Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Chinese Expansion Historically Reviewed
I will not go back to the remotest periods, or seek to make any ethnological investigations as to the races that originally occupied the regions which have come under the sovereignty of China, or which, at least, have been included in the sphere of her in?uence; for were we to do so, we might find there was a time when both Mongolians and Chinese belonged to the same race; or, if we were to go further back still, it might appear that both these and manv other peoples living quite outside Chinese in?uence origin ally belonged to the same stock. But these connections are too remote and obscure, and have no important bearing on the proposition I am about to make. It is sufficient for my purpose to trace the growth of the Chinese Empire within the limits of the records which we possess - chie?y in the literature of China itself - and that, too, of a very appreciable antiquity.
It is a well-known fact that China is one of the most ancient countries of the world. The Chow dynasty ruled in the period when we begin to find reliable records, and the beginning of that dynasty dates back twelve centuries The period preceding that dynasty had been a very long one, but of it we have no reliable records. It is mainly regarded as the legendary state of Chinese history; and yet there are some records relating to twenty-three centuries b.c. There is good foundation, moreover, for believing those documents to be genuine records, from the mathematical calculations made by many experts in such matters, relating to astronomical events recorded in those documents, and which all go to confirm their accuracy.
In studying the old documents and history of China, the heart of China in the earliest period is seen to have been located somewhere far up the river Hoang - ho. Those who have studied the evolution of the alphabet tell us that the Hoang-ho is one of three remarkable rivers on the banks of which the three original systems of recording impressions were invented - the Egyptian writing on the Nile, the Cuneiform beside the streams of Mesopotamia, and the Chinese on the Hoang-ho - and that the hundreds of existing systems of writing now in use are really derivatives of these three, however varied and modified they may be.
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