United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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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

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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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governments of these lands are now freed from Turkish rule. China has been riddled with foreign influence. Japan, the one Asiatic na¬ tion which remained absolutely independent, has done so at the price of accepting western methods in all the arts of peace and war. Asia has been the cradle not only of civil¬ ization itself, but of all the great religions. Out of Mesopotamia came the germs that developed into the three systems that now hold the whole western world. The first was Hebraism, which developed very early in Palestine. From Hebraism sprang the other two, first, Christian¬ ity, and, in 622 A.D., Mohammedanism. The latter from small beginnings at Mecca and Medina in the Arabian desert became the most war-like proselytizing religion of the world. In the Middle Ages it extended even to Spain. Today it numbers 175,000,000 followers in Asia and Africa alone. From the Aryan group in Asia as well as from the Semitic have come great religions. The Persians developed Zoroastrianism, based upon the principle of the conflict between good and evil; and the Hindus originated Brahman¬ ism and its outgrowth Buddhism, which be¬ tween them now numbers perhaps 250,000,000 people in Asia. From the yellow man, too, has sprung a great system, that which Confucius originated in the 5th century B.C. and which has been the religion of most of the Chinese ever since. The Western Invasion After Vasco de Gama discovered the ocean route around Africa to India in 1497-98, the bulk of the trade-traffic was carried by sailing vessels rather than by overland caravans. With¬ in 50 years the Portuguese navigators had pushed still farther, to China and Japan, and had established a line of trading posts which amounted to a coastal empire. In the first years of the 17th century Holland, England, and France had also their commercial companies in the far East. Just before the middle of the 18th century there began a 50 years’ duel between England and France for the supremacy of southern Asia, England at length coming out victorious. In the meantime Russia had started across Siberia in 1580 and within 80 years had obtained this largest slice of Asia to the Pacific Ocean and the Amur River, unopposed by the rest of Europe and weakly questioned by the Turk. In the 18th and 19th centuries American clipper ships from Salem, Boston, and Provid¬ ence did a flourishing trade in tea, coffee, ivory, spices, and fine fabrics, and it was an American, Commodore Perry, who opened the doors of Japan in 1854, after they had been closed to the western world for a century and a half. The war between China and Japan in 1894-95 resulted in the cession of Formosa, or Taiwan as the Japanese call it, and Pescadores to Japan, and the Russo-Japanese War resulted in the cession of the southern half of the island of Sakhalin to Japan in 1905, while Korea was annexed to the island empire in 1910. The Philippines were transferred to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War in 1898. In the last decade of the 19th century various attempts were made to shorten the distance between Europe and Asia. The Suez Canal was dug, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea so that ships could go through to the Indian Ocean without rounding Africa. Russia built railroads across Siberia and Cen¬ tral Asia, and Germany was busy with a pro¬ ject more momentous still, a railway from Ber¬ lin to Bagdad—and perhaps beyond. However, despite this long familiarity with the products of Asia, and this history of active commercial relations, the country and the peo¬ ple have remained unknown to us almost down to our own day. Mission aries going to India and China found people who had been doing things the same way for so many thousands of years that it was almost impossible to teach them any other way. Nor could the bustling West understand the viewpoint of people whose minds seemed to work to set grooves. (Continued on page 42) 11