RUSSIAN & CHINESE TERRITORY

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 94, 20 April 1912, Page 13

RUSSIAN & CHINESE TERRITORY

The Russian has not, applied his names without reason. In 1858, when he founded the capital of the Amoor province, he named it Blagoveschchensk. This means "Good News" — and to all save the proofreaders in the newspaper offices. Three years 'ater he founded the capital of Primorskaya, and gave it a name that plainly showed what it was intended to be— Vladivostok, "Ruler of the East." Near tho end of his groat, /trans-continental railway he made a. brand new city and called it Dalny, "Farthest," a very appropriate name for a place 5800 miles from the starting point of the road. A petty cian of the Suchan family, springing from the narrow, beautiful, but savage glens south-west of Changbalshan, founded the Maiichu dynasty, which, for move'than 200 years has ruled China. They took the dynastic name of Manju or Manchu, in their own language meaning "Clear." To this the Europeans have added a termination, and we nave Manchuria, the "'Country of tho Manchus." Neither the Chinese themselves, nor the rest of the world, know much of Mongolia or Tibet. Most of those two countries belong to the desert, and although they have been inhabited sinco the time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, tho outside world is to them a sealed book, and they to the world an iingtiessed riddle. The great desert of Gobi, that is partly in China, partly in Manchuria, partly in Mongolia, and partly in Siberia, is traversed by the oldest transportation lines in existence. It has a caravan route over which tea and silk-laden camels have travelled toward Europe for these 3000 years, and yet from the time when Kublai Khan macadamized the ■••oad until the time when the Russian railroad paralysed it. by the competition of steam, no one of the merchants who travelled over it turned either to the right or to the left to tell Europe and the Occident of the wonders ov thi terrors of that unknown land.