Then at length the plateau peoples were again roused to action, perhaps by the influence of China, perhaps by the influence of Mohammedanism. Jenghiz Khan first dominated all the plateau peoples from his home in the Altai, and descended west and east with his Mongol hordes from the plateau to the plains below. His son and grandson continued the process of conquest and re duced all, Chinese and Tatars alike, to their rule. As they came from without, it was nothing to them where previous frontiers had been, so an attempt was made to con tinue conquest beyond them. On land this policy met with some success ; it is noticeable that in the third generation, under Kublai Khan, they made the attempt seawards also upon the land we know as Japan ; but such an attempt made by landmen was doomed to failure. The Japanese warded off the attack from their homes, and again we see how a great empire whose power lay in its landmen was met and foiled by rude sailors in the Tsushima Straits, as Xerxes had been at Salamis, and Russia was to be, but a few miles away, more than six centuries later.
This invasion by the Mongols was a conquest, and, like all conquests by races whose ideals of civilization are lower than those of the conquered, and whose power lies in their physical bravery and hardiness, it ended in the conquerors becoming more effeminate, losing control, and being absorbed. Now it results from the geographi cal conditions that China is surrounded by lands whose peoples possessed a less advanced civilization even when they have been brave and hardy, so that during its long history China has never been conquered by superior races, and its peoples have always absorbed their conquerors. None the less this Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century marks another definite advance, for such extensions as they made were made in the name of China and remained when the invaders themselves had disappeared.
Following the absorption of the Mongols, we have naturally enough the third notable historic period of pure Chinese rule, that under the Ming Dynasty from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, when an attempt was made to rule the land from Nankin, a more central position than the Wei Valley or the northern entry. Though Nankin was the capital for only a few years, and soon gave place to Pekin, yet the fact that such a position was chosen at all for the rule of the whole country is significant of a development of ideas. Pekin took its place in order to be as near as possible to entries open to invaders from the north. The foresight was justified, though unavailing in the long run, for in the seventeenth century the Tatars of Manchuria for the third and last time attempted the conquest of the whole of China, this time with success. The conquest was not sudden. Two generations elapsed from the rise to importance of the Tsings in the eastern mountains of Manchuria to the time when they were able to take possession of Pekin, and it was another generation thereafter ere the whole of China owned their rule, the last district of China proper to do so being very naturally Fokien in the south-east. As the Mongols had extended Chinese rule, so now the Manchus con tinued their conquests beyond the limits of China proper, conquering and consolidating their power in Mongolia, and as late as the closing years of the eighteenth century extending their rule beyond Tibet even across the Hima layas, where the Nepaulese till the beginning of the twentieth century owned their suzerainty.
Now, before we proceed to consider the last great series of geographical facts which have controlled Chinese history, notice what we have already learned. Broadly it comes to this, that owing to the existence of three rivers, themselves the product of the more remote geo graphical conditions of relief and climate, China has produced a homogeneous people, whose essential unity has been strengthened by the existence on the west of a plateau of enormous breadth. These two sets of features, the river system and the plateau, are the chief controls of Chinese history.
Other geographical conditions have had a like result; the position of China fronting the open ocean, on the road to nowhere by sea, and the absence of any Mediter ranean Sea, are great, silent, negative controls which have to an incalculable degree tended to confirm the Chinese in their habits as landmen, and to prevent them from becoming seamen. Nor were the Chinese forced to take to the sea, as were the Norsemen, by the poverty of a cold, sterile land. There was no effective pressure behind, as was the case with the Saxon. China is vast enough to allow such pressures as did come from the plateau or Manchuria to dissipate themselves ere the seaboard was reached, and there was always the southern land where these pressures were less felt. No way reached the sea, as was the case with the Phoenician. The coast of China is a great round curve with no penin sulas to tempt men seawards, as was the case with the Greeks. China has never been a sea-power, because nothing has ever induced her peoples to be otherwise than landmen, and landmen dependent on agriculture, with the same habits and ways of thinking drilled into them through forty centuries ; so that even when tribes from the plateau have broken in and seized the reins of power, even when millions of inhabitants have been massacred, China has not broken up into numberless units, as did the Roman Empire. The homogeneity of her people, the result to a very large extent of geographical conditions, has always asserted itself' It is the discovery of the ocean by Western civiliza tion which has gradually brought a new important factor to affect the history of China. Hitherto the Japanese — whose civilization originated in China had been the only seamen with whom the Chinese had come into contact, and the contact was not friendly, for the earlier Japanese of whom we know visited the coast of the mainland only in raids, as the Norsemen visited the rest of Europe. The last, and perhaps the most important series of such raids, took place early in the sixteenth century, just prior to the earliest noteworthy results to the Chinese of the dis covery of the ocean by the Western nations ; and the only effect then, as earlier, was to drive inhabitants inland away from the sea, on which the seamen alone felt safe. It is significant that till the thirteenth century of our era the Chinese never even heard of Formosa, lying only seventy miles from their coast, and never made it their own till 1682, after first Portu guese and then Dutch had planted trading-stations on the island. Even then it was seized only at the accession of a new alien dynasty seeking for new worlds to conquer, and, when it was conquered, was little valued during the two centuries it was held.