might proudly number Sogdiana, and even Serica, among the provinces of his empire; but his real dominion was bounded by the Oxus, and his useful intercourse with the Sogdoites, beyond the river, depended on the pleasure of their conquerors, the white Huns, and the Turks, who successively reigned over that industrious people. Yet the most savage dominion has not extirpated the seeds of agriculture and commerce, in a region which is celebrated as one of the four gardens of Asia; the cities of Samarcand and Bochara are advantageously seated for the exchange of its various productions; and their merchants purchased from the Chinese* the raw or manufactured silk which they transported into Persia for the use of the Roman empire. In the vain capital of China, the Sogdian caravans were entertained as the suppliant embassies of tributary kingdoms, and if they returned in safety, the bold adventure was rewarded with exorbitant gain. But the difficulty and perilous march from Samarcand to the first town of Shensi, could not be performed in less than sixty, eighty, or one hundred days: as soon as they had passed the Jaxartes, they entered the desert; and the wandering hordes, unless they are restrained by armies and garrisons, have always considered the citizen and the traveller as the objects of lawful rapine. To escape the Tartar robbers, and the tyrants of Persia, the silk caravans explored a more southern road;

The blind admiration of the Jesuits confounds the different periods of the Chinese history. They are more critically distinguished by M. de Guignes (Hist. des Huns, tom. i, part 1, in the Tables, part 2, in the Geography; Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, tom. xxxii. xxxvi. xlii, xliii), who discovers the gradual progress of the truth of the annals, and the extent of the monarchy, till the Christian era. He has searched with a curious eye, the connections of the Chinese with the nations of the west: but these connections are slight, casual, and obscure; nor did the Romans entertain a suspicion that the Seres or Sinæ possessed an empire not inferior to their own. [It is said, that a Chinese princess made her country acquainted with the use of the cocoon, 2,400 years before the commencement of our era. We well know, that the inhabitants of the remotest east are slow to improve; and this alone renders credible the high antiquity, to which they lay claim. Their silk is now inferior to that produced in almost all the other lands, which owe their knowledge of it to them. It has long supplied the commonest material of their dress, while garments, made in any way from wool, were among their luxuries, and till the exten sion of their commerce with England in later years, cost them thrice as much as those composed of silk.-ED.]

they traversed the mountains of Thibet, descended the streams of the Ganges or the Indus, and patiently expected in the ports of Guzerat and Malabar, the annual fleets of the West.* But the dangers of the desert were found less intolerable than toil, hunger, and the loss of time; the attempt was seldom renewed, and the only European, who has passed that unfrequented way, applauds his own diligence, that in nine months after his departure from Pekin, he reached the mouth of the Indus. The ocean, however, was open to the free communication of mankind. From the great river to the tropic of Cancer, the provinces of China were subdued and civilized by the emperors of the North; they were filled about the time of the Christian era with cities and men, mulberry-trees and their precious inhabitants; and if the Chinese, with the knowledge of the compass, had possessed the genius of the Greeks or Phoenicians, they might have spread their discoveries over the southern hemisphere. I am not qualified to examine, and I am not disposed to believe, their distant voyages to the Persian Gulf, or the Cape of Good Hope: but their ancestors might equal the labours and success of the present race, and the sphere of their navigation might extend from the isles of Japan to the straits of Malacca, the pillars, if we may apply that name, of an Oriental Hercules.t Without losing sight of land, they might sail along the coast to the extreme promontory of Achin, which is annually visited by ten or twelve ships laden with the productions, the manufactures, and even the artificers of China; the island of Sumatra and the opposite peninsula, are faintly delineated‡

* The roads from China to Persia and Hindostan may be investigated in the relations of Hackluyt and Thevenot, the ambassadors of Sharokh, Anthony Jenkinson, the Père Greuber, &c. See likewise Hanway's Travels, vol. i, p. 345–357. A communication through Thibet has been lately explored by the English sovereigns of Bengal.

