Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/24

 2 INTRODUCTION. where by a race, or races of nomads, whom they gradually drove out of their agricultural path ; and that there was horde upon horde of such nomads, far beyond the reach of their influence, of whose very names or existence they were ignorant It was only in the thirteenth century that the Chinese first sent an officer to Formosa ; and it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that they were for many centuries ignorant of the existence of peoples away in the north and north-east, much farther removed, separated from them by uncultivated plains and moimtain wilds, more difficult to traverse than the Formosan channel There is so much that is apocryphal in the dawning of Chinese history that, though doubtless based on fact, it is difficult to say where fact ends and fiction begins. But the notices of the country improperly called Manchuria are of so general a nature that there is nothing to question. Over twenty-three centuries before the Christian era, and four centuries before Abraham was bom, when the paternal govem- mcDts of Yao and Shwun are gravely said to have filled the land of China with the blessings of Te golden age, Liaotung, and the country generally known as Manchuria^ was peopled by the Siahun Shu, or Sooshun, whose descendants at the present moment rule the destinies of the half of Asia. This ancient Shun Family is said to have occupied the regions around and north of Hingking. We are left to infer that the rest of Liaotung was occupied by them, or possessed only by the deer and the tiger. The Chinese entered their present lands from the west, apparently by the main route along and across the Yellow River, for the south-west of Chihli, and the northern centre of Shansi, including Taiyuen, have always been an integral portion of China proper. When Yu (b.c. 2200) is said to have divided the land into Nine Chow or Departments, that of Ki embraced the south-west of Chihli and the northern centre of Shansi ; that of Tsing included the north-west of Shantung and the south-east and east of Chihli, extending north into Liaosi. The northern portion of Ki was afterwards formed into an independent