Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/255

 Chapter VIII. NTJJUN. The fertile plains^ beautiful vallies, and innumerable mountain ranges radiating from Cbangbaishan or the Long White Mountains, stretching northwards from Liaoyang by the east of the Liao river, up to and along the Songari throughout all its course to Saghalin, formed the home of the savage Tungusic nomads, a small branch of which gave its present dynasty to the Chinese world, and reigns over the most populous empire on the earth. Like the Mongols, that wide region has had many periods of great power and longer intervals of disintegrated rest It is during those quiescent unhistorical periods of disintegration that the people has been known under the generic names of Sishun, Sooshun or NUjun. A man of strong character would appear, who, after establishing himself chief over a few tents or villages, was succeeded by a son and grandson worthy of him. These could, by sharp swords and good laws, extend the bounds of the incipient state. A dynastic title was then assumed, which soon became the designation for the whole people. This change of title among both Mongolic and Tungusic peoples, has given rise to much error; for the "Huns,'' "Turks," and "Mongols'* differed only as the Han, Tang, and Sung of China differ. They are but dynastic titles of the same people,, just as if we described the English as the people of York» Leicester, Tudor or Hanover, according to the dynastic fSsonily which happens to rule. The same is true of the Tungusic people which occupied, for scores of centuries, those extensive regions known as Manchuria. The first name given to that people in Chinese histoiy is the Sishun, under which name the Chinese, three thousand years ago, included all the nomadic savages