Epochs of Chinese Author:Ernest Francisco Fenollosa Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter IV: EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART. CHINESE INFLUENCE. BRONZE SCULPTURE. 6th and fth Centuries A. d. CHINA is, in fact, what she nam... more »es herself, " The Middle Kingdom." She is like a great central tower encircled with powerful buttresses of races, partly akin to her in blood, partly tributary, but all feeling the weight of her great ideals. Her neighbours on the west and south -- Thibetans, Burmese, Malays of Siam and Annam -- we do not specially consider in this monograph, what is strongest in their early art being more related to Indian than Mongolian. But on the north and north-east China is fringed with a line of states and peoples, often hostile, sometimes servile, but of a blood and thought closely akin to her own. These, too, have all been submerged by very similar waves of Northern Buddhism ; and they have imported from the common centre Taoist and Confucian principles in varying proportions. The Hunnish, Scythian and Mongolian hordes to the north have seldom entered sufficiently into the pale of civilization to produce even a branch art, except when, for short periods, they have put themselves in possession of the Imperial throne. They have little in common with what we have called the Pacific affiliations of the primitive Chinese. But for the tribes on the Amoor river -- to a less extent the Manchus -- for the Coreans, and especially for the Japanese, what is primitive and what is fine in Chinese life and art have had a vital meaning, so that we may regard their several, and often robust, civilizations as almost integral parts of the central movement. The most original and the most independent of all these surrounding states has been, of course, the Japanese. The civilization of this complex island race has often proved itself, and is proving i...« less