Part 22

Marco Polo found the same indulgent tolerance of his religion. In Calaci, the principal city of Tangus, the inhabitants were “idolaters,” but there were three churches of Nestorian Christians. In the province of Tenduch, formerly the seat of Presbyter John, King George was a Christian and a priest, and most of the people were Christians. They paid tribute to the Great Khan.

Indeed, if the Mongolian attitude toward armed nations combating in Christ’s name has been implacable hostility, toward those of the faith who worshiped peacefully in their midst it has been uniformly tolerant, even favoring. The Nestorians, who brought their creed from Khorassan in the fourth century, had by 500 A.D. bishoprics in Merv, Herat, and Samarcand. The Perait Turkomans as a tribe accepted Christianity, and were unpunished. That the Faith was liberally treated in 781, under the Chinese, is self-acknowledged, on the ancient Nestorian stone of Si-an-fu. Headed by a cross, there is graven in Syrian and Chinese the Imperial decree of 638, ordering a church to be built: it gives an abstract of Christian doctrine, and an account of the “introduction and propagation of the noble law of Ta-t’sin in the Middle Kingdom.” In Si-an-fu at this time there were four thousand foreign families, cut off from return by a northern inroad of fanatical Tibetans into Turkestan.

Another monument of 830, found near the site of the old Ouighour capital on the Orkhon, and carved in Chinese, Turkish, and Ouighour characters, mentions the Western religion. A strange sect of Hebrews of unknown origin found as well an unpersecuted home at K’ai-feng-fu, where the Mosaic rites could be performed. To this day a remnant survives.

The same tolerance for alien faiths marked Tatar rule in Russia. The Khan of Sarai authorized a Greek church and a bishopric in his capital, exempting the monks from his poll-tax. Khan Usbek in 1313 confirmed the privileges of the Church, and punished with death sacrilege against it. Kublai Khan took part regularly in the Easter services, and allowed the Roman missionaries to establish a school in Shang-tu.

Indeed, reviewing the whole sweep of Asia’s religious history, one can hardly escape the deduction that if the greatest race of the greatest continent is idolatrous, it is not the fault of the Mongolians.

The Nestorian missionaries had an unsurpassed opportunity in the fourth century when their faith was new and burning, and the world was at peace. But stigmatized as heretics after a doctrinal dispute which had been settled by the logic of a street fight, in which Cyril’s Egyptian bravos defeated the Syrian henchmen of the Patriarch of Constantinople, their mother church was driven out of the Roman Empire into Persia, where, cut off from the support of the main trunk of fellow Christians, their organization withered away as a lopped branch. The chief congregations in Iran and Turan were overwhelmed by the Mohammedans, until at length there were left only the dwindling congregations in Mongolia, and such communities as those on the Malabar coast in India.

To-day one hears of interesting discoveries. Now it is of the old buried Christian strata among Turkomans of Samarcand, of doctrines preserved through the fury of Islam fanaticism by families that have secretly transmitted Christian worship through the centuries. Next it is of Nestorian monks in Asia Minor, startled at being able to read the characters of Ouighour inscriptions, relics of the writings which their predecessors carried to Mongolia. But for all practical purposes the Nestorian labors, once so promising, are as if they had never been.

Another supreme opportunity for Christianity came when Kublai Khan, in 1268, sent west by the Polo brothers for Roman missionaries to teach his people.

“The Great Khan, ... calling to him the two brethren, desired them for his love to go to the Pope of the Romans, to pray him to send an hundred wise men and learned in the Christian religion unto him, who might show his wise men that the faith of the Christians was to be preferred before all other sects, and was the only way of salvation.

“After this the Prince caused letters to the Pope to be written and gave them to the two brothers. Now the contents of the letters were as follows: He begged that the Pope would send as many as an hundred persons of our Christian faith; intelligent men acquainted with the seven arts, well qualified to prove by force of argument to idolaters and other kind of folk, that the law of Christ was best; and if they would prove this, he and all under him would be Christians.”

