The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  But ere I finish this chapter, let me draw your attention to an interesting object lesson of what education may do for a people. The granite bridge connecting Scandinavia with Russia was entirely inhabited by people of Mongolian origin. But the western half, the so-called Finnish half, was conquered by the Swedes, while the eastern half, inhabited by the Karelians, became Russian territory. After five centuries of Swedish influence and domination, the Finns of the west had become a civilized European nation superior in many ways to several countries which enjoyed a much better geographical position. But the Karelians, after an equally long period under the rule of the Russians, who some day hoped to exploit the riches of the Kola peninsula and the Murmansk coast, were exactly where they had been when the Muscovite Tsars first insisted upon their submission. Whereas in Finland proper, which did not get in touch with Slavic culture until 1809 when Sweden lost this province to Russia, the number of illiterates is one per cent., it is 97% in Karelia, which has always been under Muscovite influence. Yet the two peoples are the same, and probably have the same natural ability for spelling c-a-t, cat and t-a-i-l, tail.

  Chapter XXX

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  THE DISCOVERY OF ASIA

  Two thousand years ago the Greek geographers were fighting among themselves about the original meaning of the word ‘Asia.’ So there is no use in trying to solve the problem to-day. The theory that the word Ereb or ‘darkness’ was the name which the sailors from Asia Minor had bestowed upon the land in the west where the sun went down, and Açu or ‘glorious’ upon the land in the east where the sun arose, seems to be as good or as bad as any other.

  Then we come to the next point, which is of greater importance. How and when did the people of Europe begin to suspect that they were not the centre of the world—that their own home was but the small peninsula of an infinitely larger piece of land inhabited by ever so many more people, many of whom enjoyed a much higher degree of civilization, so that the Trojan heroes were fighting each other with weapons of such prehistoric shape that the intelligent Chinese had long since placed them in their museums of obsolete historical curiosities?

  Usually Marco Polo is mentioned as the first European to visit Asia, but there had been others before him, although we know very little that is definite about them. As has happened so often in the realm of geography, it was war rather than peace which widened our knowledge of the Asiatic map. The chance to do business with the people overseas made the Greeks familiar with Asia Minor. The Trojan war was not without its educational side. The three great Persian expeditions against the West helped matters along very nicely. I doubt whether the Persians knew where they were going. Did the Greeks mean much more to them than the Indians of North America meant to General Braddock when he moved into the wilderness to attack Fort Duquesne? I doubt it. The return visit of Alexander the Great, a couple of centuries later, was already something more than a mere military campaign, and Europe got Its first scientific ideas about the territory lying between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

  ASIA

  The Romans were far too much pleased with themselves to take a really serious interest in ‘foreign’ lands. As a source of revenue, to allow them to live a more luxurious existence at home, all foreign countries were grist to their mill. But the people whom they administered were little more than subjects of polite interest: provided they paid their taxes and worked on the roads, they could live and die and quarrel among themselves as they pleased. In a crisis the authorities called for the guards, did enough fighting to re-establish order, and washed their hands of the whole affair.

  Pontius Pilate was neither a weakling nor a scoundrel. He was merely a typical Roman colonial administrator. Once in a while some queer person like Marcus Aurelius would come to the throne, who derived a positive pleasure from sending a diplomatic mission to the mysterious, slant-eyed people of the Far East When they returned and told of the strange things they had seen, they were a seven days’ wonder. Then the Roman mob tired of them and went back to the exciting daily shows of the Colosseum.

  The Crusades taught Europe a few things about Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt, but the world continued to end on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea.

  The story which finally made Europe ‘Asia-conscious’ was not the result of a serious ‘scientific’ expedition, but was due to the labours of a hack-writer who had never set eyes upon the countries of which he wrote, a poor penny-a-liner looking for a subject that might prove popular.

