At the time of this Mongol invasion, the Manchus, a nomadic tribe, gathered up their portable tents and fled into a province lying beyond the Great Wall, permanently occupying the region now called Manchuria.  Remote and obscure, the Manchus were almost unknown to the Chinese until the year 1580, when Tai-Tsu, a remarkable man and born leader, on account of grievances suffered by his tribe, organized a revolt against China and made a victorious assault upon his powerful Suzerain.  Upon his death, in 1626, his victories were continued by his son, who overthrew the reigning dynasty and was proclaimed Emperor of China.  And that wretched youth who is to-day obscured and dominated by the powerful Empress Dowager at Pekin is the lineal descendant of Tai-Tsu and the last representative of the Manchurian Dynasty, which has ruled China for nearly four centuries.

The Manchus had not much in the way of civilization to impose upon the people they had conquered.  But such as they had they brought with them; and the shaven forehead and the queue, so precious to the Chinese, are Manchurian exotics.  Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, became the “Sacred City,” where Manchurian Emperors at death were laid beside Tai-Tsu.  Wealthy mandarins built residences there.  It became splendid and, next only to Pekin, was known as the second official city in the empire.

While the world has long been familiar with China and its civilization, Japan and Korea have only recently come out from their Oriental seclusion.  In looking into the past of the former, in vain do we seek for any adequate explanation, anything which will reasonably account for that phenomenally endowed race which occupies the centre of the stage to-day; which, knowing absolutely nothing of our civilization forty years ago, has so digested and assimilated its methods and essential principles that it is beating us at our own game.

From its earliest period this country was under a feudal system of government, with the Mikado as its supreme and sacred head.  The Divine nature of this being separated him from the temporal affairs of the nation, which were in the hands of the Shogun, who represented the strong arm of the state.  Next below the Shogun were the Daimios, the feudal or military chiefs; these in turn being the rulers of bands of military retainers which constituted the aristocratic class, and were called the Samurai.

Shintoism, a form of ancestral worship and sacrifice to dead heroes, which was the primitive cult of Japan, was in 600 A. D. superseded, or rather absorbed, by Buddhism, which for a thousand years has prevailed.  And although Shintoism to some extent still lingers, and although Confucianism with its philosophical and abstract principles has always had its followers, still Japanese civilization is the child of Gautama.