Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/767

] China, having traversed the whole of Asia, and from him are derived our first authentic accounts of those countries. The Mongolian dynasty fell, from internal insurrection, in 1366 A.D., when a national government was again set up, once more to be overthrown by an invasion of the Mánchus from the north, about 1643, when commenced the Manchu dynasty, which has existed till the present time, and from the establishment of which the political import ance of the Chinese empire began. The supremacy of the present dynasty of China over Central Asia, and the neigh bouring states of Eastern Turkistan, dates apparently from about 1680; but it has recently been thrown off in the extreme west by the Turkish races, and is very doubtfully maintained in other distant provinces, and has further been seriously limited in late years by the advances of Russia.

143. The islands of Japan have maintained an independent position from remote antiquity. Formosa is half occupied by the Chinese, half in possession of independent tribes. The whole island has quite recently, after a threatened conflict with Japan, been recognised as subject to China.

144. Of the earlier history of the Indo-Chinese nations little is known. The kingdoms are politically insignificant, and the physical peculiarities of the territories on which they are established make foreign invasion by land almost impossible, and internal communication and intercourse with the rest of the world, except by sea, difficult. Similar remarks apply to the Malay Archipelago.

145. The history of Asia thus far is the record of events brought about by the conflict of forces almost wholly developed within the continent itself. But external influences came into operation by which an altogether new set of conditions was created, leading to consequences among the most remarkable of any in the world s history. The germs of civilisation, which had their origin in Western Asia and Egypt, were thence carried by the Greeks into Europe. In Asia arose the first systems of religion and conceptions of philosophy, which have given scope and food to man s intellectual development ; and in it were taken the first steps in the formation of the sciences of observation. But it is to Greeks, instructed in Asiatic learning, that the world is indebted for its further advances. And as Asia no more contributed to this movement which she had started, so she had but little share in its results, or in the benefits it conferred on mankind. Her history presents an unceasing repetition of barbaric invasions, instigated by the love of plunder, which swept, wave after wave, over the most fertile and populous provinces where civilisation and wealth had begun to appear, and left ruin and demoralisation in their departing track. It may well be doubted whether Asia, speaking generally, had made any permanent advance in the arts of civilisation since the disruption of the Roman empire, until those events occurred which have brought her under the immediate influence of the powers of the West, and which may prove to have given the whole continent a lasting impulse towards progress. These events are the establishment, little more than a century ago, of British supremacy in the south, and still later of that of Russia in the north.

146. The extension of Russian authority into Northern Asia began about the year 1700, and by the end of the century Russian settlements extended across Siberia to Kamchatka. The advance of this power on the west of Asia into the borders of Turkey, Persia, and Turkistan, and on the east into the outlying provinces of China, is of much later date, and must be regarded as a natural and necessary consequence of the position of a powerful and civilised state brought into contact with barbarous neighbours.

147. The first introduction and subsequent growth of European power and influence in Eastern and Southern Asia have been almost wholly the result of maritime dis covery and enterprise. Under the stimulus of expected commercial gain, and guided by the intelligence of mariners who, like Columbus, were acquainted with the astronomical teachings of the Arabs, and who, in defiance of the Chris tian church, believed in the sphericity of the earth, the first of a great series of voyages of discovery was under taken, which in 1492 gave to Europe its knowledge of America. A few years later the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco di Gama, in 1498, opened out Asia to the commercial enterprise of the maritime nations of Europe. The trade with the East, which had hitherto found a route overland along the Black Sea and Caspian, or up the Red Sea by Egypt, or by the Persian Gulf to Syria, and had been seriously affected by the irruptions of the Mongols, had been centred with the merchants of Genoa and Venice. The opening of the sea route destroyed the monopoly previously established by the Italians, and the Portuguese naturally were the first to benefit by their discovery. The other maritime nations soon followed in their track. A new impetus was thus given to intercourse with Asia, which in a short time altogether changed the current of events in that continent.

148. The Portuguese landed on the Malabar coast of Hindostan in 1498, and speedily made themselves masters of the Indian Ocean, which they swept with their fleets from Arabia to China. They took Ormuz and Aden, became supreme on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, in Ceylon and the Malayan islands, and established powerful settlements at the mouth of the Ganges. They first reached China in 1516, and were permitted to establish about twenty years later a factory at Macao, which they still maintain. From that time the intercourse between China and Europe by sea has been regularly and gradually extended. The power of the Portuguese in India, after lasting nearly a century, fell into insignificance, partly by the arms of the Mahometans, partly by the efforts of the Dutch and English to which latter nation they ceded the island of Bombay in 1661, on the treaty of marriage of Charles the Second.

149. The Dutch, the Danes, the Spaniards, the French, and the British, all acquired in a similar manner, and (excepting the Danes) still retain settlements of various degrees of importance in India, the Malay peninsula and Archipelago, and China, of which those of the British in India, Ceylon, and China, of the Dutch in Java and the neighbouring islands, of the French in Camboja, and the Spaniards in the Philippine Islands, alone call for mention. The celebrated Jesuit missionaries, who were long the only authorities on China, first reached Canton in 1579, though Christian teachers had penetrated into the country several centuries before, even, it is said, as early as 635 A.D., and churches were built and converts made in 1274, as reported by Marco Polo. The Jesuits, from their superior knowledge, soon made themselves a powerful body in the state, and their influence was great till about 1700, after which, owing at first apparently to conflicts regarding the limits of the Pope's jurisdiction over Chinese, they lost favour, and eventually were subjected to positive persecution. They have never regained their former authority. The later intercourse of Europeans with China has introduced some of the forms of Western progress, and opened the empire to commerce.

150. The history of the British settlements in India East India calls for more detailed notice. The English East India Company. Company was founded in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in 1599, with a purely commercial aim. For 150 years the Company confined itself to extending its trade, but the difficulties of protecting the operations of commerce in the midst of such anarchy as prevailed in the provinces in which their settlements were, at length forced them to arm 