THE peninsula which contains these four ancient kingdom, independent, semi-independent and subject, is four times as large as the Balkan peninsula. The first of the four when we start from the west, Burma, enjoyed complete independence until the year 1885 when the English, to the general approval of the natives and the world at large, sent the last of the local rulers into exile and annexed the country and made it part of their empire.Nobody objected much except the king himself but he was a true representative of a type that has no longer any reason to exist, except in the movies, the proverbial“Oriental potentate”who as a rule was nothing but an undetected lunatic.Needless to say that he was not even a local product but an import from the north.The peninsula as a whole has suffered a good deal from that kind of gentry.The situation of the local mountain-ranges was chiefly responsible.Whereas India was cut off from the north by high mountains which ran from east to west and therefore enjoyed a certain natural protection, the whole of this unfortunate peninsula is taken up by five independent mountain ridges which run from south to north and thereby offer almost ideal means of access to any one wishing to move from the harsh grass-land of central Asia to the rich coast-land of the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Siam and the South China Sea.And the sort of men bred by central Asia we have already met wherever our maps were dotted by an abundance of ruined cities and pillaged farms.

Lest you should shed unnecessary tears over the fate of the last of the independent Burmese potentates, know ye that in order to celebrate his accession to the throne he had revived the good old Asiatic custom of killing all his relatives. The Turkish sultans had always done that as a mere matter of precaution, like taking out accident insurance when you are elected president of a South American republic.But in the eighties of the last century the story of these hundred odd brothers and cousins and nephews, slaughtered in cold blood, did not read quite so well, and an English governor took the place of the former monarch.Since then the country, whose population consists of only three percent Hindus but ninety percent Buddhists, has greatly prospered and the Irrawaddy River, which is navigable all the way from Rangoon to Mandalay, has become an artery of trade such as it had never been before.It has seen more rice boats and oil tankers and ships of all sorts than ever before during its long history.

As for Siam, the country just east of Burma and separated from it by the Dawna Range and the Tanen-Tanng-gyi Mountains, it owes its continued independence to a combination of circumstances of which the mutual jealousy between England in the west and France in the east is most certainly not one of the least important. And furthermore, Siam has been singularly fortunate in its rulers.Old King Chulalongkorn, who held the throne for over forty years, was a descendant of a Chinaman who during the latter half of the eighteenth century had delivered Siam from the Burmese.By cleverly playing his western neighbors against those from the east, and by a few trivial concessions and above all things by not surrounding himself with English and French advisers but by choosing his experts from among the much less dangerous smaller nations, this enlightened Siamese reduced the number of analphabets in his domains from 90%to 20%,founded a university, developed railroads, made the Menam River navigable for over 400 miles, installed an excellent postal and telegraphic system and trained his army sufficiently well to make himself not only a desirable ally but also a potentially dangerous enemy.

Bangkok on the Menam delta grew until it finally had almost a million inhabitants, a great many of whom still live on rafts anchored in the river, which gives Bangkok the aspect of a sort of eastern Venice. Instead of closing the country to foreign immigration, the industrious Chinese were liberally encouraged to settle down in the capital and they now form one-ninth of the total population and have greatly contributed towards making Siam one of the most important rice exporting nations.The interior is still densely covered with very valuable forests and teakwood is an important article of export.And good luck or good sense made the Siamese rulers retain at least a part of the Malacca peninsula which contains the richest tin deposits of the world.

On the whole, however, the government of Siam has been opposed to the industrialization of the country. The inhabitants of all tropical lands will have to remain primarily interested in agriculture and other simple pursuits if they wish to survive.Siam seems to be one of the few Asiatic countries where the desirability of such a policy has been understood.Let Europe have its factories and slums, as long as Asia can keep its villages and fields.They may not be the sort of villages the westerling likes, but they suit the eastern temperament, and the factory does not.

By the way, the agricultural riches of Siam are somewhat different from those of most other countries. Outside of a million hogs, raised by the Chinese, the country can boast of no less than 6,000,000 tame buffaloes and 6822 elephants, which are in domestic service and hire out as derricks and trucks.

