[Sidenote:  Red Sea basin.]

On the southwest margin of Asia, the Red Sea, despite its desert shores, has maintained the influence of its intercontinental location and linked the neighboring elements of Africa and Asia.  Identity of climatic conditions on both sides of this long rift valley has facilitated ethnic exchanges, and made it the center of what Ratzel calls the “Red Sea group of peoples,” related in race and culture.[566] The great ethnic solvent here has been Semitic.  Under the spur of Islam, the Arabs by 1514 had made the Red Sea an Arabian and Mohammedan sea.  They had their towns or trading stations at Zeila on the African side of the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, at Dalaqua, the port of Abyssinia, at Massowa, Suakin, and other towns, so that this coast too was called Arabia Felix.[567]

[Sidenote:  Assimilation facilitated by ethnic kinship.]

Vicinal location about an enclosed basin produces more rapidly a unification of race and culture, when some ethnic relationship and affinity already exists among the peoples inhabiting its shores.  As in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, so in the Yellow Sea of Asia, the working of this principle is apparent.  The presence along its coasts of divergent but kindred peoples like the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, allowed these to be easily assimilated to a Yellow Sea race and to absorb quickly any later infusion, like that of the Tatars and Manchus.  China, by reason of its larger area, long-drawn coast, massive population, and early civilization, was the dominant factor in this basin; Korea and Japan were its culture colonies-a fact that justifies the phrase calling “China the Rome of the Far East.”  Historical Japan began on the island of Kiu-sui, facing the Yellow Sea.  Like Korea, it derived its writing, its fantastic medical notions, its industrial methods, some features of its government administration, its Buddhism and its religion of Confucius from the people about the lower Hoangho.[568] Three centuries ago Japan had its colony on Korean soil at Fusan, the Calais of the East.[569] For purposes of piracy and smuggling Japanese penetrated far up the rivers of China.  Korea has kept in touch with China by an active trade and diplomatic relations through the centuries.

But to-day China is going to school to Japan.  Since Japan renounced her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermit life, the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been suddenly restored.  The enforced opening of the treaty ports of Japan, Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to reassert its power to unite, and to unite now more closely and effectively than ever before, under the law of increasing territorial areas.  The stimulus was first communicated to the basin from without, from the trading nations of the Occident and that new-born Orient rising from the sea on the California shores.