﻿ON THE CHINESE. 37 t 



Saviour, that a small kingdom was erected in the pro- 

 evince of She?i-si, the capital of which stood nearly 

 in the thirty -fifth degree of northern latitude, and 

 about jive degrees to the west of Si-gan : both the 

 country and its metropolis were called Chin ; and the 

 dominion of its princes was gradually extended to the 

 east and west. A king of Chin, who makes a figure 

 in the Shahnamah among the allies of Afrasiyah, was, 

 I presume, a sovereign of the country just men- 

 tioned ; and the river of Chin, which the poet fre- 

 quently names as the limit of his eastern geogra- 

 phy, seems to have been the Yellow River, which the 

 Chinese introduce at the beginning of their fabulous 

 annals. I should be tempted to expatiate on so curi- 

 ous a subject, but the present occasion allows nothing 

 superfluous, and permits me only to add, that Man- 

 jrukhan died in the middle of the thirteenth century, 

 before the city of Chin, which was afterwards taken 

 by Kublai, and that the poets of Iran perpetually 

 allude to the districts around it which they celebrate, 

 with Chegil and Khoten, for a number of musk ani- 

 mals roving on their hills. The territory of Chin, so 

 called by the old Hindus, by the Persians, and by the 

 Chinese (while the Greeks and Arabs were obliged by 

 their defective articulation to miscall it Sin) gave its 

 name to a race of emperors, whose tyranny made 

 their memory so unpopular, that the modern inhabit- 

 ants of China hold the word in abhorrence, and speak 

 of themselves as the people of a milder and more vir- 

 tuous dynasty ; but it is highly probable that the whole 

 nation descended from the Chinas of Menu, and, mix- 

 ing with the Tartars (by whom the plains of Honau 

 and the more southern provinces were thinly inhabit- 

 ed) formed by degrees the race of men whom 

 we now see in possession of the noblest empire in 

 Asia. 



In support of an opinion, which I offer as the re- 

 sult of long and anxious inquiries, I ihould regularly 

 Vol. II, B b 



