New Forces in Old China | Page 7

coal
the apparently inexhaustible deposits of iron ore, we have the two
products on which material greatness largely depends.
The population proves to be even greater than was supposed, for while
400,000,000 was formerly believed to be a maximum estimate, the
general census recently taken by the Chinese Government for the
purpose of assessing the war tax places the population of the Empire at
426,000,000. This, however, includes 8,500,000 in Manchuria,
2,580,000 in Mongolia, 6,430,020 in Tibet and 1,200,000 in Chinese
Turkestan. Some of these regions are only nominally Chinese. Those
on the western frontier were until comparatively recent years almost as
unknown as the poles. Sven Hedin's description of those that he
traversed is wonderfully fascinating. Only a daring spirit, the explorer
of the type that is born, not made, could have pierced those vast
solitudes and wrested from them the secret of their existence. That
Hedin had no money for such a costly quest could not deter this Viking
of the Northland. Kings headed the subscription and others so eagerly
followed that ample funds were soon in hand. Princes helped with
equipment and counsel. The Czar made all Russian railways free
highways, and every local official and nomad chieftain exerted himself
to aid the expedition. Hedin does not claim to give anything more than
an ordered diary of his travels, together with a description of the lands
he explored and the peoples he found. But what a diary it is! It takes the
reader away from the whirl of crowded cities and clanging trolley-cars
into the boundless, wind-swept desert and the solitude of majestic
mountains where the lonely traveller wanders with his camels through
untrodden wildernesses or floats down the interminable stretches of
unknown rivers, while night after night he sleeps in his tiny tent or
under the open sky. The author failed to reach the long-sought Lassa,
the suspicious Dalai Lama refusing to be deceived or cajoled and
sternly sending the inquisitive traveller out of the country. But the
expedition of three years and three days was rich in other disclosures of
ruined cities and great watercourses and lofty plateaus and majestic
mountain ranges. The population is sparse in those desolate wastes, and
the scattered inhabitants are wild and uncouth and free.

Manchuria, however, is far from being the barren country that so many
imagine it to be. It is, in many respects, like Canada, a region
embracing about 370,000 square miles and of almost boundless
agricultural and mineral wealth. The population, save in the southern
parts, is not yet dense but it is rapidly increasing.
But in central and eastern China, the conditions are very different. Here
the population can only be indicated by a figure so large that it is
almost impossible for us to comprehend it. Consider that the eighteen
provinces alone, with an area about equal to that part of the United
States east of the Mississippi River, have eight times the population of
that part of our country.
``There are twice as many people in China as on the four continents--
Africa, North and South America and Oceanica. Every third person
who toils under the sun and sleeps under God's stars is a Chinese.
Every third child born into the world looks into the face of a Chinese
mother. Every third pair given in marriage plight their troth in a
Chinese cup of wine. Every third orphan weeping through the day
every third widow wailing through the night are in China. Put them in
rank, joining hands, and they will girdle the globe ten times at the
equator with living, beating human hearts. Constitute them pilgrims
and let two thousand go past every day and night under the sunlight and
under the solemn stars, and you must hear the ceaseless tramp, tramp,
of the weary, pressing, throbbing throng for five hundred years.''[2]
[2] The Rev. J. T. Gracey, D. D., ``China in Outline,'' p. 10.

There is something amazing in the immensity of the population. Great
cities are surprisingly numerous. In America, a city of nearly a million
inhabitants is a wonderful place and all the world is supposed to know
about it. But while Canton and Tien-tsin are tolerably familiar names,
how many in the United States ever heard of Hsiang-tan-hsien ? Yet
Hsiang-tan- hsien is said to have 1,000,000 inhabitants, while within
comparatively short distances are other great cities and innumerable
villages. In the Swatow region, within a territory a hundred and fifty

miles long and fifty miles wide, there are no less than ten walled cities
of from 40,000 to 250,000 inhabitants, besides hundreds of towns and
villages ranging from a few hundred to 25,000 or 30,000 people. Men
never tire of writing about the population adjacent to New York,
Boston and Chicago. But in five weeks' constant journeying through