Excerpt from Thibaw's Queen The immemorial East has passed into a proverb. To us new nations of the west Asia is a country of the past. We think of it as the land where the empires of Babylon and Assyria, of Persia and India, of China and Japan flourished long ago. For two thousand years Asia stood in the vanguard of progress. When we were savages colouring ourselves with woad, and clothing ourselves with skins the East gloried in an old civilisation. Great conquerors lived and fought and erected kingdoms and founded cities. Great rulers arose and made laws and consolidated these kingdoms, and welded the peoples into a whole. Great prophets were born whose teachings spread throughout the earth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.