Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/78

 the 'Son of Heaven;' while the last name, that of the 'Great Pure Kingdom,' follows the designation of the present ruling house, which styles itself the 'Pure Dynasty,' in contradistinction to the preceeding dynasty which it overthrew, and which was called the Ming or 'Bright Dynasty.' The foreigner's appellation of China is of uncertain origin, hut it is supposed to mean the land of Chin or Tsin, a family that ruled about 250, and even this name is used indiscriminately as covering two areas very different in size. When we use the word China it may mean the Chinese Empire proper, the empire of the eighteen provinces; or it may mean the eighteen provinces and the dependencies of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet, whose bond of attachment to the empire, in strength, is in the above order. The eighteen provinces comprise in area about 1,500,000 square miles, or an area about equal to that portion of the United States lying east of Colorado. The shape of the empire proper is substantially rectangular, extending from the latitude of 42° north, which is about that of New York, to 18° north, or the latitude of Vera Cruz. When the dependencies are included under the title of China the northern boundary is carried to the forty-eighth parallel, or say the latitude of New Foundland, and the whole has an area of over 4,000,000 square miles, a greater surface than that of Europe, or of the United States and Alaska combined. This great area is reputed to support a population of upwards of 400,000,000; figures, however, which I will later point out to be, in my belief, a gross exaggeration, but the balance, even after the most conservative reductions, will still easily be the greatest single contiguous conglomeration of people under one ruler. Racially speaking, they are a conglomeration. Who the Chinese were originally is not known. It is generally believed that they came from Western or Central Asia, and, conquering the scattering nomadic tribes inhabiting what is now China, seized their country.

In the dependencies and Chinese proper we find distinctly different peoples, with their individual customs; while scattered about the empire proper are settlements of strange tribes, whose origin is absolutely unknown but who are believed to be relics of the aboriginal inhabitants.

Lack of intercommunication has allowed the language of the Chinese to become locally varied, and to such an extent, that although the written characters are the same, the spoken dialect of the North and South are so different as to be mutually unintelligible. There are said to be in the empire proper eight dialects, each again being many times subdivided by local colloquialisms. Of these dialects the most important is the so-called Mandarin or Pekingese, the dialect of the North and the official language of the country, for it is the one which all government officials are required to learn and use. It therefore holds the position in respect to other dialects that the French formerly held in Europe as the Court tongue, or language of diplomacy and officialism.