THE PULSE OF ASIA
INTRODUCTION
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CENTRAL ASIA
IN the progress of human knowledge the marked advances in each science have been made under the stimulus of a great fundamental principle. Astronomy could proceed but little beyond astrology until Newton discovered the law of gravitation; physics remained empirical until the conservation of energy was recognized; chemistry was merely alchemy until its pioneers worked out the unfailing law of the replacement of atom by atom; and geology would still be miner's lore, if scientists had not seen that in the course of ages the earth as we know it has been slowly evolved by processes identical with those still in action. So, too, in the biological sciences, botany, zoölogy, and physiology, all was confusion until Darwin touched the key of evolution and a vast number of apparently unrelated facts fell into their appointed places, and the way was open for the wonderful advances of the last half century.
The anthropological sciences are also bound together by the unifying principle of evolution. Geography, anthropology, history, and sociology form an anthropological group possessing a unity as great as that of the biological sciences, although this has been perceived only within a few years. The average man thinks of geography, the oldest of all the sciences, as a schoolboy study of maps and of empirical descriptions of places and people. He forgets thatthe leaders of geographic thought have gone far beyond this, and are beginning to see that their science deals not only with the distribution of organic and inorganic forms in space, but also with the relation, both direct and indirect, of the entire group of organic forms inhabiting any part of the earth's surface to the inorganic forms in the same region. Geography, according to the new view, tells us not only what forms of plants and animals live together in mutual dependence, but also why the human inhabitants of a given region possess certain habits, occupations, and mental and moral characteristics, and why they have adopted a certain form of social organization. Among primitive people the relation of inorganic causes to organic results is universally recognized. Literature is full of references to the nearness of the Red Man to Nature, and to the complete dependence of primeval man upon her. Among highly civilized people, the relation is lost sight of because of the mixture of races, the growing control which man exercises over nature, and the rise of great religious or ethical ideas, racial hatreds, and dominant personalities. Nevertheless, it is there, and a patient untangling of the snarled threads of history will bring it to light.
In searching out the foundations upon which to build the new sciences of anthropology and sociology, students are turning more and more to geography in its broader sense. The anthropologist finds that the development of civilized man from the savage state is inextricably bound up with the various types of physical environment in which successive generations have lived. The sociologist discovers that the conditions of human society to-day arein part the result of racial characteristics due to past environments, and in part the result of present geographic conditions. Climate, the relation of land and sea, the presence of mountains, the location of trade routes, and the suitability of a region for agriculture, mining, or manufacturing are all potent factors in determining sociological conditions. The dependence of history upon geography is equally great. In recent years there has arisen the so-called " bread and butter school " of historians, who hold that the deepest cause of historical events is the necessity of mankind to subsist. The ambition of kings, the hatred of race for race, the antagonisms of religion, may agitate the surface and cause the waves which seem to us so portentous; but far down below all these there is the unending struggle for bread. It is this primarily which makes men work. It manifests itself in the discontent of the poor peasants of Russia, in the disputes between labor and capital in America, and in the bitter cry of the famine-stricken millions of India and China against the foreigners who seem to rob them of bread. An increasing supply of food has made Egypt contented and prosperous during the last few decades. Scarcity of food, present or prospective, for its increasing population has brought Japan into conflict with Russia, and is bringing it face to face with the United States in California, where the Japanese coolie is said to take the bread from the mouth of the native-born American laborer. According to this view, geography is clearly the basis of history, for the productivity of a country depends upon geographic facts, especially upon climate.
