Fifty years ago two intrepid French missionaries, Huc and Gabet, made their way to Lhasa, but they were not allowed to remain there. The Chinese residents made them prisoners, under pretext of giving them protection, and sent them to the seacoast through the heart of the empire. They were thus enabled to see the vast interior at a time when it was barred alike to traveller and missionary. Of this adventurous [Page 64] journey Huc's published "Travels" is the immortal monument. We have thus gone over China and glanced at most of her outlying dependencies. The further exploration of Tibet we may postpone until she has made good her claims to dominion in that mountain region. The vastness of the Chinese Empire and the immensity of its population awaken in the mind a multitude of questions to which nothing but history can give an adequate reply. We come therefore to the oracle whose responses may perhaps be less dubious than those of Delphi. [Page 65] PART II HISTORY IN OUTLINE FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY [Page 67] CHAPTER XIII ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE _Parent Stock a Migratory People--They Invade China from the Northwest and Colonise the Banks of the Yellow River and of the Han--Their Conflicts with the Aborigines--Native Tribes Absorbed by Conquerors_ That the parent stock in which the Chinese nation had its origin was a small migratory people, like the tribes of Israel, and that they entered the land of promise from the northwest is tolerably certain; but to trace their previous wanderings back to Shinar, India, or Persia would be a waste of time, as the necessary data are lacking. Even within their appointed domain the accounts of their early history are too obscure to be accepted as to any extent reliable. They appear to have begun their career of conquest by colonising the banks of the Yellow River and those of the Han. By slow stages they moved eastward to the central plain and southward to the Yang-tse Kiang. At that early epoch, between 3000 and 2000 B. C., they found the country already occupied by various wild tribes whom they considered as savages. In their early traditions they describe these tribes respectively by four words: those of the south are called _Man_ (a word with the silk radical); those on the east, _Yi_ (with [Page 68] the bow radical); those on the north, _Tih_ (represented by a dog and fire); and those on the west, _Jung_ ("war-like, fierce," the symbol for their ideograph being a spear). Each of these names points to something distinctive. Some of these tribes were, perhaps, spinners of silk; some, hunters; and all of them, formidable enemies.