AGRICULTURAL countries originate great cities because field cultivation leads directly to trade. The people have something to sell in a neighbouring market town, and they exchange the produce of the soil for useful articles which they wish for at home. The largest cities are found where the soil is most fertile, and where the courses of rivers render conveyance most easy. When Baron Richthoven was in China twenty years ago, he studied with the experienced eye of a practical geologist the contour of China in all its provinces. In the North, China presents the special features of the loess formation. A dull country without trees offers everywhere the singular spectacle of a tolling plateau with the occurrence of sudden fissures in the light crumbling soil, Perpendicular walls line these breaks in the monotony of the land surface. They may vary from two hundred to seven of eight hundred feet deep. These water-worn fissures with vertical sides arrest the traveller's eye as a main feature in the. geography of North China. Here and there they open out into plains where rich cultivation attests the industry of the farmer, The brooks of the higher Lauds become broad streams where two or more rivulete combine their forces, The mighty Yellow River is there to unite the ramifications of many tributary rivers which, starting from different points of the watershed, join to swell the volume of water as it rolls through five provinces to the sea, What it is now, it was in Marco Polo's time six centuries Six centuries before that it was the same when Arabs and Nestoria: visited the Court of the Emperor 'liang ing-huang and. his successors in the Tang. dynasty. When that reowned Emperor, the patron of poetry and painting, escaped from his capital in Shensi to take refuge from rebellion in Chengtu, the chief city then as now of Szechuan province, he left the loess country behind to penetrate into the wild and fertile West. But that was by no means a new experience to the Chinese inhabitants. The historians and poets of the country had described it long before. In the third century the story of the 'I'hres Kingdoms had made s deep impression on the native mind. China was then for the firat_time divided into three parts with an Emperor to each. The main features in the geography are made in the North by the Yellow River, as in Central China by the Yangtzekiang. The traveller as he obtains ideas of a more general nature of the geography of the country learns to combine the Yellow River with the loess for-motion in the north just as he connects rice cultivation with broad alluvial tracts watered by the Yangtzekiang in Central Chins.
In the Han dynasty from B.C. 200 to AD. 200 we find ourselves arrested by the spectacle of Yellow River embankments broken through and restored in times of destructive floods. We ask, are we now at the beginning of Chinese geographical history? Far from it. The poet sand historians of that time engaged earnestly in the task of restoring the records of antiquity and recovering from those records the-geographical facts of more ancient times, They were the friends of knowledge as Chin Shi-huang, the book-burner, was its enemy. He was like the Caliph Omar who ordered the fire to be kindled at Alexandria that burned the books of the Greeks. They were both savages who richly deserve the dishonour heaped on them in later ages, for they, being the enemies of knowledge, were the enemies of man. Even Confucius himself, that reverent student of antiquity over 2,300 years ago, travelled among the same scenes of which von Richthoven has now for the first time given us exact pictures. In one of his drawings we see several sailing boats on the winding Yellow River in the eastern part of Honan province, On the right band is a long loess wall apparently ten times the height of the ing boats and presenting two distinct terraces about equal in thickness one above the other. Near some cottages, surrounded by trees on the north bank of the river, we can see the perpendicular fissures in this Zoess wall quite distinctly. In another of Richthoven's pictures we look out from the door of an archway upon a sea of loess terraces vertically cut. Through them the mule path winds down the archway, and it will soon be passing between vertical walls several hundred feat deep as it goes forward through this singular formation; so utterly unlike what we are accustomed to notice in our own country. Through such scenes 2,350 years ago Confucius formerly travelled with his pupils, But was this aa far back as we can go if we wish to know what ancient geographical records the Chinese possess No. Confucius himself was a loving student of antiquity. The classics as he read them belonged to all the preceding ages, since about B.C. 2200. 'I'hese books were the treasures of the famous Chinese Sage among them is the Yii-kung, a most valuable geographical fragment. It sketches all north and central China, There is not an important mountain, river, 8 lake, which it leaves unnamed. The wonder in regard to the Vii-kung, as Richthoven has carefully pointed out, is that 4,100 years ago the Chinese knew their own country in its topography so remarkably well that the book itself, and the facts it contains with the language and style of its composition, are thus shown to belong to the age which the Chinese themselves assign to it, There must have been Imperial government in the days of Yao and Shun and of the Hsia dynasty, as tradition says, and this account of the geography must come down to us from that time. Four thousand years ago the writers of this old record knew all China from Szechuan and Kansu to the sea near Shanhaikuan in: the Gulf of Pechili, A large proportion of the names of mountains and rivers found in this book are the same that are applied to them now. Four thousand years ago the principles of government were such that the whole country was minutely known to the administration, language was Chinese, and the writing used was Chiuesa; the principles of government were so much the same as now that if a native scholar is asked when the country first began to have nine ranks of officers, five orders of nobility, and a system of administration like the present, he will reply that it is all in the Book of History. But if the Yii-kung geography was written four thousand years ago, which is known by internal evidence, this being a part of the Book of History, that whole work may be accepted by us, as it was by Confucius and Mencius, as a collection of true records of the history of the country in the old days, as far back as the time of Abraham and Moses. It is marked visibly by incompleteness, The chapters are fragments and the omissions ara regrettably numerous, but what is found there is of priceless value to him who investigates the ancient history of mankind, In regard to the topography of the country described by the Yi-kung it has been checked and verified very fully by von Richthoven, He has gone himself over the whole region from Kansu in the west to Shanhaikuan in the east. He has taken notes of all the mountains and rivers mentioned. For example, in Shensi where the geography describes the work of the great Yi in connection with three mountains called Chien, Chi, and Ching, the traveller remarks these hills are so low that at present they find no place in the enumeration of covspicnous Chinese mountains, They ate mentioned because they are the first hills on the West, standing on the north side of the rich agricultural plain of the Wei River. They were landmarks to the inhabitants of that region where the Chinese first established their title to be regarded as a cultured nation. We can place confidence in Richthoven's view because he has seen himself the very hills spoken of in this old-world monument. We can trust him the more because he rejects the exaggerations of later times, Men-dus said that " Yii did not during nine years enter his own door, his work not being finished." Richthoven very justly remarks the work could not be done in nine years, It is not said in the Y-kung that he bored through mountains and banked all the rivers, The old document is free from all. impossibilities, It is a geographical statement which bears on its face the evidence of reality. Mencius rather liked to say things pleasant to the ear,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.