+ For the Chinese navigation to Malacca and Achin, perhaps to Ceylon, see Renaudot (on the two Mahometan Travellers, p. 8-11, 13-17, 141-157), Dampier (vol. ii, p. 136), the Hist. Philosophique des deux Indes (tom. i, p. 98), and the Hist. Générale des Voyages (tom. vi, p. 201). The knowledge, or rather ignorance, of Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy, Arrian, Marcian, &c. of the countries eastward of Cape Comorin, is finely illustrated by D'Anville (Antiquité Géographique de l'Inde, especially p. 161-198). Our geography of India is improved by commerce and conquest; and has been illus trated by the excellent maps and memoirs of Major Rennel. If he

as the regions of gold and silver; and the trading cities named in the geography of Ptolemy, may indicate, that this wealth was not solely derived from the mines. The direct interval between Sumatra and Ceylon is about three hundred leagues; the Chinese and Indian navigators were conducted by the flight of birds and periodical winds, and the ocean might be securely traversed in square-built ships, which, instead of iron, were sewed together with the strong thread of the cocoa-nut. Ceylon, Serendib, or Taprobana, was divided between two hostile princes; one of whom possessed the mountains, the elephants, and the luminous carbuncle, and the other enjoyed the more solid riches of domestic industry, foreign trade, and the capacious harbour of Trinquemale, which received and dismissed the fleets of the East and West. In this hospitable isle, at an equal distance (as it was computed) from their respective countries, the silkmerchants of China, who had collected in their voyages, aloes, cloves, nutmeg, and sandal wood, maintained a free and beneficial commerce with the inhabitants of the Persian Gulf. The subjects of the great king exalted, without a rival, his power and magnificence; and the Roman, who confounded their vanity by comparing his paltry coin with a gold medal of the emperor Anastasius, had sailed to Ceylon in an Æthiopian ship, as a simple passenger.*

As silk became of indispensable use, the emperor Justinian saw, with concern, that the Persians had occupied by land and sea the monopoly of this important supply, and that the wealth of his subjects was continually drained by a nation of enemies and idolaters. An active government would have restored the trade of Egypt and the navigation of the Red Sea, which had decayed with the prosperity of the empire; and the Roman vessels might have sailed for the purchase of silk, to the ports of Ceylon, of Malacca, or even of China. Justinian embraced a more humble expedient, and solicited the aid of his Christian allies, the Ethioextends the sphere of his inquiries with the same critical knowledge and sagacity, he will succeed, and may surpass, the first of modern geographers. The Taprobane of Pliny (6, 24), Solinus (c. 53), and Salmas. Plinianæ Exercitat. (p. 781, 782), and most of the ancients, who often confound the islands of Ceylon and Sumatra, is more clearly described by Cosmas Indicopleustes; yet even the Christian topographer has exaggerated its dimensions. His information on the Indian and Chinese trade is rare and curious (lib. 2, p. 138, lib. 11,

The

pians of Abyssinia, who had recently acquired the arts of navigation, the spirit of trade, and the sea-port of Adulis,* still decorated with the trophies of a Grecian conqueror. Along the African coast, they penetrated to the equator in search of gold, emeralds, and aromatics; but they wisely declined an unequal competition, in which they must be always prevented by the vicinity of the Persians to the markets of India; and the emperor submitted to the disappointment, till his wishes were gratified by an unexpected event. gospel had been preached to the Indians: a bishop already governed the Christians of St. Thomas on the pepper-coast of Malabar; a church was planted in Ceylon, and the missionaries pursued the footsteps of commerce to the extremities of Asia.t Two Persian monks had long resided in China, perhaps in the royal city of Nankin, the seat of a monarch addicted to foreign superstitions, and who actually received an embassy from the isle of Ceylon. Amidst their pious occupations they viewed with a curious eye the common dress of the Chinese, the manufactures of silk, and the myriads of silkworms, whose education (either on trees or in houses) had once been considered as the labour of queens.

