A considerable measure of the cultural predominance of China over her neighbors is to be ascribed to her more numerous population, which in turn was partly due to the cultural advance. The Chinese were the first nation to maintain a system of fairly reliable census records. In the first century and a half after Christ, under the Hans, ten censuses showed from 29 to 83 million inhabitants, the average being 63 millions, or about the same as the estimated population of the Roman empire at its height; somewhat more than that of Europe when America was discovered. A thousand years later, between 1021 and 1580, eight censuses yielded from 43 to 100 millions, with an average of 62 millions. Under the Manchus the population gradually rose from 125 millions in 1736 to 380 in 1881. To-day, the northern half of China is about twice as populous as the southern, and the eastern half exceeds the western in the same ratio. This superior density of population in the northeast reflects the fact that ancient China was the northeast. The same grounding in the past is evident in the fact that from the time of the Chous until the Mongol conquest in 1268, the imperial capitals lay mainly in Shensi or Honan, the core of the old kingdom.
Many ingredients of modern Chinese civilization, and most of its distinctive color, have been present in it since the opening of the historic period. Such are the use of hemp and silk as the typical textile materials; of jade as the precious stone of the nation; the tremendous, life-long moral authority accorded to parents, and the associated worship of ancestors; the unusual respect and rewards for learning; a professed contempt for war and emotional activity; aversion for mythological and metaphysical, scientific, or any other sort of speculation, and coupled therewith an unflagging interest in practical ethics, in the cultivation of character, in the finer shaping of the relations of individuals. These and other leanings endow Chinese civilization with something persistently idiomatic, with a quality of coherent originality. If this civilization were less great, China and the countries influenced by it would be spoken of as constituting what among barbarous and savage peoples we call a culture-area. In the widest perspective, they are such. China, India, the West—which in this view of course includes the Near East as well as Europe—are the three great focal centers of civilization in the eastern hemisphere. Their cultures have risen far above those of the intervening and peripheral nations. Until quite recent centuries, the three have run their courses with approximately equal achievement. And while exchanging elements since prehistoric times, they have each molded both what they borrowed and what they devised into a unified and distinctive design, have stamped it with original patterns. In short, culture development in China, India, and the Occident has been coördinate.
Of course, this distinctness of the three great regions of Old World civilization does not imply that diffusion of culture elements between them ever ceased. It is the form more than the content of civilization that is peculiar to the three areas. From India, for instance, China derived Buddhism, which was accorded a reception under the Hans and cultivated with fervor in the following centuries. Cotton came in the wake of the religion—first as a rare and valuable textile, then to be grown. The West, within the historic period, gave glass and perhaps the impulse toward a Chinese “invention”—porcelain, a glazed-through pottery. In recent centuries the West acted as transmitter for several elements of American origin, tobacco, for example, and maize, which quickly became an important food-plant in parts of China. There have even been reimportations. Gunpowder is said to have been used for fireworks in China in the fifth century, for war in the twelfth, but its employment for the propulsion of missiles from firearms is due to introduction by the Altaic nations in the fifteenth century. From the fourth century B.C. on, there are repeated references in Chinese sources to the magnetic needle and to “south-pointing chariots”—apparently a compass-like device used on land, though probably only as a mechanical toy. Then the needle was applied to geomantic purposes, until Arab or other foreign sailors took it up as a true mariner’s compass, and in the eleventh or twelfth century reintroduced it to the Chinese as an instrument of navigation.
Nor was civilization as stagnant in China as the outsider is likely to think, who becomes aware first of all of its persistent native flavor. The old war chariot, for instance, went out of use about contemporaneously in China and the West. Printing from engraved blocks was in vogue in the sixth century after Christ, from movable clay types in the dynasties between the Tangs and the Mongols, from metal types not much later, since the art was established among the imitating Koreans in the fifteenth century. A system of classifying the numerous characters was invented before the Tangs; the modern one of grouping them according to 214 radicals, under the Mings. True encyclopædias were first compiled in the fourteenth century—four hundred years earlier than in the West. The system of awarding office on the basis of literary examinations took root under the Hans and became organized under the Tangs. The earliest poetry, three thousand years ago, was rimed, and had four or five monosyllabic words in the line. In the Tang time, the line became extended to seven words; and still later was the origin of the peculiar rhythm of alternating tones—a system by which every other word was one bearing the “even” tone and those between any of the other tones. Paper making is said to date from the Hans, and paper money was first issued—disastrously as in some of the first Western attempts—under the Mongols. These and dozens of other instances that might be compiled exemplify, as does the history of ancient Egypt, that even those cultures constantly move to which one is tempted to apply the stigma “conservative” or “tradition-bound.”
253. The Lolos
Scattered in the mountains of southern and western China are a number of barbarous, semi-independent peoples of distinctive ways and speech who maintain their national or tribal status. They seem on first contact to promise a picture of the pre-Chinese culture of the area, but examination shows their customs to be a blend of primitive and advanced, ancient and recent elements. The Lolos of Szechuan may serve as an example. They eat meat from their herds, use no milk, but wear woolen clothing. They grow neither cotton nor rice. They raise oats, buckwheat, maize, and potatoes. Two of these plants are of north or west Asiatic origin; the others are American. Plows are used. Houses are of lashed bamboos, and rain-coats of palm-fiber. No pottery is made, but iron is worked into weapons and tools by native smiths. The Lolos are warlike. They fight like Malaysians with lance and sword. They are organized “feudally,” into nobility and commoners, with tribal heads or lords. They marry cousins. Religion resembles that of the more backward Indo-Chinese and Malaysian peoples. Sorcerer-priests cure disease; sacrifice animals for their blood, the flesh being eaten; offer also fermented liquor; divine the future by observing parts of the sacrificed animals—the cracks that develop in heated shoulder-blades (§ [97]). There is a native system of writing, which seems to derive from Chinese stimulus, if not sources. It is obvious that this culture has fused together very old elements that are characteristic of southeastern Asia, with elements that have flowed in from remote sources or during the most recent centuries. It is also clear that certain ingredients of Chinese culture have been freely absorbed and others rejected by this mountain people.
Such cultures as that of the Lolos may be described as internally marginal or peripheral. They differ from externally marginal cultures, like those of the Bushmen, Australians, Fuegians, in that the latter, on account of their geographical remoteness, have retained their ancient level with relative purity. Included marginal cultures, on the contrary, being of necessity exposed to subsequent influences, are regularly a mixture of belated and recent ingredients, no matter how well integrated these may have become.
254. Korea
Korea has repeatedly been under the political authority of China, more often autonomous, but for three thousand years has been dependent on China culturally. Non-Chinese influences have also reached it: such as an alphabet of Indian origin (§ [149]); and probably the earliest iron industry came in from Altaic sources. In its turn, the peninsula transmitted to Japan: until about a thousand years ago, Chinese writing and culture reached Japan mainly via Korea. The spread of Chinese civilization was perhaps largely of the usual, slow, diffusing kind, but was several times accelerated by the settlement in Korea of groups of Chinese refugees, colonists, or adventurers; for instance in Chou and Han times. The center of power and civilization within Korea has gradually moved southwards, which suggests the waning of original central Asiatic affiliations as Chinese ones became stronger. The first realm to be defined was Fuyu on the Sungari river. Then followed Kokorai or Korai, whence our name Korea. In the centuries immediately before and after Christ, Shinra and then Hiaksai, farther south on the peninsula, came into the lead. By the beginning of this period not only the writing but the classic books of China had been introduced. Since the fourteenth century Confucianism has been the state religion—though the people had long before become Buddhists—and literary examinations for office of the Chinese type have been in vogue.