The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  THE MOUNTAIN PASSES OF ASIA

  There is a theory that Angkor was originally built on the sea, and long before the delta of the Mekong had been formed, but in that case the sea would have retreated more than 300 miles. That would be a record. For in historical times the sea has never retreated much more than five miles in the case of Ravenna and seven miles in the case of Pisa. The why and how and wherefore of Angkor will probably always remain a secret. But here stood a city that was as important in its time as New York is to-day. And it is gone. It has become a subject for picture post cards, sold at a penny apiece to the visitors of the Paris colonial exhibition. And yet, once upon a time, it was a centre of civilization while Paris was still a collection of evil-smelling mud hovels. It is all very strange!

  As for the delta of the Mekong, to-day it is part of the French colony of Cochin-China which the French occupied in 1867 when their imperial prestige needed a little boosting after the disastrous failure of the great Mexican expedition. It has one excellent harbour, Saigon, where a few thousand French officials eagerly await the day when they can return to the home country to rest in peace and honour from their difficult labours in administering the affairs of the four million inhabitants of Cochin-China entrusted to their care.

  To the east of Cochin-China lies Annam, which also continues to be a kingdom, although since 1886 it has enjoyed the ‘protection’ of the French. The interior produces timber but the country is mountainous and has no roads and has therefore remained almost completely undeveloped.

  Tongking in the north is much more important because it not only has an excellent river, the Song-Koi, but also on account of the presence of coal and cement. It really is a part of China and as such raises and exports cotton, silk, and sugar. Its capital is Hanoi which since 1902 replaced Saigon as the chief seat of government for all the French possessions in Indo-China. These include, besides the four countries just mentioned, a narrow strip of land in the interior, called Laos, annexed in 1893, and which I set down here merely for the sake of vital statistics. The southernmost part of this big peninsula is divided into two parts. The so-called Federated Malay States consist of four small semi-independent principalities under British protection, and the rest is a crown colony known administratively as the Straits Settlements. It was exceedingly important for England to get hold of the Malay peninsula, for the mountains, which sometimes rise to a height of 8000 feet, contain some very rich tin deposits, and the climate allows a vast variety of tropical products to be grown here at practically no cost. Rubber, coffee, pepper, tapioca, and gambier (necessary in the dyer’s trade) are exported in large quantities from Penang, on the Straits of Malacca, and from Singapore, a city of over half a million inhabitants, situated on a small island which controls all the great sea routes between north and south and east and west.

  Singapore, the Lion City, was built by that famous Sir Stamford Raffles who foresaw the strategic importance of this point. It was Raffles who urged upon the governments of England and India the importance of taking Java from the French, who had seized it in 1811—part of the Napoleonic policy of ‘grab where you can.’ In 1819 Singapore was a jungle. To-day it has more than 500,000 inhabitants, the strangest variety and hodge-podge of races and languages to be found almost anywhere in the Orient. It is as strongly fortified as Gibraltar, and is the terminal station of a railway line which connects it with Bangkok in Siam, but not as yet with Rangoon in Burma. It will play a great part when the inevitable clash between the East and West finally takes place. In anticipation of that event, it maintains a set of bar-rooms, the splendour of which is famous all over the Orient, and loses almost as much money on the annual races as the city of Dublin.

  Chapter XXXVII

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  THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA, THE GREAT PENINSULA OF EASTERN ASIA

  China is a very large country. It has a circumference of 8000 miles, a distance of about equal to the diameter of the globe, and it is larger than the whole European continent.

  The Chinese people form fully one-fifth of the total population of our planet, and they knew how to use gunpowder and how to write letters at a time when our ancestors still painted their faces a pale blue and hunted the wild boar with a stone axe. To give an adequate description of such a country in a few pages is out of the question. All I can give you is a sketch, an outline. The details (if you are interested) you can afterwards fill in for yourself, for there is enough literature on China to furnish two or three libraries.

