ere the Coreans,
or whence they came. But we do not. They are not Turanic--of the
Finno-Turko-Mongol stock (by language); they are not speakers of
billiard-balls, allied to the Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetans.
But the fact is that neither blood-affinity nor speech-affinity
is much to the purpose here; we have to do with affinities of
culture. During the period 240 B. C.--1260 A. D. a great
civilization rose, flowered, and waned in the Far East; it had
its origin in China, and spread out to include in its scope
Japan, Corea, and Tibet; probably also Annam and Tonquin, though
we hear less of them;--while Burma, Assam, and Siam, and those
southerly regions, though akin to China in language, seem
to have been always more satellite to India. Mongols and
Manchus, though they look rather like Chinese, and have lived
rather near China, belong by language and traditionally by
race to another group altogether--to that, in fact, which
includes the very Caucasian-looking Turks and Hungarians;
as to what culture they have had, they got it from China
after the Chinese manvantara had passed.

The Chinese themselves are only homogeneous in race in the sense
that Europe might be if the Romans had conquered it all, and
imposed their culture and language on the whole continent. The
staid, grave, dignified, and rather stolid northern Chinaman
differs from the restless and imaginative Cantonese not much less
than the Japanese does from either. This much you can say:
Chinese, Japanese, and Coreans have been molded into a kind of
loose unity by a common culture; the peoples of China into a
closer homogeneity by a common culture-language, written and
spoken,--and by the fact that they have been, off and on during
the last two thousand years, but most of the time, under the same
government. As to Corea, though in the days of Confucius it was
unknown to the Chinese, the legends of both countries ascribe the
founding of its civilization and monarchy to a Chinese minister
exiled there during the twelfth century B. C. Japanese legendary
history goes back to 600 B. C.;--that is, to the closing of the
Age of the Mysteries, and the opening of that of the Religions:--
I imagine that means that about that time a break with history
occurred, and the past was abolished: a thing we shall see
happen in ancient China presently. But I suppose we may call
Shotoku Daishi the Father of historical Japan;--he who, about the
end of the sixth century A. D.,