Two intermediate provinces which, speaking accurately, belong neither to the middle basin of the Yangtse nor to the southern basin of the ‘West River,’ their rivers draining as they do direct into the Pacific, are Chekiang and Fukien: in climate and productions, however, they belong rather to Mid China than to the south and so are fitly introduced into this chapter. They may be said to be cut off from the great province of Kiangsi on their west by the range of the Wu-yi-shan, commonly pronounced ‘Bohea,’ the crest of which forms the water-parting from the Yangtse basin and turns their streams eastward to the sea. Both provinces are wholly mountainous, with the exception of a few square miles of flat land to the north and east of Hangchow, which geographically form a part of the Yangtse delta, there being no line of demarcation whatever.

Chekiang is the smallest of the eighteen provinces, having an area of 36,000 square miles only, with a population estimated at 11,000,000. Its name is taken from a river in the southern part of the province called the Che-kiang, meaning Crooked River, one of the many small rivers that, rising in its western mountains, traverse the province in a west-east direction and fall with a rapid incline into the sea. Chekiang is one of the best-known provinces to European travellers;

Eurasia, the greatest land mass on the globe, appropriately holds in its centre the loftiest table-land; a table-land walled in by the highest mountains on the earth's surface, rendering it as difficult of access as it is inhospitable to live in. Yet its very inaccessibility has proved a great attraction to travellers, and to-day the character of the country, its chief orographical features, its climate and resources are familiar to all; the blank spaces have been filled in step by step by a series of capable and adventurous travellers, until finally, in 1904, by the members of the mission dispatched by Lord Curzon to Lhasa, under Sir Frank Younghusband, the ‘Forbidden City’ has been once more visited by Europeans and so its mysteries have been unfolded to the outer world.

Tibet occupies an area of some 700,000 square miles, and latest travellers credit it with not more than 800,000 or possibly 1,000,000 inhabitants, making little more than one inhabitant to the square mile; but seeing that six-sevenths of the country is uninhabitable and frequented only during the short summer by nomads on the northern border, who find, in a few of the more favoured spots of the high plateau, a scanty pasture for their flocks and an escape from the great heat and the insect plagues of the lower surrounding depressions, we may relegate some 700,000 inhabitants to the 70,000 square miles of the lower plateau, which should thus be credited with ten inhabitants to the square mile, a figure probably well within the mark.

While the empire of China, or rather the Central Flowery Land, as the Chinese designate the eighteen provinces of China proper, is surrounded on the north and west by the dependencies surveyed in the preceding chapters, and on the east by the sea, the southern frontier is coterminous with Indo-China. Tongking in ancient times formed, with the present ‘Kwang’ provinces—Kwangsi and Canton, the kingdom of Yueh, which was conquered under the martial Han dynasty in the second century b.c. The hold of the Chinese was intermittent, however, from the time of the break-up of the Han until comparatively recent times, when the country was definitely reconquered under the reign of Yunglo, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, A.D. 1403—25; but subsequent emperors contented themselves with the acknowledgement of Chinese suzerainty and the sending of an annual tribute. Meanwhile, the Annamese had adopted Chinese civilization and had organized the government on the Chinese model, with officials selected by competitive examination in the Chinese classics, Confucianism having long previously been adopted as the national cult. In the eighteenth century Roman Catholic missions were established in the country, quarrels ensued, resulting ultimately in annexation, first of Lower Cochin-China in 1859—63, and lastly of Tongking, after an inglorious war with China, in 1884; and thus the present French empire of Indo-China became an established fact.

If we start from the southernmost corner of Mongolia where the Gobi desert impinges on the Great Wall, north of the Chinese province of Kansu,—crossing, on our way south, the arids and waste of Ala-shan,—we are suddenly brought up by the high mountain range that divides the Gobi desert on the north from the little-less desert country of the Koko-nor and Tibet on the south.

This mountain range, crossed by Prejevalski and named by him the Richthofen range, after the celebrated German traveller of that name, forms a fertile isthmus between two deserts by which the road leads from China proper to the Tarim basin and the Lob-nor depression in the west, and so brings us to the subject of our present chapter—Chinese Turkestan.

Chinese Turkestan, also known as Eastern Turkestan, is officially called by the Chinese, Hsinkiang or the New Dominion, adding, since 1877, as the result of Tso Tsung-tang's great campaign against the successors of Yakob Beg, a nineteenth to the original eighteen provinces of China proper,—although this name is unknown to the inhabitants, who are familiar only with the local names, such as Hi with Kulja to the north of the Tien-shan; and Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar to the south.

Siam, the last of the continental countries on our list, whose frontier until recently marched with that of China, and whose people are one in which the Mongol type of the inhabitants of the countries hitherto described fades off into that of the Hindu-Malayan races to its west and south, forms the outermost extension of the wide region abutting on the China Sea and that has Chinese civilization as its base, in contradistinction to the races of Aryan or Iranian type that people the western half of the Eurasian continent, in which civilization developed simultaneously but independently from the early Graeco-Phenician inhabitants of the shores of the Mediterranean. The contrast in mental type and consequent modes in which the phenomena of mind and matter are regarded by the Mongol and the Aryan, is as marked as is that of their physical conformation; the typical distinctive feature of which, in the Mongol, is the bridgeless nose with wide flattened nostrils, the prominent cheekbones and retreating forehead, contrasting with the aquiline nose and dome-shaped forehead of the Aryan. Holding this main distinction in view, the Malays, like the Japanese, must be classed with the Mongol division of humanity, to which, likewise, the Shans and Siamese undoubtedly belong, although a certain admixture of Aryan and Hindu blood is apparent among them, which may account for their greater receptivity of western ideas and less subservience to that Chinese philosophical teaching, which has been at once the glory and the bane of the neighbouring nations.

During Mr. Little's absence in China, the proofs of this book were kindly read for me by my colleague at the London School of Economics, Mr. A. J. Sargent, to whom my thanks are due. Mr. Little returned in time to see the last revise.

The maps and diagrams in the text have been prepared by Mr. A. W. Andrews of the Diagram Company, to whom and to Mr. J. G. Bartholomew, who executed the coloured maps, my thanks are also due.

This unique area of level land in the wide, otherwise purely mountainous, region of Szechuan cannot be passed over in a general description of the province, but demands a short essay to itself, so important is its relation to the rest of the province and so peculiar are its characteristics in China, and, we may confidently add, in the world at large. There are other lake basins now dry and converted into fertile agricultural land, but we know of no other similarly isolated basin, unless it be that of the Great Salt Lake in North America, that depends for its perennial fertility upon a so complicated and original system of artificial irrigation as that which we see to-day exhibited in the Chengtu plain. This plain is, roughly speaking, a parallelogram measuring some seventy miles south-west and north-east by about forty miles north-west to south-east, thus possessing an area of about 2,800 square miles—just that of County Cork in Ireland, and little more than half the area of the one county of York in England, but probably the most highly productive and thickly populated piece of land of its size on the surface of the globe: the population of the county of London may possibly be still closer packed, but there is no comparison in the relative productiveness of the soil, due, in the case of Chengtu plain, to its artificial enrichment by the return to the soil of all the refuse matter emanating from a dense population, coupled with a system of irrigation the most elaborate conceivable.