  China, like India, is a peninsula, but a semicircular peninsula, not a triangular one. In another very important way it is different from India. There is no great mountain barrier on the north to act as a protection. On the contrary, the mountains of China resemble the fingers of a hand stretching out westward. In consequence thereof the rich Chinese plains bordering upon the Yellow Sea have at all times been wide open to the hardy pioneers of central Asia.

  In order to overcome this handicap, the Chinese emperors of the third century before our era (the period during which Rome and Carthage fought for the mastery of the Mediterranean) constructed a gigantic wall, over 1500 miles long and 20 feet wide and, in places, 30 feet high, which ran all the way from the Gulf of Liao-tung to Kia-jü-kwan, just west of Su-chow on the borders of the Gobi desert.

  This brick and granite barrier has done its duty well and honourably. In the seventeenth century it fell before the onslaughts of the Manchus. All the same, a fortification which has held its own for almost twenty centuries is no mere trifle. Those we build nowadays are useless after ten years and have got to be renewed at enormous cost.

  As for China proper, not counting Mongolia and Manchuria and Tibet and Turkestan, it is a vast circle neatly divided into three almost equal parts by the Yang-tze-Kiang in the south and the Hwang-Ho in the north. The northern part, in which Peking is situated, has very cold winters and moderately hot summers, as a result of which the people eat millet and no rice. The central part, protected against the winds from the north by the Tsing-ling-shan range, has a much warmer climate and a much denser population which eats rice and does not know the sight or taste of grain. The third part, south China, has warm winters and very hot and moist summers, and cultivates everything that will grow in the tropics.

  Northern China is again divided into two parts, the mountain regions of the west and the plains of the east. These mountain regions of the west are the famous loess country. Loess is a very fine sort of loam, looking a yellowish grey, and it is very porous, as a result of which the rain of Heaven disappears as fast as it touches the earth, while rivers and brooks cut themselves deep ravines which make travel from one part of the country to the other as difficult as it is in Spain.

  The plain of the east is situated on the Gulf of Chih-li which is so rapidly being filled up with the deposits carried down by the Hwang-Ho that it is almost unnavigable and has no good harbour. A little further towards the north there is another river, much smaller than the Hwang-Ho but quite as useless from the point of view of navigation. This is the Pei-Ho, which has the distinction of being the great drainage canal which looks after the sewage disposal of the former Chinese capital, Peking. As conditions in China change from hour to hour, I will merely say that Peking has been the capital of the Celestial Empire for nine centuries, or ever since the days when William of Normandy conquered England, but that I have no idea whether at the time this book goes to press it will be the Chinese capital, a mere Chinese city, or the temporary or definite residence of a Japanese general.

  THE BIG CHINESE RIVERS

  It is however a very ancient town and it has seen a great many ups and downs. In 986 it was conquered by the Tartars. In the twelfth century the Chinese recaptured it but did not care to retain it as their capital, and made it a second-rate provincial centre called Yen-shan Fu. Half a century later it was once more taken by another Tartar tribe who now called it Chung-tu, or the ‘central capital.’ Another century later it was occupied by Genghis Khan, who however refused to c
ome and live there in fatuous ease but remained faithful to his tent in the heart of the Mongolian Desert. One of his successors, the famous Kublai Khan, felt differently. He rebuilt the ruins of Peking and baptized them Yenking, or ‘the great court,’ although at that time they were better known by their Mongolian name of Camaluc, or the ‘city of the Khan.’

  Finally these Tartars were expelled too, and a king of Chinese origin, the first of the famous Ming dynasty, mounted the throne. Yenking then became Peking, or the ‘north Court.’ As Peking it remained the centre of the Chinese government, but so far removed from the rest of the world that it was not until 1860 that a European ambassador was allowed to visit the capital in his official capacity and with all the pomp and circumstance befitting a man whose father had given the British Museum the Elgin marbles.

  The city in the heyday of its power must have been tremendously strong. The walls were sixty feet thick and almost fifty feet high and defended by square towers and gateways which were fortresses in themselves. On the inside the city was like a Chinese puzzle, containing a number of smaller cities, one inside the other, an imperial city, and a Manchu city, and a Chinese city, and, after the middle of the nineteenth century, a foreign city.

