Abstract
NOT long since the Chinese Ambassador to England, in the course of a remarkable speech at Folkestone, twitted European scholars with the labours which they freely bestowed on the study of extinct nations and races, while the still existing civilisation of China, hardly inferior in antiquity to that of any other race, received but scant attention. Whether the charge is well founded or not we cannot pretend to decide here; but there is, we believe, no doubt that there is still in Chinese literature a vast mine, into which but few and trifling shafts have been sunk. The wealth of the geographical literature of China, for instance, is known to but a few scholars, and one of these, M. de Rosny of Paris, in a work recently published on the Oriental nations known to the ancient Chinese, says that, among all the literatures of the East, that of the Chinese probably contains the most valuable information for the study of Asiatic ethnography, for a crowd of nations which have disappeared, or which are unknown in Europe, have been the subject of substantial notices by the Chinese, outside which, probably, we know nothing of their political history or of the annals of their civilisation. M. de Rosny's work, which is published by the Ethnographical Society of Paris, is devoted to the translation and piecing together of extracts from old topographical works respecting various countries known to the Chinese in ancient times. Much of the labour in a work of this kind must necessarily be devoted to identifying the places mentioned. In many cases this has not even now been satisfactorily dune. Thus, the origin of the name Ta-tsin, applied to the Roman Empire, is wrapped in obscurity. The latest theory is that it is the phonetical representation of Tarsus in Cilicia, whence Antoninus sent ambassadors to Bactria, so that the name of Tarsus was the first echo which China received of Rome. But although there is much in M. de Rosny's volume which can only interest the technical Sinologue, yet one can gather from the text, as well as from the maps, a fairly accurate idea of the knowledge of geography possessed by the Chinese in early times. Of the maps, which are nine in number, one contains the Indian Archipelago as known to the Chinese, and six others Indo-China and Malaysia, according to Chinese geographers, at various periods from the twelfth century before our era down to 906 after Christ.
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Ancient Chinese Geography . Nature 31, 58 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/031058a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/031058a0