Pioneers in the Far East
The Quest for Cathay. • By Sir Percy Sykes. (A. and C. Black. 15s.) THIS is a good introduction to the history of Far Eastern travel from Aristeas of Proconnesus in the seventh century n.e. to Benedict Goes the Jesuit in 1603-1607. It was China that took the lead in breaking down that barrier between East and West of which neither the Persians nor Alexander had been conscious ; her travellers and generals extended her influence to the Caspian and brought back Buddhism and Hellenistic sculpture and the breed of horses which the Tang have made famous. But this expansion did not bring corre- sponding gains to -the West. - Nestorian Christians and Manicheans spread through Asia, and the -Romans spent more than they could afford on. silk. But though-merchants traded to India during the first two centuries A.D. and rare pioneers (whom the Chinese annals call envoys) reached -the Western Turks and even the Chinese Court, Rome and Byzantium remained almost entirely ignorant of China. The Mongol conquests established the peace of death in Central Asia and opened the way for John de Piano Carpini and William of Rubruq, those bold Franciscans who visited the Great Khan and brought back some knowledge of the land of the Kitai. But when Marco Polo took the same road and came back after seventeen years in China with an astonishing fund of accurate information he was met with general disbelief. The missionaries and merchants who followed in his footsteps showed that he had not been wrong, and for a brief sixty years brought Europe into direct contact with the tolerant empire of Kublai Khan's successors. Then the door closed again and China became a travellers' property until, after 150 years, the Portuguese, followed by the great Jesuits, rediscovered her and revealed her to the West.
Sir Percy Sykes has made good use of the travellers' narra- tives. He is at his best with Marco polo, much of whose route he folloWed and even mapped in Persia, the Pamirs and Chinese Turkestan. These countries have not changed so very much since Polo's day ; the leading families of Badakhshan still claim descent from the followers of Alexander ; the great- horned " Ovis Poli " of the Pamirs still tempts the hunter ; the memory of Nestorian Christianity is preserved in Chinese Turkestan by the sign of the cross which a dealer makes over an unsold horse.
It would be ungracious to carp at a short book, which was obviously written to entertain rather than to instruct. Sir Percy's list of travellers does not pretend to completeness ; he might, however, have quoted from the interesting account of the embassy which Shah Rukh, the son of Thnur, sent to the Ming Court. He very rightly, dwells on the English efforts to find the North-West passage and reopen trade beyond the Caspian in the sixteenth century, but says nothing of the remarkable Russian penetration of Siberia which began in the fourteenth century and reached the Eastern Coast in 1615.
There arc a number of good illustrations and maps. It is pleasant to know that Benedict Goes, the last of the brave men whom the author commemorates, is still venerated by the Moslems of Suchau, the city on the edge of the Gobi desert
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