In saying that geography is the basis of the anthro-pological sciences, it is not meant to imply that physical processes explain all the qualities of man. They do not explain life, or mind, or ideals. At present we can only confess that we do not understand what these are, or how we came to possess them. We can only ascribe their origin to the same great Intelligence which framed the material universe and gave it immutable laws. We know, however, that they are the greatest forces in the world, the motive power which moves mankind. In the past, men have supposed that the human race either progressed blindly, or was led onward by the direct interposition of some unseen divine power. Now, we begin to see that man's course has been guided by his physical surroundings, just as a railroad winds here and there at the command of river, hill, or lake. To carry the analogy farther, the living mind of man, with its ideals, its love, and its pain, is the motive force to which is due the progress of human institutions; and history is the track along which man has advanced. Sometimes his course has been straight, sometimes devious, and at times it has doubled back on itself; but on the whole, it has led toward a dimly seen goal of uprightness, freedom, justice, and love.
We have studied the energizing mind, and know something of how it acts, though not of what it is. We have examined the human institutions of the home, the church, the state, and the social organization of industry; and our knowledge of them is large. The track, too, has been scrutinized minutely by historians; and we know its curves and grades, both up and down. One thing alone has been neglected : we have not looked at the country throughwhich we have passed. To-day we are beginning to study our surroundings, and to see that we have reached our present position because of certain geographic facts. Historians have been slow to accept this view. When they found a piece of downgrade in the track, they looked at the cars and the engine to find its cause. They have failed to see that the swift descent of the United States into a financial panic and the hard pull out of it may be due to the fact that the train is crossing a valley, and not to overloading of the cars in the shape of over-production, or to poor couplings in the shape of a weak financial system, though these may precipitate disaster. It may be, as we shall see, that panics are due to the regular recurrence of periods of deficient rainfall, causing poor crops and fluctuating prices. If this is so, we must not only look to our couplings and our load ; we must bridge the next valley, or cut and fill the road-bed so as to diminish the grades.
Again, as we look at the past, we see the track of history double far back on itself at the time of the fall of Rome before barbarian invaders. At present we are facing a similar, albeit peaceful invasion on the part of the starving millions of China: the fear that our track may again turn back is before us. The relapse of Europe in the Dark Ages, as future chapters will show, was due apparently to a rapid change of climate in Asia and probably all over the world, — a change which caused vast areas which were habitable at the time of Christ to become uninhabitable a few centuries later. The barbarian inhabitants, were obliged to migrate, and their migrations were the dominant fact in the history of the known world for centuries. We of to-dayshall do well to ascertain whether we too are not facing the problem which faced the Romans. Parts of China have been growing drier and less habitable during recent centuries, and if the process continues, we are in danger of being overrun by hungry Chinese in search of bread. We cannot, perhaps, prevent their migration ; but if we understand the cause, we can profit by the lessons of the past and avoid the danger, as a railroad engineer avoids turning back by choosing a place where he can tunnel through the mountains to the broad uplands on the other side.
The importance of climate and of changes of climate in history and the allied sciences has never been fully realized. It is climate which causes the Eskimo to differ so widely from the East Indian; it is climate which almost irresistibly tempts the Arab to be a plunderer as well as a nomad, and allows the Italian to be an easy-going tiller of the soil. And, if Percival Lowell is right, it is the dry climate of Mars which has caused the inhabitants of that planet to adopt an advanced form of social organization, where war is unknown, and each man must be keenly conscious of the interdependence of himself and the universal state.
Four years of life in Asiatic Turkey and three years of travel in Central Asia have impressed upon me the importance of the geographic basis in the study of the anthropological sciences. Hence this book. It is an attempt to describe Central Asia in such a way as to show the relation of geography to history and the related sciences, and to show the immense influence which changes of climate have exerted upon history.
From the Caspian Sea on the west to Manchuria on theeast, Central Asia is largely a country of deserts. It is politically divided into the countries of Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, northern India, Tibet, China, and Asiatic Russia. It varies in elevation from the low depression of the Caspian Sea and the small basin of Turfan, lying three hundred feet below sea-level in the very heart of Asia, to the plateaus of Tian Shan, Tibet, and the Pamirs at an elevation of from 10,000 to 20,000 feet above the sea. Although usually the mountainous parts are comparatively rainy and are often well covered with vegetation, the lowlands, which comprise most of the country, are intensely dry and almost absolutely desert. The people are equally varied, the fierce Afghan being as different from the sycophant Persian, as is the truculent Mongol from the mild Chanto of Chinese Turkestan. Yet in spite of all this, not only the physical features of the country, but the habits and character of its inhabitants, possess a distinct unity; for all alike bear the impress of an arid climate.
