CHINESE MUSICIAN.
HISTORICAL SKETCH OF CHINA FROM THE EARLIEST
TIMES TO FIRST CONTACT WITH
EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION.
Origin of Chinese People—Legends—Golden Age of China—Beginnings of Authentic History—Dynasty of Chow—Cultivation of Literature and Progress—Music, Slavery, Household Habits Three Thousand Tears Ago—Confucius and his Work—First Emperor of China—Burning of Books—Han Dynasty—Famous Men of the Period—Paper Money and Printing—Invasions of Tartars and Mongols—Sung Dynasty—Literary Works—Famous Chinese Poet—Literature, Law and Medicine—Kublai Khan—Ming Dynasty—Private Library of a Chinese Emperor—Founding of the Present Dynasty—Connection Between Chinese History and the Rest of the World.
Obscurity shrouds the origin of the Chinese race. The Chinese people cannot be proved to have originally come from anywhere beyond the limits of the Chinese empire. At the remotest period to which investigations can satisfactorily go back, without quitting the domain of history for that of legend, we find them already in existence as an organized, and as a more or less civilized nation. Previous to that time, their condition had doubtless been that of nomadic tribes, but whether as immigrants or as true sons of the soil there is scarcely sufficient evidence to show. Conjecture, however, based for the most part upon coincidences of speech, writing or manners and customs, has been busy with their ultimate origin; and they have been variously identified with the Turks, with the Chaldees, with the earliest inhabitants of Ireland, and with the lost tribes of Israel.
The most satisfactory, however, of recent conclusions, based on most careful investigations are as follows: The first records we have of them represent the Chinese as a band of immigrants settling in the north-eastern provinces of the modern empire of China and fighting their way amongst the aborigines much as the Jews of old forced their way into Canaan against the various tribes which they found in possession of the land. It is probable that though they all entered China by the same route they separated into bands almost on the threshold of the empire, one body, those who have left us the records of their history in the ancient Chinese books, apparently following the course of the Yellow river, and turning southward with it from its northernmost bend, settling themselves in the fertile districts of the modern provinces of Shan-hsi and Honan. But as it is believed also that at about the same period a large settlement was made as far south as Anam of which there is no mention in the books of the northern Chinese, we must assume that another body struck directly southward through the southern provinces of China to that country.
Many writers answer the question that arises as to whence these people came, by declaring that research directly points to the land south of the Caspian sea. They find many reasons in the study of languages which furnish philological proof of this assertion. And they affirm that in all probability the outbreak in Susiana of possibly some political disturbance in about the 24th or 23rd century B.C., drove the Chinese from the land of their adoption and that they wandered eastward until they finally settled in China and the country south of it. Such an emigration is by no means unusual in Asia. We know that the Ottoman Turks originally had their home in northern Mongolia, and we have a record of the movement at the end of last century of a body of six hundred thousand Kalmucks from Russia to the confines of China. It would appear also that the Chinese came into China possessed of the resources of western Asian culture. They brought with them a knowledge of writing and astronomy as well as of the arts which primarily minister to the wants and comforts of mankind.
