# The Earth and Its Inhabitants/Asia/Volume 2/Chapter 1

A translation of Reclus's Nouvelle Géographie Universelle ("New Universal Geography").
​regions were in the popular imagination transformed to strange and terrible monsters. The two civilisations were independently developed at either extremity of the continent without exercising any mutual influence one on the other, following parallel lines, yet as distinct one from the other as if they had been born on two different planets. There was undoubtedly a time when South China had even more frequent relations with the scattered islands of the South Sea than with the western regions with which it is connected by an unbroken continental mass. Common physical traits prove that towards the south the Chinese race has been intermingled with the tribes peopling the oceanic regions.
Nevertheless, the barrier of plateaux and highlands shutting in the Chinese world offers here and there some wide gaps, some opening towards the south, others in the direction of the north. Nor are the snowy ranges themselves inaccessible. Altaï, Tian-shan, Tsûng-ling, Kuen-lun, Nan-ling, are all crossed by tracks, over which the trader makes his way regardless of fatigue and cold. The slopes of these uplands, and even the plateaux, are inhabited to an elevation of from 10,000 to 15,000 feet, and traces of the permanent or passing presence of man are everywhere met along the route. But owing to their barbarous lives and rude political state these highland populations added a fresh obstacle to that presented by the physical conditions to free international intercourse. The unity of the Old World was finally established when the Europeans of the West, by means of the sea route, established direct relations with the peoples of the eastern seaboard. But before that time direct communications even between the Yang-tze and Amur basins across the barbarous populations of the intervening plateaux took place only at rare intervals, and were due as much to the great convulsions of the Asiatic peoples as to the growing expansive power of the Chinese political system. But such rare and irregular international movements had but little influence on the life of the Chinese nation. For thousands of years this race, being almost completely isolated from the rest of mankind, was thrown back on its own resources in working out its natural development.
Intercourse with India and Europe.
The first great internal revolution of China took place at the time of the introduction of the Indian religious ideas. However difficult it may be to interpret the ancient doctrine of Lao-tze, there can be scarcely any doubt that it was affected by Hindu influence. Some of his precepts are identical in form with those of the sacred writings of the Buddhists, and all are imbued with the same sentiment of humanity and universal philanthropy. Nor does Lao-tze ever cite the leading characters of Chinese history as models of virtue or as examples to be followed, so that the body of his doctrines is associated by no traditional ties with the past annals of his country. According to the unanimous tradition he travelled in the regions lying to the west of China, and the popular legend points to the Khotan highlands as the place whence he was borne heavenwards.
The barrier raised by the mountains, plateaux, and their barbarous inhabitants between China and India was so difficult to be crossed that the communications ​between the two countries were effected by a detour through the Oxus basin. The Buddhist religion itself was not propagated directly, and penetrated into the empire not from the south, but from the west. During the periods of its peaceful expansion China included the Tarim basin, and maintained free intercourse with the Oxus basin over the Pamir passes. At that time traders followed the famous "Silk Highway," which was also known to the Greeks, and it was by this or other routes across the plateaux that were introduced the rich products of Southern Asia, as well as the more or less legendary reports of the marvellous region of the Ganges. The same road was also followed by the Buddhist pilgrims. After three centuries of religious propaganda the new faith was finally established in the country of Confucius, and received official recognition in the sixty-fifth year of the new era. Buddhism found favour with the Chinese people from its pompous rites, the rich ornaments of its temples, the poetry of the symbolic lotus blooming in the midst of the waters. It also pleased them, because it opened up vistas of those magnificent Southern lands hitherto concealed from their gaze by the intervening snowy ranges and plateaux. But after all the Fo-Kiao, or worship of Buddha, changed little in the social life of China. The ceremonial was modified, but the substance remained much the same. Whatever be the sacred emblems, the religion that has survived is still that which is associated with the rites in honour of ancestry, with the conjuring of evil spirits, and especially with the strict observance of the old traditional formulas.