Central Asia, more fully perhaps than any other part of the world, exemplifies the great geographic type in which the topography, vegetation, animal life, and human civilization have developed along the lines characteristic of prolonged aridity. We all know something of arid countries, empirically or from observation. We need, however, a more general concept, so that the term "arid " shall bring to mind the essential features of a definite geographic type, just as the term " bovine " brings to mind the spreading horns, large eyes, heavy body, cloven hoofs, cud, and other essential features of a definite zoölogic type. If once the geographic type is well understood in its highly developedform in Central Asia, it will be easy to comprehend how similar conditions of climate in other parts of the world give rise to similar topographic features, and how the two combine to determine the distribution and nature of life of all forms.
The rainfall of Central Asia is so small that the rivers fail to reach the sea. Hence the whole of a vast region, stretching three thousand miles east and west, and having an area nearly equal to that of the United States, is made up of enclosed basins, from which there is no outlet. Each consists essentially of a peripheral ring of higher land, usually mountainous, but sometimes merely a broad, gentle arch, — within which a desert plain of gravel, sand, and clay, brought from the mountains by rivers, surrounds a salt lake, or the saline beds whence the waters of an ancient lake have evaporated. Where the peripheral ring of higher land is at all mountainous, it is flanked, and often half buried, by vast slopes of barren rock-waste — typical piedmont deposits of gravel, washed out from the uplands by floods. Because of the aridity, vegetable life is scanty except along the courses of streams and in the rainy plateaus. Far less than a tenth of the country is permanently habitable: the rest is either absolute desert, or mitigated desert which supports vegetation part of the year, but is too dry among the plains, and too cold among the mountains, to allow permanent occupation. Hence the inhabitants must either live in irrigated oases along the rivers, or wander from place to place in search of pasture for their flocks. There are no manufacturing communities, either large or small ; no commercial centres except local bazaars ; and no con-tinuous agricultural population, such as that of the Mississippi Valley, dependent on rain for its water supply. Two main types of civilization prevail: the condition of nomadism with its independent mode of life, due to the scattered state of the sparse population, and the condition of intensive agriculture in irrigated oases with its centralized mode of life, due to the crowding together of population in communities whose size is directly proportional to that of the streams. Because of the arid climate and the consequent physical characteristics of Central Asia, its types of civilization have been, are, and probably must continue to be fundamentally different from those of well-watered regions such as most of America and Europe.
My acquaintance with Central Asia began in 1903, when I was appointed by the Carnegie Institution of Washington to assist Professor William M. Davis of Harvard University in the physiographic work of an expedition to Russian Turkestan, under the lead of Mr. Raphael Pumpelly. I remained in Central Asia from May, 1903, to July, 1904, spending most of the time in Russian Turkestan. I crossed into Chinese Turkestan for a month, however, the first summer, and spent four months in eastern Persia during the winter. The results of the expedition are recorded in " Explorations in Turkestan," a volume published by the Carnegie Institution. The following year I had the good fortune to be invited by Mr. Robert L. Barrett to accompany him on an expedition to Chinese Turkestan. Arriving in India in February, 1905, we proceeded north to the Vale of Kashmir among the Himalayas, crossed them in May, and reached Chinese Turkestan in June. There we workedtogether for two months, and then undertook independent expeditions, Mr. Barrett going east from Khotan to China Proper, while I went east by another route to Lop-Nor, and then, turning north, arrived at Turfan in March, 1906, and reached home the following May via Siberia and Russia.