  Until the Boxer outbreak of 1900 the foreign diplomatic representatives lived in a small square of their own just between the Manchu city and the Chinese city. After the siege, this diplomatic ghetto was strongly fortified and heavily garrisoned with troops of the different countries to prevent a recurrence of this most unfortunate incident. Peking, of course, contains a number of palaces and temples. But here I should draw attention to a very interesting difference between the temperaments of the people of China and those of India, which explains to a certain degree why these two countries have practically nothing in common except that they are both of them hopelessly overpopulated.

  THE CHINESE WALL IS THE ONLY STRUCTURE MADE BY HUMAN HANDS THAT WOULD HE VISIBLE TO AN ASTRONOMER OF THE MOON

  The Hindus have always taken their gods very seriously, and when they built them a temple it must be the biggest, the most expensive and the showiest temple the money of the poor sweating peasants could buy. “Not a penny for public improvements, but millions for the gods!” was the slogan of the Brahmans. The Chinese are nominally Buddhists, but every Chinaman from the humblest laundry-man to the most powerful of the old Mandarins had fallen under the influence of that shrewd old sage Kung-fu-tsze or Confucius, who, during the second half of the sixth century, had preached his gospel of common, everyday horse-sense without wasting much time upon vague discussions about the Life Hereafter. And it was completely in keeping with the Confucian notions about the ‘sensible thing to do’ that the Chinese rulers spent the greater part of their revenue upon public improvements, upon canals and irrigation dams and Chinese walls and river improvements, but just enough upon their temples and shrines not to make the gods feel that they were in any way being slighted.

  As the ancient Chinese were a people of tremendous artistic ability, they could achieve much more satisfactory results and at a much smaller cost than the natives of the Ganges valley. It is true that nowhere in China does the traveller find anything at all comparable to the vast structures of India. A few gigantic statues of animals guarding the gardens of the Ming rulers, some sixty miles north of Peking, and here and there a large Buddha—:that is all. The rest is of modest dimensions, albeit of excellent proportions. But curiously enough, the art of China appeals to the people of the West much more than does the art of India. Chinese paintings and sculptures and pottery and lacquer-work fit into a European or American home, whereas their Indian counterparts disturb the harmony and are slightly upsetting, even when seen in a museum..

  To the modern business world China is important because it has very large coal deposits and the second largest iron deposits in the world. When the English and German and American mines get exhausted, we can still go to the province of Shan-si to keep warm.

  To the south-east of the province of Chih-li lies the province of Shan-tung with the peninsula of that name which separates the Gulf of Chih-li from the Yellow Sea. This part of China is very mountainous, except for the valley of the Hwang-Ho, which formerly ran due south into the Yellow Sea. But it changed its course suddenly in 1852, and that little affair showed us that a flood in China really meant a flood. Again in 1887 a million Chinese perished in the floods when the river once more broke its banks. In order to find a parallel for the Hwang-Ho’s behaviour we should have to imagine the Rhine suddenly making up its mind to flow into the Baltic, or the Seine deciding to run into the Bay of Biscay instead of into the English Channel. As the Hwang-Ho has changed its mouth at least ten times in twenty centuries we are by no means certain that the present channel will be definite. Dikes and dams which in other parts of the world are apt to keep a river within bounds are of no avail against such rivers as the Hwang-Ho and the Yang-tze, for the dikes through which the river broke in 1853 were fifty feet high, and they were rent like tissue paper.

  And then there is something else that makes these rivers such a nuisance. You must have heard the Chinese referred to as ‘the Yellow Race,’ and you must have seen articles in the newspapers about the Yellow peril, etc., etc. As a rale we associate the idea of yellow and Chinese with the colour of a Chinaman’s face. But when the emperors of China called themselves Hwang-ti, which meant Lord of the Yellow Earth, they were not thinking of their subjects but of the land inhabited by these subjects. The yellow loess mud carried down by the Hwang-Ho turns everything in northern China yellow—the water of the river, the water of the sea, the roads, the houses, the fields, the clothes of the men and women. And it is that yellow dust which has given its name to a race which for the rest is really not much more yellow than the average city dweller of the West.