In the advance of Christianity the steps ahead have been made not so much by the conversion of the people as by the winning of their rulers,--Constantine, giving to Rome’s legions the standard of the Cross; Clovis; Ethelbert; Vladimir, who drove the whole population of Kiev naked into consecrated water of the Dnieper; Charlemagne, moving against the Saxons with his corps of priests. Where these spoke for a hundred thousand souls, Kublai spoke for a hundred million. He was able to deliver; it was the Pope who did not rise to the occasion. In all Christendom Gregory could find but two priests to go with the Khan’s messengers, and these turned back in the midst of the journey, alarmed by the prospect of its hardships. The Khan, who wished some religion, sent to Tibet, and received the Buddhist missionaries whom he requested. So China, Mongolia, Tibet, and eastern Turkestan are Buddhist to this day.

Yet once again the Christian opportunity came. The way which had been opened into China by Matteo Ricci had been followed by Jesuit missionaries, until at the beginning of the seventeenth century there were two churches in Peking, some three hundred thousand converts in the Empire, and the favor of the Emperor Hang was with the Western faith.

When Christianity was spreading with cumulative rapidity, the Dominicans and Franciscans came in and denounced the Jesuit workers for tolerating the ancestor-cult of the Chinese, and for permitting God to be called “Shang-ti.” In vain the Emperor Hang, appealed to by the Jesuits, declared that by “Shang-ti” the Chinese meant “Ruler of the Universe,” and that the Confucian rites were family ceremonies and not idolatry. The rival friars persuaded the Pope to proclaim “Tien-chu” the proper Chinese word for God, and to condemn all ancestral ceremonies. Thereupon, the Chinese Emperor, rebuffed and disgusted with all the wrangling fraternities, condemned the Christian religion and killed the friars, save those whom he wanted for the Imperial Observatory.

One cannot but recall an early commentary made by Mangu Khan upon the jarring Christian sects whose rival dogmas have prevented, and do to this day, the common progress.

“We Mongolians believe that there is but one God, through whom we live and die, and we have an upright heart towards Him. That as God hath given unto the hand fingers, so He hath given many ways to men. God hath given the Scriptures to you, and ye Christians keep them not. But He hath given us soothsayers, and we do that which they bid us, and we live in peace.”

For some years after Kublai Khan’s death, the Mongol Empire held its preëminence by inertia rather than by strength. Each of the khans had his kingdom. Presently the nations that had been subdued began to rise against the numerically small garrisons of Mongolia. In China, the young Bonze, Chu-Yuan-Chang, finally organized a band of Boxers, and succeeded in driving out the last degenerate Mongol khan from Peking. He united the old eighteen provinces and established the Ming Dynasty, the tombs and palaces of whose kings are still the most celebrated structures of China.

In Russia, Dimitri of the Don gathered one hundred and fifty thousand men and defeated the Mongols at Kulikovo.

If the old supreme monarch of the north had lost his sway, in the south the Mongol race was being lifted to its second period of empire under Tamerlane, the Iron Khan. His was the history of the first Mongol conqueror repeated. The ant that Timur watched during his exile, which fell back and returned sixty-nine times before it carried its grain of wheat to the top of the wall, was the symbol of his early career. Constant obscure tribal conflicts, unsuccessful at first, led finally to a gathering of the nomads into a terrible invading army. The Golden Horde was hurled against Dimitri, defeated him, and marched upon Moscow. It was sacked with the horrors of Genghis’ days, and all Russia was ravaged to the Don and the Sea of Azov. One of Tamerlane’s armies traversed the Pamir into India, and, by the capture of Delhi, opened the way for the Mogul Dynasty of his sons, which was to endure until the Indian Mutiny. His Indian army, returning, swept a swath of desolation through Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Georgia, and Armenia. Every city that was taken was sacked, and the event commemorated by a pyramid of skulls embedded in mortar. One hundred and twenty pyramids marked Tamerlane’s path through India alone. The Delhi pyramid was made from the skulls of one hundred thousand slain “with the sword of holy war.”

Bajazet, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks,--themselves sprung from a nomad Mongol tribe,--was threatened by Tamerlane on the west. In a great battle Bajazet was defeated.