p. 337, 338, edit. Montfaucon). * See Procopius, Persic. (lib. 2, c. 20). Cosmas affords some interesting knowledge of the port and inscription of Adulis (Topograph. Christ. lib. 2, p. 138, 140-143), and of the trade of the Axumites along the African coast of Barbaria or Zingi (p. 138, 139), and as far as Taprobane (lib. 11, p. 339). [Arkiko, a small town, or village of 400 houses, on the south-western side of the bay of Massuah, near the straits of Babelmandel, is said to be the ancient Adulis. It is described in Bruce's Travels (Book 5, c. 12). Some writers call it Erquico. The trophies referred to by Gibbon, are a statue of Ptolemy Euergetes and the inscription on its pedestal, which was published by Leo Allatius at Rome in 1631, and by Thevenot in 1666.-ED.]

+ See the Christian missions in India, in Cosmas (lib. 3, p. 178, 179, lib. 11, p. 337), and consult Asseman, Bibliot. Orient. (tom. iv, p. 413548). The invention, manufacture, and general use of silk in China, may be seen in Duhalde. (Description Générale de la Chine, tom. ii, p. 165, 205–223.) The province of Chekian is the most renowned both for quantity and quality. [Libavius, a professor at Jena and Coburg, about the year 1600, treating De Bombyciis (in his Nat. Cult. 2, p. 2, 69) says, that the two monks did not bring their treasure from China, but from Assyria, where, according to Pliny (Hist. Nat. 11, 25-27), the worms were bred in his days. Pliny's description does not correspond with the genuine bombyx, which he had never seen, and of which his account is very obscure. Still Libavius makes it appear very probable, that silk equal to the Chinese was

They soon discovered that it was impracticable to transport the short-lived insect, but that in the eggs, a numerous progeny, might be preserved and multiplied in a distant climate. Religion or interest had more power over the Persian monks than the love of their country: after a long journey, they arrived at Constantinople, imparted their project to the emperor, and were liberally encouraged by the gifts and promises of Justinian. To the historians of that prince, a campaign at the foot of Mount Caucasus has seemed more deserving of a minute relation, than the labours of these missionaries of commerce, who again entered China, deceived a jealous people by concealing the eggs of the silkworm in a hollow cane, and returned in triumph with the spoils of the east. Under their direction, the eggs were hatched at the proper season by the artificial heat of dung; the worms were fed with mulberry leaves; they lived and laboured in a foreign climate: a sufficient number of butterflies were saved to propagate the race, and trees were planted to supply the nourishment of the rising generations. Experience and reflection corrected the errors of a new attempt, and the Sogdoite ambassadors acknowledged, in the succeeding reign, that the Romans were not inferior to the natives of China in the education of the insects and the manufactures of silk,* in which both China produced in Assyria, and that Persian merchants enhanced the value of their wares, by pretending that they came from distant climes. The silk-worms had probably passed through Cochin China to India, and thence into Persia, as from Constantinople they gradually continued to proceed westward.-ED.] * Procopius, lib 8. Gothic.

4, c. 17. Theophanes Byzant. apud. Phot. Cod. 84, p. 38. Zonaras, tom. ii, lib. 14, p. 69. Pagi (tom ii, p. 602) assigns to the year 552 this memorable importation. Menander (in Excerpt. Legat. p. 107) mentions the admiration of the Sogdoites; and Theophylact Simocatta (1. 7, c. 9) darkly represents the two rival kingdoms in (China) the country of silk. [In the fifteenth century a strange infatuation prevailed, respecting the means of propagating silk-worms. It was believed that they were engendered by mulberry leaves. These were supplied plentifully for twenty days and nights to young calves, which were then killed, and the maggots found in their putrid carcasses were supposed to be silk-worms. The process was described in Latin verse by Vida, the poet of "Leo's golden days," and in French prose, by Isner in his treatise, "Des Vers à soie." A grave German doctor put it to the test of experiment, when of course the bubble burst. Wiser efforts were made with emulative care in France, Spain, Germany, and Italy; but the climate and soil of the latter country appear to be most