232 NOTES AND QUERIES 



Chapter 31. Seven Centuries of Asia. 



The Western world always enjoyed the advantage of a variety 

 of competing cultures. It consisted of separate geographical and 

 national areas, divided from and yet brought into touch with one 

 another by an inland sea. It progressed inland from the sea. China 

 had only one important centre of culture, and that inland, whence 

 civilisation spread by river valleys and found its limit at the sea coast. 

 This topic of the stunting of China really takes us beyond our Seven 

 Centuries, for, while it is true enough that art and poetry blossomed 

 most exuberantly under the T'ang — the intellectual maturity of 

 Chinese thought came later under the Sung, and the stiffening did 

 not seriously set in till Ming times. Mr. Wells complains of the 

 difficulty of getting adequate material for this Chinese part of his 

 history ; the fact is we have no really good, modern, general history 

 ■of China in English — it is a want that badly needs supplying. We 

 have the beginning, and we have the end, and a good deal of dryasdust 

 "Sinology" for those who can dig it out, but very little history 

 with the breath of life in it. Then the Chapter ends with a quite 

 delightful excursus on the travels of Yuan Chuang the Buddhist 

 pilgrim who wandered from China to India and back in 629 to 645, in 

 the days of that great ruler, T'ang T'ai-tsung, who, as Mr. Wells 

 observes, tried to get Yuan Chuang to translate Laotzu into Sanscrit 

 for Indian readers, much as Constantine had tried to get Arius and 

 Athanasius to settle down amicably, and with as little success. 



Chapter 3If. The Great Empire of Jengis Khan and his Successors. 



(The Age of the Land Ways) This begins with "Asia at the end 

 •of the 12th Century," where I should have liked more emphasis laid 

 on the importance of the Confucian Renaissance of Sung times, as 

 being as great a movement of the human mind as the earlier phases 

 of that Renascence of Western Civilization that forms the subject 

 of the next Chapter. This section is followed by "The Rise and 

 Victories of the Mongols" how they swept over almost all Asia 

 and Eastern Europe, destroying indeed but bringing all peoples 

 together, effacing every distance and every distinction in the widest, 

 if one of the loosest, of all the Empires to which history introduces us. 

 Illustrative of its influence we have next "The Travels of Marco 

 Polo" — with the re-awakening of western interest in geography, and 

 the introduction of many new and revolutionary ideas. Then, the 

 Ottoman Turks and Constantinople, where their presence was a side- 

 consequence of the Mongol conquests — showing how nearly they came 

 to pushing European civilization out into the Atlantic. Mr. Wells 



