92 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



In spite of the zeal, the activity, and the devotion displayed by 

 both Catholic and Protestant missionaries, we cannot say that their 

 success in China has been considerable or their action deep. The 

 Chinaman is not hostile to Christianity; he is indifferent; he finds in 

 the moral system of his great sage, Confucius, the precepts which 

 guide him in private and public life; he takes in the doctrines of 

 Buddha, the practices of Taoism, the superstitions of Feng-shui, 

 all that is necessary to him in the question of religion. Christianity 

 is still for the Chinaman a foreign religion, the superiority of which 

 has not been made so clear to his eyes as to induce him to adopt it 

 as a matter of course; and though the religion of Christ met with 

 almost unrestricted success among the pagan nations forming the old 

 Roman Empire, or amid the wild tribes of modern Africa, Oceania, 

 and America, it has entirely failed with the Far Eastern peoples, indif- 

 ferent or atheist. If I dared say what I think, I should add that the 

 destruction of Chinese society as it exists at present could alone 

 secure the triumph of Christianity, and the literati understand this 

 so well that they, and not the people, are hostile to its spread. 



Though the number of the followers of Islam in China be far in- 

 ferior to that of the Buddhists, the disciples of Mohammed have 

 nevertheless played a considerable part in the Middle Kingdom. 



The Arabs called Ta-zi were known to the Chinese, who mention 

 them in the annals of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907), through Persia, 

 the name of which appears for the first time in the Chinese annals 

 (461) in connection with an embassy sent to the court of the Wei 

 sovereigns. During the eighth century the Bagdad Abbassides and 

 their celebrated Khalif Harun ar-Rashid joined with the Uigurs and 

 the Chinese against the Tibetans, their common enemy. A fact inter- 

 esting to note, is the presence of Ta-zi in the kingdom of Nan-Chao, 

 a part of the actual Yun-nan Province, as early as 801. 



The Arabs built at Canton a large mosque, which was burnt down 

 in 758. In the course of the following century, in 875, the Mohamme- 

 dans transferred their business from Canton to the Malay Peninsula, 

 at Kalah, which inherited the commercial importance of Ceylon in the 

 sixth century. Western visitors at the court of the Mongol Khans 

 mention a number of high Mussulman dignitaries. We shall see that 

 in the eighteenth century K'ien-lung annexed to his empire the 

 T'ien-Shan, part of the share of Jagatai in the inheritance of his 

 father, Chinguiz Khan. Without going into the particulars of the 

 rebellions which devastated Central Asia, we shall recall that in 

 1864, a soldier of fortune, Yakub, captured Kashgar and the other 

 towns south of the T'ien-Shan, thus creating a Mohammedan power 

 in Northwestern China between the possessions newly acquired by 

 the Russians after the storming of Tashkant (June 27, 1865) and 



