAN DESERTLARGER IMAGE
CALM IN THE FAR EAST: THE SETTING OF THE SUN IN THE MONGOLIAN DESERT
LARGER IMAGE
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 ofNorth 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.
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.
Pacific and the Destinies of Peoples
If between the continent of Australia and the coasts of China to-day there is only a commercial connection, it must not be forgotten that Australia is closely identified with the Polynesian races, who in turn are related to the early Japanese. New Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia, and New Guinea, as parts of one and the same continent, which now in many places has disappeared beneath the sea, present an ethnographic study of unusual importance and interest. In few other parts of the world is so great an ethnographic variation imposed upon a single connecting racial family as in the island divisions of the South Seas—Australasia, Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. It is by the existence of this underlying relationship that the Indo-Pacific races, whatever their specific origin, undoubtedly link up two hemispheres which organically are widely separated. By the abruptly disintegrated character of existing racial location, however, it is possible to read the impression made by the Pacific Ocean on the history of the world. If oceanic influences are represented in other ways to-day, and tribal migrations in a body are occurrences of the past, the necessities of the age still make such heavy demands on what is, after all, the immemorial highway of mankind that the Pacific can still be said to mould the destinies of races to-day as easily as it has obliterated them in the past.
What will Happen To-morrow?
Turning to Asia, although the Empires of Russia in Siberia and of China have worked out their destinies independently of the Pacific, remaining unaffected by it more than all other Eastern states, the part that the Pacific has played in the development of Asia since the eighteenth century cannot go unnoticed. Japan, in particular, has profited by the readiness of communication that the ocean provides to rise above prejudices which are usually inseparable from an island people and are pre-eminently to be expected among Asiatics. In China the absence of any prominent dependence onthe sea, either for food or means of transport, has produced in very sinister form an aversion against the West. None the less, under pressure from the Occident, and without regarding the example set by Japan, the Celestial Empire has permitted much commercial encroachment. Succeeding the galleons of the buccaneers have come the stately traders of the merchant princes of Europe and America, and these in turn have given place to the steamers of industrial trusts, exacting as large a tribute as the earliest marauders. While the consequences of industrial expansion among Oriental people have made the Pacific the focus of much restless energy, Japan, now as great a Power on land as formerly she was, and is, at sea, has developed an intelligence that has made her pre-eminent among the trading nations of the East. Undeterred by exertion, unmoved by expenditure, Japan has displaced the carrying trade of the Pacific by her fearless invasion of Western markets. Throughout the isles of the Southern Seas, and up and down the face of the Pacific slope, the islanders have swarmed, filling the lands of their passage with unaccustomed energy.
Looking back, then, at the conditions of Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and comparing them with those existing to-day, it will be noticed that a wide gulf still separates Japan from China in the twentieth century as it formerly separated China from the rest of the Far East. On the one side there is China, now emerging from revolution; on the other there is Japan, voicing the regeneration of Asia with raucous tones.
China Thirty years Hence
Meanwhile the vast interests of the Occident in the Orient are united with either power by frequent political intercourse and a traffic which has given to the Pacific priority of place in the battle for commercial supremacy. Yet while China is commercially independent of the West, and Japan dependent upon it, all branches of foreign industry cannot but view with alarm the increasing aggressiveness of the spirit of independence now inspiring Asia at the prompting of Japan. Obviously these signs are the indication of an approaching cleavage between East and West, which, when fully attained, will bear witness to the complete severance of the shackles hitherto enthralling Asia to the interests and purposes of the West. It must not be forgotten that Japan already has achieved her complete regeneration. Thirty years hence China, no doubt, will have followed suit, when a federacy of the Far Eastern Powers may become an accomplished fact. Even at this moment such a union is possible, and its realisation would impose upon all European Governments the immediate revision of their Asiatic policies.
At this time such a combination is hampered only by the unwillingness of China to accept the suggestions of Japan in anything affecting the policy of Asia, although, in spite of this objection, active reforming influences are gradually effecting important changes throughout the Chinese Empire. For the moment, therefore, Japan is content to tread alone the path she has marked out, encouraging her subjects by example to exploit Asia for the Asiatics, and to secure recognition of the doctrine of equality between the white and Asiatic races.
If the full significance of this movement is not yet discernible, there is enough evidence to show that the problem will rank among the greatest that the politics of the twentieth century can disclose. Not only one part of the civilised globe will be affected by the rise of a dominant Asia, for the whole world will be confronted equally with the necessity of resisting whatever indications may appear. If it is difficult to devise an arrangement short of total exclusion that does not admit an annual influx of a large number of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Indian immigrants into the lands affected by this invasion, it is at least tolerably certain that if the existing flow of Asiatics across the Pacific to America and Australasia continues unabated for a further decade, the areas now menaced will be inhabited by a white minority.
Problem of the Century
It appears evident that the continuation of the Far East under existing conditions is doubtful, if not impossible, in view of the awakening of Asia and the visible prejudices that Western democracy entertains against the Asiatic. Yet if the clash of conflicting interests ultimately precipitates a struggle between the two great racial divisions of the world, there can be no doubt that the moral teachings of humanity will be discredited.
ANGUSHAMILTON