The portion of the earth's surface comprised in this term covers a vast extent of territory. Setting aside the Dutch East Indies, a group of islands many of which are singly as large as a European state, aggregating an area equal to that of the European continent outside Russia; as well as the Malay peninsula, which, attached to the mainland alone by the narrow isthmus of Kra, may be treated as belonging geographically, as it assuredly does ethnographically, to the great Malay archipelago; we have the whole of Eastern Asia outside of British India and Siberia for our theme. The Philippine group should also rightly be included in the ‘Far East,’ but it is comprised in the Malay archipelago, and so is technically beyond our limit. We include then in the definition, for the purpose of the present work, the continental countries of China with its outlying dependencies, Siam and Indo-China, together with the long string of islands in the Pacific which make up the empire of Japan—being all the countries commonly understood in the term ‘Far East.’

The varying scales on which the maps in our atlases are drawn render them utterly deceptive as far as comparative areas are concerned, and an atlas of the world on one and that a fairly large scale is a desideratum for which we shall probably have long to wait. Occasionally an inset map of the British Isles is added to maps of Asiatic lands and forms a welcome basis of comparison.

The analogy we have already indicated between the eastern coast of North America and that of Eastern Asia cannot fail to strike any one who studies their geography and is familiar with the climate and resources of the two regions. Either is situated on the east coast of a great continent: each is affected by a warm gulf stream, the reflux of the trade-wind driven current in the tropical regions to the south—deflected off its shores by the land-masses obstructing a continuous western flow—and thus the stream, as it starts eastwards, leaves room in both cases for the descent of a cold Arctic current between it and the coast to the north. The distinction is that on the Indo-China coast, owing to the different configuration of the land and the wider sweep of the Pacific, these phenomena take place in a lower latitude. On the coast of North America, the Gulf Stream ascends to 35° north before moving east; on the coast of China the Kuro-siwo takes its departure on the verge of the tropics. The monsoon winds, due to the larger land-mass of the Asiatic continent, that prevail off the coasts of India and China go farther to emphasize the distinction; blowing in winter steadily from the north they drive the surface cold water at that season farther south than do the more intermittent gales of the North Atlantic; river, the western half being thinly peopled by aboriginal tribes, and valuable only for its wealth in minerals ; isolated fertile valleys are found amongst the lofty mountain mass which fills this region, such as the Chien-chang valley with its chief city, Ningyuen, in the.south, and the rich valley of Yachow in the north.

The eighteen populous provinces which compose ‘China proper’ are enveloped on all sides, excepting the one open to the Pacific, by thinly peopled regions of more than double the area of the kernel, all acknowledging Chinese sway, having been acquired, some by conquest, some by inheritance, some by hardly unwilling submission to the superior civilization of their illustrious neighbour; all form together an area exceeding that of Europe, and not the least valuable of these outlying possessions is Manchuria.

Manchuria is so named from the Tartar tribe originally dwelling in the country, the Manchu, which conquered China in 1644 and whose descendants form the ruling dynasty to-day. The country, including the maritime province of Primorsk, has an area equal to that of France and Germany combined, possesses an exceptionally rich soil, and potential resources which only need development to render it equally productive: this vast region, extending from the 39th to the 52nd parallel of north latitude, lies farther to the south than do those countries, but, owing to the drop in the isotherms of Eastern Asia, the winter climate is colder by some thirty degrees than in the corresponding latitude in Europe, and ten to twenty degrees colder than in the same latitude in New England.

