Several estimates of the population of the country have been attempted since the latter part of the 16th century. Captain Gill, a traveller in the 19th century, and who, in 1882, was murdered by an Arab shaikh, is of opinion that they have all been too high. Famines, with rebellions of the Tae-ping and of the Mahomedans in Kwei-chow and Yunnan, are supposed to have reduced the nation to 250 or 300 millions.
1570 ? 307,467,000 in the reign of Kien lung Wong. 1743, 200,000,000 Grosier, 1813, 360,000,000 Census.
1842, 414,686,994 „ According to Mr. Knowlton, the census of 1839, as given by M. Sacharoff of the Russian embassy in Pekin, made a population of 415,000,000. A census was found in Governor Yeh's Yamun at Canton ; and the Chinese commissioners at Tien sing, in 1859, stated the population at 400,000,000, which is a fourth of the human race, twice the population of British India with its feudatories, and seven times that of Russia. China proper has 280 to the square mile, while that of Britain and Ireland has only 260.
Tribes.—The various types of race on the moun tain frontier of China, Burma, and Tibet, possess the highest interest for all ethnographical students. Of the aboriginal inhabitants of China, the Kwei people, remnants are to be found to this day in Northern Cambodia. These Kwei, whom M. Terrien de la Couperie conjectures to have been an Aryan people, possessed a literature to which the term Kwei shoo or Kwei Books' probably refers.
The country at the mouth of the Amur in 1842 was ceded to Russia by the Chinese, but mem bers of the Aino family are settled there, and due north of Pekin is a Mongol tract which nearly separates the true Tungus part of Manchuria.
The Hakka inhabit Loong-Moon, Toong-Koong, T'seng-shing, and other districts. They eat dog's flesh.
The Tan are a race of Chinese boatmen dwelling in their boats in all the Chinese rivers, similar to the Yao and Man tribes. Their physique is vastly superior to that of the house population, who designate them Suee Ili, or waterfowl.
The Ng-'Tsock are a tribe in China who undress and bathe and re-clothe the dead. They are deemed unclean, and are not permitted to worship in the temples ; their sons are not allowed to become candidates for literary degrees. They resemble the pollinctores of the ancient Romans.
Illiau-tsi is a term applied to the hill tribes of China. They seem to be in small clans ; no leas than 82 of them residing in the small province of Kwei-chu. Some of their names are appellatives, —Sang, wild • Heh-sang, black wild ; Heh-kioh, black foot; Yan-jin ; and others are the Nung, the Lo-Lo, and Yau in the mountain ranges of S.W. China. The Miau-Izi, on the south of Sze chum, are said to be wild mountaineers, but much connected with them is obscure. Friar Odoric noticed the differences between the races on the two sides of a great mountain. Polo also speaks of savage cannibals with blue-painted (i.e. tattooed) faces in Foli-kieu• and some observations of Sir John Davis corroborate this (Polo, 178; Chinese Supp. p. 260). In the modern Chinese census, one class of the population in a district of the province of Canton appear as blacks (Chin. Mod. p. 167). Indeed, Semedo (about 1632) says there was still an independent kingdom, presum ably of the 3fiau-tsi, in the mountains dividing Foh-klen, Canton, and Kiang-si, viz. those of which Odoric speaks (Rel. Della China, p. 19), certain F'ung people who once visited the court of the Chinese emperor, and delighted him by their dancing and singing. These F'ung people still exist in South-Western China.
Its Army, of 800,000 men in four divisions, is made up of 68,000 Manchu, 80,000 Mongol, and 625,000 Chinese. The baunermen of the Mongols are the elite of the dominant Manchu. The Chinese soldiery are in two bodies, one of which, about half a million in number, is designated soldiers of the green flag, and receive pay of four silver tad (27s.) per month ; the other portion are a militia, holding lands for service, and drilled for a month once a year. Since the year 1878, they have obtained from Europe, swift, heavily-armed gunboats. Military Feudatories of the empire are scattered through the regions known to the Chinese geographer as Inner and Outer Mongolia, Uliasutai, and Tsing Hai or Koko-Nor ; but there are also the troops of Tibet, under the resident minister of that country. The tribes acknowledg ing the sway of China are divided into Inner and Outer Mongolians. The former occupy the region to which their name refers them ; the latter, all the other tracts and districts above mentioned.