  The father and uncle of Marco Polo were Venetian merchants whose business dealings had brought them into contact with Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. Kublai Khan happened to be a man of great intelligence who thought that his people would be benefited by the introduction of a certain amount of Western efficiency. He had heard that two Venetians occasionally visited Bokhara, a country in Turkestan between the Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya at the foot of the Altai mountains. He invited them to come to Peking. They went and were received with great honours. After several years they decided that their families needed them. The Khan bade them go home for a while and return and bring their bright young son and nephew Marco, about whom they had been talking so much.

  In 1275, after a trip of three and a half years, the Polo family returned to Peking. Young Marco was all he had been said to be. He became a favourite at the Court, was made governor of a province, received titles and honours, but after two dozen years he got homesick and so returned to Venice by way of India (that part of the voyage was on the sea) and Persia and Syria.

  His neighbours, not in the least interested in tall stories, nicknamed him Marco Millions, for he was for ever telling them how many leagues he had covered in his travels, and how rich the Khan was, and how many golden statues there were in this temple or that, and how many silken gowns the concubines of such and such a prime minister owned. Why should they believe such yarns, when it was well known that even the wife of the Emperor of Constantinople had only a single pair of silk stockings?

  And Marco Millions might have died and his story might have died with him if Venice and Genoa had not engaged in one of their little quarrels just then, and if Marco, as commander of a Venetian galley, had not been taken prisoner by the victorious Genoese. He remained in prison for a year, sharing his cell with a citizen from Pisa by the name of Rusticiano. This Rusticiano had had some experience as a writer, having popularized a number of Arthurian tales and chivalric romances. He quickly recognized the publicity value of the great Polo story, and during their time in prison he pumped Marco for information. Taking down everything Marco told him, he gave the world a book which is read as much to-day as when it was first published in the fourteenth century.

  What probably gave the book its success was its constant references to gold and to riches of all sorts. The Romans and the Greeks had vaguely spoken of the opulence of eastern potentates but Polo had been on the spot, had seen all these things with his own eyes. The efforts to find a short-cut to the Indies really date from that time. But the task was difficult.

  Finally in 1486 the Portuguese got as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Ten years later they were in India. Forty years later they were in Japan. Meanwhile Magellan, coming from the east, had reached the Philippine Islands, and by that time the exploitation of southern Asia was in full swing.

  So much for the general outline. How Siberia was discovered I have already told. The first visitors to the other countries will be given honourable mention when we get to them.

  Chapter XXXI

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  WHAT ASIA HAS MEANT TO THE REST OF THE WORLD

  Europe gave us our civilization but Asia gave us our religion. What is even more interesting, Asia gave the world the three great monotheistic religions which now dominate mankind. Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism are all of Asiatic origin. It is curious to reflect that when the Inquisitioners were burning their Jews, both the executioners and their victims were appealing to deities of Asiatic origin; that when the Cr
usaders were killing the Mohammedans and vice versa, it was a conflict of two Asiatic creeds which bade them do murder upon each other; and that whenever a Christian missionary gets into a dispute with a follower of Confucius, the two are merely engaged in a purely Asiatic exchange of opinions.

  But Asia did not only give us our religious beliefs. It also gave us the fundamentals upon which we have constructed the entire fabric of civilization. In the pride of our recent technical inventions, we may loudly boast of “our great Western progress” (we occasionally do), but that much-vaunted progress of the West is merely a continuation of the progress that was begun in the East. It is highly doubtful whether the West would have been able to go ahead if it had not learned the rudiments of everything it knows in the schools of the East.

  The knowledge of the Greeks was not the result of cerebral spontaneous combustion. Mathematics and astronomy and architecture and medicine did not, like Pallas Athene, jump forth from the head of Zeus, armed from head to foot, ready for the glorious battle upon human stupidity. They were the result of slow and painful and deliberate growth, and the real pioneering work was done along the banks of the Euphrates and tine Tigris.

  From Babylon the arts and sciences travelled to Africa. Here the Egyptians took them in hand until the Greeks had at last reached a sufficiently high degree of civilization to appreciate the beauty of a geometrical problem and the loveliness of a perfectly balanced equation. From that moment on we can speak of a truly ‘European’ science. But that truly European science had had an Asiatic ancestor which had lived and prospered more than 2000 years before.

