ASIA 



so one-sided Europeans invading Asia for 

 their own profit. After the rise of Moham- 

 medanism in the seventh century A.D., the 

 fanatical Arabs pushed their sovereignty into 

 Africa and thence into Spain, and for a time 

 it looked as though Europe might become a 

 prey to these zealots from the East. This 

 danger was averted, but Western Asia remained 

 long prominently in the thought of Christian 

 Europe by reason of the Crusades, which were 

 directed against the Saracens in the Holy Land. 

 Meanwhile, a new power was rising in Asia 

 which threatened Europe the Ottoman Turks, 

 who in 1453 gained a firm foothold on the west- 

 ern continent. 



Throughout all this time the rest of Asia 

 was all unknown to Europe, but with the 

 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries conditions 

 changed. Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and 

 British navigators explored the southern and 

 southeastern coasts, and their governments 

 promptly planted colonies where they had gone 

 and laid the foundations for that dominance 

 of Asia which persists to-day. In the north, 

 Russia was making inroads into Siberia, but 

 the Farthest East, China and Japan, remained 

 wrapped in the obscurity which had shrouded 

 them through all the centuries. Not until the 

 nineteenth century did Western nations force 

 an entrance into these countries which lived in 

 the past, but to-day Western ideals and civili- 

 zation are making themselves felt throughout 

 Asia, and several of the Asiatic nations have 

 come to play prominent parts in world politics. 

 These statements must not be construed too 

 liberally, for while governments may have 

 adopted more advanced theories and scholars 

 may have discarded much of the old formal 

 learning, the bulk of the people in most coun- 

 tries live to-day as they lived a thousand years 

 ago or more, ignoring and even resenting all 

 attempts to introduce among them new civili- 

 zation and new faiths. Asia thus remains, as 

 one writer calls it, the "one stronghold of the 

 spirit of the past." 



Religions in Asia. An extremely interesting 

 fact in connection with Asia is that every one 

 of the great world religions had there its origin. 

 Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Juda- 

 ism, with its two offshoots of Christianity and 

 Mohammedanism, were all evolved in Asia. 

 Most of them have still their stronghold there, 

 but Christianity has not made much progress 

 in the land of its birth, and has grown slowly 

 in Asia only as the results of almost super- 

 human efforts on the part of missionaries. 



420 ASIA 



To-day there are fewer than 20,000,000 Chris- 

 tians in the whole continent, while Brahmanism 

 has over ten times that number, Buddhism 

 over twenty times and Mohammedanism over 

 eight times. Of these great religions, the two 

 offshoots of Judaism have been the only really 

 militant or missionary faiths. 



Other Items of Interest. A representative of 

 the United States Department of Agriculture 

 has spent six years in China, Siberia and Tur- 

 kestan, searching for trees and plants worth 

 growing in America. Jujubes, for the arid 

 regions; persimmons suitable for drying; bam- 

 boos, for eating and for landscape gardening; 

 "strawberry" trees, hawthorns, and new varie- 

 ties of the cherry and the peach are among 

 those which are proving successful. 



Nearly four-fifths of the world's silk comes 

 from Asia. 



As far back as 1800 the United States ex- 

 ported more than a million dollars worth of 

 goods to Asia, but until 1897, when the amount 

 was $39,000,000, the trade did not equal that 

 with South America. In 1905 Asia took $128,- 

 000,000 worth of American products, but in 

 1909, only a little more than half as much, 

 whereupon South American business again be- 

 came more important until 1915. The annual 

 export to Asia is now about $115,000,000, only 

 about four per cent of all the exports of the 

 United States. 



United States imports from Asia have always 

 exceeded exports. In 1800 they were over 

 $11,000,000; now they are well over $200,- 

 000,000. 



Canada sells about $5,000,000 worth of its 

 products to Asiatics, and buys over twice as 

 much from them. 



The almost constant struggle between Europe 

 and Asia from earliest times is one of the 

 interesting phases of history. Beginning, ac- 

 cording to Herodotus, even earlier than the 

 ten-year siege of Troy which forms the story 

 of the Iliad, it was continued in the wars in 

 which Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis 

 figured, in the expeditions of Alexander, the 

 Roman conquests, the invasions of the Huns, 

 the Saracen inroads, the Crusades and the 

 contest with the Turk which have extended 

 into our own time. 



Russia-in-Asia is the largest country on the 

 globe. 



Asia is the only continent which rivals North 

 America in tobacco growing, to which over a 

 million acres are devoted, mostly in India. 



Rice is Asia's great crop. Its annual produc- 



