"Cathay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... basin, and its gradual inclusion of all the Atlantic countries of Europe, through whose maritime enterprise the historical horizon was stretched to include America. In the same way, mediaeval trade with the Orient, which had familiarized Europe with distant India and Cathay, developed its full historico-geographical importance when it started the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century. The expansion of the geographical horizon in 1512 to embrace the earth inaugurated a widespread historical movement, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... exquisite surface of Orient idols! O, hewn by the workmen of cunning Cathay For the sword-hilts of kings and their saddles and bridles! O, carved for Athene! O, chosen to-day For the match now proceeding Betwixt those two leading And infantile billiard ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... no immediate practical results. The Bristol ships brought back no rich cargoes of gold or silver or spices, to tell England that she had won a passage to the Indies and Cathay. The idea, however, that a short passage would be discovered to those rich regions was to linger for nearly two centuries in the minds of maritime adventurers ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... patent even in matters seemingly scientific. For although the Chinese civilization, even in the so-called modern inventions, was already old while ours lay still in the cradle, it was to no scientific spirit that its discoveries were due. Notwithstanding the fact that Cathay was the happy possessor of gunpowder, movable type, and the compass before such things were dreamt of in Europe, she owed them to no knowledge of physics, chemistry, or mechanics. It was as arts, not as sciences, they were invented. And it speaks volumes for her civilization that she ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Turks swept westward. Arabia, Syria, the Isles of Greece, and, at last, in 1453, Constantinople itself, fell into their hands. The Eastern Empire, the last survival of the Empire of the Romans, perished beneath the sword of Mahomet. Then the pathway by land to Asia, to the fabled empires of Cathay and Cipango, was blocked by the Turkish conquest. Commerce, however, remained alert and enterprising, and men's minds soon turned to the hopes of a western passage which should provide a new route to ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
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