Alhacen, Tamerlane’s Arabian secretary, relates that the conquered king was examined by his master.

“Wherefore dost thou use so great cruelty towards men? Dost thou not pardon sex or age?”

Bajazet might logically have responded with a “tu quoque,” but his position did not warrant it.

“I am appointed by God to punish tyrants,” continued Tamerlane. He had an iron cage made; and locked within it like a linnet, the unfortunate sultan was carried from place to place, because, in the Tatar’s naïvely quoted words, “It is necessary that he be made an exemplary punishment to all the cruel of the world, of the just wrath of God against them.”

The invasion of China was under way, in 1405, when Tamerlane died, leaving a renewed Mongol Empire, which stretched from the Hoang-ho to the Don, and from Siberia to India.

Here again the descendants of the savage conquerors rose to the requirements of their sovereignty and obeyed the peaceful and humane maxims that each of the two great and warlike and pitiless tyrants had bequeathed to his successors. They ruled with a fair degree of wisdom and a large measure of success. A descendant of Tamerlane was to build at Agra, in 1630, the most splendid monument the world has ever seen, the Taj-Mahal.

In the century after Tamerlane’s death the Hordes split up once more, Ivan the Great of Moscow, having consolidated many neighboring princedoms, with the nominal consent of his Tatar overlord, at length seized the opportunity to refuse the payment of tribute. The Mongol Khan had no longer the power to compel it at the sword’s point, and without a battle the Tatar supremacy was covertly relinquished. In 1480 the long servitude of Russia to the alien invader was ended. From this time the Mongol nomads appear hardly at all in history. They withdrew gradually to their Asian steppes, leaving in Turkey, in the Crimea, and in India, the kingdoms of their offshoot tribes. Russia and China still felt the raids of the horsemen, for the khans of the Golden Horde were yet not to be despised.

Fernan Hendez Pinto, the shipwrecked Portuguese of the generation after Vasco da Gama, was in China in 1542 when Tatars came down and besieged it. He saw “an emperor called Caran whose seigniorie confineth within the mountains of Gen Halidan, a nation which the naturals call Moscoby, of whom we saw some in this citie [of Tuymican], ruddie, of big stature, with shoes and furred clothes, having some Latin words, but seeming rather, for aught we observed, idolaters than Christians.

“To the ambassador of that Prince Caran, better entertainment was given than to all the rest. He brought with him one hundred and twenty men of his guard, with arrows and gilded quivers, all clothed in chamois-skins, murrie and green. After whom followed twelve men of high giantlike stature, leading great greyhounds, in chains and collars of silver.”

When Yermak cleared the way to Sibir, and opened the path that was to lead to the Pacific, the Mongols were pushed south. Russians still had Tatars all along their frontier, but these were pressed steadily back as the Slavic race advanced eastward. The Tatar domains were restricted soon to the steppe country and Mongolia.

After Yermak’s time the Mongol power sank. It fell further when the Manchus established their dynasty in Peking in 1644. So low had its estate become that even the old fighting instinct was gone,--all the passionate desire for independence that has been the Mongols’ birthright since the dawn of history. How had it vanished? Christianity had not come. Buddhism had come, and it was the tolling of the knell for freedom.

The sum of national energy and the heat of the new dispensation were diverted into theocracy. The meaning of life, its value and its duty, these basic ideas which determine the ultimate activities of every race, were revolutionized by the new faith. To the Pagan the world was good despite its evils; struggle against environment measured the worth of manhood and freedom was the supreme blessing. To the Buddhist, life was an evil in which the soul had become enmeshed. The path to release lay not in overcoming the environment, but in retreating from it within the citadel of the soul. Resignation, self-surrender, the yielding of this world to secure the other world beyond,--such were the forces which transformed the Mongols from the foremost warriors into the priest-ridden, subject, unaspiring people of to-day. The supreme problem in the autonomy of China, and in the subjugation of India, is involved in the point of view of Buddhism and its outgrowth in character.

