So different from ours (the author writes
as an American) are many phases of their social life that one is
tempted to suspect that the same law, which placed their feet opposite
to ours, of necessity turned their heads the other way.
To pursue this study is not to delve in a necropolis like Nineveh
or Babylon; for China is not, like western Asia, the grave of dead
empires, but the home of a people
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endowed with inexhaustible vitality. Her present greatness and her
future prospects alike challenge admiration.
If the inhabitants of other worlds could look down on us, as we
look up at the moon, there are only five empires on the globe of
sufficient extent to make a figure on their map: one of these is
China. With more than three times the population of Russia, and an
almost equal area, in natural advantages she is without a rival,
if one excepts the United States. Imagination revels in picturing
her future, when she shall have adopted Christian civilisation,
and when steam and electricity shall have knit together all the
members of her gigantic frame.
It was by the absorption of small states that the Chinese people
grew to greatness. The present work will trace their history as
they emerge, like a rivulet, from the highlands of central Asia
and, increasing in volume, flow, like a stately river, toward the
eastern ocean. Revolutions many and startling are to be recorded:
some, like that in the epoch of the Great Wall, which stamped the
impress of unity upon the entire people; others, like the Manchu
conquest of 1644, by which, in whole or in part, they were brought
under the sway of a foreign dynasty.
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