ANCIENT CHINA SIMPLIFIED

[Illustration: Tripod of the Chou dynasty, date 812 B.C. In 1565 A.D. it was placed by the owner for safety in a temple on Silver Island (near Chinkiang), where it may be seen now. Taken (by kind permission of the author) from Dr. S. W. Bushell's "Chinese Art," vol. i. p. 82.]

ANCIENT CHINA SIMPLIFIED

BY EDWARD HARPER PARKER, M.A., (Manc.)

PROFESSOR OF CHINESE AT THE VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
LONDON

PREFACE

Boswell once remarked to Dr. Johnson that "the history of England is so strange that, if it were not well vouched as it is, it would be hardly credible." To which Johnson replied in his usual style: "Sir, if it were told as shortly, and with as little preparation for introducing the different events, as the history of the Jewish kings, it would be equally liable to objections of improbability." Dr. Johnson went on to illustrate what he meant, by specific allusion to the concessions to Parliament made by Charles I. "If," he said, "these had been related nakedly, without any detail of the circumstances which generally led to them, they would not have been believed."

This is exactly the position of ancient Chinese history, which may be roughly said to coincide in time with the history of the Jewish kings. The Chinese Annals are mere diaries of events, isolated facts being tumbled together in order of date, without any regard for proportion. Epoch-making invasions, defeats, and cessions of territory are laconically noted down on a level with the prince's indiscretion in weeping for a concubine as he would weep for a wife; or the Emperor's bounty in sending a dish of sacrificial meat to a vassal power by express messenger. In one way there is a distinct advantage in this method, for, the historian being seldom tempted to obtrude his own opinion or comments, we are left a clear course for the formation of our own judgments upon the facts given. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that what may be called the philosophy of history has never been seized by the Chinese mind: the annalists do not trouble themselves with the rights and aspirations of the masses; the results to general policy that naturally follow upon increase of population, perfecting of arms and munitions of war, admixture of foreign blood with the body politic, and such like matters. The heads of events being noted, it seems to be left to the reader to fill in the details from his imagination, and from his knowledge of contemporary affairs. For instance, suppose the reign of Queen Victoria were to begin after this fashion:--"1837, 5th moon, Kalends, Victoria succeeded: 9th moon, Ides, Napoleon paid a visit: 28th day, London flooded; 10th moon, 29th day, eclipse of the sun"; and so on. At the time, and for many years--possibly centuries--afterwards, there would be accurate general traditional, or even written, information as to who Victoria was; why Napoleon paid a visit; in what particular way the flood affected England generally; from what parts the eclipse was best visible, etc. These details would fade in distinctness with each successive generation; commentators would come to the rescue; then commentators upon commentators; and discussions as to which man was the most trustworthy of them all.

Under these circumstances it is difficult enough for the Chinese themselves to construct a series of historical lessons, adequate to guide them in the conduct of modern affairs, out of so heterogeneous a mass of material. This difficulty is, in the case of Westerners, more than doubled by the strange, and to us inharmonious, sounds of Chinese proper names: moreover, as they are monosyllabical, and many of them exactly similar when expressed in our letters, it is almost impossible to remember them, and to distinguish one from the other. Thus most persons who make an honest endeavour by means of translations to master the leading events in ancient Chinese history soon throw down the book in despair; while even specialists, who may wish to shorten their labours by availing themselves of others' work, can only get a firm grip of translations by comparing them with the originals: it is thus really impossible to acquire anything at all approaching an accurate understanding of Chinese antiquity without possessing in some degree the controlling power of a knowledge of the pictographs.

It is in view of all these difficulties that an attempt has been made in this book to extract principles from isolated facts; to avoid, so far as is possible, the use of Chinese proper names; to introduce these as sparingly and gradually as is practicable when they must be used at all; to describe the general trend of events and life of the people rather than the personal acts of rulers and great officers; and, generally, to put it into the power of any one who can only read English, to gain an intelligible notion of what Chinese antiquity really was; and what principles and motives, declared or tacit, underlay it. It is with this object before me that I have ventured to call my humble work "Ancient China Simplified," and I can only express a hope that it will really be found intelligible.

EDWARD HARPER PARKER.

18, GAMBIER TERRACE, LIVERPOOL, May 18, 1908.

AIDS TO MEMORY

There is much repetition in the book, the same facts being presented, for instance, under the heads of Army, Religion, Confucius, and Marriages. This is intentional, and the object is to keep in the mind impressions which in a strange, ancient, and obscure subject are apt to disappear after perusal of only one or two casual statements.

The Index has been carefully prepared so that any allusion or statement vaguely retained in the mind may at once be confirmed.
The chapter headings, or contents list, which itself contains nearly five per cent of the whole letterpress, is so arranged that it omits no feature treated of in the main text.

In the earlier chapters uncouth proper names are reduced to a minimum, but the Index refers by name to specific places and persons only generally mentioned in the earlier pages. For instance, the states of Lu and CHENG on pages 22 and 29: it is hard enough to differentiate Ts'i, Tsin, Ts'in, and Ts'u at the outstart, without crowding the memory with fresh names until the necessity for it absolutely arises.

The nine maps are inserted where they are most likely to be useful: it is a good plan to refer to a map each time a place is mentioned, unless the memory suffices to suggest exactly where that place is. After two or three patient references, situations of places will take better root in the mind.

The chapters are split up into short discussions and descriptions, because longer divisions are apt to be tedious where ancient history is concerned. And the narrative of political movement is frequently interrupted by the introduction of new matter, in order to provide novelty and stimulate the imagination. Moreover, all chapters and all subjects converge on one general focus.

On page 15 of "China, her Diplomacy, etc." (John Murray, 1901), I have confessed how tedious I myself had found ancient Chinese history, and how its human interest only begins with foreign relations. I have, however, gone systematically through the mill once more, and my present object is to present general results only obtainable at the cost of laboriously picking out and resetting isolated and often apparently unconnected records of fact.

NAMES OF CHIEF LOCALITIES

CHOU: at first a principality in South Shen Si and part of Kan Suh, subject to Shang dynasty; afterwards the imperial dynasty itself.

TS'lN: principality west of the above. When the Chou dynasty moved its capital east into Ho Nan, Ts'in took possession of the old Chou principality.

TSIN: principality (same family as Chou) in South Shan Si (and in part of Shen Si at times).

TS'I: principality, separated by the Yellow River from Tsin and Yen; it lay in North Shan Tung, and in the coast part of Chih Li.

TS'U: semi-barbarous principality alone preponderant on the Yang- tsz River.

WU: still more barbarous principality (ruling caste of the same family as Chou, but senior to Chou) on the Yang-tsz embouchure and Shanghai coasts.

YUEH: equally barbarous principality commanding another embouchure in the Hangchow-Ningpo region. Wu and Yueh were at first subordinate to Ts'u.

YEN: principality (same family as Chou) in the Peking plain, north of the Yellow River mouth,

SHUH and PA: in no way Chinese or federal; equivalent to Central and Eastern Sz Ch'wan province.

CHENG: principality in Ho Nan (same family as Chou).

SUNG: principality taking in the four corners of Ho Nan, Shan Tung, An Hwei, and Kiang Su (Shang dynasty family).

CH'EN: principality in Ho Nan, south of Sung (family of the Ploughman Emperor, 2250 B.C., preceding even the Hia dynasty).

WEI: principality taking in corners of Ho Nan, Chih Li, and Shan Tung (family of the Chou emperors).

TS'AO: principality in South-west Shan Tung; neighbour of Lu, Wei, and Sung (same family as Chou).

TS'AI: principality in Ho Nan, south of CH'EN (same family as Chou).

LU: principality in South-west Shan Tung, between Ts'ao and Ts'i (its founder was the brother of the Chou founder).

HU: very small principality in Ho Nan, south of Cheng (same obscure eastern ancestry as Ts'i),

K'I: Shan Tung promontory and German sphere (of Hia dynasty descent); it is often confused with, or is quite the same as, another principality called Ki (without the aspirate).

The above are practically all the states whose participation in Chinese development has been historically of importance,

NAMES OF CHIEF PERSONAGES

CONFUCIUS: after 500 B.C. premier of Lu; traced his descent back through the Chou dynasty vassal ruling family of Sung to the Shang dynasty family.

TSZ-CH'AN: elder contemporary of Confucius; premier of Cheng; traced his descent through the vassal ruling family of Cheng to the Chou dynasty family: date of death variously stated.

KWAN-TSE: died between 648 and 643 B.C., variously stated; premier of Ts'i; traced his descent to the same clan as the ruling dynasty of Chou.

YEN-TSZ: died 500 B.C.; premier of Ts'i; traced his descent to a local clan, apparently eastern barbarian by origin.

WEI YANG: died 338 B.C.; premier of Ts'in; was a concubine-born prince of the vassal state of Wei, and was thus of the imperial Chou dynasty clan.

SHUH HIANG: lawyer and minister of Tsin; belonged to one of the "great families" of Tsin; was contemporary with Tsz-ch'an. HIANG SUH: diplomat of the state of Sung; pedigree not ascertained,

KI-CHAH: son, brother, and uncle of successive barbarian kings of Wu, whose ancestors, however, were the same ancestors as the orthodox imperial rulers of the Chou dynasty; contemporary of Tsz- ch'an.

NAMES OF THE SO-CALLED "FIVE PROTECTORS"

(ONLY THE TWO FIRST OF THE FIVE WERE SO OFFICIALLY; THE TWO LAST
WERE SO, EVEN OFFICIALLY, THOUGH NEVER COUNTED AMONGST THE FIVE.)

1. MARQUESS OF Ts'i (not of imperial Chou clan, perhaps of "Eastern Barbarian" origin).

2. MARQUESS OF TSIN (imperial Chou clan).

3. DUKE OF SUNG (imperial Shang dynasty descent),

4. "KING" OF T'SU (semi-barbarian, but with remote imperial Chinese legendary descent).

5. EARL OF TS'IN (semi-Tartar, with legendary descent from remote imperial Chinese).

6. "KING" OF Wu (semi-barbarian, but of imperial Chou family descent).

7. "KING" OF YUEH (barbarian, but with legendary descent from ultra-remote imperial Chinese).

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

OPENING SCENES

Beginning of dated history--Size of ancient China--Parcelled out into fiefs--Fiefs correspond to modern hien districts-- Mesne lords and sub-vassals--Method of migration and colonizing-- Course of the Yellow River in 842 B.C.--Distant fiefs in Shan Tung and Chih Li provinces of to-day--A river which subsequently became part of the Grand Canal--The Hwai River system of waters-- Europeans always regard China from the sea inwards--Corea, Japan, and Liao Tung unknown in 842 B.C. except, perhaps, to the vassal state in Peking plain--Orthodox Chinese adopting barbarian usages in Shan Tung--Eastern barbarians on the coast to Shanghai--No knowledge of South or West Asia--Left bank of Yellow River was mostly Tartar, except in South Shan Si--Ancient capital in Shan Si--Ancient colonization of the Wei River valleys in Shen Si-- Possibilities of Western ideas having been carried by Tartar horsemen from Persia and Turkestan--Traditions of western, eastern, and southern intercourse previous to 842 B.C.--Early knowledge of the River Yang-tsz and its three mouths--Explorations by ancient emperors--Development of China followed much the same normal course as that of Greece or England.

CHAPTER II

SHIFTING SCENES

Character of the early colonizing Chinese satraps--Revolt of the western satrap and flight of the Emperor in 842 B.C.--Daughter of a later satrap marries the Emperor--Tartars mix up with questions of imperial succession and kill the Emperor--Transfer of the imperial metropolis from Shen Si to Ho Nan--The Chou dynasty, dating from 1122 B.C.--Before its conquest, the vassal house of Chou occupied the same relation to the imperial dynasty of Shang that the Wardens of the Western Marches, or Princes of Ts'in, did in turn to the imperial dynasty of Chou--The Shang dynasty had in 1766 B.C., for like reasons, supplanted the Hia dynasty-No events of great interest recorded in limited area of China before 771 B.C.--Decline of the imperial power until its extinction in 250 B.C.--The Five Tyrant or Protector period--Natural movement to keep pace with political development--Easier system of writing-- Development of trade and industry--Living interests clash with extinct aspirations--From 722 B.C. to 480 B.C. is the period of change covered by Confucius' history

CHAPTER III

THE NORTHERN POWERS

The state of Tsin in Shan Si--In 771 B.C.: its ruler escorts the Emperor to his new capital--Only in 671 B.C. does Confucius mention Tsin--Divided from Ts'in by the Yellow River--Important difference between the sounds Tsin and Ts'in--Importance of the whole Yellow River as a natural boundary--The state of Ts'i also engaged in buffer work against Tartar inroads--Remote origin of Ts'i-Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i grow powerful as the Emperor grows weaker--The state of Yen in the Peking plain--The founder of Yen immortalized in song--Complete absence of tradition concerning Yen's origin--Its possible relations with Corea and Japan--Centre of political gravity transferred for ever to the north--Tartar movements in Asia generally 800-600 B.C.--Never was a Tarter empire--Reason for using the loose word "Tartars"--Race divisions then probably very much as now--Attempt to classify the Tartars in definite groups--Ch'wan unknown by any name--Nothing at all was known in China of the north and west: a fortiori of Central Asia

CHAPTER IV

THE SOUTHERN POWER

The collapse of the Emperor led to restlessness in the south too-- The Jungle country south of the River Han--Ancient origin of its kings--Claim to equality--Buffer state to the south--Ruling caste consisted of educated Chinese--Extension of the Ts'u empire-- Annamese connections--Claims repeated 704 B.C.--Capital moved to King-thou Fu near Sha-shi--First Ts'u conquests of China--Five hundred years of struggle with Ts'in for the possession of all China

CHAPTER V

EVIDENCE OF ECLIPSES

How far is history true?--Confucius and eclipses--Evidence notwithstanding the destruction of literature in 213 B.C.-- Retrospective calculations of eclipses and complications of calendars--Eclipse of 776 B.C.--Errors in Confucian history owing to rival calendars

CHAPTER VI

THE ARMY

Paraphernalia of warfare--Ten thousand and one thousand chariot states--Use of war-chariots, leather or wood--Chariots allotted according to rank--Seventy-five men to one cart--War-chariots date back to 1800 B.C.--Tartar house-carts--Rivers mostly unnavigable in north--Introduction of canals and boat traffic--Population and armies--Vague descriptions--Early armies never exceeded 75,000 men--The use of flags--Used in hunting as well as in war--Victims sacrificed to drums--A modern instance of this in 1900 A.D.

CHAPTER VII

THE COAST STATES

The coast states in possession of the Yang-tsz delta--The state of Wu really of the same origin as the imperial dynasty of Chou-- Comparison with Phoenician colonists--Wu induced by Tsin to attack Ts'a-Ancient name was Keugu--Wu falls into the whirl of Chinese politics--Confucius and his contemptuous treatment of barbarians-Lu, in South Shan Tung, the place where Confucius held official posts--Great Britain and Duke Confucius--Five ranks for rulers of vassal states--Sacking of the Ts'u capital by Wu in 506 B.C.--Wu's vassal Yueh turns against Wu--Uviet the native name of Yueh--Bloody wars between Wu and Yiieh--Extinction of Wu in 483 B.C.--Yueh was always a coast power--Reasons for Confucius' endeavours to re-establish the old feudal system

CHAPTER VIII

FIRST PROTECTOR OF CHINA

The first Hegemon or Protector of China and his own vassal kingdom of Ts'i--Limits of Ts'i and ancient course of the Yellow River-- Absence of ancient records--Shiftings of capital in the ninth century B.C.--Emperor's collapse of 842 and its effect upon Ts'i-- Aid rendered by Ts'i in suppressing the Tartars--Inconsiderable size of Ts'i--Revenges a judicial murder two centuries old--Rapid rise of Ts'i and services of the statesman--philosopher Kwan-tsz-- The governing caste in China--Declares self Protector of China 679 B.C.--Tartar raids down to the Yellow River in Ho Nan-Chinese durbars and the duties of a Protector--Ts'in and Ts'u too far off or too busy for orthodox durbars--Little is now known of the puppet Emperor's dominions--Effeminate character of all the Central Chinese orthodox stales--Fighting instincts all with semi- Chinese states--Struggle for life becoming keener throughout China

CHAPTER IX

POSITION OF ENVOYS

Sanctity of envoys--Rivalry of Tsin north and Ts'u south for influence over orthodox centre--The state of CHENG (imperial clan)--The state of Sung (Shang dynasty clan)--Family sacrifices-- Instances of envoy treatment--The philosopher Yen-tsz: his irony-- The statesman Tsz-ch'an of CHENG--Ts'u's barbarous and callous conduct to envoys--Greed for valuables among high officers-- squabble for precedence at Peace Conference--Confucius manipulates history--Yen-& and Confucius together at attempted assassination

CHAPTER X

THE SECOND PROTECTOR

Death of First Protector and his henchman Kwan-tsz, 648-643 B.C.-- Ts'i succession and Sung's claim to Protectorate--Tartar influence in Ts'i--Ts'u's claim to the hegemony--Ridiculous orthodox chivalry--Great development of Tsin--A much-married ruler-- Marriage complications--Interesting story of the political wanderings of the Second Protector--Tries to replace Kwan-tsz deceased--Pleasures of Ts'i life--Mean behaviour of orthodox princes to the Wanderer--Frank attitude of Ts'u--Successive Tartar-born rulers of Tsin, and war with T&n--Second Protector gains his own Tsin throne--Puppet Emperor at a durbar--Tsin obtains cession of territory--Triangular war between the Powers-- Description of the political situation--China 2500 years ago beginning to move as she is now doing again

CHAPTER XI

RELIGION

I'Jo religion except natural religion--Religion not separate from administrative ritual--The titles of "King" and "Emperor"--Prayer common, but most other of our own religious notions absent--Local religion in barbarous states--Distinction between loss and annihilation of power--Ducal rank and marquesses--Distinction between grantee sacrifices and personal sacrifices--Prayer and the ancient Emperor Shun, whose grave is in Hu Nan--Chou Emperor's sickness and brother's written prayer--Offers to sacrifice self-- Messages from the dead--Lao-tsz's book--Ts'in and conquered Tsin Sacrifices--Further instances of prayer

CHAPTER XII

ANCESTRAL WORSHIP

Ancestral tablets carried in war-Shrines graduated according to rank--Description of shrines--Specific case of the King of Ts'u-- Instance of the First August Emperor much later--Temple of Heaven, Peking, and the British occupation of it--Modern Japanese instance of reporting to Heaven and ancestors--Tsin and Ts'i instances of it--Sacrificial tablets--Writing materials--Lu's special spiritual status--Desecration of tombs and flogging of corpses--Destruction of ancestral temples--Imperial presents of sacrificial meat-- Fasting and purification--Intricate mourning rules. So-65

CHAPTER XIII

ANCIENT DOCUMENTS FOUND

History of Tsin and the Bamboo Annals discovered after 600 years' burial--Confirmatory of Confucius' history--Obsolete and modern script--Ancient calendars--Their evidence in rendering dates precise--The Ts'in calendar imposed on China--Rise of the Ts'in power--Position as Protector--Vast Tartar annexations by Ts'in-- Duke Muh of Ts'in and Emperor Muh of China--Posthumous names-- Discovery of ancient books--Supposed travels of Emperor Muh to Tartary--Possibility of the Duke Muh having made the journeys-- Ts'in and Tsin force Tartars to migrate--Surreptitious vassal "emperors"--Instances of Annam and Japan--Tsin against Ts'in and Ts'u after Second Protector's death--Ts'i never again Protector-- Ts'in's Chinese and Tartar advisers--Foundations for Ts'in's future empire.

CHAPTER XIV

MORE ON PROTECTORS

The Five Protectors of China more exactly defined--No such period as the "Five Tyrant period" can be logically accepted as accurate-- Chinese never understand the principles of history as distinct from the detailed facts--International situation defined--Flank movements--Appearance of barbarous Wu in the Chinese arena-- Phonetic barbarian names--The State of Wei--Enlightened prince envoy to China from Wu--Wu rapidly acquires the status of Protector--Confucius tampers with history--Risky position of the King of Wu--Yueh conquers Wu, and poses as Protector--The River Sz (Grand Canal).

CHAPTER XV

STATE INTERCOURSE

Further explanations regarding the grouping of states, and the size of the smallest states--Statesmen of all orthodox states acquainted with one another--No dialect difficulties in ancient times--Records exist for everything--Absence of caste, but persistence of the hereditary idea--The great political economist Kwan-tsz--Tsz-ch'an, the prince-statesman of Cheng--Shuh Hiang, statesman of Tsin--Reference to Appendix No. r--The statesman Yen- tsz of Ts'i--Confucius' origin as a member of the royal Sung family--Confucius' wanderings not so very extensive--Confucius no mere pedant, but a statesman and a humorist--Hiang Suh of Sung, inventor of "Hague" Conferences--Ki-chah, prince-envoy of Wu--K'u- peh-yuh, an authority in Wei--Ts'in had no literary men--Lao-% of Ts'u--Reasons why Confucius does not mention him

CHAPTER XVI

LAND AND PEOPLE

Ancient land and land-tax-Combination of military service with land cultivation--Studious class had to study tao (in its pre-Lao-tsz sense)--Next the trading classes--Next the cultivators-- Last the handicraftsmen--Another division of the people--Responsibility of rulers to God--Classification of rulers and ruling ranks--Eunuchs and slaves--Cadastral survey in Ts'u state--Reserves for sporting-- Cemeteries--Salt-flats Another land and military service system in Ts'u--Kwan-tsz's system in Ts'i--Poor relief--Shrewd diplomacy--His master becomes First Protector--commerce and fairs--"The people" ignored in history--Tsin reforms and administration--The "great family" nuisance--Roads, supplies, post-stages--Ts'i had developed even before Kwan-tsz--Restlessness of active minds under the yoke of ritual.

