RUSSIA’S ROAD INTO CHINA.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LX, Issue 143769, 18 April 1912, Page 3

RUSSIA’S ROAD INTO CHINA.

MONGOLIA A LAND OF MEDIAEVAL MAGNIFICENCE AND SQUALOR.

When the bumping tarantass rolls across the Chinese frontier into Mongolia, it enters a kingdom of the Middle Ages flung down into the twentieth century. Feudal princes, lords of armies weaponed with spear and bow, tax and drive to the covee their nomad serfs, A hierarchy of priests, whose divine head lives in a palace at Holy Urga, sways the multitude of superstitionsteeped Mongols, and receives the homage of pilgrims wending their way from Siberia, from the Volga, from Tibet, from all Mongolia, to their Canterbury of Latnaism. In prostrate devotion the penitents girdle the Sacred City, before whose hovels beggars dispute with dogs their common nourishment, and in whose compounds princes of the race of Genghi Khan, with armies of retainers, live bedless, bathless, lightless, in the felt huts of their race.

Squalid magnificence and goodhumoured, kindly hospitality are linked to utter brutality. Sable furs and silks cover sheepskins worn until they drop from the body. Here and there among the natives a Chinese trading caravansary; alien, walled, peculiar, stands as of old the Hansatown, with merchant guilds and far-brought caravan goods. Tho Russian advance has been always eastward, towards an ice-free port on the Pacific. Cut off by the Japanese, the one outlet now for Russia is through Mongolia, striking straight for Pekin, and the heart of China. This is the century-old road of tho tea-trade. Here is the shortest route from Europe to tho East. H»e, through tho defiles and tho. broken foothills of the Gobi Plateau, lies the future redemption of the great unfettered land route to North China. The Chinese are themselves advancing to anticipate it. They have already built into Kalgan. To this trading centre across the pale a Russian railway may yet pass, and her colonists make fruitful the unpeopled wilds of Mongolia. The way of adventure and strangeness, where the years turn back, is this old road of the Golden Horde, loading down past the ancestral homes of the Turks to the Great Wall.—“ The Prussian Road to China.”