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CHAPTER  X

INTERNAL  TRADE
China  is  a  continent,  mountains  and  deserts  replacing  on
the  west  the  seas  which  circumscribe  it  on  the  east  and
south  ;  and  no  study  of  its  trade  conditions  would  be
complete  which  was  restricted  to  its  maritime  traffic.  Prior
to  the  application  in  Europe  of  the  magnetic  needle  to  the
mariner’s  compass  in  the  twelfth  century,  the  only  traders  by
sea  to  the  land  of  Sinim  were  the  venturous  Arabs  ;  but
centuries  before  that  date  the  Sérica  vestis  had  reached
the  West  by  land  transport  over  the  mountains,  plateaux*
and  deserts  of  Central  Asia,  through  the  hundred  degrees  of
longitude  which  separated  the  silkworm  from  the  European
wearer  of  its  product.  These  routes  were  mainly  in  the
north.  From  the  north-east  the  routes  taken  in  the
seventeenth  century  and  those  taken  to-day  by  the  Russian
tea  caravans,  outflanked  the  deserts  and  struck  well  north
until  they  emerged  in  what  is  now  Siberia.  The  main
trade  routes  however  struck  north-west  through  the
province  of  Kansu,  following  those  lines  which  appeared  on
the  school  maps  of  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century
with  the  mysterious  designations  Tien  Shan  Pei  Lu  and
Tien  Shan  Nan  Lu,  which,  being  interpreted,  mean  the
Routes  North  and  South,  respectively,  of  the  Mountains  of
Heaven.  1  his  is  no  longer  a  through  trade  route.  Another
such  route  is  that  taken  to-day  in  supplying  tea  and  sah
to  Tibet  from  Szechwan  by  Tatsienlu,  with  an  alternative
route  by  Sungpan  ;  and  another  is  the  now  unimportant
route  from  Yunnan  by  Szemao  into  Burma.
I  he  same  enterprise  which  built  up  a  foreign  trade  by
land,  was  applied  also  to  the  development  of  internal  trade