CHAPTER XVII

EDUCATION AND LITERARY

Very little mention of ancient writing or education--Baked inscribed bricks unknown to the loess region--Cession of land inscribed upon metal--The Nine Tripods--Ts'u claims them-- Instances of written grants and prayers--Proof of teaching--A written public notice--Probable use of wood--Conventions upon stone--Books in sixth century B.C.--Maps, cadastre, and census records--A doubtful instance--A closed letter--Indentures--A military map--Treaties--Ancient theory of juvenile education for office--Invention of new-written script 827 B.C.--Patriarchal rule inconsistent with enlightenment--Unification of script, weights, measures, and axle-breadths by the First August Emperor Further invention of script and first dictionary--Facility of Chinese writing for reading purposes-- Chinese now in a state of flux.

CHAPTER XVIII

TREATIES AND VOWS

Treaties and imprecations--Smearing with blood of victims-- Squabble re precedence in the treaty-making--Shuh Niang's philosophy--Confucius' tampering with history condoned--Care of Chinese in preserving first-hand evidence--Emperor ignored by treaty-makers--Form of a treaty, with imprecation--Mesne lords and their vassals--Negotiations and references for instructions-- Ts'u's first protectorate in 538--Ts'u's difficulty with Wu--The Six Families of Tsin--Sacrificing cocks as sanction to vows-- Drawing human blood as sanction--Pigs for the same purpose--Kwan- tsz's honourable behaviour in keeping treaty--Confucius not so honourable: instances given--Casuistry backed up by a proverb.

CHAPTER XIX

CONFUCIUS AND LITERATURE

Life-time of Confucius--Secret of his influence--Visit of the Wu prince to Confucius' state--Lu's "powerful" family plague--Lu's position between Tsin and Ts'u influences--Ts'i studies the ritual in Lu: Yen-tsz goes thither--Sketch of Lu history in its connection with Confucius--What were his practical objects?-- Authorities in support of what Confucius' Annals tell us--Original conception of natural religion--Spread of the earliest patriarchal Chinese state--No other people near them possessed letters--The way in which the Chinese spread--Lines of least resistance--The spiritual emperor compared with some of the Popes--Lu's spiritual position--Confucius of Sung descent, and at first not an influential official in Lu--Lu's humiliation--Ts'i's intrigues to counteract Confucius' genius--Travels of Confucius and his history--His edited works.

CHAPTER XX

LAW

Original notion of law--War and punishment on a level--Secondary punishments--Judgment given as each breach occurs--No distinction between legislative and judicial--Private rights ignored by the State--Public weal is Nature's law--First law reform for the Hundred Families--Dr. Legge's translation of the Code-- Proclamation of the Emperor's laws--Themistes or decisions-- Capricious instances: boiling alive by Emperor--Interference of Emperor in Lu succession--Tsang Wen-chung's coat--Barbarity of the Ts'u laws--Lu's influence with the Emperor--Tsin's engraved laws--Tsz-ch'an's laws on metal in Cheng--Confucius disapproves of published law--English judge-made law--All rulers accepted Chou law--Reading law over sacrificial victim--Laconic ancient laws-- Command emanates from the north--Definition of imperial power--The laws of Li K'wei in Ngwei state (part of old Tsin)--Direct influence on modern law.

CHAPTER XXI

PUBLIC WORKS

Engineering works of old Emperors--Marvellous chiselled gorge above Tch'ang--Pa and Shuh kingdoms (= Sz Ch'wan)--The engineer Li Ping in Sz Ch'wan: his sluices still in working order after 2200 years of use--Chinese ideas about the sources of the Yang-tsz--The Lolo country and its independence--The Yellow River and its vagaries--Substitution of the Chou dynasty for the Shang dynasty-- First rulers of Wu make a canal--Origin of the Grand Canal-- Explanation of the old riverine system of Shan Tung--Extension of the Canal by the First August Emperor--Kublai Khan's share in it-- The old Wu capital--Soochow and its ancient arsenals--No bridges in old clays: fords used--Instances--Limited navigability of northern rivers--Various Great Walls--Enormous waste of human life--New Ts'in metropolis--Forced labour and eunuchs.

CHAPTER XXII

CITIES AND TOWNS

Ancient cities mere hovels--Soul, the capital of modern Corea-- Modern cities still poor affairs--Want of unity causes downfall of Ts'in and China--Magnificence of Ts'i capital--Ts'u's palaces imitated in Lu--The capital of Wu--Modern Soochow--Nothing known of early Ts'in towns--Reforms of Wei Yang in Ts'in--Probable population--Magnificent buildings at new Ts'in metropolis-- Facility with which vassal states shifted their capitals-- Insignificant size of ancient principalities--Walled cities.

CHAPTER XXIII

BREAK-UP OF CHINA

Collapse of Wu, flight in boats to Japan--Ground to believe that the ruling caste of Japan was influenced by Chinese colonists in the fifth century B.C.--Rise of Yueh, and action in China as Protector--Changes in the Hwai River system--Last days of the Chou dynasty--The year 403 B.C. is the second great pivot point in history--Undermining of Ts'i state by the T'ien or Ch'en family-- Confucius shocked at the murder of a Ts'i prince--Sudden rise of Ts'in after two centuries of stagnation--The reforms of Wei Yang lead to the conquest of China--Orthodox China compared with Greece--The "Fighting State" Period.

CHAPTER XXIV

KINGS AND NOBLES

Titles of the Emperors of the Chou dynasty--The word "King" in modern times--Posthumous names--The title "Emperor" and the word "Imperial"--"God" confused with "Emperor"--Lao-tsz's view-- Comparison with Babylonia, Egypt, etc.--No feudal prince was recognized by the Emperor as possessing the same title as the Emperor--The Roman Emperors--The five ranks of nobles--The Emperor's private "dukes" compared with cardinals--The state of Lu--The state of Ts'i--The state of Tsin--No race hatreds in China--The state of Wei--Clanship between dynasties--Sacrificial rights--The state of Cheng: a fighting ground for all--The state of Ch'en--Explanation of the term "duke" as applied to all sovereign princes.

CHAPTER XXV

VASSALS AND EMPEROR

The vassal princes of the Chou and previous dynasties--Vassal princes and their relations with the Emperors--Protectors make great show of defending the Emperors rights--The Emperor's sacrifices to God--Rules and rights concerning fees--All China belongs to the Emperor--Peculiar notions about the Emperor's territory--Respect due to imperial envoys--Direct and indirect vassals--Ts'u's group of vassals--Ts'u compared with Macedon-- Never subject to the Emperors--Right of passage for armies-- Special complimentary use of the term "viscount"--Titles not inherited during mourning--Forms of address--Rival Protectors and their respective subordinate states--Tribute from the states to the Emperor, and presents from the Emperor to the vassal states-- The Emperor accepts faits accomplis, and takes what he can get.

CHAPTER XXVI

FIGHTING STATE PERIOD

Period of fighting states--Tsin divided into Han, Ngwei, and Chao- Ts'in developing herself in Tartary and in Sz Ch'wan--Want of orderly method in Chinese history--How the statesmen of each vassal state developed resources--Ts'in's military development compared with that of Prussia from 1815 to 1870--"Perpendicular and Horizontal" period--Object to crush Ts'in--Rival claimants for universal empire--First appearance of the Huns or Turks-Helpless position of Old China--Bloody battles in Ts'in's final career of conquest--A million men decapitated--Immense cavalry fights- Ts'in's supreme effort for conquest of China.

CHAPTER XXVII

FOREIGN BLOOD

Resume of Chinese historical development--General lines of Chinese advance--Methods of Chinese colonization--Equal pedigree claims of half-Chinese states--Tsin and Ts'i were even more ancient than orthodox China--Degree of foreignness in Ts'u-Ts'u native words and music--Ts'u peculiarities-Succession laws in Ts'u and Lu compared--Further evidence of Ts'u's foreign ways--Beards-- Titles, posthumous and other--Ts'u admits her own savagery--Ts'u's claim to the Nine Tripods--Ts'u and the Chou rites--Ts'u's gradual civilization--Confucius' admiration of Ts'u--Confucius' style in speaking of barbarians--Distinction between "beat" and "battle"-- German distinctions of rank compared with Chinese--The historical honour of "naming"--Vagueness of testimony and the way to test evidence.

CHAPTER XXVIII

BARBARIANS

The state of Wu--First Chinese princely emigrants adopted barbarian usages--The Jungle country and Wu--Wu's way of doing the hair and Wu's confession of barbarism--Federal China uses Wu against Ts'u--Wu the same language and manners as Yueh--Native Wu words--Wu's ignorance of war--Wu's early isolation--Ts'i enters into marriage relations with Wu--Mencius objects retrospectively-- Wu ruling caste--The Wu language--Succession laws of Wu--A Wu prince's views on the soul--Confucius' views on ghosts--Ki-chah's intimacy with orthodox statesmen--Rumours of Early Japan--Japan and Wu tattooing customs alike--Japanese traditions of a connection with Wu--Dangers of etymological guess-work--Doubts about racial matters in Wu--Small value of Japanese history and tradition--General conclusions.

CHAPTER XXIX

CURIOUS CUSTOMS

Small size of ancient China--Description of ancient nucleus and surrounding barbarians--Amount of foreign element in each vassal state--Policy of the Ts'i and Lu administrations--The savage tribes of the eastern coasts--Persistency of some down to 970 A.D.--Ts'in's unliterary quality--Her human sacrifices--Her Turkish blood--Late influence of the Emperors over Ts'in--Ts'in's gradual civilization--Ki-chah on Ts'in music--Ts'u treats Ts'in as barbarian still in 361 B.C.--Ts'in's isolation previous to 326 B.C.--Tartar rule of succession at one time in Ts'in--Yiieh's barbarism--Its able king--Native name--Mushroom existence as a power--The various branches of the Yiieh race in Foochow, W&chow, and Tonquin--Wu and Yiieh spoke the same language--Ruling caste of Wu--Stern military discipline in Wu and Yiieh--Neither state proved to have had human sacrifices--Crawling customs--Ancient Chinese descent of rulers--Yiieh's later capital in the German sphere--Her power always marine.

CHAPTER XXX

LITERARY RELATIONS

Literary relations between vassal states--Confucius set the ball of philosophy a-rolling--The fourfold "Bible" of China--Odes were generally known by heart--Comparison with President Kruger and his texts--Quotations from Odes and Book enable us to fix dates--Books were heavy weights in those days--People trusted to memory--The Rites more exclusively understood by the ruling classes-- Comparison with Johnsonian wits--Instances cited, with side proofs--History and Classics corroborate each other-Evidences-- Confucius' ancestor composes odes--Political song by the children of Tsin--Another still-existing ode in reference to the Second Protector--Ts'u's early literary knowledge--General knowledge of Odes and History--Ignorance of Ts'in-Ts'in ancient documents the only ones now remaining--First definite notion of abolishing the feudal system--The pivot point 403 B.C.--Ts'in's conquests in north, south, east, and west--The First August Emperor's travels-- Lao-tsz's Taoist philosophy becomes fashionable--Ts'in's hatred of orthodox literature, and of the Odes and Book in particular--The Book of Changes escapes his hatred--Revolutionary decree of the First August Emperor-Lost annals of all feudal states but Ts'in-- Learned Tartars of Tsin-Confucius used Tsin annals too--Origin of the name Shi-ki, or "Historical Annals"--Further evidence of lost histories--Curious name for Ts'u Annals--Ts'u poetry- Ts'u's knowledge of past history--The term "Springs and Autumns"-- Baldness of early Chinese annals.

CHAPTER XXXI

ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE

Whence did the Chinese come?--All men of equal age and ancestry-- Records make civilization and nobility--Evidences of antiquity-- China and the West totally unknown to each other in ancient times-- Tartars the connecting link--Though tamed by religion they are not much changed now--Traders then, as now, but no through travellers--Chinese probably in China for myriads of years before their records began--Tonic peculiarities of all tribes near China except the Tartars--Chinese followed lines of least resistance-- Tartars driven back, but difficult to absorb--So with Coreans and Japanese-Indo-China not so favourable for Chinese absorption-- Records decided the direction taken by culture--Southern half- Chinese have equal claims with orthodox Chinese--Traditions of ancient emperors in north, coast, and south parts--Suggestions as to how the most ancient Chinese spread themselves--No hint of immigration from anywhere--The old suggestion of immigration from the Tarim Valley and Babylonia--Suggested compromise with Western religious views--Creation and Nature--Compromise with the supernatural and imaginative--Summing up.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE CALENDAR

The Chinese calendar--Confucius and eclipses--Proclaiming the new moon--Celestial observations in different states--Chinese year is luni-Solar--Difficulty with the exact length of a moon--Ingenious devices for bringing the solar and lunar years, the seasons, solstices, and equinoxes into harmony with agricultural needs--The sixty-year cycle--Various reforms of the calendar, and various changes in the month beginning the year--Effect of calendar changes on Confucius' birthday--All is evidence in favour of accuracy of the Chinese records.

CHAPTER XXXIII

NAMES

The difficulty of proper names--Instances-Clans and detached families--Surnames and personal names--Strange personal appellations--Interchange of names by all states--Eunuchs and priests-Minute rules about "naming" individuals--Confucius conveys praise or censure by "naming" persons--The principles upon which several names are applied to one person--Tabu-Instances, and Roman parallel--The Duke of Chou virtual founder of posthumous name system--Dying king and posthumous choice of name--Incestuous marriages in own clan--Hushing up incest in high places-- Complication of names connected--Bearing of names upon the political events connected therewith.

CHAPTER XXXIV

EUNUCHS, HUMAN SACRIFICES, FOOD

Eunuchs and their origin--criminals with feet chopped off as keepers--Noseless criminals for isolated picket duty--The branded were gate-keepers--Eunuchs for the harem--"Purified men"-- Comparative antiquity of Persia and China--Eunuchs in Tsin--Ts'i eunuchs and Confucius--Eunuchs in Wu--Ts'u's uses for eunuchs-- Eunuch intrigues in connection with the First August Emperor--The First Emperor's putative father--His works--Eunuch witnesses assassination of Second August Emperor--General employ of eunuchs in China--Human sacrifices in Ts'in and Ts'u: also in Ts'i--Doubts as to its existence in orthodox China--Han Emperor's prohibition-- No fruit wine in ancient China--Spirits universal--Vice around ancient China rather than in it--Instances of heavy drinking in Ts'i and Ts'u--Tsin drinking--Confucius and liquor--Drinking in Ts'in--Ancient Chinese were meat-eaters--Horse-flesh and Tartars-- Horse-liver in Prussia--Anecdote of Duke Muh and the hippophagi-- Bears' paws as food--Elephants in Ts'u--Dogs as food.

CHAPTER XXXV

KNOWLEDGE OF THE WEST

The Emperor Muh's voyages to the West in 984 B.C.--The question of destroyed state annals-Exaggerated importance of the expedition, even if facts true--King Muh's father was killed in a similar expedition--Discovery of the Bamboo Books of 299 B.C. in 281 A.D.-- Imaginary interpretations put upon King Muh's expedition by European critics--The Queen of Sheba--Professor Chavannes attributes the travels of Duke Muh of Ts'in 650 B.C.--Description of first journey--Along the great road to Lob Nor-Modern evidence that he got as far as Urumtsi--Six hundred days, or 12,000 miles-- Specific evidence as to distance travelled each day--Various Tartar incidents of the journey--The Emperor's infatuation on the second journey--Lieh-tsz, the Taoist philosopher, on the Emperor Muh's travels--Arguments qualifying M. Chavannes' view that Duke Muh, and not the Emperor Muh, undertook the journeys.

CHAPTER XXXVI

ANCIENT JAPAN

Wu kingdom--Name begins 585 B.C.--This is the year Japanese "history" begins--The first king and his four sons--Prince Ki- chah--War with Ts'u and sacking of its capital--King Fu-ch'ai and his wars against Yiieh--Offered an asylum in Chusan--Suicide of Fu-ch'ai--Escape of his family across the seas to Japan--China knew nothing of Japan, even if Wu did--Story reduced to its true proportions--Traces of prehistoric men in Japan--Possible movements of original inhabitants--Existing evidence better than none at all--East from Ningpo must be Japan--Like early Greeks and Egyptian colonists--Natural impulses to emigration--Refugees from China compared to Will Adams--Natural desire to improve pedigrees-- No shame to Japan's ruling caste to hail from China--European comparisons--How the Japanese manufactured their past history-- Imagination must be kept separate from evidence.

CHAPTER XXXVII

ETHICS

Peculiar customs--Formalities of surrender--A number of instances of succession rules--Status of wives-Cases where the Emperor himself breaks the rules--Instances of irregular succession in various states--Customs of war--Cutting off the left ear as trophy--Rewards for heads--Principles of facing north and south-- Turning towards Mecca--Left and Right princes--Modern instances of official seating--North and south facing houses--Chivalrous rules about mourning--Funeral missions--The feudal yearnings of Confucius explained--Respect even of barbarians for mourning--Many other quaint instances of funeral and mourning rules--Promises made to a dying non compos of no avail--Mencius and the diplomatists.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

WOMEN AND MORALS

Rights of women in ancient China--The legal rule and the actual fact--Instances of irregularity in female status, both in ancient and modern China--Instances of incest and irregular marriage even in orthodox states-Women, once married, not to come back--The much-married Second Protector--Hun and Turk customs about taking over Wives--Clan marriages of doubtful legality--Succession rules-- Ts'u irregularities and caprice--Elder brothers by inferior wives--Paranymphs, or under-studies of the wife--Women always under some man's power--Incestuous fathers--Lex Julia introduced into Yiieh by its vengeful King--The evil morals of the Shanghai-Ningpo region of ancient Yiieh--No prostitution in ancient China, except perhaps in Ts'i--No infanticide--Incest and names.

CHAPTER XXXIX

GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

Orthodox China compared with orthodox Greece--Our persistent "traditions" about the Tower of Babel and the Tarim Valley-Wu, Yiieh, and ancient traditions--The "Tribute of Yii" says nothing of Western origin of Chinese--No ancient knowledge of the West, nor of South China--The Blackwater River and the Emperor Muh--The "Tribute of Yii" says nothing of the supposed Western emigration of the Chinese--Some traditions of Chinese migrations from the south--Traditions of enfeoffment of vassals in Corea, about 1122 B.C.--Knowledge of China as defined by the First Protector, and as visited by the Second in the seventh century B.C.--Evidence of the Emperor's limited knowledge of China in 670 B.C.--Yiieh first appears in 536 B.C.--Tsin never saw the sea till 589 B.C.--Ts'i's ignorance of the south-u, Yiieh, and Ts'u all purely Yang-tsz riverine states--Ts'u alone knew the south--CHENG's ignorance of the south--Ts'u and orthodox China of the same ancient stock-- Tsin's ignorance of Central China--Tsin defines Chinese limits for Ts'u--Ancient orthodox nucleus was the "Central State," a name still employed to mean "China" as a whole.

CHAPTER XL

TOMBS AND REMAINS.

Evidences still remaining in the shape of the tombs of great historical personages--Elephants used to work at the Wu tombs-- Royal Ts'u tomb desecrated--Relics of 1122 B.C. found in Lu--Ts'in destitute of relics--Confucius and the Duke of Chou's relics--Each generation of Chinese sees and doubts not of its own antiquities-- No reason for European scepticism--Native critics know much more than we do.

CHAPTER XLI

THE TARTARS

From ancient times Tartars intimately connected with the Chinese-- How the Chou state had to migrate to avoid the Tartars--Chou ancestors had originally fled from China to the Tartars--Chou family's subsequent dealings with the Tartars--How Ts'in replaced Chou as the semi-Tartar or westernmost state of China--Tartars for many centuries in possession of Yellow River north bank--Once extended to Kiang Su province--Confucius' knowledge of the Tartars--Tartar attacks in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.-- Causes of the Protector system--Incompetence of Emperors to stave off Tartar attacks--Ts'i's extensive relations with the Tartars-- The Second Protector and his adviser--Rude treatment of the Second Protector by the orthodox Chinese states--Ts'u's bluff hospitality-- Second Protector had to check Chinese instead of Tartar ambitions-- Tsin's Tartar admixture--Comparison with Roman adventurers--How Tartars have in modern times ruled China and Asia.

CHAPTER XLII

MUSIC

Music in Chinese life--Confucius' present dwelling and the ancient instruments therein--Comparison with Wagner's Ring--Musicians as corrupters of simplicity--Tsin and Ts'in dialects--Music as an adjunct to government--Confucius' views on music--Ts'u music--The effect of music on the mind--Rewards in the shape of right to play certain tunes--The Emperor Muh's music--Music coupled with soothsaying--Lao-tsz on benevolence and justice-Playing the banjo-- Music at sacrifice or worship--Modern abstinence from music-- First August Emperor compared with Saul and his music.

CHAPTER XLIII

WEALTH, SPORTS, ETC.

Ancient and modern ideas of wealth--Ts'in and Ts'u valuables-- Furniture--Mats and divans--Tea and wine--Tartar couches--Inlaid ivory sofas--State treasure--Wealth in horses-Silks and furs in Tsin and Ts'u--Women as property--Pearls and jade as portable property--A Chinese Crocesus--Escape by sea to Shan Tung--Gold as money--Bribery with "metal"--Iron and gold mines in Wu--Fine Wu swords--"Cash" as coins--Ts'u money--Weight of a gold piece--Cooks important personages--"Meat-eaters" meant the ruling classes-- Silk universal--Poor wore hemp--No cotton--Ts'in custom of wearing swords--Jade marks of rank--Sports--Egret fights-war hunts--Horses in Peking plain--Hunting chariots and "shaft-gates"--Yamen, ya, and Turkish encampments--Cockfighting-Lifting heavy weights--Ball games--Women at looms--Little said of family life-- No homely pastimes--No squeezed feet--Helplessness of the people under their taskmasters.

