POPULATION. Beyond rough estimates made for purposes of taxation and tributes, no official census of China has yet been taken, and anything like an official enumeration of the empire is un known. Considerations of revenue make the counting rather of the nature of an assessment, for young children and aged 1114'11 were not in eluded. War, rebellion, famine, and flood have !maimed great thietuations in the population. The Tai-ping Rebellion reduced the registration by two-fifths. It may be stated that 400,000,000 in round numbers approximates the truth. al though some authorities are not willing to eon cede so large a figure. It is eertain that while the fertile plain region is over-populated, two thirds of the empire, and even of China proper, could maintain a much greater population. In 1894 the population of China proper, according to E. H. Parker. one of the ablest economic students of the Chinese, was 421,800.000; Sze Omen. the most populous province, having 79, 500.000 inhabitants, and Kwei-chow, the least populous, 4.800,000. The population of Great Britain and Bengal probably exceeds in density that of the average population of China, though no European State except Belgium can reach the average of the eastern Chinese provinces. If the Chinese should develop their energies by the in troduction of scientific farming, milling, engineer ing. and railways, China proper could easily double its population without endangering its food-supply. The following is a list of provinces, with the meanings of their appellations: The population of the Chinese Empire has generally been greatly overestimated. Recent careful estimates give a total of 399,680,000. as signing to China proper 383,000,000. The Chinese abroad are found in every civilized and uncivil ized eountry—there being in the Americas. in eluding Hawaii, about 110,000; in the Dutch, British, and American East Indies and French Indo-China, between 5,000.000 and 7.000,000, with many also in Australia, Japan, and Korea. In 1900 there were 16.811 foreigners resident in the treaty ports of China, of whom 3471 were British, 2000 Japanese, 190S Americans, 1941 Russians, 1175 Portuguese, 1034 French. and 1343 Germans.
Eruxot.oGY. in common parlance the term Chinese is applied indiscriminately to the gen eral population of the Chinese Empire. By some ethnologists 'Sinitic' (`Chinese') is used in the sense in which others employ `Tibeto-Chinese,' 'Tibeto-lndo-Chinese,' etc., to designate that great branch of the :Mongolian or yellow race which has peopled China, Tibet, and Farther India, and of which the Chinese proper are the oldest, most cultured, most numerous, and most important representatives. The Chinese proper, with whom thousands of years of eivilization and the possession of common signs for a written language have masked to a considerable extent somatic and linguistic diversit:es, are the result of a fusion of peoples, few of whom were far re moved from one another in speech or in blood, though in the process of conquering the vast ter ritory which they now control, they have re ceived the blood of a number of more primitive races, not all of whom are with certainty to he credited to the Mongolian stock. Their earliest home seems to have been in the region to the north of the present Province of Kan-sit. and ex tending to the Altai, where, about it.c. 5000, they had, as a more or less agricultural people, de veloped the elements of their racial culture. About 11.C. 3000 (stimulated. perhaps, by the pressure of Aryan tribes on the southwest, :1101 more primitive hordes on the northwest), they began the descent of the great river-valleys of the klo-ang-ho and Yang-tsc-kiang and their trib utaries to the shores of the Pacific. This prog ress was slow, as the 'savages' (the original inhahitants) were very numerous, but by 11.0. 1000-700 the greater part of the work was done, the pre-Chinese aborigines between the Pei-ho and the Xang-tse-kiang having been exterminated, assimilated, or driven into the mountains of the west and south, where they still survive. While this expansion was going on, the northwest and north of the empire were invaded by a succession of barbaric Sibiric tribes, from which quarter came also the Mongol conquerors of the Chinese in the Thirteenth Century of our era, and the Manchu dynasty that since 1044 has reigned over the people.