United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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Upon our first look at the map it seems strange that Asia should support so large a population. Most of the continent consists of places where people can only hunt or graze sheep or reindeer. Even in China, which con¬ tains more people than any other country in the world, there are vast tracts of waste coun¬ try. Most of Mongolia consists of the already referred to Gobi Desert, the most desolate re¬ gion in the world. It is so little known that story writers feel safe in making it the scene of amazing adventures along the route of the camel trains that brave the stinging sand and dust storms to trade between China and Siberia. The sands are now covering the countries about the Gobi. In the Lob Nor (“Nor” means lake) sand has choked up a whole inland sea until it is now merely a series of mashy lakes in which the once great river Tarim loses itself. Dunes as high as hills are threatening the river, and explorers have found in the region known as the Takla Makan desert, ruins of great old cities buried in the sand. On and on, right across the great continent, sweep the desert sands, creeping down to that ancient seat of civilization, Persia. Whole cities have been doomed as the sand, over the course of the centuries, has advanced upon them. The once-great river systems are now a network of watercourses running nowhere, no longer making fertile a land that once blos¬ somed like the rose. Even the Tigris-Euphrates valley is not the fertile land it once was. To the desert regions must be added the other low population areas: the great cold stretches of the Siberian forest; the hot jungles of the Ganges valley in India; and the dense tropical forests of the Malay Peninsula. What, then, is the secret of the vast popu¬ lation of Asia when so large a part of the land is desert, grassland, forests, and mountain peaks? For the answer we must look to the great river valleys of China and India. In the one are found half of all the people of Asia, 25 million more than Europe, and in the other as many people as are in North Amer ica, South America, and Africa combined. The Yangtze in China is the most densely populated river valley in the world. The river is navigable for 2,000 miles and along its banks are little farms hardly bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Here for thousands of years people have grown crops and kept their soil fresh by the use of river mud and fertilizers. People live even on the river itself, in little boats called sampans, whose matting roofs are the shape of half a barrel. In the valley of the Amur to the north there is a smaller population, but people fairly swarm along the fertile banks of the Hwang River. Before the Christian era, China began the building of what is practically a fourth great river: the Grand Canal, 850 miles long. Fol¬ lowing this and countless smaller canals are more of the tiny close-packed farms and flooded rice fields, where mulberry groves are planted for the silkworm, and crops are grown between the rows of trees, for not an inch of soil must be wasted. In India, too, there are swarming river val¬ leys, particularly the Ganges, and the fertile valley between the Ganges and the Brama- putra. The Indus valley is less productive owing to the Indian desert just west of it, but the fertile soil is now being reclaimed by irriga¬ tion. In all, India has a population three times as great as that of the United States. The three chief rivers of Siberia, the Ob, the Yenisei, and the Lena, of course do not sup¬ port such great populations. They are broad and deep enough to be navigable and the soil is fertile, but they are frozen too much of the year. The great rivers of western Asia, the Tigris and the Euphrates, water a valley which was of the greatest productiveness 5,000 years ago, but today is little developed. Other countries where a great many people live are those which are blessed by rain-laden ocean winds breaking against mountains. Thus the Empire of Japan, which for all its hundreds 9

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ASIA, Continent with a Past... and a Future PETER GORDON WHITE Illustrated By Ann Phalps OTRETCHING from the frozen plains of the Arctic Circle to the tropical forests of the Malay Peninsula, and from Europe and Africa to within 36 miles of North America, lies Asia, almost one-third of the dry-land mass of the entire globe. We have a fair idea of distances here in North America; we can compare them all in multiples of the mileage from Winnipeg to St. Paul. We even have some idea of the extent of Europe as measured in bomber-time from London to Berlin or Cologne or Essen. But with Asia it is different; we don’t have much point of reference. There is a little literary device that authors turn to in over¬ coming such a dilemma, it goes something like this: if all the mountains in Asia were placed on top of one another (this is a purely imagin¬ ary example) they would more than equal the height of the Empire State building multiplied by the number of letters in the New Deal alphabet, or, if all the dust of Calcutta was gathered up and placed in boxes 6 feet long by 17% inches wide placed end to end . . Calcutta would be a much cleaner place than it is. All right then; to gain some idea of the size of the great Asiatic Continent, consider that we could put all of Europe and Africa on it and still have two million square miles to spare. If you have any idea of how much two million square miles is you can see what I mean. If two million is beyond your comprehension, you make take both North and South America, put them on Asia, and have only 500,000 miles left over. Now you know the size of Asia. But the Orient not only gives