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Of later wanderers, however, there are not a few, though for the most part their references to Malaya and Indo-China are merely incidental, and it is curious to note the impunity with which, during the Middle Ages, solitary white men were able to travel unmolested through Asiatic lands. This forces upon us a recognition of the fact that the European invasion of Asia, which began with the rounding of the Cape by Vasco da Gama in 1497, has had a very injurious effect upon the character of the Oriental peoples. Prior to the coming of the white men an extraordinary measure of tolerance, even of hospitality, was extended to strangers without distinction of race or creed. All the early travellers combine in bearing testimony to the care which was taken of aliens by, for example, the authorities in China, the people who before all others are to-day a byword for their suspicious dislike of foreigners. The reason of this change of attitude is to be sought for, not in the naughtiness of the Oriental, nor in his moral degeneracy, but in the misconduct of the early European filibusters which put the East forever on the defensive, and caused the name of the white man to stink in the nostrils of the brown peoples.

The only medieval wanderers with whose passage through southeastern Asia we need concern ourselves are Blessed Odoric of Pordone in Friuli, a friar of the Order of St. Francis, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad Ibn Abd Allah El Lawâti, commonly called Ibn Batuta, "the traveller without peer of the whole Arab nation," as he is affectionately called by a holy man of