A Forbidden Land - published 1880

This is the earliest book in Google's new book section I've found so far - but I just started looking a couple of days ago.

Below is one of the longer notes I found interesting. (I'm about 60 pages into reading the book). The exert is about the plight of the local people under the centralized, nation-wide, but corrupt traditional government in the Chosun era (1392-1910).

(Below this snippet I included some illustrations of Koreans in the book. A significant portion of the first part of the book deals with guesses about the origin of the race(s) that make up Korean society - with some of the guess work being that the noble class is more Caucasian while the lower classes are more mongrel. I read a similar line about the Japanese in a book from the same time period - roughly speaking (1904). This is all connected to the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution and how it was taken up - not just by Western colonial nations - but also others - including Japan. In the book on Japan's rise as an Empire, the author suggested the southern strain of Japanese peoples came to the islands via Malaysia and before that India - the home of the ancient (white) Aryans).