  In order to permit his subjects to proceed from northern China to central and southern China without running the risk of a long sea voyage, one of the Chinese emperors ordered a canal to be built. Constructed early in the seventh century, it runs for 700 miles from Hang-chow in the south to Tientsin in the north, crossing both the Yang-tze and Hwang-Ho in its course, and fulfilled its purpose faithfully until 1852 when the Hwang-Ho moved from the Yellow Sea to the Gulf of Chih-li and seriously damaged the northern section of the canal. But this Grand Canal, the longest in the world, shows that the ancient rulers of the land were men of enlightened views.

  THE GRAND CANAL IN CHINA

  But to return to the peninsula of Shan-tung. Its hard rocky coast has been responsible for the formation of several very important harbours. One of those, Wei-hai-wei, just east of Chi-fu, was until 1930 in English hands. The British, had leased it from China when Russia occupied Port Arthur on the other side of the Gulf of Chih-li for use as a naval base and a station of their Trans-Siberian railway. The lease stipulated that England should withdraw as soon as the Russians had disappeared from the Liao-tung peninsula. But when Japan took Port Arthur in 1905, the English remained. The Germans, not to be outdone, then occupied the bay ol Kiao-Chow, further towards the south, and the city of Tsing-tao, both of them also parts of the Shan-tung peninsula. This meant that the Great War also had its reverberations in the Far East. Germans and Britons fought for the possession of something which belonged to neither of them and, as usually happens in such cases, a third party, the Japanese, got away with the stolen goods.

  In order to regain a little of the goodwill of the Chinese, Wei-hai-wei and Kiao-Chow have since been returned to China. But as Japan has taken Manchuria, the old game will probably begin all over again. Look for the details in the next edition.

  The east of central China consists of a wide and fertile plain which is really the continuation of the plain of northern China, but the interior is mountainous. Through these mountains the Yang-tze wends its tortuous way until at last it reaches the East China Sea. It takes its origin in the mountains of Tibet, to the west of the province of Szechwan, a region almost as large as France, but supporting a much larger
population, as the red soil is exceedingly fertile. Several mountain-ranges running from south to north cut it almost completely off from the rest of the world. As a result it has suffered but little from the visitation of the white man, and is distinctly more Chinese than the rest of China.

  Continuing its course towards the sea, the Yang-tze next traverses the province of Hu-peh, where the famous city of Hankow is situated. This was the centre of the revolution of 1911 which upset the last emperor of the Manchu dynasty and turned the oldest monarchy in the world into a republic. Up to Hankow the Yang-tze is navigable for ocean-going vessels with a displacement of over 1000 tons. The way in which the waterways of western China converge at Hankow makes this river-port second to none in importance. Hankow is but one of the three adjacent towns separated by the converging rivers. With the other two, Hanyang and Wuchang, the population approaches 2,000,000 and they handle the trade of Hunan, Szechwan, Kweichow, Hu-peh, and southern Shensi. Below Hankow, the river is the main artery of commerce for central China until it reaches the sea near Shanghai, the centre of China’s foreign trade, and one of the first Chinese harbours which was open to foreign commerce at the conclusion of the so-called ‘Opium War’ between England and China in 1840–42.

  To the south of the Yang-tze delta lies Hang-chow, which Marco Polo knew as Kinsai, and in the east Su-chow, the name of which suggests tea. The suggestion is correct. The lower part of the Yang-tze valley is very fertile, and it was for this reason that Nanking, which is situated where the Yang-tze begins its delta, was for a long time not only the most important city of central China but also the residence of its emperor.

  Partly on account of its historical past and partly on account of its strategic position, half-way between Canton and Peking, and partly because it is not directly menaced by the guns of foreign warships, the city of Nanking was chosen as the centre of that government which at the moment of writing seems to be the ‘official government’ of China.