So Far As Our Knowledge Enables Us To Speak, The Chinese Of The Present Age Are In All Essential Points Identical With Those Of The Time Of Confucius, And There Is No Reason To Doubt That Before His Time The Chinese National Character Had Been Thoroughly Formed In Its Present Mold.

The limits of the empire have varied from time to time under circumstances of triumph or disunion, but the Middle Kingdom, or China Proper, of the eighteen provinces has always possessed more or less of its existing proportions.

Another striking and peculiar feature about China is the small amount of influence that the rest of the world has exercised upon it. In fact, it is only during the present century that that influence can be said to have existed at all. Up to that point China had pursued a course of her own, carrying on her own struggles within a definite limit, and completely indifferent to, and ignorant of, the ceaseless competition and contests of mankind outside her orbit, which make up the history of the rest of the Old World. The long struggles for supremacy in Western Asia between Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian, the triumphs of the Greek, followed by the absorption of what remained of the Macedonian conquests in the Empire of Rome, even the appearance of Islam and the Mohammedan conquerors, who changed the face of Southern Asia from the Ganges to the Levant, and long threatened to overrun Europe, had no significance for the people of China, and reacted as little on their destiny as if they had happened in another planet.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 3 of 704
Words from 551 to 817 of 191255