HISTORY OF ASIA GENERAL SURVEY 93 



the Anglo-Indian Empire. For some time, Yakub was the undis- 

 puted and redoubtable sovereign of a real empire, with Yarkand as 

 a capital. England dispatched to Yakub special missions with Sir 

 Douglas Forsyth at their head in 1870 and in 1873; in 1872 the 

 Russian staff-colonel Baron Kaulbars signed a treaty of commerce 

 with the Mohammedan potentate. Yakub's rule was ephemeral and 

 ended with him when he died on the 29th of May, 1877; in fact, 

 the Chinese general Tso Tsung-tang had subdued a great part of his 

 territory, the conquest of which he completed after the death of the 

 Ameer. 



Another outburst of the Mohammedans, caused by a quarrel be- 

 tween miners of different creeds and conflicting interests, took place 

 about 1855 in Southwestern China, in the Yun-nan Province, and it 

 led to the creation of a sultanate at Ta-li, which lasted till the cap- 

 ture of this stronghold by the Chinese Imperial troops on the 15th 

 of January, 1873. 



China, which is the main subject treated of in this general view, 

 was in fact isolated only in the ancient times of her history, when her 

 territory, watered by the Yellow River, hardly extended beyond the 

 right bank of the Yang-tse Kiang. From the fourteenth century 

 the land route to China was closed, and the foreigners who arrived 

 by sea at the beginning of the sixteenth could at Canton only 

 hold any intercourse with the Chinese, who got their scanty infor- 

 mation about distant lands from the Canton merchants and the 

 missionaries submerged in the enormous mass of the empire. The 

 Cossacks who came from the north in the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries added little or rather nothing to this knowledge. It seems 

 paradoxical, but it is nevertheless exact to say that China was opened 

 to Western civilization and influence by the British gun. In the Middle 

 Ages, China had the benefit of some extraneous ideas through Buddh- 

 ism imported from India and through the Mongols who served as a 

 link between Europe and Asia. China herself broke her own bounds ; 

 like the Persian and Arab merchants visiting her ports, her own 

 traders penetrated to the farthest extremity of the Persian Gulf. 

 At different times she held Annam in bondage; she tried to conquer 

 Burmah and Japan, but failed; her influence was all-powerful in 

 Korea, and she carried on her explorations to the Islands of Sunda, 

 which soon became one of the favorite spots of her emigration. 



With the Chinese Dynasty of the Ming, which replaced in 1368 

 the Mongol rule in the Middle Kingdom, China assumes the definite 

 form under which she is known henceforward to the foreigner. The 

 Manchu Conquest in 1644 brings a fresh element into the country, 

 but the new-comers are soon absorbed; they add to the Chinese 

 Empire the land from which they come and which constitutes to-day 