CHAPTER XLIV

CONFUCIUS

Confucius--His merits--His imperial and ducal origin--Migration of his family from Sung to Lu--His warrior father--His quaint childish fancies--Lu officer foretells his greatness--His first pupils--His appointment as steward--His visit to Laos--No reason for mentioning this visit in history--Neither philosopher yet "great"--Lu in a quandary--Helplessness of the Emperor under Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u pressure--Yen-tsz sees Confucius, and discusses Ts'in's greatness--Studying the Rites at Lu-Date of Confucius' visit to Lao-tsz--Struggle of great families for popular rights-- Confucius offers services to Ts'i--Examines Rites of Hia--Yen- tsz's jealousy of Confucius--Confucius back in Lu--His literary labours--His official posts and his views on law--Ts'i overborne by Wu--Ts'i's attempt at assassination defeated by Confucius' diplomacy--Treaty between Lu and Ts'i--Civil war in Lu--Confucius Premier--Successful administration--Confucius leaves Lu in disgust--His treatment in Wei state--Leaves Wei, but returns to old friend there--Confucius' suspicious visit to a lady--Leaves disgusted via Sung for Ts'ao--Visits to Cheng (mistaken for Tsz-ch'an) and Ch'en--A prey to rival ambitions--Episode of the Manchurian bustard--Revisits Wei--Arrested; solemn promise broken-- Base behaviour--Starts to visit Tsin--Confucius' enemy repents-- Arrangements to get Confucius back to Lu--He first visits Ts'ai- Excursion to Ts'u--Three years more in Ts'ai--T-s'u's literary status--Competition amongst princes for Confucius' services-- Confucius and war--Reaches Lu after fourteen years of wandering-- Confucius' travels the same as the Second Protector's--Consoles himself with literature--Popularizes history-Edits the Changes and the Odes--His history--The Tso Chwan.

CHAPTER XLV

CONFUCIUS AND LAO-TSZ

Historians had to be careful--Reverence for rulers--Confucius' feelings--His failings--All on the surface--His concealments--His artful censures--Sanctity of the classes--Confucius' meannesses and indiscretions--Allowances must be made for time and place-- Tsz-ch'an quite as good a man--Reasons for permanency of Confucian system--Reasons for Lao-tsz not being mentioned--All Chinese statesman-philosophers were, or tried to be, practical--First mention of Lao-tsz's new Taoism--Lao-tsz well known 400 B.C.-- State intercourse before Confucius' time--Philosophy taught by word of mouth--Cheapening of books accounts for spread of knowledge--Description of ancient books--Confucius was young when he visited Lao-tsz--Lao-t&s book in ancient character--Meagreness of details evidence of rigid truth--Obscurity of the Emperor-- Difficult questions of fact answered--How Lao-tsz was visited-- Proofs of genuineness--Originals must be studied by foreign critics.

CHAPTER XLVI

ORACLES AND OMENS

Consulting the oracles--The Changes, or Book of Diagrams--Ts'u and Ts'i as instructors of Chou--Tortoise augury--Consulting ancestors--Heaven's decree--Heaven's spontaneous, manifestations of favour--Astrology--Prognostication--Text of the Changes survives unmutilated--Ts'in consults oracles about moving capital-- Ts'in's greatness foretold--Omens--Dies n&s--Oracles in the battlefield--Prophecy in Tsin, Ts'u, and Lu--Shuh Hiang's scepticism--Tsz-ch'an and the omen of fighting snakes--Children sing prophetic songs--"Passing on" threatened evil--Tortoise oracles in Ts'o and Wu--High status of diviners-"-Transferring" evil in Ts'u--Rivers as gods--Our own prophecies--Good faith and truth.

CHAPTER XLVII

RULERS AND PEOPLE

Personal character of wars--People's interests ignored--Instances-- Comparisons with the Golden Fleece and Naboth's vineyard--Second Protector avenges scurvy treatment--The halt, the maim, and the blind--Jephthah's rash vow-Divinity of kings--Ts'u more tyrannical than China--Responsibility of Chinese before Heaven--The King can do no wrong--Emperors reign under Heaven--Heaven in the confidence of rulers--Sacred person of kings--Distinction between official and private death--Double chivalry of a Tsin general--The gods and Tsz-ch'an's scepticism.

APPENDICES

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[For the illustration of the Wuchuan vase, and the inscription thereon, I am indebted to Dr. S. W. Bushell M.D., from whose work on "Chinese Art" (vol. i. p. 82) the plates (kindly lent by H.M.
Stationery Office) are taken. For the photograph of the Duke of "Propagating Holiness" (i.e. Confucius) I am indebted to the Jesuit Fathers of Shanghai, and to Father Tschepe, who obtained it from his Grace.]

1. Tripod of the Chou dynasty, date 8l2 B.C. In 1565 A.D. it was placed by the owner for safety in a temple on Silver Island (near Chinkiang), where it may be seen now.

Taken (by kind permission of the author) from Dr. S. W. Bushell's "Chinese Art," vol. i. p. 82. Frontispiece

2. K'ung Ling-i, the hereditary Yen-sheng Kung, or "Propagating Holiness Duke"; 76th in descent from K'ung K'iu, alias K'ung Chung-ni, the original philosopher, 551-479 B.C.

This portrait was presented to "the priest P'eng" (Father Tschepe, S.J.), on the occasion of his visit last autumn (7th moon, 33rd year). To face page 81

3. Original inscription on the Sacrificial Tripod, together with (1) transcription in modern Chinese character (to the right), and (2) an account of its history (to the left). Taken from Dr.
Bushell's "Chinese Art".

[Illustration: MAP]

LIST OF MAPS

1. The other small maps will explain each section more in detail.

2. This map is intended to give a general idea of the extremely limited area of the empire in the sixth century B.C.

3. Like the modern Sultan, the Chow Emperor was gradually driven into a corner, surrounded by Bulgarias, Servias, Egypts, and other countries once under his effective rule; and, like the Sultan, the Chou Emperor remained spiritual head for many centuries after the practical dismemberment of his empire.

4. Until quite recent times, the true source of the Yang-tsz had been unknown to the Chinese, and the River Min has been, and even still is, considered to be the chief head-water. It flows through the rich country of ancient Shuh, now the administrative centre of Sz Ch'wan province.

5. Even now the Yang-tsz River is practically the only great route from China into Sz Ch'wan, and in ancient times the rapids were probably not negotiable by large craft.

6. The land routes into Sz Ch'wan from the head-waters of the Wei and Ilan Rivers are all extremely precipitous. It was not until 200 B.C. that any military road was attempted.

7. Ancient China meant the Yellow River. Then the Han and the Hwai. Next the Yang-tsz. Last the Sz Ch'wan tributaries of the Yang-tsz. It was through the lakes and rivers south of the Yang- tsz that China at last colonized the south.

CHAPTER I

OPENING SCENES

The year 842 B.C. may be considered the first accurate date in Chinese history, and in this year the Emperor had to flee from his capital on account of popular dissatisfaction with his tyrannical ways: he betook himself northward to an outlying settlement on the Tartar frontier, and the charge of imperial affairs was taken over by a regency or duumvirate.

At this time the confederation of cultured princes called China-- or, to use their own term, the Central Kingdom--was a very different region from the huge mass of territory familiar to us under those names at the present day. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that civilized China, even at that comparatively advanced period, consisted of little more than the modern province of Ho Nan. All outside this flat and comparatively riverless region inhabited by the "orthodox" was more or less barbaric, and such civilization as it possessed was entirely the work of Chinese colonists, adventurers, or grantees of fiefs in partibus infidelium (so to speak). Into matters of still earlier ancient history we may enter more deeply in another chapter, but for the present we simply take China as it was when definite chronology begins.

The third of the great dynasties which had ruled over this limited China had, in 842 B.C., already been on the imperial throne for practically three hundred years, and, following the custom of its predecessors, it had parcelled out all the land under its sway to vassal princes who were, subject to the general imperial law and custom, or ritual, together with the homage and tribute duty prescribed thereunder, all practically absolute in their own domains. Roughly speaking, those smaller fiefs may be said to have corresponded in size with the walled-city and surrounding district of our own times, so well known under the name of hien.
About a dozen of the larger fiefs had been originally granted to the blood relations of the dynastic founder in or after 1122 B.C.; but not exclusively so, for it seems to have been a point of honour, or of religious scruple, not to "cut off the sacrifices" from ruined or disgraced reigning families, unless the attendant circumstances were very gross; and so it came to pass that successive dynasties would strain a point in order to keep up the spiritual memory of decayed or rival houses.

Thus, at the time of which we speak (842 B.C.), about ten of the dozen or so of larger vassal princes were either of the same clan as the Emperor himself, or were descended from remoter branches of that clan before it secured the imperial throne; or, again, were descended from ministers and statesmen who had assisted the founder to obtain empire; whilst the two or three remaining great vassals were lineal representatives of previous dynasties, or of their great ministers, keeping up the honour and the sacrifices of bygone historical personages. As for the minor fiefs, numbering somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred, these play no part in political history, except as this or that one of them may have been thrust prominently forward for a moment as a pawn in the game of ambition played by the greater vassals. Nominally the Emperor was direct suzerain lord of all vassals, great or small; but in practice the greater vassal princes seem to have been what in the Norman feudal system were called "mesne lords"; that is, each one was surrounded by his own group of minor ruling lords, who, in turn, naturally clung for protection to that powerful magnate who was most immediately accessible in case of need; thus vassal rulers might be indefinitely multiplied, and there is some vagueness as to their numbers.

Just as the oldest civilizations of the West concentrated themselves along the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile, so the most ancient Chinese civilization is found concentrated along the south bank of the Yellow River. The configuration of the land as shown on a modern map assists us to understand how the industrious cultivators and weavers, finding the flat and so-called loess territory too confined for their ever-increasing numbers, threw out colonies wherever attraction offered, and wherever the riverine systems gave them easy access; whether by boat and raft; or whether--as seems more probable, owing to the scanty mention of boat-travel--by simply following the low levels sought by the streams, and tilling on their way such pasturages as they found by the river-sides. When it is said that the earliest Chinese we know of clung to the Yellow River bed, it must be remembered that "the River" (as they call it simply) turned sharp to the north at a point in Ho Nan province very far to the west of its present northerly course, near a city marked in the modern maps as Jung-t&h, in lat. 35 degrees N., long, 114 degrees E., or thereabouts; moreover, its course further north lay considerably to the westward of the present Grand Canal, taking possession now of the bed of the Wei River, now of that of the Chang River, according to whether we regard it before or after the year 602 B.C.; but always entering the Gulf near modern Tientsin. Hence we need not be surprised to find that the Conqueror or Assertor of the dynasty had conferred upon a staunch adviser, of alien origin, and upon two of his most trusty relatives, the three distant fiefs which commanded both sides of the Yellow River mouth, at that time near the modern Tientsin. There was no Canal in those days, and the river which runs past Confucius' birth-place, and now goes towards feeding the Grand Canal, had then a free course south-east towards the lakes in Kiang Su province to the north of Nanking. It will be noticed that quite a network of tributary rivers take their rise in Ho Nan province, and trend in an easterly direction towards the intricate Hwai River system. The River Hwai, which has a great history in the course of Chinese development, was in quite recent times taken possession of by the Yellow River for some years, and since then the Grand Canal and the lakes between them have so impeded its natural course that it may be said to have no natural delta at all; to be dissipated in a dedalus of salt flats, irrigation channels, and marshes: hence it is not so obvious to us now why the whole coast-line was at the period we are now describing, when there was no Grand Canal, quite beyond the reach of Chinese colonization from the Yellow River valley: this was only possible in two directions--firstly to the south, by way of the numerous ramifications of the Han River, which now, as then, joins the Yang-tsz Kiang at Hankow; and secondly to the south- east, by way of the equally numerous ramifications of the Hwai River, which entered the sea in lat. 34o N. No easy emigration to the westward or south-westward was possible in those comparatively roadless days, for not a single river pointed out the obvious way to would-be colonists.

Accustomed as we now are to regard China as one vast homogeneous whole, approachable to us easily from the sea, it is not easy for us to understand the historical lines of expansion without these preliminary explanations. Corea and Japan were totally unknown even by name, and even Liao Tung, or "East of the River Liao," which was then inhabited by Corean tribes, was, if known by tradition at all, certainly only in communication with the remote Chinese colony, or vassal state, in possession of the Peking plain: on the other hand, this vassal state itself (if it had records of its own at all), for the three centuries previous to 842 B.C., had no political relations with the federated Chinese princes, and nothing is known of its internal doings, or of its immediate relations (if any) with Manchus and Coreans. The whole coast-line of Shan Tung was in the hands of various tribes of "Eastern Barbarians." True, a number of Chinese vassal rulers held petty fiefs to the south and the east of the two highly civilized principalities already described as being in possession of the Lower Yellow River; but the originally orthodox rulers of these petty colonies are distinctly stated to have partly followed barbarian usage, even despite their own imperial clan origin, and to have paid court to these two greater vassals as mesne lords, instead of direct to the Emperor. South of these, again, came the Hwai group of Eastern barbarians in possession of the Lower Hwai valley, and the various quite unknown tribes of Eastern barbarians occupying the marshy salt flats and shore accretions on the Kiang Su coast right down to the River Yang-tsz mouth.

As we shall see, a century or two later than 842 B.C. powerful semi-Chinese states began to assert themselves against the federated orthodox Chinese princes lying to their north; but, when dated history first opens, Central China knew nothing whatever of any part of the vast region lying to the south of the Yang-tsz; nothing whatever of what we now call Yiin Nan and Sz Ch'wan, not to say of the Indian and Tibetan dominions lying beyond them; fortiori nothing of Formosa, Hainan, Cochin-China, Tonquin, Burma, Siam, or the various Hindoo trading colonies advancing from the South Sea Islands northwards along the Indo-Chinese coasts; nothing whatever of Tsaidam, the Tarim Valley, the Desert, the Persian civilization, Turkestan, Kashgaria, Tartary, or Siberia.

It is, and will here be made, quite clear that the whole of the left bank of the Yellow River was in possession of various Turkish and Tartar-Tibetan tribes. The only exception is that the south- west corner of Shan Si province, notably the territory enclosed between the Yellow River and the River F&n (which, running from the north, bisects Shan Si province and enters the Yellow River about lat. 35" 30' N., long. 110 degrees 30' E.) was colonized by a branch of the imperial family quite capable of holding its own against the Tartars; in fact, the valley of this river as far north as P'ing-yang Fu had been in semi-mythical times (2300 B.C.) the imperial residence. It will be noticed that the River Wei joins the Yellow River on its right bank, just opposite the point where this latter, flowing from the north, bends eastwards, the Wei itself flowing from the west. This Wei Valley (including the sub- valleys of its north-bank tributaries) was also in 842 B.C.
colonized by an ancient Chinese family--not of imperial extraction so far as the reigning house was concerned--which, by adopting Tartar, or perhaps Tartar--Tibetan, manners, had for many generations succeeded in acquiring a predominant influence in that region. Assuming that--which is not at all improbable--the nomad horsemen in unchallenged possession of the whole desert and Tartar expanse had at any time, as a consequence of their raids in directions away from China westward, brought to China any new ideas, new commercial objects, or new religious notions, these novelties must almost necessarily have filtered through this semi- Chinese half-barbarous state in possession of the Wei Valley, or through other of their Tartar kinsmen periodically engaged in raiding the settled Chinese cultivators farther east, along the line of what is now the Great Wall, and the northern parts of Shan Si and Chih Li provinces.

We shall allude in a more convenient place and chapter to specific traditions touching the supposed journeys about 990 B.C. of a Chinese Emperor to Turkestan; the alleged missions from Tonquin to a still earlier Chinese Emperor or Regent; and the pretended colonization of Corea by an aggrieved Chinese noble-all three events some centuries earlier than the opening period of dated history of which we now specially speak. For the present we ignore them, as, even if true, these events have had, and have now, no specific or definite influence whatever on the question of Chinese political development as expounded here. It seems certain that for many centuries previous to 842 B.C. the ruling and the literary Chinese had known of the existence of at least the Lower Yang-tsz and its three mouths (the Shanghai mouth and the Hangchow mouth have ceased long ago to exist at all): they also seem to have heard in a vague way of "moving sands" beyond the great northerly bend of the Yellow River in Tartarland. It is not even impossible that the persistent traditions of two of their very ancient Emperors having been buried south of the Yang-tsz--one near the modern coast treaty-port of Ningpo, the other near the modern riverine treaty-port of Ch'ang-sha--may be true; for nothing is more likely than that they both met their death whilst exploring the tributaries of the mysterious Yang-tsz Kiang lying to their south; because the father of the adventurous Emperor who is supposed to have explored Tartary in ggo B.C. certainly lost his life in attempting to explore the region of Hankow, as will be explained in due course.

All this, however, is matter of side issue. The main point we wish to insist upon, by way of introduction, in endeavouring to give our readers an intelligible notion of early Chinese development, is that Chinese beginnings were like any other great nation's beginnings--like, for instance, the Greek beginnings; these were centred at first round an extremely petty area, which, gradually expanding, threw out its tentacles and branches, and led to the final inclusion of the mysterious Danube, the gloomy Russian plain, the Tin Islands, Ultima Thule, and the Atlantic coasts into one fairly harmonious Graeco-Roman civilization. Or it may be compared to the development of the petty Anglo-Saxon settlements and kingdoms and sub-kingdoms, and their gradual political absorption of the surrounding Celts. In any case it may be said that there is nothing startlingly new about it; it followed a normal course.

CHAPTER II

SHIFTING SCENES

Having now seen how the Chinese people, taking advantage of the material and moral growth naturally following upon a settled industrial existence, and above all upon the exclusive possession of a written character, gradually imposed themselves as rulers upon the ignorant tribes around them, let us see to what families these Chinese emigrant adventurers or colonial satraps belonged.
To begin with the semi-Tartar power in the River Wei Valley-- destined six hundred years later to conquer the whole of China as we know it to-day--the ruling caste claimed descent from the most ancient (and of course partly mythological) Emperors of China; but for over a thousand years previous to 842 B.C. this remote branch of the Chinese race had become scattered and almost lost amongst the Tartars. However, a generation or two before our opening period, one of these princes had served the then ruling imperial dynasty as a sort of guardian to the western frontier, as a rearer of horses for the metropolitan stud, and perhaps even as a guide on the occasion of imperial expeditions into Tartarland. The successor of the Emperor who was driven from his capital in 842 B.C. about twenty years later employed this western satrap to chastise the Tartar nomads whose revolt had in part led to the imperial flight. After suffering some disasters, the conductors of this series of expeditions were at last successful, and in 815 B.C. the title of "Warden of the Western Marches" was officially conferred on the ruler for the time being of this western state, who in 777 B.C. had the further honour of seeing one of his daughters married to the Emperor himself. This political move on the part of the Emperor was unwise, for it led indirectly to the Tartars, who were frequently engaged in war with the Warden, interfering in the quarrels about the imperial succession, in which question the Tartars naturally thought they had a right to interfere in the interests of their own people. The upshot of it was that in 771 B.C. the Emperor was killed by the Tartars in battle, and it was only by securing the military assistance of the semi-Tartar Warden of the Marches that the imperial dynasty was saved. As it was, the Emperor's capital was permanently moved east from the immediate neighbourhood of what we call Si-ngan Fu in Shen Si province to the immediate neighbourhood of Ho-nan Fu in the modern Ho Nan province; and as a reward for his services the Warden was granted nearly the whole of the original imperial patrimony west of the Yellow River bend and on both sides of the Wei Valley. This was also in the year 771 B.C., and this is really one of the great pivot-points in Chinese history, of equal weight with the almost contemporaneous founding of Rome, and the gradual substitution of a Roman centre for a Greek centre in the development and civilization of the Far West. The new capital was not, however, a new city. Shortly after the imperial dynasty gained the possession of China in 1122 B.C., it had been surveyed, and some of the regalia had been taken thither; this, with a view of making it one of the capitals at least, if not the sole capital.

As Chinese names sound uncouth to our Western ears, and will, therefore, in these introductory chapters only be used sparingly and gradually, it becomes correspondingly difficult to explain historical phenomena adequately whilst endeavouring to avoid as far as possible the use of such unintelligible names: it will be well, then, to sum up the situation, and even repeat a little, so that the reader may assimilate the main points without fatigue or repulsion. The reigning dynasty of Chou had secured the adhesion of the thousand or more of Chinese vassal princes in 1122 B.C., and had in other words "conquered" China by invitation, much in the same way, and for very much the same general reasons, that William III. had' accepted the conquest of the British Isles; that is to say, because the people were dissatisfied with their legitimate ruler and his house. But, before this conquest, the vassal princes of Chou had occupied practically the same territory, and had stood in the same relation to the imperial dynasty subsequently ousted by them in 1122, that the Wardens of the Marches occupied and stood in when the imperial house of Chou in turn fled east in 771 B.C. The Shang dynasty thus ousted by the Chou princes in 1122, had for like misgovernment driven out the Hia dynasty in 1766 B.C. Thus, at the time when the Wardens of the Marches (whose real territorial title was Princes of Ts'in) practically put the imperial power into commission in 771 B.C., the two old-fashioned dynasties of Shang and Chou had already ruled patriarchally for almost exactly one thousand years, and nothing of either a very startling, or a very definite, character had taken place at all within the comparatively narrow area described in our first chapter.

