China and the Chinese

by Edmond Plauchut

The skin of this prolific race is always yellow, sometimes pale, and sometimes of a brownish tinge. The stiff straight hair of the Mongol is as black as ebony, and the skull is of the so-called bracycephalic type, that is to say, short as compared to its breadth, whilst that of the Chinese and Tartars is mesaticephalic, or of medium length and breadth.

The face is round, the eyes are mere narrow slits, often decidedly oblique, the nose is large, the cheek-bones are very prominent, and the lips are thick.

At first sight it would appear that the Mongolian dialects all spring from one primitive speech, but examination of evidence proves that this is not the case, for they really belong to two very ancient branches of human speech: the monosyllabic language of the Indo-Chinese races, and the polysyllabic of the other Mongolians. The Tibetans, Burmans, Siamese, and Chinese dialects are all monosyllabic, whilst those in use by the Coreans, Japanese, Tartars, Kirghizes, Kalmucks, Buriats, Samoyedes, and Finns are polysyllabic.

All the inhabitants of the continent of Asia, with the exception of a few tribes of the extreme north, certain groups of Malays and Dravidians in India, with some of the dwellers in the Mediterranean districts of the south-west, belong to the so-called Homo mongolicus, or Mongolian branch of the great human family, whilst in Europe it claims the Finns and Lapps of the north, the Osmanlis of Turkey, and the Magyars of Hungary. Homo articus, or the Polar group, is considered by the best authorities to have originally formed part of the Mongolian branch, including the Esquimaux, the Greenlanders, the Kamtchatkans, etc., all of whom, however, as pointed out by Haeckel, the great German naturalist, have in the course of centuries become so modified by the conditions of life in the Arctic regions, that they may now be looked upon as forming a separate species.

The inhabitants of the extreme north are short and squat, their skulls are of the mesaticephalic, or even in some cases of the dolichocephalic type, that is to say, they are long in proportion to their breadth; their eyes are narrow and oblique, as are those of the Mongols; they have high cheek-bones and large mouths. Their hair is coarse and black, and their skin of a more or less clear brown colour, sometimes approaching to white, and sometimes to yellow, as amongst the Mongols, whilst now and then it is reddish, as is that of the native Americans. The dialects spoken by these remote tribes differ as much from those of other Mongols as they do from the American forms of speech, and the probability is that these inhabitants of the Arctic regions are really a degenerate branch of the Mongol race, whose progenitors passed over into the north of America from the north-east of Asia.

CHINESE ISOLATION

In spite of the fact that emigrants did occasionally drift across the formidable northern and western boundaries of the vast Celestial Empire, the one leading idea for many centuries, alike of rulers and ruled, was to keep their land sacred from intruders, and discourage all intercourse with other nations, whom the Chinese were trained from infancy to look upon as utter barbarians. There is no more thrilling or more interesting story in literature than that of how this cherished isolation was in the end broken in upon and the delusion finally dispelled, that Europe was but a small, sparsely populated district, whose inhabitants were eager to trade with the yellow men because of the poverty of their own land.

The Russians and the Dutch, as well as the Portuguese, were eager in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to trade with China, and plant permanent colonies within its boundaries, but self-interest alone prompted their efforts, and they did nothing to open the eyes of the natives to the true character of western civilization. The French, however, to their honour be it spoken, were the pioneers of missionary effort, and as has been well pointed out by Archibald Colquhoun in his China in Transformation, page 43, "the earlier knowledge of the West acquired by China, and that of China acquired by the West, were mainly achieved by French missionaries; no French Government ever sent a mission to Pekin to seek merely advantages of trade," and it was not until 1869 that a different policy was inaugurated. Far different was it with the English who obtained a footing in China, for from the very first their one aim was to trade upon the ignorance of the natives, and to make the largest possible fortunes. British trade with China began later than that of the other great Western powers, but it rapidly grew to far greater importance than that of Russia or Portugal, chiefly because it was mainly carried on by that great and powerful commercial body, the East India Company, on whom rests the responsibility of the first introduction to the Celestial Empire of opium, now consumed in such immense quantities and cultivated in China itself, but which was totally unknown there before the eighteenth century. For over two centuries the East India Company enjoyed a monopoly of trade, and in their eagerness for gain its members swallowed many an affront to their own and their country's dignity, for their relations to the Chinese Government resembled those of humble suppliants to the "Son of Heaven."