[CHAPTER XV]
ETHNOLOGY OF THE CHINESE FAR WEST
In the foregoing chapters I have attempted to give some account of a portion of that wild border country which constitutes the Far West of China, and most readers will perhaps agree that of all its striking features it possesses no peculiarity so remarkable and so puzzling as the number and diversity of the races by which it is peopled. At a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1904 a well-known Oriental scholar, Sir George Scott, K.C.I.E., made the remark that "the country north of Tali-fu is the place where we shall find, if we ever do find, the solution of a great many of the puzzling questions of the different races who inhabit the frontier hills." Those secluded ravines and icy mountains have served as both the cradle and the death-bed of nations. From that region have issued vigorous and ambitious tribes, bent on a career of glory and conquest; and back to it the shattered remnants of decaying races have crept home to die.
The preceding chapters may have revealed something of the nature of the country from the geographical point of view. Fathomless chasms, towering cliffs and gloomy river-gorges are to be found throughout its length and breadth; and we need hardly be surprised to find that the strange variations which characterise its climate, scenery, fauna and flora, are faithfully reproduced in the vivid contrasts that exist among its many-tongued peoples.
The comparatively short journey from Tachienlu to Tali-fu has introduced us to some of these peoples, but these do not by any means exhaust the tribal varieties of this remote part of the Chinese empire. North of Tachienlu, up to the borders of Chinese Turkestan and Mongolia, there are semi-independent races, some of which are perhaps only remotely connected with any of those mentioned in this book; while the wilder parts of the extreme north and east of Upper Burma and the Shan States contain further ethnological problems of their own, which scholars have so far indicated rather than solved.
Most of these tribes disclaim any connection with each other, but it is impossible to believe that they are all of independent origin. Probably the scattered threads of their history will never be gathered up until scholars have found time and opportunity to study their social, physical and linguistic peculiarities by prolonged residence among them. Libraries cannot assist us much when historical records are entirely wanting or are obviously unreliable, and travellers who move rapidly from place to place can do little more.
MIXTURE OF RACES
Professor E. H. Parker sums up his remarks on the subject by expressing the opinion that most of the far western tribes of China "will be found to range themselves either under the Shan or the Tibetan head."[284] This is probably true enough if we give a very wide interpretation to the word "Tibetan," and also to the word "Shan." Our knowledge of Tibet has till recently been of a very fragmentary nature, and the veil of mystery that hung over that secluded land until it was partially torn away by Lord Curzon's Lhasa expedition, and by such enterprising travellers as Sven Hedin, has prevented us from realising how far the Tibetans are from being a homogeneous race. No one who has come across the people of eastern Tibet and has also read the descriptions of western and central Tibet given us by recent writers and travellers, can fail to see that in spite of all that they possess in common the inhabitants of Tibet are a mixed people. "Long-heads" and "broad-heads," swarthy faces, white faces and yellow faces, long noses and flattened noses, oblique eyes and straight eyes, coal-black hair and brown hair, and many other physical peculiarities differentiate the people of one Tibetan district from those of another, just in the same way as they differentiate the various races of India and Indo-China. Nearly all the people of eastern Tibet have adopted the peculiar form of Buddhism which as Lamaism we have learned to associate with that country, and their languages and customs are saturated with Tibetan influences. In spite of many dialectical peculiarities I found that the people of the Yalung watershed were nearly always able to speak and understand Tibetan. Yet many of them are bi-lingual, and their own languages—as may be seen from the vocabularies in the Appendix—appear to be nearly as distinct from Tibetan as they are from Chinese.
Who are entitled to be called pure Tibetans—if such people exist—and who should be regarded as of hybrid or alien race, are therefore questions not very easily determined. All the country west of the Ta Tu river and the Chien-ch'ang valley may rightly enough be designated Tibetan Ssuch'uan or Chinese Tibet, if the name does not mislead us into supposing that the natives of the king of Chala's state, for instance, are of the same type as the inhabitants of Lhasa. But as these tribes are certainly not Chinese, what are we to call them if Tibetan is, strictly speaking, a misnomer?