In 1650 a son of the leader, Tu-she-tu Khan, was made chief of the Mongol _kutukhtus_, or cardinals, with the title of Cheptsun Damba. This monsignor began the Urga hierarchy of Gigins, or god-priests, which has continued until the present time, when the eighth Gigin reigns at the Holy City. As the powerful Tu-she-tu clan lost its vitality, Chinese influence made itself felt. This was directed in general toward the encouragement of the priesthood, whose celibacy and other-worldliness dovetailed with Chinese control.

The Mongol khans, becoming through the years more and more unwarlike, had grown tired of internecine feuds. They were at last won over by China to a nominal allegiance and the payment of a formal tribute, reciprocating which, imperial gifts of tenfold value served as artful bribes. Modestly, diplomatically, came King Stork, leaving to the local Daimios, seemingly undisturbed, their feudal sway. With the coming of the first Manchu governor began the present era of Mongolia.

As time went on, the Chinese, more astute and cunning, took little by little from the careless hands of the nomad princes the reins of real political power. The native chiefs were wheedled into giving up many ancient rights over the vassals, as well as their general taxing powers. The celibate priests, who were draining the manhood of their idle but powerful hierarchy, were subsidized and directed by the interlopers. They preached to their confiding countrymen obedience and submission. In the Mongol Gigin of Urga, the Chinese raised up a native power superior to all the old feudal lords, whose armies melted away beneath the ecclesiastical dominion. When the Gigin became in turn too great a menace, they caused it to be decreed that each succeeding incarnated Buddha must come from Tibet, and that his main powers must be delegated to a “Council of Lamas.”

In the train of the Manchus came the Chinese traders, polite, supple, calling themselves friends of the Mongols, offering their alluring wares on undefined credit terms which tangled the unsuspicious natives in inextricable usury. Peking-brought gewgaws were paid for a hundred times over in the food and clothing which the natives kept giving to the compounding voracity of the debt.

Chinese coolies pressed up the river-valleys, begging land here, intruding themselves there; more followed, and ever more, until the best of the pastures were filched away, and the nomads, in order to exist, were forced to trek to the more distant and barren slopes. Deforesting transformed into deserts whole provinces. The once famed virtue of the Tatar women is forgotten, and every Chinaman has his “friend” whom he leaves behind when he returns to his native land. The big prosperous Mongol families, that early travelers noted, are no more. Two or three children are the most that one sees to a _yurta_, and the population, owing to lama celibacy and the decreased means of subsistence, is declining from year to year.

This is the people and this the land which sent horde after horde through centuries to conquer the world; where in half a dozen generations a little band of blacksmiths like the Turks could breed a nation that would dominate Asia. With narrowing means of subsistence, and aliens draining their small surplus capital, the Mongol race lies prostrate beneath the Yellow Empire. The grim Malthusian tenet that the world cannot give food for all its children falls short here of the grim actuality. The silent invasion of the Chinese has been as ruthless as was the march of Genghis Khan. The economic garroting of a race is what the world has seen in Mongolia.

No longer are there men to lead or men to fight. Obediently and submissively the once fierce, ranging warriors have yielded to the artfully-imposed yoke. The army of unmatched cavalry has become a memory, and a nation of fighters has become a race of timid herders, with little heart or brain. The sons of the old soldiers have learned to shave their heads and croon Tibetan prayers, and the fires of a people’s ambition are quenched in the creed that makes abstention from effort a cardinal virtue, and annihilation life’s supreme objective. What there was of virtue and of valor lies buried in distant graves. Ringed with the bones of slaughtered captives, rusted swords at their sides, they sleep well, those old forgotten warriors. In poverty and hardship, priest-ridden and debt-ridden, decimated and degenerated, their descendants eke out their sterile days. But there lingers yet among them a half-forgotten memory of the heroic past. The wandering chanter still sings in the twilight the old “Song of Tamerlane”--Tamerlane who will come again, they say, and lead the hordes once more to victory.

When the divine Timur dwelt in our tents, The Mongol Nation was redoubtable and warlike. Its least movements made the earth bend; Its mens’ look froze with fear The ten thousand people upon whom the sun shines. O Divine Timur, will thy great soul soon return? Return, return; we await thee, O Timur!