From this date of 771 B.C., and for five hundred years more down to 250 B.C., when the Chou dynasty was extinguished, the rule of the feudal Emperors of China was almost purely nominal, and except in so far as this or that powerful vassal made use of the moral, and even occasionally of the military power of the metropolitan district when it suited his purpose, the imperial ruler was chiefly exercised in matters of form and ritual; for under all three patriarchal dynasties it was on form and ritual that the idea of government had always been based. Of course the other powerful satraps--especially the more distant ones, those not bearing the imperial clan-name, and those more or less tinged with barbarian usages--learning by degrees what a helpless and powerless personage the Emperor had now become, lost no time in turning the novel situation to their own advantage: it is consequently now that begins the "tyrant period," or the period of the "Five Dictators," as the Chinese historians loosely term it: that is to say, the period during which each satrap who had the power to do so took the lead of the satrap body in general, and gave out that he was restoring the imperial prestige, representing the Emperor's majesty, carrying out the behests of reason, compelling the other vassals to do their duty, keeping up the legitimist sacrifices, and so on. In other words, the population of China had grown so enormously, both by peaceful in-breeding and by imperceptible absorption of kindred races, that more elbow-room was needed; more freedom from the shackles of ritual, rank, and feudal caste; more independence, and more liberty to take advantage of local or changed traditions. Besides all this, the art of writing, though still clumsy, expensive, and confined in its higher and literary aspects to the governing classes, had recently become simplified and improved; the salt trade, iron trade, fish industry, silk industry, grain trade, and art of usury had spread from one state to the other, and had developed: though the land roads were bad or non-existent, there were great numbers of itinerant dealers in cattle and army provisions. In a word, material civilization had made great strides during the thousand years of patriarchal rule immediately preceding the critical period comprised between the year 842 B.C. and the year 771 B.C.
The voices of the advocates and the preachers of ancient patriarchal virtues were as of men crying in a wilderness of substantial prosperity and manly ambition. Thus political and natural forces combined with each other to prepare the way for a radical change, and this period of incipient revolution is precisely the period (722-480) treated of in Confucius' history, the first history of China--meagre though it be--which deals with definite human facts, instead of "beating the air" (as the Chinese say) with sermons and ritualistic exhortations.

CHAPTER III

THE NORTHERN POWERS

We have already alluded to a princely family, of the same clan- name as the Chou Emperor, which had settled in the southern part of modern Shan Si province, and had thus acted as a sort of buffer state to the imperial domain by keeping off from it the Tartar- Turk tribes in the north. This family was enfeoffed by the new Chou dynasty in 1106 B.C. to replace the extremely ancient princely house which had reigned there ever since the earliest Emperors ruled from that region (2300 B.C.), but which had resisted the Chou conquest, and had been exterminated. Nothing definite is known of what transpired in this principality subsequently to the infeoffment of 1106 B.C., and prior to the events of 771 B.C., at which latter date the ruling prince, hearing of the disaster to his kinsman the Emperor, went to meet that monarch's fugitive successor, and escorted him eastwards to his new capital. This metropolis had, as we have explained already, been marked out some 340 years before this, and had continued to be one of the chief spiritual and political centres in the imperial domain; but for some reason it had never before 771 B.C. been officially declared a capital, or at all events the capital. Confucius, in his history, does not mention at all the petty semi-Tartar state of which we are now speaking before 671 B.C., and all that we know of its doings during this century of time is that rival factions, family intrigues, and petty annexations at the cost of various Tartar tribes, and of small, but ancient, Chinese principalities, occupied most of its time. It must be repeated here, however, that, notwithstanding Tartar neighbours, the valley of the River Fen had been the seat of several of China's oldest semi-mythical emperors-possibly even of dynasties,-and at no time do the Tartars seem to have ever succeeded in ousting the Chinese from South Shan Si. The official name of the region after the Chou infeoffment of 1106 B.C. was the State of Tsin, and it was roughly divided off to the west from its less civilized colleague Ts'in by the Yellow River, on the right bank of which Tsin still possessed a number of towns. It is particularly difficult for Europeans to realize the sharp distinction in sound between these two names, the more especially because we have in the West no conception whatever of the effect of tone upon a syllable It may be explained, however, that the sonant initial and even-voiced tone in the one case, contrasted with the surd initial and the scaled tone in the other, involves to the Chinese mind a distinction quite as clear in all dialects as the European distinction in all languages between the two states of Prussia and Russia, or between the two peoples Swedes and Swiss: it is entirely the imperfection of our Western alphabet, not at all that of the spoken sounds or the ideographs, that is at fault.

The Yellow River, running from north to south, not only roughly separated from each other these two Tartar-Chinese buffer states in the north-west, but the same Yellow River, flowing east, and its tributary, the River Wei, also formed a rough boundary between the two states of Tsin and Ts'in (together) to the north, and the innumerable petty but ancient Chinese principalities surrounding the imperial domain to the south. These principalities or settlements were scattered about among the head-waters of the Han River and the Hwai River systems, and their manifest destiny, if they needed expansion, clearly drove them further southwards, following the courses of all these head-waters, towards the Yang- tsz Kiang. But, more than that, the Yellow River, after thus flowing east for several hundred miles, turned sharp north in long. 114o E., as already explained, and thence to the north-east formed a second rough boundary between Tsin and nearly all the remaining orthodox Chinese states. Tsin's chief task was thus to absorb into its administrative system all the Tartar raiders that ventured south to the Yellow River.

But there was a third northern state engaged in the task of keeping back the Tartar tribes, and in developing a civilization of its own-based largely, of course, upon Chinese principles, but modified so as to meet local exigencies. This was the state of Ts'i, enclosed between the Yellow River to the west and the sea to the east, but extending much farther north than the boundaries of modern Shan Tung province, if, indeed, the embouchure of the Yellow River, near modern Tientsin, did not form its northern boundary; but the promontory or peninsula, as well as all the coast, was still in the hands of "barbarian" tribes (now long since civilized and assimilated), of which for many centuries past no separate trace has remained. We have no means of judging now whether these "barbarians" were uncultured, close kinsmen of the orthodox Chinese; or remote kinsmen; or quite foreign. When the Chou principality received an invitation by acclamation to conquer and administer China in 1122, an obscure political worthy from these eastern parts placed his services as adviser and organizer at the command of the new Chou Emperor, in return for which important help he received the fief of Ts'i. Although obscure, this man traced his descent back to the times when (2300 B.C.) his ancestors received fiefs from the most ancient Emperors. From that time down to the year 1122 B.C., and onwards to the events of 771 B.C., nothing much beyond the fact of the Chou infeoffment is recorded; but after the Emperor had been killed by the Tartar- Tibetans, this state of Ts'i also began to grow restive; and the seventh century before Christ opens with the significant statement that "Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i, now begin to be powerful states." Of the three, Tsin alone bore the imperial Chou clan-name of Ki.

[Illustration: Map.

1. In 2200 B.C. the Yellow River was divided at the point where our map begins, and the main waters were conducted to the River Chang, which thus formed one river with it. But a secondary branch was conducted eastwards to the Rivers T'ah and Tsi (now, 1908, the Yellow River).

2. In 602 B.C. this secondary branch suddenly turned north, followed the line of the present (1908) Grand Canal, and joined the main branch, i.e. the River Chang.

3. The capitals of Ts'i and Lu are shown. The Yellow River divided Tsin from Ts'i, but Tartars harried the whole dividing line.]

North of the Yellow River, where it then entered the sea near the modern treaty-port of Tientsin, there was yet another great vassal state, called Yen, which had been given by the founders of the Chou dynasty to a very distinguished blood relative and faithful supporter: this noble prince has been immortalized in beautiful language on account of the rigid justice of his decisions given under the shade of an apple-tree: it was the practice in those days to render into popular song the chief events of the times, and it is not improbable, indeed, that this Saga literature was the only popular record of the past, until, as already hinted, after 827 B.C., writing became simplified and thus more diffused, instead of being confined to solemn manifestoes and commandments cast or carved on bronze or stone.

"Oh! woodman, spare that tree, Touch not a single bough, His wisdom lingers now."

The words, singularly like those of our own well-known song, are known to every Chinese school-boy, and with hundreds, even thousands, of other similar songs, which used to be daily quoted as precedents by the statesmen of that primitive period in their political intercourse with each other, were later pruned, purified, and collated by Confucius, until at last they received classical rank in the "Book of Odes" or the "Classic of Poetry," containing a mere tenth part of the old "Odes" as they used to be passed from mouth to ear.

Even less is known of the early days of Yen than is known of Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i; there is not even a vague tradition to suggest who ruled it, or what sort of a place it was, before the Chou prince was sent there; all that is anywhere recorded is that it was a very small, poor, and feeble region, dovetailed in between Tsin and Ts'i, and exposed north to the harassing attacks of savages and Coreans (i.e. tribes afterwards enumerated as forming part of Corea when the name of Corea became known). The mysterious region is only mentioned here at all on account of its distinguished origin, in order to show that the Chinese cultivators had from the very earliest times apparently succeeded in keeping the bulk of the Tartars to the left bank of the Yellow River all the way from the Desert to the sea; because later on (350 B.C.) Yen actually did become a powerful state; and finally, because if any very early notions concerning Corea and Japanese islands had ever crept vaguely into China at all, it must have been through this state of Yen, which was coterminous with Liao Tung and Manchuria. The great point to remember is, the extensive territory between the Great Wall and the Yellow River then lay almost entirely beyond the pale of ancient China, and it was only when Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Yen had to look elsewhere than to the Emperor for protection from Tartar inroads that the centre of political gravity was changed once and for ever from the centre of China to the north.

We know nothing of the precise causes which conduced to unusual Tartar activity at the dawn of Chinese true history: in the absence of any Tartar knowledge of writing, it seems impossible now that we ever can know it. Still less are we in a position to speculate profitably how far the movements on the Chinese frontier, in 800-600 B.C., may be connected with similar restlessness on the Persian and Greek frontiers, of which, again, we know nothing very illuminating or specific. It is certain that the Chinese had no conception of a Tartar empire, or of a coherent monarchy, under the vigorous dominion of a great military genius, until at least five centuries after the Tartars, killed a Chinese Emperor in battle as related (771 B.C.). It is even uncertain what were the main race distinctions of the nomad aggregations, loosely styled by us "Tartars," for the simple reason that the ambiguous Chinese terminology does not enable us to select a more specific word. Nevertheless, the Chinese do make certain distinctions; and, as what remains of aboriginal populations in the north, south, east, and west of China points strongly to the probability of populations in the main occupying the same sites that they did 3000 years ago (unless where specific facts point to a contrary conclusion), we may fairly assume that the distribution was then very much as now-beginning from the east, (1) Japanese, (2) Corean, (3) Tungusic, (4) Mongol-Turkish, (5) Turkish, (6) Turkish-Tibetan, and Mongol-Tibetan (or Mongol-Turkoid Tibetan), (7) Tibetan. The Chinese use four terms to express these relative quantities, which may be called X, Y, Z, and A. The term "X," pure and simple, never under any circumstances refers to any but Tibetans (of whom at this time the Chinese had no recorded knowledge whatever except by name); but "X + Y" also refers to tribes in Tibetan regions. The term "West Y" seems to mean Tibetan-Tartars, and the term "North Y" seems to mean Mongoloid- Tunguses. There is a third Y term, "Dog Y," evidently meaning Tartars of some kind, and not Tibetans of any sort. The term "Z" never refers to Tibetans, pure or mixed, but "Y + Z" loosely refers to Turks, Mongols, and Tunguses. The terms "Red Z", "White Z," and "North Z" seem to indicate Turks; and what is more, these colour distinctions--probably of clothing or head-gear-continue to quite modern times, and always in connection with Turks or Mongol- Turks. The fourth term "A" never occurs before the third century before Christ, and refers to all Tartars, Coreans, etc.; but not to Tibetans: it need not, therefore, be discussed at present. The modern province of Sz Ch'wan was absolutely unknown even by name; but several centuries later, as we shall shortly see, it turned out to be a state of considerable magnitude, with quite a little imperial history of its own: probably it was with this unknown state that the bulk of the Tibetans tried conclusions, if they tried them with China at all.

Be that as it may, the present wish is to make clear that at the first great turning-point in genuine Chinese history the whole of north and west China was in the hands of totally unknown powers, who completely shut in the Middle Kingdom; who only manifested themselves at all in the shape of occasional bodies of raiders; and who, if they had any knowledge, direct or indirect, of India, Tibet, Turkestan, Siberia, Persia, etc., kept it strictly to themselves, and in any case were incapable of communicating it in writing to the frontier Chinese populations of the four buffer states above enumerated.

CHAPTER IV

THE SOUTHERN POWER

But the collapse of the imperial power in 771 B.C. led to restlessness in the south as well as in the north, north-western, and north-eastern regions: except for a few Chinese adventurers and colonists, these were exclusively inhabited by nomad Tartars, and perhaps some Tibetans, destitute of fixed residences, cities, and towns; ignorant of cultivation, agriculture, and letters; and roving about from pasture to pasture with their flocks and herds, finding excitement and diversion chiefly in periodical raids upon their more settled southern and western neighbours.

The only country south of the federated Chinese princes in Ho Nan province (as we now call it) was the "Jungle" or "Thicket," a term which vaguely designated the lower waters of the Han River system, much as, with ourselves, the "Lowlands" or the "Netherlands" did, and still does, designate the outlying marches of the English and German communities. "Jungle" is still the elegant literary name for Hu Peh, just as Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i are for Shen Si, Shan Si, and Shan Tung. The King of the Jungle, like the Warden of the Western Marches, traced his descent far back to the same ancient monarchs whose blood ran also in the veins of the imperial house of Chou; and moreover this Jungle King's ancestors had served the founders of the Chou dynasty in 1150 B.C., whilst they were still hesitating whether to accept the call to empire: hence in later times (530 B.C.) the King made it a grievance that his family had not received from the founder of the Chou dynasty presents symbolical of equality of birth, as had the Tsin and Lu (South Shan Tung) houses. If any tribes, south, south-east, or south-west of this vague Jungle, whose administrative centre at first lay within a hundred miles' radius of the modern treaty-port of Ich'ang, were in any way known to Central China, or were affected by orthodox Chinese civilization, it was and must have been entirely through this kingdom of the Jungle, and in a second-hand or indirect way. The Jungle was as much a buffer to the south as Ts'in was to the north-west, Tsin to the north, and Ts'i to the north-east. The bulk of the population was in one sense non- Chinese; that is, it was probably a mixture of the many uncivilized mountain tribes (all speaking monosyllabic and tonic dialects like the Chinese) who still survive in every one of the provinces south of the Yang-tsz Kiang; but the ruling caste, whose administrative centre lay to the north of these tribes, though affected by the grossness of their barbarous surroundings, were manifestly more or less orthodox Chinese in origin and sympathy, and, even at this early period (771 B.C.), possessed a considerable culture, a knowledge of Chinese script, and a general capacity to live a settled economical existence. As far back as 880 B.C.
the King of the Jungle is recorded to have governed or conciliated the populations between the Han and the Yang-tsz Rivers; but, though he arrogated to himself for a time the title of "Emperor" or "King" in his own dominions, he confessed himself to be a barbarian, and disclaimed any share in the honorific system of titles, living or posthumous, having vogue in China, reserving it for his successors to assert higher rights when they should feel strong enough. Like an eastern Charlemagne, he divided his empire between his three sons; and this empire, which gradually extended all along the Yang-tsz down to its mouths, may have included in one of its three subdivisions a part at least of the Annamese race, as will be suggested more in detail anon.

The first really historical king, who once more arrogated the supreme title in 704 B.C., took advantage of imperial weakness to extend his conquests not only to the south but to the north of the River Han, attacking petty Chinese principalities, and boldly claiming recognition by the Emperor of equality in title. "I am a barbarian," said he, "and I will avail myself of the dissensions among the federal princes to inspect Chinese ways for myself." The Emperor displayed some irritation at this claim of equal rank, but the King retorted by referring to the services rendered by his (the King's) ancestor, some five hundred years earlier, to the Emperor's ancestor, virtual founder of the Chou dynasty. In 689 B.C. the next king moved his capital from its old site above the Ich'ang gorges to the commanding central situation now known as King-thou Fu, just above the treaty-port of Sha-shi': this place historically continues the use of the old word Jungle (King), and has been all through the present Manchu dynasty (1644-1908) the military residence of a Tartar-General with a Banner garrison; that is, a garrison of privileged Tartar soldiers living in cantonments, and exempt from the ordinary laws, or, at least, the application of them. It is only in 684 B.C. that the Jungle state is first honoured with mention in Confucius' history: it was, indeed, impossible then to ignore its existence, because, for the first time in the annals of China, Chinese federal princes between the Han River and the westernmost head-waters of the Hwai River had been deliberately annexed by these Jungle "barbarians." History for the next 450 years from this date consists mainly of the intricate narration how Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and the Jungle struggled, first for hegemony, and finally for the possession of all China, The Jungle was now called Ts'u.

CHAPTER V

EVIDENCE OF ECLIPSES

Having now shown, as shortly and as intelligibly as we can, how the germs of Chinese development were sown at the dawn of true history, let us proceed to examine how far that history, as it has come down to us, contains within it testimony to its own truth. We shall revert to the description of wars and ambitions in due course; but, as so obscure a subject as early Chinese civilization is only palatable to most Western readers in small, varied, and sugared doses, we shall for the moment vary the nourishment offered, and say a few words upon eclipses.

Confucius, whose bald "Spring and Autumn" annals, as expanded by three separate commentators (one a junior contemporary of himself), is really the chief authority for the period 722-468 B.C., was born on the 20th day after the eclipse of the sun which took place in the 10th month of 552 B.C., or the 27th of the 8th moon as worked out to-day (for 1908 this means the 22nd September). Confucius himself records thirty-seven eclipses of the sun between 720 and 481, those of 709, 601, and 549 being total.
Of course, as Confucius primarily recorded the eclipses as seen from his own petty vassal state of Lu in Shan Tung province (lat.
35" 40' N., long, 117" E.), any one endeavouring to identify these eclipses, and to compare them with Julian or Gregorian dates, must, in making the necessary calculations, bear this important fact in mind. It so happens that nearly one-third of Confucius' thirty-seven eclipses are recorded as having taken place between the two total eclipses of 601 and 549. This being so, I referred the list to an obliging officer attached to the Royal Observatory, who has kindly furnished me with the following comparative list:-

CONFUCIUS' DATE. OPPOLZER'S JULIAN DATE.
B.C. 601, 7th moon.---600, September 20.
" 599, 4th " ---598, March 5.
" 592, 6th " ---591, April 17.
" 575, 6th " ---574, May 9.
" 574, 12th " ---573, October 22.
" 559, 2nd " ---558, January 14.
" 558, 8th " ---557, June 29.
" 553, 10th " ---552, August 31.
" 552, 9th " " 552, 10th " ---551, August 20.
" 550, 2nd " ---549, January 5.
" 549, 7th " ---548, April 19.

It will be observed that there is no Oppolzer's date to compare with the first of the two eclipses of 552; this is because I omitted to notice that there had been recorded in the "Springs and Autumns" two so close together, and therefore I did not include it in the list sent to the Observatory; but with the exception of the total eclipse of 601, all the other eclipses, so far as days of the moon and month go, are as consistent with each other as are modern Chinese dates with European (Julian) dates. As regards the year, Oppolzer's dates are the "astronomical" dates, that is, the astronomical year--x is the same as the year (x + 1) B.C.; or, in other words, the year of Christ's birth is, for certain astronomical exactitude purposes, interpolated between the years 1 B.C. and A.D. 1, as we vulgarly compute them: that is to say, the eclipses of the sun recorded 2,400 years ago by Confucius, from notes and annals preserved in his native state's archives as far back as 700 B.C., are found to be almost without exception fairly correct, with a uniform "error" of about one month, despite the fact that attempts were made by the First August Emperor to destroy all historical literature in 213 B.C. This being so in the matter of a dozen eclipses, there still remain two dozen for specialists to experiment upon, not to mention comets and other celestial phenomena. From this collateral evidence, imperfect though it be, we are reasonably entitled to assume that the three expanded versions of Confucius' history are trustworthy, or at the very least written in the best of faith.

Just as our mathematicians find no difficulty either in foretelling or retrospecting eclipses to a minute, so does the ancient "sixty" cycle, which the Chinese have from time immemorial used for computing or noting days and years, enable them, or for the matter of that ourselves, to calculate back unerringly any desired day. Thus, suppose the 1st January, 1908, is the 37th day of the perpetual cycle of sixty days; then, if the Chinese historians say that an eclipse took place on the first day of the new moon, which began the 9th Chinese month of the year corresponding in the main to our 800 B.C., and that the 1st day of the moon was also the 37th day of the sixty-day perpetual cycle, all we have to do is to take roughly six cycles for each year, six thousand cycles for each thousand years, allowing at the same time two extra cycles every third year for intercalary moons, and then dealing with the fractions or balance of days. If our calculation does not bring the two 37th cyclic days together accurately, we must of course go into the question of how and when the Chinese calendars were altered, a subject that will be treated of in a subsequent chapter. It must be remembered that there can never be any question of so much as a whole year being involved in the balance of error; for, with the Chinese as with us, one year, whenever modified, always means that space of time, however irregularly computed at each end of it, within which two solstices and two equinoxes have taken place, Voltaire, in the article on "China" of his Universal Dictionary, remarks that "of 32 ancient Chinese eclipses, 28 have been identified by Western mathematicians"; and M. Edouard Chavannes, who has given a great deal of time and labour to working out the mysteries of the Chinese calendar, does not hesitate to claim accuracy to the very day (29th August) for the eclipse of the sun recorded in the Book of Odes (as re-edited by Confucius) as having taken place on the 28th cyclic day of the beginning of the both moon in 776 B.C. (i.e. of--775). This eclipse is of course not recorded in the "Springs and Autumns," which begins with the year 722 B.C.