  And Asia bestowed further blessings upon us. The domestic animals, the dog and the cat and the useful quadrupeds, the docile cow and the faithful horse, together with the sheep and the hog, were all of them of Asiatic origin. When we think of the part played by these useful creatures during the era before the invention of the steam-engine, we begin to realize the debt we owe to Asia. To which we must add the greater part of our bill-of-fare, for practically all of our fruits and vegetables, most of our flowers, and practically all of our poultry is of Asiatic origin and was brought to Europe by the Greeks, the Romans, or the Crusaders.

  Asia, however, was not always a Lady Bountiful, carrying rich blessings from the banks of the Ganges and the Yellow River to the poor barbarians of the West. Asia could also be a terrible taskmaster. The Huns, who during the fifth century ravaged central Europe, were of Asiatic origin. The Tartars, who followed them seven centuries later and turned Russia into an Asiatic dependency to the everlasting detriment of all the other European nations, hailed from the desert regions of central Asia. The Turks, who during five long centuries caused so much bloodshed and misery and made eastern Europe into what it is to-day, were an Asiatic tribe. And another hundred years may see a united Asia once more upon the war path and eager to repay us for some of the things we have done to her children since Berthold Schwartz invented his gunpowder.

  Chapter XV

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  THE CENTRAL ASIATIC HIGHLANDS

  The 17,000,000 square miles of Asia are divided into five unequal parts.

  First of all, and nearest to the Arctic, lies the great plain which I mentioned when speaking of Russia. Next come the central highlands. Then the high plateaux of the south-west. Next the peninsulas of the south; and finally the peninsulas of the east. As I have already described the great Arctic plain, I can continue at once with the second part of the programme.

  The central Asiatic highlands begin rather mildly with a series of low mountain chains which form more or less parallel lines running invariably from east to west or from south-east to northwest, but never from north to south. In many places, however, the crust of the earth has been badly broken and twisted and folded and tortured by great volcanic upheavals. Thus we get the irregular contours of the Yablonoi mountains east of Lake Baikal, the Khangai and Altai mountains west of Baikal, and the Tien-shan mountains just south of the Balkash Lake. To the west of these mountains are the plains. To the east lies the high plateau of Mongolia, where the Gobi desert is situated, the home of the ancestors of Genghis Khan.

  West of the Gobi desert lies the slightly lower plateau of east Turkestan or Sinkiang. It is the valley of the Tarim River, which aimlessly loses itself in the nearby lake of Lob-nor, famous through the discoveries of the Swedish traveller Sven Hedin. On the map the Tarim looks like a small desert brook. Yet it is one and a half times as long as the Rhine. For remember, Asia is the country of the gigantic proportions.

  Just north of Turkestan there is a gap between the Altai and Tien-shan mountains. It is the land mentioned on our atlases as Zungaria, and it leads up to the Kirghz steppes. It consists of an enormous valley which was the gateway through which all the desert tribes, the Huns, the Tartars, and the Turks, started upon their marauding expeditions against Europe.

  South of the Tarim basin, due south-west to be more accurate, the landscape becomes exceedingly complicated. The Tarim basin is cut off from the valley of the Oxus or the Amu-Darya (which loses itself in the Aral Sea) by a high plateau, the Plateau of Pamir, also called the Roof of the World. The Pamir mountains, already known to the Greeks, were on the direct route from Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to China. They were a good deal of a barrier, but could be crossed by a few difficult mountain passes. These passes average between 15,000 and 16,000 feet in height. Remember that Mont Blanc is only a little over 15,000 feet high.

  Then you get some idea of a mountainous territory where the passes lie at a higher altitude than the highest mountain tops of Europe and America, where the mountains themselves therefore dwarf anything we ourselves have to offer in the shape of crinkled globe-crust.

