Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/32

exceptionally large number live on the very brink of indigence.

Here it should be noted that to every impartial student of China's manners and customs the scepticism of foreigners as to the correctness of her statistics and their preference for their own rough estimates seem merely a phase of Occidental prejudice. The Chinese obtain their records of population by the aid of a registration law which requires that all the names of a house's inmates shall be inscribed on a board kept hanging in a conspicuous place. Such a system is not guaranteed against mistakes, but it deserves more credence than foreign critics are generally disposed to accord to it, and since its errors, if any, would evidently be on the side of omissions, the figures derived from it cannot be regarded as exaggerations.

The confines of China, if in that term be included Manchuria, Mongolia, Ili, and Thibet, are well defined by nature. Along the whole length of its northern frontier the Empire is conterminous with Asiatic Russia, but the two are separated by a great range of mountains which, under various local appellations, the best known being the Altai, stretch in a generally east-and-west direction through a distance of some twenty-five hundred miles, when, turning southward, they join the Tien-shan (celestial mountains), the latter passing into the Belurtag, which with the Himalayas form the western barriers of the Empire. At three points only do these natural barriers lose