Furthest to the east is
1. The Tungusic Group,
Which occupies the coast from the northern boundary of China to Kamschatka, and westward to the Yenissei river. It embraces the Manchus and the Tungus. The former, a bold hardy people, possessed themselves of the throne of China early in the seventeenth century, and continue to rule it by a military despotism, adapted with consummate skill to the peculiarities of Chinese character. This has led to an extensive fusion of Sinitic blood among the Manchus, and also an improvement in their social status. They have become Buddhists, and their language is losing ground before the Chinese.
The Tungus to the north of them, inhabiting a vast district of forest, swamp and mountain, east of the Yenissei river, are of ruder life. They depend for subsistence on the chase and on their large herds of reindeer. In religion they adhere to the worship of the powers of nature, and are under the control of their priests or “shamans.” They present a well marked Asiatic type, a brachycephalic skull (81°), round face and oblique eyes, the hair coarse and straight, the beard scanty. In stature they are of medium height, strongly built, and the senses of sight and hearing unusually keen.
Like most nations dwelling in or near the Arctic zone, the disposition of the Tungus is decidedly cheerful and affable. He is hospitable to strangers, and honorable in his dealings. In habits, however, he has no notion of cleanliness, and the Tatar name applied to him—tongus, hog—expresses what his not over-nice neighbors think of his mode of life.
The tribes were subjected to the Russian domination about 1650, and have been gradually improving their condition. A portion of them called Lamuts reside on the sea of Ochotsk, and have fixed villages with houses built in the Russian style.[135]
2. The Mongolic Group
had their original home in Mongolia, a vast arid country south of the Altai range, and west of Manchuria. Before the Christian era they had extended north beyond the mountains and occupied the land around Lake Baikal, whence they proceeded easterly, and under the name of Kalmucks have settled quite to the river Volga. Few of them are agriculturists, it being their preference to wander over the pastures with their flocks. Their religion is a debased form of Buddhism grafted on their ancient fetichism. In physical type they are true Asiatics, and are of a restless, warlike disposition.
In the extended region which they inhabit, stretching over seventy degrees of longitude, they have had space to multiply until their numbers once became a menace to all other nations of the Eurasian continent. Under Genghis Khan, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, they poured down in countless hordes on the cultivated nations of Asia and Europe, and in a few years established a monarchy, the then greatest in the world. About a century later his descendant, the sanguinary Tamerlane, swept Asia from the Indian Ocean to the Arctic circle; and at the close of yet another century Baber, of the same redoubted lineage, founded the empire of the Great Mogul (Mongol) in India, extending from the Indus to the Ganges. Based, however, on despotism, barbarism and fanaticism, these gigantic states disappeared in a few generations, leaving scarcely a trace of their existence except the ruins of the higher civilizations which they had destroyed.