The Chou dynasty, which came into power in 1122, for the second time put back the year a month because the calendar was getting confused. That is, they made what we should call January begin the legal year instead of February; or the still more ancient March; but some of the vassals either used computations of their own, or kept up those handed down by the two dynasties previous to that of Chou: hence in the Confucian histories, as expanded, there are frequent discrepancies in consequence of events apparently copied from the records of one vassal state having been reported to the historian of a second vassal state without steps having been taken to adjust the different new years.

CHAPTER VI

THE ARMY

As the struggle for pre-eminency which we are about to describe involved bloodthirsty combats extending almost uninterruptedly over five centuries, it may be of interest to inquire of what consisted the paraphernalia of warfare in those days. It appears that among the Chinese federal princes, who, as we have seen, only occupied in the main the flat country on the right bank of the Yellow River, war-chariots were invariably used, which is the more remarkable in that after the Conquest in 220 B.C. of China by the First August Emperor of Ts'in, and down to this day, war-chariots have scarcely ever once been even named, at least as having been marshalled in serious battle array. The Emperor alone was supposed in true feudal times to possess a force of 10,000 chariots, and even now a "10,000-chariot" state is the diplomatic expression for "a great power," "a power of the first rank," or "an empire." No vassal was entitled to more than 1000 war-chariots. In the year 632 B.C., when Tsin inflicted a great defeat upon its chief rival Ts'u, the former power had 700 chariots in the field. In 589 B.C. the same country, with 800 chariots included in its forces, marched across the Yellow River and defeated the state of Ts'i, its rival to the east. Again in 632 Tsin offered to the Emperor 100 chariots just captured from Ts'u, and in 613 sent 800 chariots to the assistance of a dethroned Emperor. The best were made of leather, and we may assume from this that the wooden ones found it very difficult to get safely over rough ground, for in a celebrated treaty of peace of 589 B.C. between the two rival states Tsin and Ts'i, the victor, lying to the west, imposed a condition that "your ploughed furrows shall in future run east and west instead of north and south," meaning that "no systematic obstacles shall in future be placed in the way of our invading chariots."

One of the features in many of the vassal states was the growth of great families, whose private power was very apt to constrain the wishes of the reigning duke, count, or baron. Thus in the year 537, when the King of Ts'u was meditating a treacherous attack upon Tsin, he was warned that "there were many magnates at the behest of the ruler of Tsin, each of whom was equal to placing 100 war-chariots in the field." So much a matter of course was it to use chariots in war, that in the year 572, when the rival great powers of Ts'u and Tsin were contesting for suzerainty over one of the purely Chinese principalities in the modern Ho Nan province, it was considered quite a remarkable fact that this principality in taking the side of Ts'u brought no chariots with the forces led against Tsin. In 541 a refugee prince of Ts'u, seeking asylum in Tsin, only brought five chariots with him, on which the ruler, ashamed as host of such a poor display, at once assigned him revenue sufficient for the maintenance of 100 individuals. It so happened that at the same time there arrived in Tsin a refugee prince from Ts'in, bringing with him 1000 carts, all heavily laden. On another occasion the prince (not a ruler) of a neighbouring state, on visiting the ruler of another, brings with him as presents an eight-horsed chariot for the reigning prince, a six-horsed conveyance for the premier, a four-horsed carriage for a very distinguished minister in the suite, and a two-horsed cart for a minor member of the mission.

Besides the heavy war-chariots, there were also rather more comfortable and lighter conveyances: in one case two generals are spoken of ironically because they went to the front playing the banjo in a light cart, whilst their colleague from another state-- the very state they were assisting--was roughing it in a war- chariot. These latter seem to have connoted, for military organization purposes, a strength of 75 men each, and four horses; to wit, three heavily armed men or cuirassiers in the chariot itself, and 72 foot-soldiers. At least in the case of Tsin, a force of 37,500 men, which in the year 613 boldly marched off three hundred or more English miles upon an eastern expedition, is so described. On the other hand, thirty years later, a small Ts'u force is said to have had 125 men attached to each chariot, while the Emperor's chariots are stated to have had 100 men assigned to each. In the year 627 a celebrated battle was fought between the rival powers of Ts'in and Tsin, in which the former was utterly routed; "not a man nor a wheel of the whole army ever got back." War-chariots are mentioned as having been in use at least as far back as 1797 B.C. by the Tartar-affected ancestors of the Chou dynasty, nearly 700 years before they themselves came to the imperial power. The territory north of the River Wei, inhabited by them, is all yellow loess, deeply furrowed by the stream in question, and by its tributaries: there is no apparent reason to suppose that the gigantic cart-houses used by the Tartars, even to this day, had any historical connection with the swift war- chariots of the Chinese.

Little, if anything, is said of conveying troops by boat in any of the above-mentioned countries north of the Yang-tsz River. None of the rivers in Shen Si are navigable, even now, for any considerable stretches, and the Yellow River itself has its strict limitations. Later on, when the King of Ts'u's possessions along the sea coast, embracing the delta of the Yang-tsz, revolted from his suzerainty and began (as we shall relate in due course) to take an active part in orthodox Chinese affairs, boats and gigantic canal works were introduced by the hitherto totally unknown or totally forgotten coast powers; and it is probably owing to this innovation that war-chariots suddenly disappeared from use, and that even in the north of China boat expeditions became the rule, as indeed was certainly the case after the third century B.C.

Some idea of the limited population of very ancient China may be gained from a consideration of the oldest army computations. The Emperor was supposed to have six brigades, the larger vassals three, the lesser two, and the small ones one; but owing to the loose way in which a Shi, or regiment of 2,500 men, and a Kun, or brigade of 12,500 men, are alternately spoken of, the Chinese commentators themselves are rather at a loss to estimate how matters really stood after the collapse of the Emperor in 771: but though at much later dates enormous armies, counting up to half a million men on each side, stubbornly contended for mastery, at the period of which we speak there is no reason to believe that any state, least of all the imperial reserve, ever put more than 1000 chariots, or say, 75,000 men, into the field on any one expedition.

Flags seem to have been in use very much as in the West. The founder of the Chou dynasty marched to the conquest of China carrying, or having carried for him, a yellow axe in the left, and a white flag in the right hand. In 660 one of the minor federal princes was crushed because he did not lower his standard in time; nearly a century later, this precedent was quoted to another federal prince when hard-pressed, in consequence of which a sub- officer "rolled up his master's standard and put it in its sheath." In 645 "the cavaliers under the ruler's flag "--defined to mean his body-guard--were surrounded by the enemy.

During the fifth century B.C., when the coast provinces, having separated from the Ts'u suzerainty, were asserting their equality with the orthodox Chinese princes, and two rival "barbarian" armies were contending for the Shanghai region, one royal scion was indignant when he saw the enemy advance "with the flag captured in the last battle from his own father the general." Flags were used, not only to signal movements of troops during the course of battle, but also in the great hunts or battues which were arranged in peace times, not merely for sport, but also in order to prepare soldiers for a military life.

For victories over the Tartars in 623, the Emperor presented the ruler of Ts'in with a metal drum; and it seems that sacrificing to the regimental drum before a fight was a very ancient custom, which has been carried down to the present day. In 1900, during the "Boxer" troubles, General (now Viceroy) Yiian Shi-k'ai is reported to have sacrificed several condemned criminals to his drum before setting out upon his march.

[Illustration: Hilly County Dividing Wei Valley from Han Valley.

1. Si-ngan Fu is at the junction of the King River and Wei River.
The encircled crosses mark the oldest and the newest Ts'in capitals; all other Ts'in capitals lay somewhere between the King and the Wei.

2. From 643 B.C. to 385 B.C. Ts'in was in occupation of the territory between the Yellow River and the River Loh, taken from Tsin and again lost to Tsin at those dates.]

CHAPTER VII

THE COAST STATES

Before we enter into a categorical description of the hegemony or Protector system, under which the most powerful state for the time being held durbars "in camp," and in theory maintained the shadowy rights of the Emperor, we must first introduce the two coast states of the Yang-tsz delta, just mentioned as having asserted their independence of Ts'u, each state being in possession of one of the Great River branches, In ancient times the Yang-tsz was simply called the Kiang ("river"), just as the Yellow River was simply styled the Ho (also "river"). In those days the Great River had three mouths-the northernmost very much as at present, except that the flat accretions did not then extend so far out to sea, and in any case were for all practical purposes unknown to orthodox China, and entirely in the hands of "Eastern barbarians"; the southerly course, which branched off near the modern treaty-port of Wuhu in An Hwei province, emerging into the sea at, or very near, Hangchow; and the middle course, which was practically the combined beds of the Soochow Creek and the Wusung River of Shanghai. Before the Chou dynasty came to power in 1122 B.C., the grandfather of the future founder, as a youth, displayed such extraordinary talents, that, by family arrangement, his two eldest brothers voluntarily resigned their rights, and exiled themselves in the Jungle territory, subsequently working their way east to the coast, and adopting entirely, or in part, the rude ways of the barbarous tribes they hoped to govern. We can understand this better if we picture how the Phoenician and Greek merchants in turn acted when successively colonizing Marseilles, Cadiz, and even parts of Britain. Excepting doubtful genealogies and lists of rulers, nothing whatever is heard of this colony until 585 B.C.--say, 800 years subsequent to the original settlement. A malcontent of Ts'u had, as was the practice among the rival states of those, times, offered his services to the hated Tsin, then engaged in desperate warfare with Ts'u: he proposed to his new master that he should be sent on a mission to the King of Wu (for that was, and still is, for literary purposes, the name of the kingdom comprising Shanghai, Soochow, and Nanking) in order to induce him to join in attacking Ts'u. "He taught them the use of arrows and chariots," from which we may assume that spears and boats were, up to that date, the usual warlike apparatus of the coast power. Its capital was at a spot about half-way between Soochow and Nanking, on the new (British) railway line; and it is described by Chinese visitors during the sixth century B.C. as being "a mean place, with low-built houses, narrow streets, a vulgar palace, and crowds of boats and wheelbarrows." The native word for the country was something like Keugu, which the Chinese (as they still do with foreign words, as, for instance, Ying for "England") promptly turned into a convenient monosyllable Ngu, or Wu. The semi-barbarous King was delighted at the opening thus given him to associate with orthodox Chinese princes on an equal footing, and to throw off his former tyrannical suzerain. He annexed a number of neighbouring barbarian states hitherto, like himself, belonging to Ts'u; paid visits to the Emperor's court, to the Ts'u court, and to the petty but highly cultivated court of Lu (in South Shan Tung), in order to "study the rites"; and threw himself with zest into the whirl of interstate political intrigue. Confucius in his history hardly alludes to him as a civilized being until the year 561, when the King died; and as his services to China (i.e. to orthodox Tsin against unorthodox Ts'u) could not be ignored, the philosopher- historian condescends to say "the Viscount of Wu died this year." It must be explained that the Lu capital had been celebrated for its learning ever since the founder of the Chou dynasty sent the Duke of Chou, his own brother, there as a satrap (1122 B.C.).
Confucius, of course, wrote retrospectively, for he himself was only born in 551 and did not compose his "Springs and Autumns" history for at least half a century after that date. The old Lu capital of K'uh-fu on she River Sz (both still so called) is the official headquarters of the Dukes Confucius, the seventy-sixth in descent from the Sage having at this moment direct semi-official relations with Great Britain's representative at Wei-hai-wei. It must also be explained that the vassal princes were all dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, or barons, according to the size of their states, the distinction of their clan or gens, and the length of their pedigrees; but the Emperor somewhat contemptuously accorded only the courtesy title of "viscount" to barbarian "kings," such as those of Ts'u and Wu, very much as we vaguely speak of "His Highness the Khedive," or (until last year) "His Highness the Amir," so as to mark unequality with genuine crowned or sovereign heads.

The history of the wars between Wu and Ts'u is extremely interesting, the more so in that there are some grounds for believing that at least some part of the Japanese civilization was subsequently introduced from the east coast of China, when the ruling caste of Wu, in its declining days, had to "take flight eastwards in boats to the islands to the east of the coast." But we shall come to that episode later on. In the year 506 the capital of Ts'u was occupied by a victorious Wu army, under circumstances full of dramatic detail. But now, in the flush of success, it was Wu's turn to suffer from the ambition of a vassal.
South of Wu, with a capital at the modern Shao-hing, near Ningpo, reigned the barbarian King of Yiieh (this is a corrupted monosyllable supposed to represent a dissyllabic native word something like Uviet); and this king had once been a 'vassal of Ts'u, but had, since Wu's conquests, transferred, either willingly or under local compulsion, his allegiance to Wu. Advances were made to him by Ts'u, and he was ultimately induced to declare war as an ally of Ts'u. There is nothing more interesting in our European history than the detailed account, full of personal incident, of the fierce contests between Wu and Yiieh. The extinction of Wu took place in 483, after that state had played a very commanding part in federal affairs, as we shall have occasion to specify in the proper places. Yiieh, in turn, peopled by a race supposed to have ethnological connection with the Annamese of Vietnam or "Southern Yiieh," became a great power in China, and in 468 even transferred its capital to a spot on or near the coast, very near the German colony of Kiao Chou in Shan Tung. But its predominance was only successfully asserted on the coasts; to use the historians' words: "Yiieh could never effectively administer the territory comprised in the Yang-tsz Kiang and Hwai River regions."

It was precisely during this barbarian struggle, when federated China, having escaped the Tartars, seemed to be running the risk of falling into the clutches of southern pirates, that Confucius flourished, and it is in reference to the historical events sketched above-(1) the providential escape of China from Tartardom, (2) the collapse of the imperial Chou house, (3) the hegemony or Protector system, (4) the triumph of might over rite (right and rite being one with Confucius), and (5) the desirability of a prompt return to the good old feudal ways--that he abandoned his own corrupt and ungrateful principality, began his peripatetic teaching in the other orthodox states, composed a warning history full of lessons for future guidance, and established what we somewhat inaccurately call a "religion" for the political guidance of mankind.

CHAPTER VIII

FIRST PROTECTOR OF CHINA

The first of the so-called five hegemons or lords-protector of the federated Chinese Empire (after the collapse of the imperial power, and its consequent incapacity to protect the vassal states from the raids of the Tartars and other barbarians) was the Lord of Ts'i, whose capital was at the powerful and wealthy city of Lin-tsz (lat. 37o, long. 118o 30'; still so called on the modern maps), in Shan Tung province. Neither the Yellow River nor the Grand Canal touched Shan Tung in those days, and Lin-tsz was evidently situated with reference to the local rivers which flow north into the Gulf of "Pechelee," so as to take full political advantage of the salt, mining, and fishing industries. A word is here necessary as to this Protector's pedigree: we have seen that his ancestor, thirteen generations back, had inspired with his counsels and courage the founder of the imperial Chou dynasty in 1122 B.C.; he had further given to the new Emperor a daughter of his own in marriage, had served him as premier, and had finally been enfeoffed in reward for his services as Marquess of Ts'i, the economic condition of which far-eastern principality he had in a very few years by his energy as ruler mightily improved, notably with reference to the salt and fish industries, and to general commerce. The Yellow River, then flowing along the bed of what is now called the Chang River, and the sea, respectively, were the western and eastern limits of this state, which embraced to the north the salt flats now under the administration of a special Tientsin Commissioner, and extended south to the present Manchu Tartar-General's military garrison at Ts'ing-thou Fu. Of course, later on, during the five-hundred-year period of unrest, extensions and cessions of territory frequently took place, both within and beyond these vague limits, usually at the expense of Lu and other small orthodox states. Across the Yellow River, whose course northwards, as already stated, lay considerably to the west of the present channel, was the extensive state of Tsin; and south was the highly ritual and literary Weimar of China, the unwarlike principality of Lu, destined in future times to be glorified by Confucius.

Scarcely anything is recorded of a nature to throw specific light upon the international development of these far-eastern parts. But in the year 894 B.C. the reigning prince of Ts'i was boiled alive at the Emperor's order for some political offence, and his successor thereupon moved his capital, only to be transferred back to the old place by his son thirty-five years later. The imperial flight of 842 naturally caused some consternation even in distant Ts'i, and in 827 the next Emperor on his accession commanded the reigning Marquess of Ts'i to assist in chastising the Western Tartars. When this last Emperor's grandson was driven from his old hereditary domain in 771, and the semi-Tartar ruler of Ts'in took possession of the same, as already narrated, Ts'i was still so inconsiderable a military power that even two generations after that event, in the year 706, it was fain to apply for assistance against Northern Tartar raids to one of the small Chinese principalities in the Ho Nan province. (Roughly speaking, "Northern Tartars" were Manchu-Mongols, and "Western Tartars" were Mongol-Turks.) In 690 the prince, whose sister had married the neighbouring ruler of Lu, made an armed attack by way of vengeance upon the descendant of the adviser who had counselled the Emperor to boil his ancestor alive in 894: his power was now so considerable that the Emperor commissioned him to act with authority in the matter of a disputed succession to a minor Chinese principality. This was in the year 688 B.C., and it was the first instance of a vassal acting as dictator or protector on behalf of the Emperor; only, however, in a special or isolated case. Two years later this prince of Ts'i was himself assassinated, and the disputes between his sons regarding the succession terminated with the advent to the throne of one of the great characters in Chinese history, who was magnanimous and politic enough to take as his adviser and premier a still greater character, and one that almost rivals Confucius himself in fame as an author, a statesman, a benefactor of China; and a moralist.

This personage, who, like most Chinese of the period, carried many names, is most generally known as the philosopher Kwan-tsz, and his chief writings have survived, in part at least, until our own day. He was, in fact, a distant scion of the reigning imperial family of Chou, and bore its clan name of Ki. Here it may be useful to state parenthetically that most prominent men in all the federated states seem to have belonged to a narrow aristocratic circle, among whose members the craft of government, the knowledge of letters, and the hereditary right to expect office, was inherent; at the same time, there was never at any date anything in the shape of a priestly or military caste, and power appears to have been always within the reach of the humblest, so long as the aspirant was competent to assert himself.

The new ruler of Ts'i officially proclaimed himself Protector in the year 679 B.C., which is one of the fixed dates in Chinese history about which there is no cavil or doubt, He soon found himself embroiled in war with the Tartars, who were raiding both the state to his north in the Peking plain, and also the minor state, south of the Yellow River, that his predecessor has protected specially in 688. This was the state of Wei (imperial clan), through or near the capital town of which, near the modern Wei-hwei Fu, the Yellow River then ran northwards.

The way these successive Protectors of China afterwards exercised their preponderant influence in a general sense was this: When it appeared to them, or when any orthodox vassal state complained to them, that injustice was being done; whether in matters of duty to the Emperor, right of succession, legitimacy of birth, great crime, or inordinate ambition; the recognized Protector summoned a durbar, usually somewhere within the territory of the central area, or China proper as previously defined, and consulted with the princes, his colleagues, as to what course should be pursued.
A distinction was drawn between "full-dress durbars" and "military durbars"; the etiquette in either case was very minute, and external behaviour at least was exquisitely courteous, though treachery was far from rare, and treaties never lasted long unbroken. But to return to the First Protector. Towards the end of his glorious reign of forty-three years the Marquess of Ts'i grew arrogant, vainglorious, and licentious, so much so that his western neighbour, the powerful state of Tsin, declined to attend the durbars. Of the other great powers Ts'in (to the west of Tsin) was much too far off to take active part in these parliaments; Ts'u was too busy in spreading civilization among the barbarous states or tribes south of the Yang-tsz. The Emperor was practically a roi faineant by this time, and, curiously enough, less is known of what went on within his dominions or appanage after the western half of it fell to Ts'in in 771, than of what transpired in the territories of his three menacing vassals to the north, north-west, and north-east, and of his half- civilized satrap to the south. The fact is, all four rising powers were now carefully engaged in watching each other, and in playing a profound political game around their prey. This prey was the eastern half of the Emperor's original domain (the western half now, since 771 B.C., belonging to Ts'in) and the dozen or so of purely Chinese, highly cultured, vassal states making up the rest of modern Ho Nan province, together with small parts or wedges of modern Chih Li, Shan Tung, An Hwei, and Kiang Su. From first to last none of these ritual and literary states showed any real fight; there is hardly a single record of a really crushing victory gained by any one of them. The fighting instincts all lay with the new Chinese, that is, with the Chinese adventurers who had got their hand well in with generations of fighting against barbarians--Tartars, Tunguses, Annamese, Shans, and what not--and had invigorated themselves with good fresh barbarian blood. The fact is, the population of China had enormously increased; the struggle for life and food was keener; the old patriarchal appetite for ritual was disappearing; the people were beginning to assert themselves against the land-owners; the land-owners were encroaching upon the power of the ruling princes; and China was in a parlous state.