But at any rate the relations established between China and Hindustan during the period of Buddhist propagandism were never again completely interrupted, and from that time China has no longer remained, even for Europeans, excluded from the limits of the known world. Communication by sea was kept up between India and South China, especially through the Gulf of Tonkin. Even two hundred years before the vulgar era an emperor had sent a whole fleet to the Sunda Islands to cull the "flower of immortality." Later on, other vessels were sent to Ceylon in search of relics, sacred writings, statues of Buddha, and besides these things brought back rich textiles, gems, precious stones, taking them in exchange for their silks, porcelains, and enamelled vases. This route was also followed by the embassies, amongst others by that which, according to the Chinese annals, came from the great Tsin; that is to say, from Rome, sent by the Emperor An-tun (Aurelius Antoninus) in the year 166 of the Christian era.
In the seventh century, when the Chinese Empire, after a series of disasters and internal convulsions, resumed its expansive force and shone with renewed splendour, at the very time when Europe had again lapsed into barbarism, exploring expeditions became still more numerous. China now took the lead, and the pilgrim, H'wen-Tsang, whose itinerary in Central Asia has since been rivalled only by Marco Polo, was a true explorer in the modern sense of the term. His writings, embodied in the annals of the Tang dynasty, have a special value for the geography of Central Asia and India in mediæval times, and their importance is fully appreciated by European savants. Thanks to the Chinese documents, it has been found possible to determine with some certainty the whole of his itinerary, even in those ​"Snowy Mountains," where travellers are exposed to the attacks of the "dragons," those mystic animals which may possibly symbolize nothing more than the sufferings entailed by snow and ice. Like the other Buddhist pilgrims of this epoch, H'wen-Tsang skirted the Tibetan plateaux, where the Buddhist religion had only just been introduced, and reached India through the Oxus valley and Afghanistan. But some twenty years after his return, in 667 or 668, Chinese armies had already traversed Tibet and Nepal, thus penetrating directly into India, where they captured over six hundred towns. At this time the Chinese Empire comprised, with the tributary states, not only the whole depression of Eastern Asia, but also all the outer slopes of the highlands and plateaux surrounding it as far as the Caspian. It was also during this period that the Nestorian missionaries introduced Christianity into the empire.
Fig. 1.—Itinerary of H'wen-Tsang. :
| Scale 1 : 30,000,000. |||||
| 0 to 10,000 Feet. | 10,000 to 16,500 Feet. | 16,500 Feet and upwards. |
| 600 Miles. |||||
The progress of Islam in the west of Asia and along the shores of the Mediterranean necessarily isolated China, and long rendered all communication with Europe impossible. But in the northern regions of the Mongolian steppes warlike tribes were already preparing for conquest, and thanks to their triumphant march westwards to the Dnieper, they opened up fresh routes for explorers across the whole of the Old World. In order to protect themselves from these northern children of ​the steppe, the Chinese emperors had already raised, rebuilt, and doubled with parallel lines that prodigious rampart of the "Great Wall" which stretches for thousands of miles between the steppe and the cultivated lands of the south. Curbed by this barrier erected between two physically different regions and two hostile societies, the nomads had passed westwards, where the land lay open before them, and the onward movement was gradually propagated across the continent. In the fourth and fifth centuries a general convulsion had hurled on the West those conquering hordes collectively known as Huns; in the twelfth century an analogous movement urged the Mongols forward under a new Attila. Holding the Zungarian passes, which gave easy access from the eastern to the western regions of Asia, Jenghiz Khan might have at once advanced westward. But being reluctant to leave any obstacle in his rear, he first crossed the Great Wall and seized Pekin, and then turned his arms against the Western states. At the period of its greatest extent the Mongolian Empire, probably the largest that ever existed, stretched from the Pacific seaboard to the Russian steppes.
The existence of the Chinese world was revealed to Europe by these fresh arrivals from the East, with whom the Western powers, after the first conflicts, entered into friendly relations by means of embassies, treaties, and alliances against the common enemy, Islam. The Eastern Asiatic Empire was even long known to them by the Tatar name of Cathay, which under the form of Kitai is still current amongst the Russians. Envoys from the Pope and the King of France set out to visit the Great Khan in his court at Karakorum, in Mongolia; and Plan de Carpin, Rubruk, and others brought back marvellous accounts of what they had seen in those distant regions. European traders and artisans followed in the steps of these envoys, and Marco Polo, one of these merchants, was the first who really revealed China to Europe. Henceforth this country enters definitely into the known world, and begins to participate in the general onward movement of mankind.