Excerpt from Notes on China<br><br>IN order that a definite conception may be had of China, as it was and is, it should be borne in mind that with the exception of Russia, it is the largest empire that has ever existed. It occupies nearly the whole of Eastern and South eastern Asia, and lies in a regular, compact, and unbroken mass of conterminous subdivisions and outlying territories. It is composed of the original eighteen provinces correspond ing to our States, and constituting what is generally described by geographers as China Proper, but sometimes as the Middle Kingdom,' together with the outlying and encircling posses sions of Manchuria, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Ili or Chinese Turkestan, koko-nor, and Tibet. The nineteen provinces, covering an area of about square miles, are all densely populated by the Chinese, but the outlying dependencies, which are of far greater extent, are mostly arid, elevated table-lands, occupied generally by nomadic and pastoral tribes commonly known as Tartars, thinly scattered over an almost illimitable succession of plain, desert, and mountain country.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.