The province of Hupeh, the second on our list, comprises in the main the lower Han valley in the north and the middle Yangtse valley in the south; the two valleys being divided by the range of the wild Tapa-shan, the same mountains that divide Szechuan from Shensi and which, in their prolongation eastwards, finally subside under the alluvial plain of the Hwai river. It lies between the thirtieth and thirty-second parallels of latitude and between seven meridians of longitude (109 to 116), the total area being 69,000 square miles, carrying a population generally estimated at 30,000,000 souls. Hupeh, literally translated, means ‘North of the Lake,’ the Tungting being the lake alluded to; the province by which Hupeh is bounded on the south being Hunan, meaning ‘South of the Lake,’ while the two provinces together are known as the Viceroyalty of Hu-kwang, meaning ‘Lake expanse,’—the ancient name of this region. The country here formed in prehistoric times a vast lake which the Yangtse had to fill up before it commenced to form its present delta. Hupeh may then have meant northern lake (expanse), and Hunan, southern lake (expanse). One half of the area of the province, the thickly populated central portion, an ellipse the two foci of which are the great marts of Shashih and Hankow, is an alluvial plain once a vast inland sea, to this day largely covered by lagoons and swamps, and in the frequently recurring years of flood reconverted into a lake of nearly the old surface dimensions.

This work owes its origin to the suggestion of Mr. Mackinder and its completion to his encouragement. The author, not being a Geographer or Geologist by profession, as are the distinguished writers of the Geographical series with whom he has the honour to be associated, undertook the task with much diffidence: he did so, however, in the hope that his long personal acquaintance with the bulk of the countries described would make amends for his lack of expert knowledge; and that the power, acquired by a life-long residence in the East, of imparting a ‘local atmosphere’ to his descriptions would atone for the many deficiencies which he is the first to recognize.

The book has been written literally ‘in the intervals of business’ and that of an absorbing character: but this business has necessitated extended travel in China and the neighbouring countries, and so facilitated the accumulation of the needful knowledge of the regions described. The first of such journeys was made in the year 1860, at the time that Shanghai was invested by the Taipings; and led from Ningpo up the Tsien-tang river through Nganhui, and so by way of the famous potteries of Kingtehchen down the Poyang lake to Kiukiang—the whole country traversed being the scene of the great struggle then going on between the forces of Hung-hsu-chuen and the Imperialists; a long journey which his acquaintance with the language, and the prestige that in those days surrounded the Englishman in China, enabled him to accomplish in safety.

The four southern provinces which lie stretched east and west, to the south of the Yangtse basin and to the north of Tongking and the China Sea, are Yunnan, Kweichow, Kwangsi, and Kwangtung. The two latter are drained entirely by the West or Pearl River and its forks, which fall into the China Sea a short distance below Canton,—as are also portions of the two former provinces; Northern Yunnan and Kweichow, however, drain into the Upper Yangtse, while Southern Yunnan drains mainly into the Red River of Hanoi, flowing into the gulf of Tongking. In addition to these we find, traversing the southwest corner of the province of Yunnan, the Salwin, draining into the gulf of Martaban, and the Mékong with its delta in Cambodia. The four provinces are all mountainous, with little or no level land outside of the delta of the Pearl River, some high plateaux in Yunnan and a few narrow river bottoms. Yunnan is in fact a south-eastern peninsular extension of the great Tibetan plateau, itself a wide, similarly uneven, highland region in the nature of a plateau from six to seven thousand feet above sea-level, sloping gradually to the south and east, with ranges of mountains rising up to three and four thousand feet higher, with some peaks in the west above the snow-line (here fifteen thousand feet).

Starting from the west and following down the course of the Yangtse river, the first province of the middle basin is Szechuan. The name means ‘Four Streams,’ derived probably from the fact that the four great north and south valleys which comprise its richest agricultural region, and that earliest settled by the Chinese, are watered by four parallel rivers which take their rise in the mountains to the north and debouch into the Yangtse, which flows along the southern frontier of the province: these rivers, which form such a conspicuous feature in its geography, are the Min, the Chung-kiang (or Central River), the Fu-kiang and the Kialing,—the two latter uniting into one stream a few miles above their junction with the Yangtse at the Treaty Port Chungking. Farther to the west are three larger rivers, likewise running in parallel channels north and south—the Kinsha, the Yalung and the Tatu-ho, but these, though larger in volume, are comparatively of small importance, as they flow through the wild mountains of the Tibetan border as unnavigable torrents.