  But the Pamir plateau is merely a beginning. It is a sort of terminal from which the big mountain-ranges radiate in all directions. There is the Tien-shan range, which I have already mentioned, running north-eastward. To the east there is the Kuenlun range, which cuts Tibet off from the Tarim basin. There is the Karakoram, which is short but very, very steep; and finally we have the Himalaya range, which in the south cuts Tibet off from India and which breaks all records for ‘highest above sea-level,’ with altitudes of nearly five and one-half miles, reached by both Everest (29,141 feet) and Kinchinjinga (28,146 feet).

  As for the plateau of Tibet, with an average height of 15,000 feet, it is indeed the most elevated country in the world. The Bolivian plateau in South America is between 11,000 and 13,000 feet high, and supports a population of nearly three millions, whereas Tibet, which covers an area equal to one-fifth of that of Russia in Europe, has a population of about two million people.

  This shows to what extremes of air-pressure the human body can accustom itself. Tourists who have crossed the Rio Grande know the discomforts they experience when they are allowed to spend a few days in the delightful Mexican capital, which is only 7400 feet high. They are warned beforehand not to hustle as they do at home, and to take it easy until their heart ceases to pump like a sledge-hammer whenever they walk a few yards. The Tibetans not only walk but they carry everything the country needs on their backs across mountain passes which are quite frequently too steep for mules and horses but which are the only connexion they have with the outside world.

  THE HIGH PLATEAU OF TIBET

  Although Tibet is about two hundred miles further south than the semi-tropical island of Sicily, the snow remains on the ground for at least six months of every year and the thermometer not infrequently goes down to 30°. Nevertheless, this high plateau with its terrible wind storms, raging across the bleak salt-bogs of the south, its dust and snow and general discomforts of living, has become the home of an exceedingly curious religious experiment.

  During the seventh century Tibet was merely a principality like so many other Asiatic States, ruled over by a king who lived in Lhasa, the City of God. One of these kings was converted to Buddhism by his Chinese wife. Since that day Buddhism has flourished in Tibet as nowhere else in Asia. Lhasa is to the Buddhists wha
t Rome is to the Catholics, or Mecca to the Mohammedans—the holy of holies.

  The Buddhism of Tibet is not the pure original doctrine of the gentle Indian prince who lived and died six centuries before the birth of Christ. It is the usual degenerate form, foil of devils and spooks, and it has forgotten a great many of the noble teachings of the founder of that great Asiatic faith. But Tibet has been a bulwark of Buddhism which has been of great help in preserving that religion against the attacks of the Mohammedans from the west and the pagan creeds of southern India. Its uninterrupted success may in part have been the result of a very extraordinary arrangement which that Church provides for an almost automatic continuation of the institution of the Buddhistic papacy.

  The Buddhists have always believed in the reincarnation of the soul. It follows that the soul of Gotama himself must continue somewhere on this earth. All that was necessary was to find him and make him head of all the faithful. Now it is well to remember that Christianity, which is so much younger than Buddhism, has a great many ideas and institutions in common with its old neighbour and rival. Pious Buddhists were in the habit of eschewing, the Devil and the flesh long before John the Baptist retired into the wilderness. Their monks practised celibacy, poverty, and chastity ages before Saint Simeon Stylites climbed his pillar at Telenasa, near Antioch, in Syria. They also exercised high political functions. During the reign of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan and an ardent convert to Buddhism, the abbots of an important Tibetan monastery were recognized as the political rulers of all Tibet In return for this favour, the new Dalai Lama, in his quality of spiritual over-lord of the whole Buddhist world, officially crowned the Tartar Khan Emperor of Mongolia, just as Pope Leo III had crowned Charlemagne. In order to keep the dignity of Lama (or superior spiritual ruler) in the same family, the first Lamas broke the rules of celibacy and remained married until they had begotten a son to succeed them. But during the fourteenth century a great reformer arose among the Tibetan monks, a sort of Martin Luther of Buddhism. When he died, the old monastic orders had been re-established in all their former rigour, and their head, the Dalai Lama (the Lama as big as the ocean), was once more recognized as their spiritual shepherd by one-quarter of all the people on earth. He was to be assisted in his task by the Pantshen Lama or Glorious Teacher, who was to be a sort of vice-pope. The method of succession has never been changed.