Though at the other end of the pole of human endeavour in comparison with the Chinese, and familiar only with the elemental accessories to life, the islanders, under the influence of this alien strain, at the dawn of our era had emerged from a state of tribal control to the recognition of the authority of a single and supreme ruler. Two centuries later Japanese arms were strong enough to invade Korea, where several victories were gained; but even then the Middle Kingdom maintained no communication with the islands of the Yellow Sea, and was more or less indifferent to the rise of over-sea relations between her vassal and the mariners from the East. It is possible to trace to this obliquity in the political vision of the Celestial Empire of the day much of the subsequent havoc that the self-same race were to inflict upon the coasts of Asia. Impressed with no consideration for the interests of the mainland, and troubled by no sense of material responsibility, Japanese corsairs harried the Chinese and Korean coasts unmercifully, finding in the occupation an outlet for that primitive but inherited instinct for aggression that stimulates the race to-day.
Disturbed less by the appearance of an island Power than by a confederacy of barbarian clans that, by 1000 A.D., had exerted a mastery over Mongolia, Tartary, and Manchuria, and a century later served as a menace to the safety of the dynasty itself, the Celestial Empire was beset on two sides by enemies who were attracted by the prosperity of its people. Unmindful to a great degree of the dangers which were accumulating, an instinct for and an interest in trade, confirmed by the revelation of the self-supporting character of an empire that reached to Cochin-China in one direction and the Pamirs in another, prompted the Chinese to neglect the arts of war in their preference for the triumphs of peace.
The Peaceful Path of the Chinese
Characterised by a capacity for infinite pains, and possessed of a complete understanding of the varied resources of agriculture, the Chinese insensibly pursued a path leading always in a contrary direction to those marked out by Nature for the islanders, as for the fierce nomads of the steppe. Thus innately addicted to habits of peace, centuries upon centuries of undisturbed prosperity chastened natures that were never very warlike; whereas the exact inversion of this existence propelled those hordes of Tartars, Huns, Turks, Khitans, Kins, Mongols, and Manchus to leave the Far North in a disfiguring passage through Asia, and bade the islanders release their sails in expeditions against Korea. It was not enough for the founder of the Tzin dynasty to fortify his northern frontiers by the construction of the Great Wall, or for that great warrior Panchow to drive the Huns before him to the Oxus itself, or for the rulers in the long period of disunion which unites the fall of the Han dynasty to the rise of the Sung to compromise with the leaders of successive rushes of barbarian horsemen by matrimonial alliances with their families. The cause lay in the foundations of the race itself. Yet, such was the insidious character of the land against which these mounted hordes so often flung themselves that, although the imminence of attack ultimately became a thing with which the Government of China was wont to conjure the peaceful, well-contented lower classes and the luxury-loving upper classes, the effect of each invasion was dissipated so soon as the invaders experienced the subtle blandishments of Chinese civilisation.
Swift-moving History in Little Known Lands
Presented with remarkable clearness, we have an array of devastating invasions, the one following the other in rapid succession and occasionally assuming such dimensions that the operations riveted the attention of Europe upon the little-known lands of Asia, which in most instances required only the passage of a few centuries for the minutest vestige to be obliterated. Thus the Kins, who left no trace, displaced the Khitans, equally irrecoverable, and were in turn dispossessed by the Mongols, whose wide dominion embraced so much of the earth’s surface that in 1227 A.D. the whole of High Asia, from the Caspian to Korea, and from the Indus to the Yellow Sea, recognised its sway—always excepting the strong but still despised sea-state of Japan, whose lusty inhabitants threw back the allied hosts of China, Korea, and the Mongol monarch in 1274 and 1281.
Yet if the Mongols, in an effort to wreak their vengeance on the Chinese, razed to the ground the cities of the vanquished so that their horsemen could ride over their deserted sites without stumbling, none the less they earned the acclamations of posterity by the facilities that the Mongol domination of Central Asia offered to communications between the West and Cathay. Marco Polo was not alone in his knowledge of the Court of the Great Khan, although doubtless he was the first to visit it. But this liberty of intercourse, existing only by the land route to Asia, was measured solely by the duration of the Mongol rule; freedom of action along the high-road from West to East stopped prematurely when the sway of Islam settled once again over Central Asia. Two centuries elapsed before, under the banners of the Manchus, bold horsemen of the North, in 1644, flashed once again through the plains of China, imposing, by a change of costume and of coiffure, perhaps the most striking effect of any that has followed in the train of these invasions.
Opening the Gates of the East
But if the exclusiveness of the Mohammedan conquerors closed the route to Cathay so effectually that for two hundred years nothing more was heard of the country, Columbus, Cabot and others set themselves the task of opening up communications by water. But it was not Cathay that they reached. That was left to the Portuguese Raphael Perestralo to accomplish by sailing, in 1511, from Malacca to Canton, and thus winning the coveted distinction of first approaching China by sea. Fifty years later (1560) the same race succeeded in obtaining a settlement at Macao, while the Spaniards gazed with longing eyes from their strongholds in the Philippine Islands upon the rich junks on the China seas. Such was the effect of these trading visits from the West that the Chinese in their turn were emboldened to visit for themselves these outlying centres of Western traffic. But it was more usually vessels from Japan that were seen, for the Chinese were still without any special appetite for Western trade. With the islanders, on the other hand, a love of barter, acting on the native instincts of a maritime people, caused them to traverse these more distant waters; although occasionally the scantiness of the resources in their own country moved them, so that they were propelled as much by stern necessity as by the lust of war and loot or a passion for trade. At first Polynesia, then Malaysia and India were visited. Again, trips were made to the remote coasts of Mexico. Still later, a colony founded at Goa became the centre of an important trading connection throughout the Indian hemisphere. In these voyages we see the attractive influence exercised by the Pacific and the Indian Oceans on an island people, who, fitted by temperament no less than by position, played in Eastern waters the rôle filled by the Elizabethan explorers on the coasts of the New World.