us extremes in area, it sets other records too. Within its bounds is the highest point on the globe: Mount Everest, on the borders of Nepal and Tibet, rises 29,000 ft. above the sea (that’s some three hundred United Colleges piled on top of one another). Asia contains the lowest point in the world: the Dead Sea lies in the deepest hollow of the earth, 1,300 ft. below sea level, in south¬ ern Palestine. Asia presents the most desolate scenes of scorching desolation in the Gobi Desert, and contrasts that arid spot with the wettest region in the world: the lands of the monsoons in India. It contains the hottest and the coldest places in the world (excluding Winnipeg). More than half the population of the whole world is there. The cradle of the human race, of all religion, wisdom, and civil¬ ization is there. Shangri-la, well known to the Japanese as the base of the famous American Flying Fortresses, is there. Vast, scarcely- tapped resources, all the past, and perhaps the future, of civilization is there. The Place and the People Because of our very profound ignorance of even the physical aspects of the Far East it would be possible, and no doubt valuable, to continue with further factual and somewhat sensational information on this section of the globe. However, as students of history, we must see the people of any land we study, for it is the people, not the places, that make his¬ tory. And yet, the inter-relation of the peoples and their environment is so great that it is impossible to study the one without the other, and so in our consideration of population the geographical determinents will be carried along in the thread of the discussion. In Asia there are some 900,000,000 more people than there are in all the rest of the world, even including the 5 o’clock crowd on the Winnipeg street-cars. Two-thirds of them (i.e., the Asiatics) are yellow people, and al¬ most all the rest are white, with a scattering of black people in India, and a brown race in the Malay Peninsula which has no well-defined relation to the others. 8

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of islands, has an inhabitable area little larger than Manitoba, yet contains more than six times as many people as the whole of Canada. The Centuries Asia has been called the cradle of the human race, and some scientists have pointed to de¬ finite regions such as the Caucasus or Asia Minor as the first abode of civilized man, the place from which he migrated to Europe and southern Asia carrying his primitive culture with him. However this may be, Asia can show re¬ mains of the oldest known civilization in the world except Egypt. At Troy in Asia Minor, the peninsula lying between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the heroes of Homer were fighting 3,000 years or more ago, and archaeolo¬ gists have found on the same site cities still older than the one they fought for. In Caucasia, the broad isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, lay Colchis, the rich and fertile land whither Greek legend says that Jason went in search of the Golden Fleece. Scientists tell us that here the stone-fruit trees such as the peach, the apricot, and cherry first de¬ veloped from the same wild ancestor. Here, too, are the ruins of the great old cities of Armenia, and here rises the snow-capped peak of Mount Ararat, nearly 17,000 feet high, where the Bible tells us Noah’s ark struck land after that excessively moist season commonly re¬ ferred to as the flood. Palestine along the Mediterranean coast of the Arabian peninsula is the scene of Bible story and of the development of the ancient Hebrew civilization. Persia as a political power dates back to 559 B.C. when Cyrus made his sweeping conquest. And oldest of all civiliza¬ tions in the world, except Egypt, is that of Mesopotamia in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, where there were great cities as early as 3,000 B.C., followed by the empires of Babylonia and Assyria. In the two other fertile flood plains besides Mesopotamia—where people could cultivate the arts of peace protected by ocean, desert, and mountain barriers—there were early civiliza¬ tions, though as yet the historians have not ben able to prove quite how old. In China there are definite records as far back as 1100 B.C. In India the princes rode on elephants and lived in splendid palaces at the time of Alex¬ ander’s campaign to the Indus in the 4th cen¬ tury B.C. For thousands of years, however, the civil¬ ization of Asia stood still. The Indians of Alex¬ ander’s time were skilled in all the arts they ever possessed down to the time of the British occupation. The Chinese preceded Europe in the invention of printing, paper making, porcelain, guns, gunpowder, fine weaving and perhaps the compass. But having found a good way of writing, governing, making cloth, and tilling the soil 3,000 years ago, they simply stopped seeking for new methods. The Arabs, sweeping over the feeble rem¬ nants of Greek and Roman civilization in the early Christian. centuries, absorbed and de¬ veloped the learning they fell heir to. Through¬ out the Middle Ages they led the world in agri¬ culture, building, weaving, metal working, and mathematical science. But their culture has remained at the same stage ever since, while the West has been forging ahead, as witness the fact that today most of Asia is politically in the hands of Europe. Russia has put her stamp on the new countries of Siberia and the old countries of Central Asia and Transcaucasia, more than one-third of the area of the continent. Britain has occupied India and scattered points such as Aden, in Arabia, so that at the begin¬ ning of the World War I, she already con¬ trolled one-ninth of Asia. In Arabia and Persia, too, European forces are at work, and the new 10