IX

CHINA

Destiny has bequeathed to his once subject-race the heritage of Genghis Khan, but whether its Manchu possessor can or cannot hold even his own birthright is to-day an enigma. The last few years have seen the gathering of the eagles, disputing the mastery of eastern Asia, where China stands against the world. Slav, Saxon, and Frank press in, upon the supine empire. Has this yellow race the manhood and the capacity to rally against them and retrieve its national integrity?

The cession of Formosa after the war of 1895 began the partition. China’s defenselessness was then visualized. The revelation of her easy defeat set every predatory nation on the alert. Watchful for an occasion, which two murdered missionaries supplied, Germany, by clumsy but successful unscrupulousness, seized Kiao-chow and two hundred miles of hinterland. Three weeks after the bludgeoned ratification of Admiral Diedrich’s grab, Russia procured the signature of the intimidated Emperor to the lease of Port Arthur. France demanded and secured the cession of Kwang-chow-wan, on the mainland opposite the island of Hainan. England acquired the lease of Wei-hai-wei, and continental territory opposite Hong-kong. Italy came to claim as its portion Sanmen Bay; but this at least China found courage to refuse.

Then followed a period when, backed each by its government, invading cohorts of promoters scooped in franchises and special privileges of every description. The latter part of 1899 saw foreigners pushing in from Manchuria on the north, where Russia with her so-termed railway guards held the strategic route, and from Yun-nan on the south, where France was constructing a similar road of conquest. It showed four European nations so established along the coast that only by courtesy of a foreign government could a Chinese vessel cast anchor in some of the principal ports of China. It saw a Belgian-French railway driving from Peking into the heart of the Empire at Hankow; an American line started north from Canton to the same objective; an English line controlling the territory between the main northern trade-centres, Niu-chwang and Tien-tsin; a French society in possession of a great south-country copper concession; Russians with the exclusive right to all the gold in two _eimucks_ of Mongolia; and an English syndicate deeded the best of the Chinese coal-fields.

The partition was thus far accomplished. The continental nations seemed to be ready for all that they could get. The strength of Great Britain’s traditional position, based upon maintaining the integrity of China, was shaken by her lease of Wei-hai-wei, although this lease was to run only so long as Russia should hold Port Arthur. England was on the point of recognizing openly “spheres of influence,” as is shown by the inferential claim to special British rights in the Yangtse region set forth in the official transactions of Sir Claude McDonald, and brought out under parliamentary interpellation, when a Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Balfour Ministry spoke of “British rights” to the provinces adjoining the Yangtse River and Ho-nan and Che-kiang.

There was apparently good warrant for the general belief that in expectation of an impending partition a provisional understanding had been reached by the different chancelleries, regarding the share of each nation, England being allotted the mighty domain from the Yellow Sea to Burma and Afghanistan, including all Tibet, as well as six hundred and fifty thousand square miles in China proper. In general, from Shan-tung inland the valley of the Hoang-ho was destined for Germany; the district north of her Anamese possessions for France; all Mongolia and Manchuria for Russia; Corea and the province of Fokien on the mainland opposite Formosa, for Japan. Peking and the surrounding district, whose disposition was embarrassed by jealousy if not by scruples, was alone left for the Chinese.

At this critical juncture, when the day of dismemberment seemed indeed to have arrived, the United States came forward in behalf of the “open-door” doctrine, as a means of preserving the nationality and the integrity of China. In a circular letter to the Powers, our Secretary of State, Mr. John Hay, asked that adhesion be given in writing to three main propositions, appertaining to each country “within its respective sphere, of whatever influence.” These points were that no treaty port rights or other vested interests should be interfered with; that the Chinese tariff should be maintained; that no discriminating railway charges or harbor-dues should be imposed.

America’s might, thrown into the wavering balance, turned the scale. Great Britain gave ready adhesion. Though the responses of some of the other Powers were evasive, none was at this time willing to bear the onus of an adverse stand: each nation nominally accepted, and the movement toward partition was checked.