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Updated: June 3, 2025
We said good-by to India without much regret; in fact, we were elated to secure accommodations on a small Indo-China boat that made the run to Penang and Singapore in about eight days. No berths could be secured on the ships that go by the way of Burma. Those ships were booked full for several trips ahead.
Indo-China is a great bay-window bulging from the southeastern corner of Asia, its casements opening on the China Sea and on the Gulf of Siam. Of all the countries of the Farther East it is the most mysterious; of them all it is the least known.
All the hazy history of Asia, of Mongolia, Pamir, Himalayas, Mesopotamia, Persia and China, surrounds the Living God of Urga. It is little wonder that his name is honored along the Volga, in Siberia, Arabia, between the Tigris and Euphrates, in Indo-China and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Of vessels plying between Bangkok and the ports of French Indo-China there were but two the Bonite, a French packet slightly larger than a Hudson River tugboat, which twice monthly makes the round trip between the Siamese capital and Saigon; and a Danish tramp; the Chutututch, an unkempt vagrant of the seas which wanders at will along the Gulf Coast, touching at those obscure ports where cargo or passengers are likely to be found.
The animal weighed at least five hundred pounds but they brought it to our camp and we purchased the skin for ten rupees. South of Gen-kang the money of the region, like all of Yün-nan for some distance from the Burma frontier, is the Indian rupee which equals thirty-three cents American gold; in that part of the province adjoining Tonking, French Indo-China money is current.
There are only four principal kinds now existing, namely, the gibbon, orang-outang, chimpanzee, and the gorilla, of which the first is much less familiar than the others. The known species of gibbons occur in Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula.
After the great initial successes of Hitlerite Germany in 1939-1941, Japan became convinced that the time had come for a decisive blow against the positions of the Western European powers and the United States in the Far East. Lightning blows were struck at Hong Kong and Singapore, at French Indo-China, and at the Netherlands East Indies.
France, not to be outdone by her neighbors, gained concessions of territory in the south, adjoining her Indo-China possessions, and Italy, last of all, came into the Eastern market with a demand for a share of the nearly defunct empire. The nations appeared to be settling on China in all directions and to be ready to tear the antique commonwealth to pieces between them.
But the realisation of this dream also belongs to the next period. In the Far East, too, this was a period of beginnings. Ever since 1787 before the Revolution the French had possessed a foothold on the coast of Annam, from which French missionaries carried on their labours among the peoples of Indo-China.
Tartars ruled at Peking all over northern China, Corea, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Tibet, and took tribute from Indo-China and Java. Tartars were spread over central Asia, holding sway in Turkestan and Afghanistan. The Golden Horde ruled the Caucasus, a large part of Russia, and a piece of Siberia. Tartars held sway in Persia, Georgia, Armenia, and a part of Asia Minor.
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