70 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the 'Son of Heaven;' while the last name, that of the 'Great Pure King- 

 dom,' follows the designation of the present ruling house, which styles 

 itself the 'Pure Dynasty,' in contradistinction to the preceeding dynasty 

 which it overthrew, and which was called the Ming or 'Bright Dynasty.' 

 The foreigner's appellation of China is of uncertain origin, hut it is sup- 

 posed to mean the land of Chin or Tsin, a family that ruled about 

 250 B. c, and even this name is used indiscriminately as covering two 

 areas very different in size. When we use the word China it may mean 

 the Chinese Empire proper, the empire of the eighteen provinces; or it 

 may mean the eighteen provinces and the dependencies of Manchuria, 

 Mongolia and Tibet, whose bond of attachment to the empire, in 

 strength, is in the above order. The eighteen provinces comprise in 

 area about 1,500,000 square miles, or an area about equal to that por- 

 tion of the United States lying east of Colorado. The shape of the 

 empire proper is substantially rectangular, extending from the latitude 

 of 42° north, which is about that of New York, to 18° north, or the lati- 

 tude of Vera Cruz. When the dependencies are included under the title 

 of China the northern boundary is carried to the forty-eighth parallel, or 

 6ay the latitude of New Foundland, and the whole has an area of over 

 4,000,000 square miles, a greater surface than that of Europe, or of the 

 United States and Alaska combined. This great area is reputed to sup- 

 port a population of upwards of 400,000,000; figures, however, which 

 I will later point out to be, in my belief, a gross exaggeration, but 

 the balance, even after the most conservative reductions, will still easily 

 be the greatest single contiguous conglomeration of people under one 

 ruler. Racially speaking, they are a conglomeration. Who the Chinese 

 were originally is not known. It is generally believed that they came 

 from Western or Central Asia, and, conquering the scattering nomadic 

 tribes inhabiting what is now China, seized their country. 



In the dependencies and Chinese proper we find distinctly different 

 peoples, with their individual customs; while scattered about the empire 

 proper are settlements of strange tribes, whose origin is absolutely un- 

 known but who are believed to be relics of the aboriginal inhabitants. 



Lack of intercommunication has allowed the language of the Chinese 

 to become locally varied, and to such an extent, that although the 

 written characters are the same, the spoken dialect of the North and 

 South are so different as to be mutually unintelligible. There are said 

 to be in the empire proper eight dialects, each again being many times 

 subdivided by local colloquialisms. Of these dialects the most im- 

 portant is the so-called Mandarin or Pekingese, the dialect of the North 

 and the official language of the country, for it is the one which all gov- 

 ernment officials are required to learn and use. It therefore holds the 

 position in respect to other dialects that the French formerly held in 

 Europe as the Court tongue, or language of diplomacy and officialism. 