The journey through Chinese Turkestan from India to Siberia forms the main theme of this book, but I shall devote a few chapters to other parts of Central Asia. This volume, like the majority of so-called " geographical " books, is a description of a journey; but, as I have already said, it is also an attempt to describe certain parts of Asia as illustrations of the great principles of geography. My conception of that science, as stated above, is the one which has been spread abroad in the world at large, and especially in America, during the last few years by the persistent labors of Professor Davis. According to his definition, geography is primarily the study of the various natural divisions or provinces of the earth's surface as illustrations of the relations between the inorganic physical facts of the earth, air, and water on the one hand, and the organic facts of the vegetable, animal, and human world on the other. To illustrate : The investigation of the structure, origin, form, and climate of a lofty plateau and a neighboring arid plain is not geography, but geology, physiography, or meteorology. Neither can the study of the methods of plant growth and animal nutrition rightly be called geography, but botany or zoölogy. When, however, we consider the fact that because of the elevation of the plateau its climate is such that grass grows abundantly in summer; while the plain, beinglower, has less rainfall, and bears only a sparse growth of grass in the early spring, we at once bring in the element of relation between the organic and the inorganic, and the study becomes geography. For the purposes of geography, it is only necessary to understand enough of the plateau, the plain, and the grass to gain a clear conception of how the one acts on the other. If animals inhabit the country, they must be such as can live on grass, or can prey on their grass-eating companions. Further, if the plain is waterless in summer, and the plateau is deeply buried in snow in winter, the animals must perforce migrate, and a new geographic factor is introduced. When man enters the region, he finds it too dry in one part and too cold in another for agriculture. Hence he must live upon animals, either as a hunter, or, when the population becomes a little denser and the wild animals diminish in number, as a shepherd. In either case he must wander from place to place. Such a nomadic life induces certain habits as to cleanliness, eating, traveling, sleeping, working, resting, and the like. The habits in turn develop certain moral qualities, such as gluttony alternating with abstemiousness, hardihood under physical difficulties, laziness, hospitality, and others. Thus the physical features of the region give rise to certain kinds of vegetation, which in turn determine the species and movements of animals, and so cause man to adopt the nomadic life. And man, because he happens to be a pastoral nomad, develops certain habits, physical, mental, and moral, which, taken together, constitute character. Geography, it seems to me, cannot logically be content, as many geographers would have it, with the mere description of physi-cal features and of their influence on the distribution of living species. It must deal with a given region, or natural province, as a whole; and must describe the entire assemblage of organic forms which result from a specified group of inorganic controlling features. The description is not complete unless it includes the highest and most interesting realm of geography, — the influence of physical environment, directly or through other forms of life, upon the mental and moral condition of man.
In accordance with this view of geography, I shall describe some of the chief and most typical physical features of Central Asia, not for their own sake, but as a preparation for the study of their relation to life. Then I shall set forth certain events, conversations, and scenes which fell within my own experience, and shall show how they illustrate the influence of the physical environment already described upon the habits, thought, and character of the people. The descriptions centre in five basins located in northern India, western China, eastern Persia, and Asiatic Russia. The first basin, that of Kashmir, lies among the Himalaya mountains. Unlike the others, it has sufficient rainfall, so that it is not self-contained, but is drained by the Jhelum River, which flows out through a gorge in the surrounding mountains and reaches the sea. Hence the conditions of life are different from those of Central Asia in general, and resemble those of moister countries, such as Italy. The next three basins, those of Lop and Turfan in China, and Seyistan (Sistan, or Seistan) in Persia, are so arid that their rivers either dwindle to nothing in the desert, or end in shallow salt lakes. They closely resemble one another, andwhen the main features of one have been comprehended, but little need be added as to the others. The last basin, the so-called Aralo-Caspian depression, possesses many of the characteristics of its more arid neighbors, but its great size and the absence of mountains to the north give it a diversity of climate unknown to the others. I shall not consider it except in relation to the problem stated in the next paragraph.
