HISTORY OF ASIA GENERAL SURVEY 95 



flicted upon foreigners; it was forbidden to the natives to teach their 

 language to any "Western Devil" (Yang-kwei-tse) ; the lex iali- 

 onis, man for man, was applied with all its cruelty and injustice. 



This state of things lasted till the Opium War, which gave Eng- 

 land the means of opening China more widely to the foreign trade 

 and of making the way for the introduction of Western ideas, with- 

 out abating, however, the arrogant pretensions of the mandarins. 



In the course of the sixteenth century began the double march 

 toward China, by the north and the south, by land and by sea, 

 which brought into contact the nations of the Occident and those of 

 the Far East. Ermak's Cossacks were the pioneers of the northern 

 route, Vasco da Gama's sailors and Albuquerque's soldiers were the 

 pilots and the conquerors of the southern route. 



To the Portuguese we owe the discovery, or more exactly the 

 reopening, of the road of Asia in modern times. The cape dis- 

 covered by Bartholomew Diaz in 1485, doubled by Vasco da Gama 

 in 1497, was the great port of call from Europe to Asia, until the 

 ancient way of Egypt was resumed during the nineteenth century. 

 Masters of the Indian Ocean, the capture of Malacca in 1511, their 

 first voyage to Canton in 1514, a wreck in 1542 at Tanegashima, in 

 the Japanese Archipelago, gave to the Portuguese the possession 

 of an immense empire and the control of an enormous trade which 

 they were not able to 'keep. The annexation of Portugal to Spain, 

 "The Sixty Years' Captivity," under Philip the Second, was as 

 harmful to the first, drawn by its conqueror into a struggle fatal 

 for her prosperity, as was to the Dutch colonies the absorption of 

 Holland by Napoleon I. 



The Spaniards settled in the Philippine Islands; the Dutch, with 

 the enterprising Cornelius Houtman, landed in 1596 at Bantam, 

 created the short-lived colony of Formosa, and a lasting empire 

 in the Sunda Islands, where in 1619 they laid the foundations of the 

 town of Batavia, on the ruins of the old native port of Jacatra. 



However, one may say that England really opened Eastern Asia 

 to foreign influence, at least by sea, from the day in 1634 when the 

 gun of Captain Weddell thundered for the first time in the Canton 

 River. It was with the accompaniment of British powder that during 

 two centuries the countries of the Far East carried on trade with the 

 Western merchants. It was on sea, and of course by the south, that 

 England fought for the supremacy in Asia. 



A terrible struggle in India against the French, where Clive and 

 Hastings got the benefit of the labors and exertions of Fra^ois Martin, 

 Dumas, Dupleix, and others, three wars against the Mahrats, the 

 conquest of the Punjab, the crushing of the great rebellion of 1858, 

 the suppression of the Empire of the Great Mogul, have secured to 