French Indo-China, the name usually given to all the French possessions in the peninsula, consists of five parts. The first one of these, going from south to north, is Cambodia, which occupies the valley of the big Mekong River as far as the delta.It raises cotton and grows pepper.Nominally it is still a kingdom, but under French supervision.In the interior, in the midst of the dense forests just north of the great lake called Tonlé-Sap, lie some of the most interesting ruins that have ever been uncovered.They were built by a mysterious race, the Khmers, of whom we know remarkably little.During the ninth century of our era, these Khmers built themselves a capital in northern Cambodia called Angkor.It was no small affair, for the walls formed a square each side of which was not less than two miles long and thirty feet high.At first, under the influence of Hindu missionaries, the Khmers were Brahmans, but in the tenth century Buddhism was accepted as the offcial religion of the state.The spiritual explosion caused by this change from Brahmanism to Buddhism found an expression in the construction of a vast number of temples and palaces, all of which were built between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries when Angkor, the capital, was destroyed, leaving behind those most stupendous architectural ruins, compared to which the far famed efforts of our own Mayans were the work of simple-minded beginners.

There is a theory that Angkor was originally built on the sea and long before the delta of the Mekong had been formed. But in that case, the sea would have retreated more than 300 miles.That would be a record.For in historical times the sea has never retreated much more than five miles in the case of Ravenna and seven miles in the case of Pisa.Then why and how and wherefore of Angkor will probably always remain a secret.But here stood a city that was as important in its time as New York is today.And it is gone.It has become a subject for picture postal cards, sold at a penny a piece to the visitors of the Paris colonial exhibition.And yet, once upon a time, it was a center of civilization while Paris was still a collection of evil-smelling mud hovels.It is all very strange!

As for the delta of the Mekong, today it is part of the French colony of Cochin-China which the French occupied in 1867 when their imperial prestige needed a little boosting after the disastrous failure of the great Mexican expedition. It has one excellent harbor, Saigon, where a few thousand French officials eagerly await the day when they can return to the home country to rest in peace and honor from their difficult labors in administering the four million Cochin-China entrusted to their care.

To the east of Cochin-China lies Anam, which also continues to be a kingdom although since 1886 it has enjoyed the“protection”of the French. The interior produces timber but the country is mountainous and has no roads and has therefore remained almost completely undeveloped.

Tongking in the north is much more important because it not only has an excellent river, the Song-Koi, but also on account of the presence of coal and cement, and it raises and exports cotton, silk and sugar, Its capital is Hanoi which since 1902 is the chief seat of government for all the French possessions in Indo-China. These include, beside the four countries just mentioned, a narrow strip of land in the interior, called Laos, annexed in 1893,and which I set down here merely for the sake of vital statistics.The southernmost part of this big peninsula is divided into two parts.The socalled“Federated Malay States”consist of four small semi-independent principalities under British protection, and the rest is a crown colony known administratively as the Straits Settlements.It was exceedingly important for England to get hold of the Malay peninsula, for the mountains, which sometimes rise to a height of 8000 feet, contain some very rich tin deposits and the climate allows a vast variety of tropical products to be grown here at practically no cost.Rubber, coffee, pepper, tapioca and gambier(necessary in the dyers'trade)are exported in large quantities from Penang, on the straits of Malacca, and from Singapore, a city of over half a million inhabitants, situated on a small island which controls all the great sea routes between north and south and east and west.

Singapore, the Lion City, is almost as old as Chicago, having been built by that famous Sir Stamford Raffles who foresaw the strategic importance of this point while administering the Dutch colonial possessions during the time Holland was part of the Napoleonic empire. In 1819 Singapore was a jungle.Today it has more than 500,000 inhabitants, the strangest variety and hodge-podge of races and languages to be found almost anywhere in the Orient.It is as strongly fortified as Gibraltar and is the terminal station of a railroad line which connects it with Bangkok in Siam, but not as yet with Rangoon in Burma.It will play a great role when the inevitable clash between the east and the west finally takes place.In anticipation of that event, it maintains a set of bar-rooms, the splendor of which is famous all over the Orient, and loses almost as much money on the annual races as the city of Dublin.