In the study of the five basins along the lines of the definition of geography given by Professor Davis, I discovered a number of facts which lead to a new application of the geographic principle of cause and effect. In order to understand the present condition, that is the geography, of Central Asia, we must look upon it not as the result of the long-continued action of fixed physical conditions, but as the result of changing conditions. During the recorded occupation of the country by man there appear to have been widespread changes of climate. It has long been surmised by historians that certain parts of Asia have been growing more arid, but the surmise has lacked scientific confirmation. Indeed, meteorological data seem to stand directly opposed to it, for they show that there is no evidence of any appreciable change since records have been kept instrumentally. The oldest records, however, date back little more than a hundred years, and hence cannot be considered as proving anything in regard to antiquity. The data which I obtained in Central Asia, on the other hand, confirm the surmise of the historians. There is strong reason to believe that during the last two thousand years there has been a widespread and pronounced tendency towardaridity. In drier regions the extent of land available for pasturage and cultivation has been seriously curtailed; and the habitability of the country has decreased. In certain moister districts among the mountains, on the other hand, the change has been beneficial : they have become less damp and snowy, and hence more habitable. Moreover, in both the drier and the moister regions the change of climate does not appear to have been all in one direction. After a period of rapidly decreasing rainfall and rising temperature during the early centuries of the Christian era, there is evidence of a slight reversal, and of a tendency toward more abundant rainfall and lower temperature during the Middle Ages.
In relatively dry regions increasing aridity is a dire calamity, giving rise to famine and distress. These, in turn, are fruitful causes of wars and migrations, which engender the fall of dynasties and empires, the rise of new nations, and the growth of new civilizations. If, on the contrary, a country becomes steadily less arid, and the conditions of life improve, prosperity and contentment are the rule. There is less temptation to war, and men's attention is left more free for the gentler arts and sciences which make for higher civilization.
The main outlines of the history of Central Asia agree with what would be expected from a knowledge of the changes of climate through which the country has passed. The favorable changes coincide with periods of prosperity and progress; the unfavorable with depression and depopulation. My own investigations show that the parallelism between climatic changes and history applies to an area extending at least three thousand miles, from Turkey onthe west to China Proper on the east. Other evidence, which has not as yet been investigated in detail, indicates that the parallelism applies to all the historic lands of the Old World and possibly to the New. As we look back into the past, we are forced to the conclusion that whatever the motive power of history may be, one of the chief factors in determining its course has been geography; and among geographic forces, changes of climate have been the most potent for both good and bad.
In the last chapter of this book I shall consider this conclusion in its broader outlines as part of the philosophy of history. For the most part, however, I shall confine myself to a statement of the phenomena which have led to its adoption. Briefly restated, the fundamental idea of this volume is that geography is the basis of history. The physical features of the earth's surface limit the organic inhabitants of a given region to certain species of plants and animals, including man, which live together in mutual dependence. The world is naturally divided into geographic provinces characterized by definite organic and inorganic forms. Among primitive men the nature of the province which a tribe happens to inhabit determines its mode of life, industries, and habits ; and these in turn give rise to various moral and mental traits, both good and bad. Thus definite characteristics are acquired, and are passed on by inheritance or training to future generations. If it be proved that the climate of any region has changed during historic times, it follows that the nature of the geographic provinces concerned must have been altered more or less. For example, among the human inhabitants of CentralAsia widespread poverty, want, and depression have been substituted for comparative competence, prosperity, and contentment. Disorder, wars, and migrations have arisen. Race has been caused to mix with race under new physical conditions, which have given rise to new habits and character. The impulse toward change and migration received in the vast arid regions of Central Asia has spread outward, and involved all Europe in the confusion of the Dark Ages. And more than this, the changes of climate which affected Central Asia were not confined to that region, apparently, but extended over a large part of the inhabited earth. Everywhere they were the most potent of geographic influences, working sometimes for progress and sometimes for destruction. Such in brief is the broad conclusion to which we are led by a study of Central Asia as an example of the influence of geography upon history. Before accepting it, it behooves us to examine with the closest scrutiny all the evidence in relation to climatic changes which may have been so momentous in the world's history.
