Note 570 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

The strength of these influences has decreased with every increase of distance from the indented coasts and teeming, seafaring population of South China, and with every decrease in race affinity. They have left only faint traces on the alien shores of far-away Australia. The divergent ethnic stock of the widespread Malay world has been little susceptible to these influences, which are therefore weak in the remoter islands, but clearly discernible on the coasts of the Philippines,570 Borneo, the nearer Sunda Islands, and the peninsula of Malacca, where the Chinese have had trading colonies for centuries.571 But in the eastern half of Farther India, which is grouped with China by land as well as by sea, and whose race stock is largely if not purely Mongolian, these influences are very marked, so that the whole continental rim of the South China Sea, from Formosa to the Isthmus of Malacca, is strongly assimilated in race and culture. Tongking, exposed to those modifying influences which characterize all land frontiers, as well as to coastwise intercourse, is in its people and civilization merely a transcript of China. The coast districts and islands of Annam are occupied by Chinese as far as the hills of Cambodia, and the name of Cochin China points to the origin of its predominant population. One-sixth of the inhabitants of Siam are Chinese, some of whom have filtered through the northern border; Bangkok, the capital, has a large Chinese quarter. The whole economic life and no small part of the intellectual life of the eastern face of Farther India south to Singapore is centered in the activity of the Chinese.572