Japan has responded most promptly and most actively to these over-sea stimuli, just as England has, of all Europe, felt most strongly the reflex influences from trans-Atlantic lands.  The awakening of this basin has started, therefore, from its seaward rim; its star has risen in the east.  It is in the small countries of the world that such stars rise.  The compressed energies of Japan, stirred by over-sea contact and an improved government at home, have overleaped the old barriers and are following the lines of slight resistance which this land-bound sea affords.  Helped by the bonds of geographical conditions and of race, she has begun to convert China and Korea into her culture colonies.  The on-looking world feels that the ultimate welfare of China and Korea can be best nurtured by Japan, which will thus pay its old debt to the Middle Kingdom.

[Sidenote:  Chinese expansion seaward.]

Despite the fact that China’s history has always had a decidedly inland character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the Pacific, nevertheless China’s direct intercourse with the west and its westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been comparable with that toward the east and south.  Here a succession of marginal seas offered easy water-paths, dotted with way stations, to their outermost rim in Japan, the Philippines and remote Australia.  About the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, the Sulu, Celebes, and Java Seas, the coastal regions of the outlying islands have for centuries received Chinese goods and culture, and a blend of that obstinately assertive Chinese blood.

The strength of these influences has decreased with every increase of distance from the indented coasts and teeming, seafaring population of South China, and with every decrease in race affinity.  They have left only faint traces on the alien shores of far-away Australia.  The divergent ethnic stock of the widespread Malay world has been little susceptible to these influences, which are therefore weak in the remoter islands, but clearly discernible on the coasts of the Philippines,[570] Borneo, the nearer Sunda Islands, and the peninsula of Malacca, where the Chinese have had trading colonies for centuries.[571] But in the eastern half of Farther India, which is grouped with China by land as well as by sea, and whose race stock is largely if not purely Mongolian, these influences are very marked, so that the whole continental rim of the South China Sea, from Formosa to the Isthmus of Malacca, is strongly assimilated in race and culture.  Tongking, exposed to those modifying influences which characterize all land frontiers, as well as to coastwise intercourse, is in its people and civilization merely a transcript of China.  The coast districts and islands of Annam are occupied by Chinese as far as the hills of Cambodia, and the name of Cochin China points to the origin of its predominant population.  One-sixth of the inhabitants of Siam are Chinese, some of whom have filtered through the northern border; Bangkok, the capital, has a large Chinese quarter.  The whole economic life and no small part of the intellectual life of the eastern face of Farther India south to Singapore is centered in the activity of the Chinese.[572]