CHAPTER I - DEFINITION

Summary

The portion of the earth's surface comprised in this term covers a vast extent of territory. Setting aside the Dutch East Indies, a group of islands many of which are singly as large as a European state, aggregating an area equal to that of the European continent outside Russia; as well as the Malay peninsula, which, attached to the mainland alone by the narrow isthmus of Kra, may be treated as belonging geographically, as it assuredly does ethnographically, to the great Malay archipelago; we have the whole of Eastern Asia outside of British India and Siberia for our theme. The Philippine group should also rightly be included in the ‘Far East,’ but it is comprised in the Malay archipelago, and so is technically beyond our limit. We include then in the definition, for the purpose of the present work, the continental countries of China with its outlying dependencies, Siam and Indo-China, together with the long string of islands in the Pacific which make up the empire of Japan—being all the countries commonly understood in the term ‘Far East.’

The varying scales on which the maps in our atlases are drawn render them utterly deceptive as far as comparative areas are concerned, and an atlas of the world on one and that a fairly large scale is a desideratum for which we shall probably have long to wait. Occasionally an inset map of the British Isles is added to maps of Asiatic lands and forms a welcome basis of comparison.