Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/253

 the same Great Wall which we saw at Kalgan. Here as well as there this wall separates the culture and settled life of China Proper from the deserts of the high plateaus which are habitable only by a nomad pastoral people. This contrast between two physically distinct parts of the surface of the globe — on the one side the warm, fruitful, well-watered Chinese lowlands intersected by mountain chains, on the other, the lofty, cold, and desert plateau — has influenced the fortunes of the nations inhabiting them. As they differed in their mode of life and character, so they hated and lived apart from each other. Just as the dull, hard life of the nomad, with its many privations, was foreign and hateful to the Chinese, so the nomad on his side looked with contempt at the tiresome industry of his agricultural neighbour, and valued his wild liberty far higher than all the blessings of the universe. Hence arose a marked contrast between the characters of both nations. The painstaking Chinese, who in long-forgotten ages attained a comparatively high although