CHAPTER IX

POSITION OF ENVOYS

It was a fixed rule in ancient China that envoys should be treated with courtesy, and that their persons should be held sacred, whether at residential courts, in durbar, or on the road through a third state. During the wars of the sixth century B.C. between Tsin in the north and Ts'u in the south, when these two powers were rival aspirants to the Protectorate of the original and orthodox group of principalities lying between them, and were alternately imposing their will on the important and diplomatic minor Chinese state of CHENG (still the name of a territory in Ho Nan), there were furnished many illustrations of this recognized rule. The chief reason for thus making a fighting-ground of the old Chinese principalities was that it was almost impossible for Ts'u to get conveniently at any of the three great northern powers, and equally difficult for Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i to reach Ts'u, without passing through one or more Chinese states, mostly bearing the imperial clan name, and permission had to be asked for an army to pass through, unless the said Chinese state was under the predominancy of (for instance) Tsin or Ts'u. It was like Germany and Italy with Switzerland between them, or Germany and Spain with France between them. Another important old Chinese state was Sung, lying to the east of CHENG. Both these states were of the highest caste, the Earl of CHENG being a close relative of the Chou Emperor, and the Duke of Sung being the representative or religious heir of the remains of the Shang dynasty ousted by the Chou family in I 122 B.C., magnanimously reinfeoffed "in order that the family sacrifices might not be entirely cut off" together with the loss of imperial sway. In the year 595 B.C. Sung went so far as to put a Ts'u envoy to death, naturally much to the wrath of the rising southern power. Ts'u in turn arrested the Tsin envoy on his way to Sung, and tried in vain to force him to betray his trust. In 582 Tsin, in a fit of anger, detained the CHENG envoy, and finally put him to death for his impudence in coming officially to visit Tsin after coquetting with Tsin's rival Ts'u.
All these irregular cases are severely blamed by the historians.
In 562 Ts'u turned the tables upon Tsin by putting the CHENG envoy to death after the latter had concluded a treaty with Tsin.
Confucius joins, retrospectively of course, in the chorus of universal reprobation. In 560 Ts'u tried to play upon the Ts'i envoy a trick which in its futility reminds us strongly of the analogous petty humiliations until recently imposed by China, whenever convenient occasion offered, upon foreign officials accredited to her. The Ts'i envoy, who was somewhat deformed in person, was no less an individual than the celebrated philosopher Yen-tsz, a respected acquaintance of Confucius (though, of course, much his senior), and second only to Kwan-tsz amongst the great administrative statesmen of Ts'i. The half-barbarous King of Ts'u concocted with his obsequious courtiers a nice little scheme for humiliating the northern envoy by indicating to him the small door provided for his entry into the presence, such as the Grand Seigneurs in their hey-day used to provide for the Christian ambassadors to Turkey. Yen-tsz, of course, at once saw through this contemptible insult and said: "My master had his own reasons for selecting so unworthy an individual as myself for this mission; yet if he had sent me on a mission to a dog-court, I should have obeyed orders and entered by a dog-gate: however, it so happens that I am here on a mission to the King of Ts'u, and of course I expect to enter by a gate befitting the status of that ruler." Still another prank was tried by the foolish king: a "variety entertainment" was got up, in which one scene represented a famished wretch who was being belaboured for some reason.
Naturally every one asked: "What is that?" The answer was: "A Ts'i man who has been detected in thieving." Yen-tsz said: "I understand that the best fruits come from Ts'u, and they say we northern men cannot come near the quality of their peaches. We are honest simpletons, too, and do not look natural on the variety stage as thieves. The true rogue, like the true peach, is a southern speciality. I did see rogues on the stage, it is true, but none of them looked like a Ts'i man; hence I asked, 'What is it?'" The king laughed sheepishly, and, for a time at least, gave up taking liberties with Yen-tsz.

In 545, when Ts'u for the moment had the predominant say over CHENG's political action, it was insisted that the ruler of CHENG should come in person to pay his respects: this was after a great Peace Conference, held at Sung, on which occasion Tsin and Ts'u arranged a modus operandi for their respective subordinate or allied vassals. There was no help for it, and the Earl accordingly went. The minister in attendance was Tsz-ch'an-a very great name indeed in Chinese history; he was a lawyer, statesman, "democratic conservative," sceptic, and philosopher, deeply lamented on his death alike by the people of CHENG, and by his friend or correspondent Confucius of Lu state. The Chinese diplomats then, as now, had the most roundabout ways of pointing a moral or delicately insinuating an innuendo. On arrival at the outskirts of the capital, instead of building the usual dais for formalities and sacrifices, Tsz-ch'an threw up a mean hut for the accommodation of his mission, saying: "Altars are built by great states when they visit small ones as a symbol of benefits accorded, and by way of exhortation to continue in virtuous ways." Four years later Ts'u sent a mission of menacing size to CHENG, ostensibly to complete the carrying out of a marriage agreed upon by treaty between Ts'u and CHENG. Tsz-ch'an insisted that the bows and arrows carried by the escort should be left outside the city walls, adding: "Our poor state is too small to bear the full honour of such an escort; erect your altar dais outside the wall for the service of the ancestral sacrifices, and we will there await your commands about the marriage."

In 538, when Ts'u was, for the first time, holding a durbar as recognized Protector, being at the time, however, on hostile terms with her former vassal, Wu, the King of Ts'u committed the gross outrage of seizing the ruler of a petty state, who was then present at the durbar, because that ruler had married (being himself of eastern barbarian descent) a princess of Wu. The following year, when two very distinguished statesmen from the territory of his secular enemy Tsin came on a political mission, the King of Ts'u consulted his premier about the advisability of castrating the one for a harem eunuch, and cutting off the feet of the other for a door-porter. "Your Majesty can do it, certainly," was the reply, "but how about the consequences?" This was the occasion, mentioned in Chapter VI., on which the king was reminded how many great private families there were in Tsin quite capable of raising a hundred chariots apiece.

It appears that envoys, at least in Lu, were hereditary in some families, just as other families provided successive generations of ministers. A Lu envoy to Tsin, who carried a very valuable gem- studded girdle with him, had very great pressure put upon him by a covetous Tsin minister who wanted the girdle. The envoy offered to give some silk instead, but he said that not even to save his life would he give up the girdle. The Tsin magnate thought better of it; but it is remarkable how many cases of sordid greed of this kind are recorded, all pointing to the comparative absence of commercial exchanges, or standards of value between the feudal states.

Ts'u seems to have thoroughly deserved Yen-tsz's imputations of treachery and roguery. At the great Peace Conference held outside the Sung capital in 546, the Ts'u escort was detected wearing cuirasses underneath their clothing. One of the greatest of the Tsin statesmen, Shuh Hiang (a personal friend of Yen-tsz, Confucius, and Tsz-ch'an) managed diplomatically to keep down the rising indignation of the other powers and representatives present by pooh-poohing the clumsy artifice on the ground that by such treachery Ts'u simply injured her own reputation in the federation to the manifest advantage of Tsin: it did not suit Tsin to continue the struggle with Ts'u just then. Then there was a squabble as to precedence at the same Peace Conference; that is, whether Tsin or Ts'u had the first right to smear lips with the blood of sacrifice: here again Shuh Hiang tactfully gave way, and by his conciliatory conduct succeeded in inducing the federal princes to sign a sort of disarmament agreement. This is one of the numerous instances in which Confucius as an annalist tries to menager the true facts in the interests of orthodoxy.

Even the more fully civilized state of Ts'i attempted an act of gross treachery, when in 500 B.C. the ruler of Lu, accompanied by Confucius as his minister in attendance, went to pay his respects.
But Confucius was just as sharp as Yen-tsz and Tsz-ch'an, his friends, neighbours, and colleagues: he at once saw through the menacing appearance of the barbarian "dances" (introduced here, again, as a "variety entertainment"), and by his firm behaviour not only saved the person of his prince, but shamed the ruler of Ts'i into disclaiming and disavowing his obsequious fellow- practical jokers. Yen-tsz was actually present at the time, in attendance upon his own marquis; but it is nowhere alleged that he was responsible for the disgraceful manoeuvre. As a result T'si was obliged to restore to Lu several cities and districts wrongfully annexed some years before, and Lu promised to assist Ts'i in her wars.

[Illustration: MAP

1. The River Sz still starts at Sz-shui (cross in circle; means "River Sz"), and runs past Confucius' town, K'iih-fu, into the Canal in two branches. But in Confucius' time what is now the Canal continued to be the River Sz, down to its junction with the Hwai. The River I starts still from I-shui (also a cross in circle; means "River I"), passes I-thou, and used to join the Sz (now the Canal) at the lower cross in a circle. The neck (dotted) of the Hwai embouchure no longer exists, and the Lake Hung-tseh now dissipates itself into lakelets and canals. The Wu fleets, by sailing up the Hwai, Sz, and I, could get up to Lu, and threaten Ts'i.

2. In Confucius' time the Yellow River turned north near the junction of the Emperor's territory with Cheng: it passed through Wei, and there divided. Its main branch, after coursing through part of the River Wei bed, left it and took possession of the River Chang bed. Up to 602 B.C. the secondary branch took the more easterly dotted line (the present Yellow River, once the River Tsi); but after 602 B.C. it cut through Hing, followed the Wei, and took the line of the present Canal. Hing was a Tartar-harried state contested by Ts'i and Tsin: it fell at last to Tsin.

3. The capitals of Ts'i, Wei, Ts'ao, Cheng, Sung, Ch'en, Ts'ai (three) are marked with encircled crosses. K'iih-fu, the capital of Lu, is marked with a small circle. In 278 B.C. the Ts'u capital was moved east to Ch'en. In 241 B.C., under pressure of Ts'in, the Ts'u capital had to be moved to the double black cross on the south bank of the Hwai.]

CHAPTER X

THE SECOND PROTECTOR

We must now go back a little. The first of the so-called Five Tyrants, or the Five successive Protectors of orthodox China, had died in 643, his philosopher and friend, Kwan-tsz, having departed this life a little before him. Their joint title to fame lies in the fact that "they saved China from becoming a Tartar province," and even Confucius admits the truth of this--a most important factor in enabling us to understand the motive springs of Chinese policy. Under these circumstances the Duke of Sung, who, as we have seen, had special moral pretensions to leadership on account of his being the direct lineal representative of the Shang dynasty which perished in 1122 B.C., immediately put forward a claim to the hegemony. He rather prejudiced his reputation, however, by committing the serious ritual offence of "warring upon Ts'i's mourning," that is, of engaging the allies in hostilities with the late Protector's own country whilst his body lay unburied, and his sons were still wrangling over the question of succession. The Tartars, however, came to the rescue of, and made a treaty with, Ts'i--this is only one of innumerable instances which show how the northern Chinese princes of those early days were in permanent political touch with the horse-riding nomads. The orthodox Duke of Sung, dressed in his little brief authority as Protector, had the temerity to "send for" the ruler of Ts'u to attend his first durbar. (It must be remembered that the "king" in his own dominions was only "viscount" in the orthodox peerage of ruling princes.) The result was that the King unceremoniously took his would-be protector into custody at the durbar, and put in a claim to be Protector himself. During the military operations connected with this political manoeuvre, the Duke of Sung was guilty of the most ridiculous piece of ritual chivalry; highly approved, it is true, by the literary pedants of all subsequent ages, but ruinous to his own worldly cause. The Ts'u army was crossing a difficult ford, and the Duke's advisers recommended a prompt attack. "It is not honourable," said the Duke, "to take advantage even of an enemy in distress." "But," said his first adviser, "war is war, and its only object is to punish the foe as severely and promptly as possible, so as to gain the upper hand, and establish what you are fighting for."

Meanwhile important events had been going on in the marquisate of Tsin, which, during the thirty-five years' hegemony of Ts'i, had been engaged in extending its territory in all directions, in fighting Ts'in, and in annexing bordering Tartar tribes. At its greatest development Tsin practically comprised all between the Yellow River in its turns south, east, and north; but, though probably half its population was Tartar, it never ceased to be "orthodox" in administrative principle. The energetic but licentious ruler of Tsin had married a Tartar wife in addition to his more legitimate spouse (daughter of the late Protector, Marquess of Ts'i); or, rather, he took two wives, the one being sister of the other, but the younger sister brought him no children. Before this he had already married two sisters of quite a different Tartar tribe, and each of his earlier wives had brought him a son. His last pair of Tartar lady-loves gained such a strong hold upon his affections that he was induced by the mother, being the elder sister of the two, to nominate her own son as his heir to the exclusion of the three elder brethren, who were sent on various flimsy pretexts to defend the northern frontiers against the more hostile Tartars. To complicate matters, the Marquess's legitimate or first spouse, the Ts'i princess, besides bearing a son, had also given him a daughter, who had married the powerful ruler of Ts'in to the west. Thus not only were Ts'in and Tsin both half-Tartar in origin and sympathy, but at this period three out of four of the Tsin possible heirs were actually sons of Tartar women. The legitimate heir, whose mother was of Ts'i origin, and, who himself was a man of very high character, ended the question so far as he was concerned, by committing dutiful suicide; the three sons by Tartar mothers succeeded to the throne one after the other, but in the inverse order of their respective ages. The story of the wanderings of the eldest brother, who did not come to the throne until he was sixty-two years of age, is one of the most interesting and romantic episodes in the whole history of China; and, even with the unfamiliar proper names, would make a capital romantic novel, so graphically and naturally are some of the scenes depicted. First he threw himself heart and soul into Tartar life, joined the rugged horsemen in their internecine wars, married a Tartar wife, and gave her sister to his most faithful henchman; then, hearing of the death of the Ts'i premier, Kwan- tsz, he vowed he would go to Ts'i and try to act as political adviser in his place. Hospitably received by the Marquess of Ts'i, he was presented with a charming and sensible Ts'i princess, who for five years exercised so enervating an influence upon his virility, ambition, and warlike ardour, that he had to be surreptitiously smuggled away from the gay Ts'i capital whilst drunk, by his Tartar father-in-law and by his chief Chinese henchman and brother-in-law. Then he commenced a series of visits to the petty orthodox courts which separated Ts'i from Ts'u.
Several of them were rude and neglectful to this unfortunate prince in distress; but Sung was an exception, for Sung ambition, as above narrated, had been roughly checked by Ts'u, and Sung now wished to make overtures to Tsin instead, and to conciliate a prince who was as likely as not to come to the throne of Tsin. In 637 the prince reached the court of Ts'u, whose ruler had quite recently begun to take formal and official rank as a "civilized" federal prince. Meanwhile, news came that his brother (by his own mother's younger sister) was dead; this younger brother had taken refuge in Ts'in during the reign of his youngest brother (the one born of the last Tartar favourite), and had, after that brother's death, been most generously assisted to the throne in turn by the ruler of Ts'in, on the understanding, however, that Tsin should cede to Ts'in all territory on the right bank of the Yellow River, i.e. in the modern province of Shen Si: but the new Tsin ruler had been persuaded by his courtiers to go back on this humiliating bargain, in consequence of which war had been declared by Ts'in upon Tsin, and the faithless ruler of Tsin had been for some time a prisoner of war in Ts'in; but, regaining his throne through the influence of his half-sister, the wife of the Ts'in ruler, had died in harness in 637 B.C. This deceased ruler's young son was not popular, and Ts'in was now instrumental in welcoming the refugee back from Ts'u, and in leading him in triumph, after nineteen years of adventurous wandering, to his own ancestral throne; his rival and nephew was killed.

All orthodox China seemed to feel now that the interesting wanderer, after all his experiences of war, travel, Tartars, Chinese, barbarians, and politics, was the right man to be Protector. But it was first necessary for Tsin to defeat Ts'u in a decisive battle; a war had arisen between Tsin and Ts'u out of an attempt on the part of CHENG (one of the orthodox Chinese states that had been uncivil to the wanderer), to drag in the preponderant power of Ts'u by way of shielding itself from punishment at Tsin's hands for past rude behaviour. The Emperor sent his own son to confer the status of "my uncle" upon him,--which is practically another way of saying "Protector" to a kinsman,--and in the year 632 accordingly a grand durbar was held, in which the Emperor himself took part. The Tsin ruler, who had summoned the durbar, and had even "commanded the presence" of the Emperor, was the guiding spirit of the meeting in every respect, except in the nominal and ritualistic aspect of it; nevertheless, he was prudent and careful enough scrupulously to observe all external marks of deference, and to make it appear that he was merely acting as mouthpiece to the puppet Emperor; he even went the length of dutifully offering to the Emperor some Ts'u prisoners, and the Emperor in turn "graciously ceded" to Tsin the imperial possessions north of the Yellow River.
Thus Ts'in and Tsin each in turn clipped the wings of the Autocrat of All the Chinas, so styled.

During these few unsettled years between the death of the first real Protector in 643 and the formal nomination by the Emperor of the second in 632, Ts'u and Sung had, as we have seen, both attempted to assert their rival claims. A triangular war had also been going on for some time between Ts'i and Ts'u, the bone of contention being some territory of which Ts'i had stripped Lu; and there was war also between Tsin and Ts'i, Tsin and Ts'in, and Tsin and Ts'u, which latter state always tried to secure the assistance of Ts'in when possible. From first to last, there never was, during the period covered by Confucius' history, any serious war between Tartar Ts'in and barbarian Ts'u; rather were they natural allies against orthodox China, upon which intermediate territory they both learned to fix covetous eyes.

The situation is too involved, in view of the uncouthness of strange names and the absence of definite frontiers--changing as they did with the result of each few years' campaigning--to make it possible to give a full, or even approximately intelligible, explanation of each move. But the following main features are incontestable:--Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u were growing, progressive, and aggressive states, all of them strongly tinged with foreign blood, which foreign blood was naturally assimilated the more readily in proportion to the power, wealth, and culture of the assimilating orthodox nucleus. The imperial domain was an extinct political volcano, belching occasional fumes of threatening, sometimes noxious, but not ever fatally suffocating smoke, always without fire. "The Hia," that is, the federation of princes belonging to pure Hia, or (as we now say) "Chinese" stock, were evidently unwarlike in proportion to the absence of foreign blood in their veins; but they were all of them equally ruses, and all of them past-masters in casuistic diplomacy.
Trade, agriculture, literature, and even law, were now quite active, and (as we shall gradually see in these short chapters) China was undoubtedly beginning to move, as, after 2500 years of a second "ritual" sleep, she is again now moving, at the beginning of the twentieth century A.D.

CHAPTER XI

RELIGION

All through these five centuries of struggle, between the flight of the Emperor with the transfer of the metropolis in 771 B.C., and the total destruction of the feudal system by the First August Emperor of Ts'in in 221 B.C., it is of supreme interest to note that religion in our Western sense was not only non-existent throughout China, but had not yet even been conceived of as an abstract notion; apart, that is to say, from government, public law, family law, and class ritual. No word for "religion" was known to the language; the notion of Church or Temple served by a priestly caste had not entered men's minds. Offences against "the gods" or "the spirits," in a vague sense, were often spoken of; but, on the other hand, too much belief in their power was regarded as superstition. "Sin" was only conceivable in the sense of infraction of nature's general laws, as symbolized and specialized by imperial commands; direct, or delegated to vassal princes; in both cases as representatives, supreme or local, of Heaven, or of the Emperor Above, whose Son the dynastic central ruler for the time being was figuratively supposed to be. No vassal prince ever presumed to style himself "Son of Heaven," though nearly all the barbarous vassals called themselves "King" (the only other title the Chou monarchs took) in their own dominions. "In the Heaven there can only be one Sun; on Earth there can only be one Emperor"; this was the maxim, and, ever since the Chou conquest in 1122 B.C., the word "King" had done duty for the more ancient "Emperor," which, in remote times had apparently not been sharply distinguished in men's minds from God, or the "Emperor on High."

Prayer was common enough, as we shall frequently see, and sacrifice was universal; in fact, the blood of a victim was almost inseparable from solemn function or record of any kind. But such ideas as conscience, fear of God, mortal sin, repentance, absolution, alms-giving, self-mortification, charity, sackcloth and ashes, devout piety, praise and glorification,--in a word, what the Jews, Christians, Mussulmans, and even Buddhists have each in turn conceived to be religious duty, had no well-defined existence at all. There are some traces of local or barbarous gods in the semi-Turkish nation of Ts'in, before it was raised to the status of full feudal vassal; and also in the semi-Annamese nation of Ts'u (with its dependencies Wu and Yiieh); but the orthodox Chinese proper of those times never had any religion such as we now conceive it, whatever notions their remote ancestors may have conceived.

Notwithstanding this, the minds of the governing classes at least were powerfully restrained by family and ancestral feeling, and, if there were no temples or priests for public worship, there were invariably shrines dedicated to the ancestors, with appropriate rites duly carried out by professional clerks or reciters.
Whenever a ruler of any kind undertook any important expedition or possible duty, he was careful first to consult the oracles in order to ascertain the will of Heaven, and then to report the fact to the manes of his forefathers, who were likewise notified of any great victory, political change, or piece of good fortune.
There is a distinction (not easy to master) between the loss of a state and the loss of a dynasty; in the latter case the population remain comparatively unaffected, and it is only the reigning family whose sacrifices to the gods of the place and of the harvest are interrupted. Thus in 567, when one of the very small vassals (of whom the ruler of Lu was mesne lord) crushed the other, it is explained that the spirits will not spiritually eat the sacrifices (i.e. accept the worship) of one who does not belong to the same family name, and that in this case the annihilating state was only a cousin through sisters: "when the country is 'lost,' it means that the strange surname succeeds to power; but, when a strange surname becomes spiritual heir, we say 'annihilated.'" We have seen in the ninth chapter how the Shang dynasty lost the empire, but was sacrificially maintained in Sung.
From the remotest times there seems to have been a tender unwillingness to "cut off all sacrifices" entirely, probably out of a feeling that retribution in like form might at some future date occur to the ruthless condemner of others. There is another reason, which is, nearly all ruling families hailed from the same remote semi-mythical emperors, or from their ministers, or from their wives of inferior birth. Thus, although the body of the last tyrannical monarch of the Shang dynasty just cited was pierced through and through by the triumphant Chou monarch, that monarch's brother (acting as regent on behalf of the son and successor) conferred the principality of Sung upon the tyrant's elder half- brother by an inferior wife, "in order that the dynastic sacrifices might not be cut off"; and to the very last the Duke of Sung was the only ruling satrap under the Chou dynasty who permanently enjoyed the full title of "duke." His neighbour, the Marquess of Wei (imperial clan), was, it is true, made "duke" in 770 B.C. for services in connection with the Emperor's flight; but the title seems to have been tacitly abandoned, and at durbars he is always styled "marquess." Of the Shang tyrant himself it is recorded: "thus in 1122 B.C. he lost all in a single day, without even leaving posterity." Of course his elder brother could not possibly be his spiritual heir. In 597 B.C., when Ts'u, in its struggle with Tsin for the possession of CHENG, got the ruling Earl of CHENG in its power, the latter referred appealingly to his imperial ancestors (the first earl, in 806, was son of the Emperor who fled from his capital north in 842), and said: "Let me continue their sacrifices." There are, at least, a score of similar instances: the ancestral sacrifices seem to refer rather to posterity, whilst those to gods of the land and grain appear more connected with rights as feoffee.