The last of these rivers once formed the western boundary of the province, but recently the boundary has been moved farther west until it now includes the right bank of the Kinsha, west of Batang in Tibet: thus the area of Szechuan is now put down as 185,000 square miles and the population at fifty to sixty millions; the valuable and populous half lies east of the Min river, the western half being thinly peopled by aboriginal tribes, and valuable only for its wealth in minerals ; isolated fertile valleys are found amongst the lofty mountain mass which fills this region, such as the Chien-chang valley with its chief city, Ningyuen, in the south, and the rich valley of Yachow in the north.

The Empire of Japan comprises a chain of islands over 2,000 miles in length, which lie like a fringe along the shores of China, Corea, and Manchuria, and form a breakwater arresting the rollers of the wide Pacific on its eastern face, and enclosing between it and the mainland of Asia the land-locked Sea of Japan in the north and the Tung Hai, or Eastern Sea, that washes the coast of China in the south. This string of islands, all acknowledging the sway of the Mikado, number about 4,000, the five principal ranging in area from 13,500 (Formosa) to 87,500 square miles (Hondo); the rest forming an archipelago of islets ranging from a fraction of I square mile up to an area of 335 square miles (Sado Island). This long chain of picturesque fragmentary domains, all, with the exception of the northern Kuriles, richly clothed with sub-tropical vegetation set in the sapphire frame of a sun-illumined sea, from which they rise steeply with no unlovely foreshore to detract from their beauty, form a fitting home for the unique people that dwell in them, and go far to explain the remarkable qualities that distinguish the Japanese race, who proudly call themselves the Anglo-Saxons of the East,—with the home of whom their own home exhibits a certain analogy of position, although the closeness of the analogy vanishes upon a near inspection of the two groups of islands which thus fall into comparison.

This middle basin of the Central Kingdom—China—is correctly defined in the words of a dispatch penned by Sir Claude Macdonald to the Chinese Foreign Office on February 19, 1898, as ‘The Yangtse region’ and the ‘provinces adjoining the Yangtse.’ A more exact definition is the ‘Yangtse basin,’ as is the definition of the northern basin we have just described—the ‘Basin of the Yellow River.’ The boundaries of the Yangtse basin are the crests of the water-partings that surround the catchment area, which area, in order to confine ourselves to the Middle Kingdom proper—the ‘eighteen provinces,’—we bring to an end in the west at the political frontier of Tibet, cutting out from our purview that upper part of the basin that lies along the higher courses of the Yangtse across the frontier. This limit, as given in modern Chinese maps, in no way corresponds with the geographical limit, the province of Szechuan; which the older maps marked as bounded on its western border by the Tatung river, and which is the true physiographical and ethnographical limit, the boundary being now made to embrace a large slice of the Tibetan plateau up to and beyond Batang: much as Yunnan, since the suppression of the Mahometan rebellion in 1875, is now made to include Atuntse and the country west of Tengyueh, nearly up to the walls of Bhamo.

Mongolia, the land of the Mongols, covers a vast extent of territory. It comprises the wide and in parts waterless plateau that divides the warm, fertile lowlands of China on the south from the cold Siberian depression on the north; the intervening distance being about 1,000 miles. The actual area of the plateau is 1,300,000 square miles, three times that of Manchuria (including the maritime province alienated to Russia), which itself, as we pointed out in the preceding chapter, exceeds that of France and Germany combined. But area alone is no test of value, and while Manchuria, as we have shown, is one of the richest countries in the world, Mongolia is one of the poorest. This natural poverty is due, always excepting the western desert portion, not so much to poorness of soil as to unfavourable location; the plateau is walled in by mountains which intercept the bulk of the moisture in the winds which sweep over its highlands, rendering these hot and dry in summer; while the elevation renders them bitterly cold in winter, so that agriculture can only be attempted in a few favoured spots, thereby confining its inhabitants to a pastoral life and so making of the Mongols a nomad race as much by necessity as by predilection.