Prayer is mentioned from the earliest times. For instance Shun, the active ploughman monarch (not hereditary) who preceded the three dynasties of Hia (2205-1767), Shang (1766-1123), and Chou (1122-249), prayed at a certain mountain in the centre of modern Hu Nan province, where his grave still is, (a fact which points to the possibility of the orthodox Chinese having worked their way northwards from the south-west). When the Chou conqueror, posthumously called the Martial King, fell ill, his brother, the Duke of Chou (later regent for the Martial King's son), prayed to Heaven for his brother's recovery, and offered himself as a substitute; the clerk was instructed to commit the offer to writing, and this solemn document was securely locked up. The same man, when regent, again offered himself to Heaven for his sick nephew, cutting his nails off and throwing them into the river, as a symbol of his willingness to give up his own body. The Emperor K'ang-hi of the present Manchu dynasty, perhaps in imitation of the Duke of Chou, offered himself to Heaven in place of his sick Mongol grandmother. A very curious instance of prayer occurs in connection with the succession to the Tsin throne; it will be remembered that the legitimate heir committed dutiful suicide, and two other half-brothers (and, for a few months, one of these brother's sons) reigned before the second Protector secured his ancestral rights. The suicide's ghost appears to his usurping brother, and says: "I have prayed to the Emperor (God), who will soon deliver over Tsin into Ts'in's hands, so that Ts'in will perform the sacrifices due to me." The reply to the ghost was: "But the spirits will only eat the offerings if they come from the same family stock." The ghost said: "Very good; then I will pray again. . . . God now says my half-brother will be overthrown at the battle of Han" (the pass where the philosopher Lao-tsz is supposed to have written his book 150 years later). In 645 the ruler of Tsin was in fact captured in battle by his brother-in-law of Ts'in, who was indeed about to sacrifice to the Emperor on High as successor of Tsin; but he was dissuaded by his orthodox wife (the Tsin princess, daughter of a Ts'i princess as explained on page 51).

In 575 Tsin is recorded as "invoking the spirits and requesting a victory." A little later one of the Tsin generals, after a defeat, issued a general order by way of concealing his weakness: to deceive the enemy he suggested that the army should amongst other things make a great show of praying for victory. There are many other similar analogous instances of undoubted prayer. Much later, in the year 210 B.C., when the King (as he had been) of Ts'in had conquered all China and given himself the name, for the first time in history, of August Emperor (the present title), he consulted his soothsayers about an unpleasant dream he had had. He was advised to pray, and to worship (or to sacrifice, for the two are practically one) with special ardour if he wished to bring things round to a favourable conclusion: and this is a monarch, too, who was steeped in Lao-tsz's philosophy.

CHAPTER XII

ANCESTRAL WORSHIP

We have just seen that, when a military expedition started out, the event was notified, with sacrifice, to the ancestors of the person most concerned: it was also the practice to carry to battle, on a special chariot, the tablet of the last ancestor removed from the ancestral hall, in order that, under his aegis so to speak, the tactics of the battle might be successful. Ancestral halls varied according to rank, the Emperor alone having seven shrines; vassal rulers five; and first-class ministers three; courtiers or second-class ministers had only two; that is to say, no one beyond the living subject's grandfather was in these last cases worshipped at all. From this we may assume that the ordinary folk could not pretend to any shrine, unless perhaps the house- altar, which one may see still any day in the streets of Canton.
In 645 B.C. a first-class minister's temple was struck by lightning, and the commentator observes: "Thus we see that all, from the Emperor down to the courtiers, had ancestral shrines",--a statement which proves that already at the beginning of our Christian era such matters had to be explained to the general public. The shrines were disposed in the following fashion:--To the left (on entrance) was the shrine of the living subject's father; to the right his grandfather; above these two, to the left and right again, the great-grandfather and great-great- grandfather; opposite, in the centre, was that of the founder, whose tablet or effigy was never moved; but as each living individual died, his successor of course regarded him in the light of father, and, five being the maximum allowed, one tablet had to be removed at each decease, and it was placed in the more general ancestral hall belonging to the clan or gens rather than to the specific family: it was therefore the, tablet or effigy of the great-great-grandfather that was usually carried about in war. The Emperor alone had two special chapels beyond the five shrines, each chapel containing the odds (left) and evens (right) of those higher up in ascent than the great and great-great-grandfathers respectively. The King of Ts'u who died in 560 B.C. said on his death-bed: "I now take my place in the ancestral temple to receive sacrifices in the spring and autumn of each year." In the year 597, after a great victory over Tsin, the King of Ts'u had been advised to build a trophy over the collected corpses of the enemy; but, being apparently rather a high-minded man, after a little reflection, he said: "No! I will simply erect there a temple to my ancestors, thanking them for the success." After the death in 210 B.C. of the First August Emperor, a discussion arose as to what honours should be paid to his temple shrine: it was explained that "for a thousand years without any change the rule has been seven shrines for the Son of Heaven, five for vassal princes, and three for ministers." In the year 253, after the conquest of the miserable Chou Emperor's limited territory, the same Ts'in conqueror "personally laid the matter before the Emperor Above in the suburb sacrifice";--which means that he took over charge of the world as Vicar of God. The Temple of Heaven (outside the Peking South Gate), occupied in 1900 by the British troops, is practically the "suburb sacrifice" place of ancient times. It was not until the year 221 B.C. that the King of Ts'in, after that date First August Emperor, formally annexed the whole empire: "thanks to the shrines in the ancestral temple," or "thanks to the spiritual help of my ancestors' shrines the Under-Heaven (i.e.
Empire) is now first settled." These expressions have been perpetuated dynasty by dynasty, and were indeed again used but yesterday in the various announcements of victory made to Heaven and his ancestors by the Japanese Tenshi, or Mikado; that is by the "Son of Heaven," or T'ien-tsz of the ancient Chinese, from whom the Japanese Shinto ritual was borrowed in whole or in part.

In the year 572 B.C., on the accession of a Tsin ruler after various irregular interruptions in the lineal succession, he says: "Thanks to the supernatural assistance of my ancestors--and to your assistance, my lords--I can now carry out the Tsin sacrifices." In the year 548 the wretched ruler of Ts'i, victim of a palace intrigue, begged the eunuch who was charged with the task of assassinating him at least "to grant me permission to commit suicide in my ancestral hall." The wooden tablet representing the ancestor is defined as being "that on which the spirit reclines"; and the temple "that place where the ancestral spiritual consciousness doth dwell." Each tablet was placed on its own altar: the tablet was square, with a hole in the centre, "in order to leave free access on all four sides." The Emperor's was twelve inches, those of vassal princes one foot (i.e. ten inches) in length, and no doubt the inscription was daubed on in varnish (before writing on silk became general, and before the hair-brush and ink came into use about 200 B.C.). The rulers of Lu, being lineal descendants of the Duke of Chou, brother of the first Emperor of the Chou dynasty (1122 B.C.) had special privileges in sacrificial matters, such as the right to use the imperial music of all past dynasties; the right to sacrifice to the father of the Duke of Chou and the founder; the right to imperial rites, to suburban sacrifice, and so on; besides the custody of certain ancient symbolic objects presented by the first Chou Emperors, and mentioned on page 22.

Of course no punishment could be spiritually greater than the destruction of ancestral temples: thus on two occasions, notably in 575 B.C. when a first-class minister traitorously fled his country, his prince, the Marquess of Lu, as a special act of grace, simply "swept his ancestral temple, but did not cut off the sacrifices." The second instance was also in Lu, in 550: the Wei friend with whom Confucius lived seventy years later, when wandering in Wei, retrospectively gave his ritual opinion on the case--a proof of the solidarity in sympathy that existed between the statesmen of the orthodox principalities. In the bloodthirsty wars between the semi-barbarous southern states of Wu and Ts'u, the capital of the latter was taken by storm in the year 506, the ancestral temple of Ts'u was totally destroyed, and the renegade Ts'u ministers who accompanied the Wu armies even flogged the corpse of the previous Ts'u king, their former master, against whom they had a grievance. This mutilation of the dead (in cases where the guilty rulers have contravened the laws of nature and heaven) was practised even in imperial China; for (see page 57) the founder of the dynasty, on taking possession of the last Shang Emperor's palace, deliberately fired several arrows into the body of the suicide Emperor. Decapitating corpses and desecrating tombs of great criminals have frequently been practised by the existing Manchu government, in criticizing whom we must not forget the treatment of Cromwell's body at the Restoration. In the year 285 B.C., when the Ts'i capital was taken possession of by the allied royal powers then united against Ts'i, the ancestral temple was burnt. In 249 B.C. Ts'u extinguished the state of Lu, "which thus witnessed the interruption of its ancestral sacrifices."

Frequent instances occur, throughout this troublous period, of the Emperor's sending presents of meat used in ancestral sacrifices to the vassal princes; this was intended as a special mark of honour, something akin to the "orders" or decorations distributed in Europe. Thus in 671 the new King of Ts'u who had just murdered his predecessor, which predecessor had for the first time set the bad example of annexing petty orthodox Chinese principalities, received this compliment of sacrificial meat from the Emperor, together with a mild hint to "attack the barbarians such as Yiieh, but always to let the Chinese princes alone." Ts'i, Lu, Ts'in, and Yiieh on different occasions between that date and the fourth century B.C. received similar donations, usually, evidently, more propitiatory than patronizing. In 472 the barbarous King of Yiieh was even nominated Protector along with his present of meat; this was after his total destruction of Wu, when he was marching north to threaten North China. Presents of private family sacrificial meat are still in vogue between friends in China.

Fasting and purification were necessary before undertaking solemn sacrifice of any kind. Thus the King of Ts'u in 690 B.C. did this before announcing a proposed war to his ancestors; and an envoy starting from Ts'u to Lu in 618 reported the circumstance to his own particular ancestors, who may or may not have been (as many high officers were) of the reigning caste. On another occasion the ruler of Lu was assassinated whilst purifying himself in the enclosure dedicated to the god of the soil, previous to sacrificing to the manes of an individual who had once saved his life. Practically all this is maintained in modern Chinese usage.

A curious distinction is mentioned in connection with official mourning tidings in the highly ritual state of Lu. If the deceased were of a totally different family name, the Marquess of Lu wept outside his capital, turning towards deceased's native place, or place of death; if of the same name, then in the ancestral temple: if the deceased was a descendant of the same founder, then in the founder's temple; if of the same family branch, then in the paternal temple. All these refinements are naturally tedious and obscure to us Westerners; but it is only by collating specific facts that we can arrive at any general principle or rule.

[Illustration: MAP

1. Ts'u's five capitals, in order of date, are marked. In 504 B.C.
the king had to leave the Yang-tsz for good in order to escape Wu attacks. In 278 B.C. Ts'in captured No. 4, and then the ancient Ch'ta capital (No. 5, already annexed by Ts'u) became the Ts'u capital (see maps showing Ch'en's position). Ts'u was now a Hwai River power instead of being a Han River and Yang-tsz power. Shuh and Pa are modern Sz Ch'wan, both inaccessible from the Han system. The Han system to its north was separated from the Wei system and the country of Ts'in by a common watershed.

2. Wu seems to have been the only power besides Ts'u possessing any knowledge of the Yang-tsz River, and Wu was originally part of, or vassal to Ts'u. 3. Pa had relations with Ts'u so early as 600 B.C. Later Pa princesses married Ts'u kings.]

CHAPTER XIII

ANCIENT DOCUMENTS FOUND

The reign of the Tsin marquess (628-635), second of the Five Protectors, only lasted eight years, and nothing is recorded to have happened during this period at all commensurate with his picturesque figure in history while yet a mere wanderer. But it is very interesting to note that the Bamboo Annals or Books, i.e. the History of Tsin from 784 B.C., and incidentally also of China from 1500 years before that date, are one of the corroborative authorities we now possess upon the accuracy of Confucius' history from 722 B.C., as expanded by his three commentators; and it is satisfactory to know that the oldest of the three commentaries, that usually called the Tso Chwan, or "Commentary of Tso K'iu-ming," a junior contemporary of Confucius, and official historiographer at the Lu Court, is the most accurate as well as the most interesting of the three. These Bamboo Books were only discovered in the year 281 A.D., after having been buried in a tomb ever since the year 299 B.C. The character in which they were written, upon slips of bamboo, had already become so obsolete that the sustained work of antiquarians was absolutely necessary in order to reduce it to the current script of the day; or, in other words, of to-day. Another interesting fact is, that whilst the Chou dynasty, and consequently Confucius of Lu (which state was intimately connected by blood with the Chou family), had introduced a new calendar, making the year begin one (Shang) or two (Hia) months sooner than before, Tsin had continued to compute (see page 27) the year according to the system of the Hia dynasty: in other words, the intercalary moons, or massed fractions of time periodically introduced in order to bring the solar and lunar years into line, had during the millennium so accumulated (at the rate apparently of, roughly, sixty days in 360,000, or, say, three half-seconds a day) that the Chou dynasty found it necessary to call the Hia eleventh moon the first and the Hia first moon the third of the year. A parallel distinction is observable in modern times when the Russian year (until a few years ago twelve days later than ours), was declared thirteen days later; and when we ourselves in 1900 (and in three-fourths of all future years making up a net hundred), omit the intercalary day of the 29th February, which otherwise occurs every fourth year of even numbers divisible by four. Thus the very discrepancies in the dates of the Bamboo Books (where the later editors, in attempting to accommodate all dates to later calendars, have accidentally left a Tsin date unchanged) and in the dates of Confucius' expanded history, pointed out and explained as they are by the Chinese commentators themselves, are at once a guarantee of fact, and of good faith in recording that fact.

But the neighbour and brother-in-law of the Tsin marquess (himself three parts Turkish), the Earl of Ts'in, who reigned from 659 to 621 B.C., and during that reign quietly laid the foundations of a powerful state which was destined to achieve the future conquest of all China, was himself a remarkable man; and there is some reason to believe that he, even at this period, also possessed a special calendar of his own, as his successors certainly did 400 years later, when they imposed their own calendar reckoning upon China. We have already seen (page 52) what powerful influence he exercised in bringing the semi-Tartar Tsin brethren to the Tsin throne in turn. He had invited several distinguished men from the neighbouring petty, but very ancient, Chinese principalities to settle in his capital as advisers; he was too far off to attend the durbars held by the, First Protector, but he sent one of these Chinese advisers as his representative, He is usually himself counted as one of the Five Protectors; but, although he was certainly very influential, and for that reason was certainly one of the Five Tyrants, or Five Predominating Powers, it is certain that he never succeeded in obtaining the Emperor's formal sanction to act as such over the orthodox principalities, nor did he ever preside at a durbar of Chinese federal princes. Long and bloody wars with his neighbour of Tsin were the chief feature of his reign so far as orthodox China was concerned; but his chief glory lies in his great Tartar conquests, and in his enormous extensions to the west. These extensions, however, must not be exaggerated, and there is no reason to suppose that they ever reached farther than Kwa Chou and Tun-hwang (long. 95o, lat. 40o), two very ancient places which still appear under those names on the most modern maps of China, and from which roads (recently examined by Major Bruce) branch off to Turkestan and Lob Nor respectively.

Most Emperors and vassal princes are spoken of in history by their posthumous names, that is by the names voted to them after death, with the view of tersely expressing by that name the essential features (good or bad) of the deceased's personal character; just as we say in Europe, officially or unofficially, Louis le Bienaime, Albert the Good, or Charles the Fat. The posthumous name of this Ts'in earl was "the Duke Muh" (no matter whether duke, marquess, earl, viscount, or baron when living, it was customary to say "duke" when the ruler was dead), and the posthumous name of the Emperor who died in 947 B.C. was "the King Muh"; for, as already stated, the Chou dynasty of Sons of Heaven were called "King," and not "Emperor" though their supreme position was as fully imperial as that of previous dynastic monarchs, and they were, in fact, "Emperors" as we now understand that word in Europe. At the same time that the Bamboo Annals were unearthed, there were also found copies of some of the old "classics" or "Scripture," and a hitherto unknown book called "the Story of the Son of Heaven Muh," all, of course, written in the same ancient script. This Son of Heaven (a term applied to all the Emperors of China, no matter whether they styled themselves Emperor, King, or August Emperor) was supposed to have travelled far west, and to have had interviews with a foreign prince, who, as his land too, was transcribed as Siwangmu. The subject will be touched upon more in detail in another chapter; but, for the present, it will be useful to say that, in the opinion of one very learned sinologist, all evidence points clearly to this expedition having been undertaken by Duke Muh of Ts'in, installed as he was in the old appanage of the emperors lost to the Tartars (as we have explained) in 771, and made over at the same time by the Emperor involved to the ancestors of Duke Muh. This view of the case is supported by the fact that in 664 B.C. Ts'in and Tsin, for some unknown reason, forced the Tartars of Kwa Chou to migrate into China, which migration was subsequently alluded to by a Tartar chief (when attending a Chinese durbar in 559 B.C.) as a well- known historical fact. It was undoubtedly the practice of semi- Chinese states, such as Ts'u, Wu, Yueh, and Shuh (the last is the modern Sz Ch'wan province, and its history was only discovered long after Confucius' time), to call themselves "Kings," "Emperors," and "Sons of Heaven," in their own country (just as the tributary King of Annam always did until the French assumed a protectorate over him; and just as the tributary Japanese did before they officially announced the fact to China in the seventh century A.D.); and there are many indications that Ts'in did, or at least might have done and would like to have done, the same thing. Hence, when the story of Muh was discovered, the literary manipulators--even if they did not really believe that it positively must refer to the Emperor Muh-might well have honestly doubted whether the story referred to Ts'in or to the Emperor; or might well have decided to incorporate it with orthodox history, as a strengthening factor in support of the theory of one single and indivisible imperial dignity; just as, again, in the seventh century and eighth century A.D., the Japanese manipulators of their traditional history incorporated hundreds, not to say thousands of Chinese historical facts and speeches, and worked them into their own historical episodes and into their own emperors' mouths, for the honour and glory of Dai Nippon (Great Japan).

After the death of the Second Protector in 628 B.C., there was a continuous struggle between Tsin and Ts'in on the one hand, and between Tsin and Ts'u on the other. Meanwhile Ts'i had all its own work cut out in order to keep the Tartars off the right bank of the Yellow River in its lower course, and in order to protect the orthodox Chinese states, Lu, Sung, Wei, etc., from their attacks; but Ts'i never again after this date put in a formal claim to be Protector, although in 610 she led a coalition of princes against an offending member, and thus practically acted as Protector.

In addition to the Chinese adviser at the disposal of Ts'in, in the year 626 the King (or a king) of the Tartars supplied Duke Muh with a very able Tartar adviser of Tsin descent; i.e. his ancestors had in past times migrated to Tartarland, though he himself still "spoke the Tsin dialect," and must have had considerable literary capacity, as he was an author. Ts'in was now, in addition to being, if only informally, a federal Chinese state, also supreme suzerain over all the Tartar principalities within reach; well supplied, moreover, with expert advisers for both classes of work. All this is important in view of the pre- eminency of Ts'in when the time came, 400 years later, to abolish the meticulous feudal system altogether.

CHAPTER XIV

MORE ON PROTECTORS

The Five Tyrants, or Protectors, are usually considered to be the five personages we have mentioned; to wit, in order of succession, the Marquess of Ts'i (679-643), under whose reign the great economist, statesman, and philosopher Kwan-tsz raised this far eastern part of China to a hitherto unheard-of pitch of material prosperity; the Marquess of Tsin (632-628), a romantic prince, more Turkish than Chinese, who was the first vassal prince openly to treat the Emperor as a puppet; the Duke of Sung (died 637), representing the imperial Shang dynasty ejected by the Chou family in 1122, whose ridiculous chivalry failed, however, to secure him the effective support of the other Chinese princes; the Earl of Ts'in (died 621) who was, as we see, quietly creating a great Tartar dominion, and assimilating it to Chinese ways in the west; and the King of Ts'u (died 591), who, besides taking his place amongst the recognized federal princes, and annexing innumerable petty Chinese principalities in the Han River and Hwai River basins, had been for several generations quietly extending his dominions at the expense of what we now call the provinces of Sz Ch'wan, Kiang Si, Hu Kwang-perhaps even Yun Nan and Kwei Chou; Certainly Kiang Su and Cheh Kiang, and possibly in a loose way the coast regions of modern Fuh Kien and the Two Kwang; but it cannot be too often repeated that if any thing intimate was known of the Yang-tsz basin, it was only Ts'u (in its double character of independent local empire as well as Chinese federal prince) that knew, or could have known, any thing about it; just as, if any thing specific was known of the Far West, Turkestan, the Tarim valley, and the Desert, it was only Ts'in (in its double character of independent Tartar empire as well as Chinese federal prince) that knew, or could know, any thing about them. Ts'i and Tsin were also Tartar powers, at least in the sense that they knew how to keep off the particular Tartars known to them, and how to make friendly alliances with them, thus availing themselves, on the one hand, of Tartar virility, and faithful on the other to orthodox Chinese culture. So that, with the exception of the pedantic Duke of Sung, who was summarily snuffed out after a year or two of brief light by the lusty King of Ts'u, all the nominal Five Protectors of China were either half-barbarian rulers or had passed through the crucible of barbarian ordeals. Finally, so vague were the claims and services of Sung, Ts'u, and Ts'in, from a protector point of view, that for the purposes of this work, we only really recognize two, the First Protector (of Ts'i) and, after a struggle, the Second Protector (of Tsin): at most a third,--Ts'u.

But although the Chinese historians thus loosely confine the Five- Protector period to less than a century of time, it is a fact that Ts'u and Tsin went on obstinately struggling for the hegemony, or for practical predominance, for at least another 200 years; besides, Ts'in, Ts'u, and Sung were never formally nominated by the Emperor as Protectors, nor were they ever accepted as such by the Chinese federal princes in the permanent and definite way that Ts'i and Tsin had been and were accepted. Moreover, the barbarian states of Wu and Yueh each in turn acted very effectively as Protector, and are never included in the Five-Great-Power series.
The fact is, the Chinese have never grasped the idea of principles in history: their annals are mere diaries of events; and when once an apparently definite "period" is named by an annalist, they go on using it, quite regardless of its inconsistency when confronted with facts adverse to a logical acceptance of it.

The situation was this: Tsin and Ts'u were at perpetual loggerheads about the small Chinese states that lay between them, more especially about the state of Cheng, which, though small, was of quite recent imperial stock, and was, moreover, well supplied with brains. Tsin and Ts'in were at perpetual loggerheads about the old Tsin possessions on the west bank of the Yellow River, which, running from the north to the south, lay between them; and about their rival claims to influence the various nomadic Tartar tribes living along both the banks, Tsin and Ts'i were often engaged in disputes about Lu, Wei, and other orthodox states situated in the Lower Yellow River valley running from the west to the east and north-east; also in questions concerning eastern barbarian states inhabiting the whole coast region, and concerning the petty Chinese states which had degenerated, and whose manners savoured of barbarian ways. Thus Ts'in and Ts'u, and also to some extent Ts'i and Ts'u, had a regular tendency to ally themselves against Tsin's flanks, and it was therefore always Tsin's policy as the "middle man" to obstruct communications between Ts'in and Ts'u, and between Ts'i and Ts'u. In 580 Tsin devised a means of playing off a similar flanking game upon Ts'u: negotiations were opened with Wu, which completely barbarous state only begins to appear in history at all at about this period, all the kings having manifestly phonetic barbarian names, which mean absolutely nothing (beyond conveying the sound) as expressed in Chinese, Wu was taught the art of war, as we have seen, by (page 34) a Ts'u traitor who had fled to Tsin and taken service there; and the King of Wu soon made things so uncomfortable for Ts'u that the latter in turn tried by every means to block the way between Tsin and Wu.
Within a single generation Wu was so civilized that one of the royal princes was sent the rounds of the Chinese states as special ambassador, charged, under the convenient cloak of seeking for civilization, ritual, and music, with the duty of acquiring political and strategical knowledge. This prince so favourably impressed the orthodox statesmen of Ts'i, Lu, Tsin, and Wei (the ruling family of this state, like that of Sung, was, until it revolted in 1106 B.C. against the new Chou dynasty, of Shang dynasty origin, and the Yellow River ran through it northwards), that he was everywhere deferentially received as an equal: his tomb is still in existence, about ten miles from the treaty- port of Chinkiang, and the inscription upon it, in ancient characters, was written by Confucius himself, who, though a boy of eight when the Wu prince visited Lu in 544, may well have seen the prince in the flesh elsewhere, for the latter lived to prevent a war with Ts'u in 485; i.e. he lived to within six years of Confucius' death: he is known, too, to have visited Tsin on a spying mission in 515 B.C. The original descent of the first voluntarily barbarous Wu princes from the same grandfather as the Chou emperors would afford ample basis for the full recognition of a Wu prince by the orthodox as their equal, especially when his manners were softened by rites and music. It was like an oriental prince being feted and invested in Europe, so long as he should conform to the conventional dress and mannerisms of "society."

Just as Wu had been quietly submissive to Ts'u until the opportunity came to revolt, so did the still more barbarous state of Yueh, lying to the south-east of and tributary to Wu as her mesne lord, eagerly seize the opportunity of attacking Wu when the common suzerain, Ts'u, required it. The wars of Wu and Yueh are almost entirely naval, and, so far as the last-named state is concerned, it is never reported as having used war-chariots at all. Wu adopted the Chinese chariot as rapidly as it had re- adopted the Chinese civilization, abandoned by the first colonist princes in 1200 B.C.; but of course these chariots were only for war in China, on the flat Chinese plains; they were totally impracticable in mountainous countries, except along the main routes, and useless (as Major Bruce shows) in regions cut up by gulleys; even now no one ever sees a two-wheeled vehicle in the Shanghai-Ningpo region. It must, therefore, always be remembered that Wu, though barbarous in its population, was, in its origin as an organized system of rule, a colony created by certain ancestors of the founder of the Chou dynasty, who had voluntarily gone off to carve out an appanage in the Jungle; i.e. in the vague unknown dominion later called Ts'u, of which dominion all coast regions were a part, so far as they could be reduced to submission. This gave the Kings of Wu, though barbarian, a pretext for claiming equality with, and even seniority over Tsin, the first Chou-born prince of which was junior in descent to most of the other enfeoffed vassals of the imperial clan-name. In 502 Wu armies even threatened the northern state of Ts'i, and asserted in China generally a brief authority akin to that of Protector. Ts'i was obliged to buy itself off by marrying a princess of the blood to the heir-apparent of Wu, an act which two centuries later excited the disgust of the philosopher Mencius. The great Ts'i statesman and writer Yen-tsz, whom we have already mentioned more than once, died in 500, and earlier in that year Confucius had become chief counsellor of Lu, which state, on account of Confucius' skill as a diplomat, nearly obtained the Protectorate. It was owing to the fear of this that the assassination of the Lu prince was attempted that year, as narrated in Chapter IX. In order to understand how Wu succeeded in reaching Lu and Ts'i, it must be recollected that the river Sz, which still runs from east to west past Confucius's birthplace, and now simply feeds the Grand Canal, then flowed south-east along the line of the present canal and entered the Hwai River near Su-chou. Moreover, there was at times boat- communication between the Sz and the Yellow River, though the precise channel is not now known. Consequently, the Wu fleets had no difficulty in sailing northwards first by sea and then up the Hwai and Sz Rivers. Besides, in 485, the King of Wu began what we now call the Grand Canal by joining as a beginning the Yang-tsz River with the Hwai River, and then carrying the canal beyond the Hwai to the state of Sung, which state was then disputing with Lu the possession of territory on the east bank of the Sz, whilst Ts'u was pushing her annexations up to the west bank of the same river. There were in all twelve minor orthodox states between the Sz and the Hwai. In 482 the all-powerful King of Wu held a genuine durbar as Protector, at a place in modern Ho Nan province, north of the Yellow River as it now runs, but at that time a good distance to the south-east of it. This is one of the most celebrated meetings in Chinese history, partly because Wu successfully asserted political pre-eminence over Tsin; partly because Confucius falsifies the true facts out of shame (as we have seen he did when Ts'u similarly seized the first place over Tsin); and partly owing to the shrewd diplomacy of the King of Wu, who had learnt by express messenger that the King of Ytieh was marching on his capital, and who had the difficult double task to accomplish of carrying out a "bluff," and operating a retreat without showing his weak hand to either side, or losing his army exposed between two foes.

In 473, after long and desperate fighting, Wu was, however, at last annihilated by Yiieh, which state was now unanimously voted Protector, Vae victis! The Yueh capital was promptly removed from near the modern Shao-hing (west of Ningpo) far away north to what is now practically the German colony of Kiao Chou; but, though a maritime power of very great-strength, Yiieh never succeeded in establishing any real land influence in the Hwai Valley. During her short protectorate she rectified the River Sz question by forcing Sung to make over to Lu the land on the east bank of the River Sz.

CHAPTER XV

STATE INTERCOURSE

Whatever may be the reason why details of interstate movement are lacking up to 842 B.C., it is certain that, from the date of the Emperor's flight eastwards in 771, the utmost activity prevailed between state and state within the narrow area to which, as we have seen, the federated Chinese empire was confined. Confucius' history, covering the 250-year period subsequent to 722, consists largely of statements that this duke visited that country, or returned from it, or drew up a treaty with it, or negotiated a marriage with it. "Society," in a political sense, consisted of the four great powers, Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u, surrounding the purely Chinese enclave; and of the innumerable petty Chinese states, mostly of noble and ancient lineage, only half a dozen of them of any size, which formed the enclave in question, and were surrounded by Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u, to the west, north, east, and south. Secondary states in extent and in military power, like Lu, CHENG, and Wei, whilst having orthodox and in some cases barbarian sub-vassals of their own, were themselves, if not vassals to, at all events under the predominant influence of, one or the other of the four great powers. Thus Lu was at first nearly always a handmaid of Ts'i, but later fell under the influence of Tsin, Ts'u, and Wu; Cheng always coquetted between Tsin and Ts'u, not out of love for either, but in order to protect her own independence; and so on with the rest. If we inquire what a really small state meant in those days, the answer is that the modern walled city, with its district of several hundred square miles lying around it, was (and usually still is) the equivalent of the ancient principality; and proof of that lies in the fact that one of the literary designations of what we now term a "district magistrate" is still "city marquess." Another proof is that in ancient times "your state" was a recognized way of saying "your capital town"; and "my poor town" was the polite way of saying "our country"; both expressions still used in elegant diplomatic composition.

This being so, and it having besides been the practice for a visiting duke always to take along with him a "minister in attendance," small wonder that prominent Chinese statesmen from the orthodox states were all personal friends, or at least correspondents and acquaintances, who had thus frequent opportunity of comparing political notes. To this day there are no serious dialect differences whatever in the ancient central area described in the first chapter, nor is there any reason to suppose that the statesmen and scholars who thus often met in conclave had any difficulty in making themselves mutually understood. The "dialects"' of which we hear so much in modern times (which, none the less, are all of them pure Chinese, except that the syllables differ, just as coeur, cuore, and corazon, coracao, differ from cor_), all belong to the southern coasts, which were practically unknown to imperial China in Confucius' time. The Chinese word which we translate "mandarin" also means "public" or "common," and "mandarin dialect" really means "current" or "common speech," such as is, and was, spoken with no very serious modifications all over the enclave; and also in those parts of Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u, which immediately impinged upon the enclave, in the ratio of their proximity. Finally, Shen Si, Shan Si, Shan Tung, and Hu Kwang are still called Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u in high-class official correspondence; and so with all other place-names. China has never lost touch with antiquity.

There is record for nearly every thing: the only difficulty is to separate what is relevant from what is irrelevant in the mass of confused data.

Another matter must be considered. Although the Chinese never had a caste system in the Hindoo sense, there is, as we have stated once before, every reason to believe that the ruling classes and the educated classes were nearly all nobles, in the sense that they were all lineal or branch descendants, whether by first- class wife or by concubine, of either the ruling dynastic family or of some previous imperial dynastic family. Some families were by custom destined for hereditary ministers, others for hereditary envoys, others again for hereditary soldiers; not, it is true, by strict rule, but because the ancient social idea favoured the descent of office, or land, or trade, or craft from father to son.
This, indeed, was part of the celebrated Kwan-tsz's economic philosophy. Thus generation after generation of statesmen and scholars kept in steady touch with one another, exactly as our modern scientists of the first rank, each as a link, form an unbroken intimate chain from Newton down to Lord Kelvin, outside which pale the ordinary layman stands a comparative stranger to the arcana within.

Kwan-tsz, the statesman-philosopher of Ts'i, and in a sense the founder of Chinese economic science, was himself a scion of the imperial Chou clan; every writer on political economy subsequent to 643 B.C. quotes his writings, precisely as every European philosophical writer cites Bacon. Quite a galaxy of brilliant statesmen and writers, a century after Kwan-tsz, shed lustre upon the Confucian age (550-480), and nearly all of them were personal friends either of Confucius or of each other, or of both. Thus Tsz-ch'an of CHENG, senior to Confucius, but beloved and admired by him, was son of a reigning duke, and a prince of the ducal CHENG family, which again was descended from a son of the Emperor who fled in 842 B.C.

If Tsz-ch'an had written works on philosophy and politics, it is possible that he might have been China's greatest man in the place of Confucius; for he based his ideas of government, as did Confucius, who probably copied much from him, entirely upon "fitting conduct," or "natural propriety"; in addition to which he was a great lawyer, entirely free from superstition and hypocrisy; a kind, just, and considerate ruler; a consummate diplomat; and a bold, original statesman, economist, and administrator. The anecdotes and sayings of Tsz-ch'an are as numerous and as practical as those about Julius Caesar or Marcus Aurelius.

Another great pillar of the state praised by Confucius was Shuh Hiang of Tsin, whose reputation as a sort of Chinese Cicero is not far below that of Tsz-ch'an. He belonged to one of the great private families of Tsin, of whom it was said in Ts'u that "any of them could bring 100 war-chariots into the field." Nothing could be more interesting than the interviews and letters (see Appendix No. 1) between these two friends and their colleagues of Ts'i, Ts'u, Lu, and Sung.

Yen-tsz of Ts'i almost ranks with Kwan-tsz as an administrator, philosopher, economist, author, and statesman. Confucius has a good word for him too, though Yen-tsz's own opinion of Confucius' merits was by no means so high. The two men had to "spar" with each other behind their respective rulers like Bismarck and Gortschakoff did. Yen-tsz's interview with Shuh Hiang, when the pair discussed the vices of their respective dukes, is almost as amusing as a "patter" scene in the pantomime, a sort of by-play which takes place whilst the curtain is down in preparation for the next formal act (see Appendix No. 2).

[Illustration: K'ung Ling-i, the hereditary Yen-sheng Kung, or "Propagating Holiness Duke"; 76th in descent from K'ung K'iu, alias K'ung Chung-ni, the original philosopher, 551--479 B.C.

This portrait was presented to "the priest P'eng" (Father Tschepe, S.J.), on the occasion of his visit last autumn (7th moon, 33rd year).]

Confucius himself had descended in the direct line from the ducal family of Sung; but Sung, like the other states, was cursed with the "great family" nuisance, and one of his ancestors, having incurred a grandee's hostility, had met with his death in a palace intrigue, in consequence of which the Confucian family, despairing of justice, had migrated to Lu. When we read of Confucius' extensive wanderings (which are treated of more at length in a subsequent chapter), the matter takes a very different complexion from what is usually supposed, especially if it be recollected what a limited area was really covered. He never got even so far as Tsin, though part of Tsin touched the Lu frontier, and it is doubtful if he was ever 300 miles, as the crow flies, from his own house in Lu; true, he visited the fringe of Ts'u, but it must be remembered that the place he visited was only in modern Ho Nan province, and was one of the recent conquests of Ts'u, belonging to the Hwai River system. As we explained in the last chapter, Ts'u's policy then was to work up eastwards to the river Sz; that is, to the Grand Canal of to-day. Confucius, it is plain, was no mere pedant; for we have seen how, in the year 500, when he first enjoyed high political power, he displayed conspicuously great strategical and diplomatic ability in defeating the treacherous schemes of the ruler of Ts'i, who had been endeavouring to filch Lu territory, and who was dreadfully afraid lest Lu should, through Wu's favour, acquire the hegemony or protectorship. He could even be humorous, for when the barbarian King of Wu put in a demand for a "handsome hat," Confucius contemptuously observed that the gorgeousness of a hat's trimmings appealed to this ignorant monarch more than the emblem of rank distinguishing one hat from another.

Sung provided one distinguished statesman in Hiang Suh, whose fame is bound up with a kind of Hague Disarmament or Peace Conference, which he successfully engineered in 546 B.C. (see Appendix No. 3).
In the year 558 he had been sent on a marriage mission to Lu. Ki- chah of Wu, who died at the ripe age of 90, was quite entitled to be king of that country, but he repeatedly waived his claims in favour of his brothers. K'u-peh-yuh of Wei, is mentioned in the Book of Rites, and in many other works. With him Confucius lodged on the two occasions of long sojourn in Wei: he is the man mentioned in Chapter XII who gave his authoritative "ritual" opinion about traitors. Ts'in never seems to have produced a native literary statesman on its own soil. During this 500-year period of isolated development, and also during the later period of conquest in the third century B.C., all its statesmen were borrowed from Tsin, or from some orthodox state of China proper; in military genius, however, Ts'in was unrivalled, and a special chapter will be devoted to her huge battues. The literary reputation of Ts'u was high at a comparatively early date, and even now the "Elegies of Ts'u" include some of the very finest of the Chinese poems and belles lettres; but in Confucius' time no Ts'u man, except possibly Lao-tsz, had any reputation at all; and Lao-tsz, being a mere archive keeper, not entrusted with any influential office, naturally lacked opportunity to emerge from the chrysalis stage. Moreover, the imperial dynasty, which Lao-tsz served, had no political influence at all: it was an ironical saying of the times; "the best civilians are Ts'u's, but they all serve other states," (meaning that the Ts'u rule was too capricious to attract talent). Hence, apart from the fact that Confucius doubted the wisdom of Lao-tsz's novel philosophy, Confucius had no occasion whatever to mention the secluded, self- contained old man in his political history, or, rather, in his bald annals of royal-movements.

CHAPTER XVI

LAND AND PEOPLE

What sort of folk were the masses of China, upon whom the ruling classes depended, then as now, for their support? In the year 594 B.C. the model state of Lu for the first time imposed a tax of ten per cent, upon each Chinese "acre" of land, being about one-sixth of an English acre: as the tax was one-tenth, it matters not what size the acre was. Each cultivator under the old system had an allotment of 100 such acres for himself, his parents, his wife, and his children; and in the centre of this allotment were 10 acres of "public land," the produce of which, being the result of his labour, went to the State; there was no further taxation. A "mile," being about one-third of an English mile, and, therefore, in square measure one-ninth of an English square mile, consisted of 300 fathoms (taking the fathom roughly), and its superficies contained 900 "acres" of which 80 were public under the above arrangement, 820 remaining for the eight families owning this "well-field"--so called because the ideograph for a "well" represents nine squares: a four-sided square in the centre, four three-sided squares impinging on it; and four two-sided squares at the corners; i.e. 100 "acres" each, plus 2-1/2 "acres" each for "homestead and onions"; or 20 of these last in all. Nine cultivators in one "well," multiplied by four, formed a township, and four townships formed a "cuirass" of 144 armed warriors; but this was under a modified system introduced four years later (590). It will be observed that the arithmetic seems confused, if not faulty; but that does not seriously affect the genuineness of the picture, and may be ignored as mere detail.

The ancient classification of people was into four groups. The scholar people employed themselves in studying tao and the sciences, from which we plainly see that the doctrine of tao, or "the way," existed long before Lao-tsz, in Confucius' time, superadded a mystic cosmogony upon it, and made of it a socialist or radical instead of an imperialist or conservative doctrine. The second class were the trading people, who dealt in "produce from the four quarters"; there is evidence that this meant chiefly cattle, grain, silk, horses, leather, and gems. The third class were the cultivators, and in those days tea and cotton, amongst other important products of to-day, were totally unknown. The fourth class consisted of handicraftsmen, who naturally made all things they could sell, or knew how to make.

Another classification of men is the following, which was given to the King of Ts'u by a sage adviser, presumably an importation from orthodox China. He divided people into ten classes, each inferior class owing obedience to its superior, and the highest of all owing obedience only to the gods or spirits. First, the Emperor; secondly, the "inner" dukes, or grandees of estates within the imperial domain: these grandees were dukes proper, not dukes by posthumous courtesy like the vassal princes after decease, and the Emperor used to send them on service, when required, to the vassal states; they were, in fact, like the "princes of the Church" or cardinals, who surround the Pope. Thirdly, "the marquesses," that is the semi-independent vassal states, no matter whether duke, marquess, earl, viscount, or baron; this term seems also to include the reigning lords of very small states which did not possess even the rank of baron, and which were usually attached to a larger state as clients, under protectorate; in fact, the recognized stereotyped way of saying "the vassal rulers" was "the marquesses." Then came what we should call the "middle classes," or bourgeoisie, followed by the artisans and cultivators: it will be noticed that the artisans are here given rank over the cultivators, which is not in accord with either very ancient or very modern practice; this, indeed, places cultivators before both traders and artisans. Lastly came the police, the carriers of burdens, the eunuchs, and the slaves. By "police" are meant the runners attached to public offices, whose work too often involves "squeezing" and terrorizing, torturing, flogging, etc. To the present day police, barbers, and slaves require three generations of purifying, or living down, before their descendants can enter for the public examinations; or, to use the official expression, their "three generations" must be "clear"; at least so it was until the old Confucian examination system was abolished as a test for official capacity a few years ago. Of eunuchs we shall have more to say shortly; but very little indeed is heard of private slaves, who probably then, as now, were indistinguishable from the ordinary people, and were treated kindly. The callous Greek and still more brutal Roman system, not to mention the infinitely more cowardly and shocking African slavery abuses of eighteenth- century Europe and nineteenth-century America, have never been known in China: no such thing as a slave revolt has ever been heard of there.

In the year 548 the kingdom of Ts'u ordered a cadastral survey, and also a general stock-taking of arms, chariots, and horses.
Records were made of the extent and value of the land in each parish, the extent of the mountains and forests, and the resources they might furnish. Observation was also made of lakes and marshes suitable for sport, and it was forbidden to fill these in. Note was taken of such hills and mounds as might be available for tombs--a detail which shows that modern graves in China differ little if at all from the ancient ones; in fact in Canton "my hill," or "mountain," is synonymous with "my cemetery." In order to fix the taxes at a just figure, stock was taken of the salt- flats, the unproductive lands, and the tracts liable to periodical inundation. Areas rescued from the waters were protected by dykes, and subdivided for allotment by sloping banks, but without introducing the rigid nine-square system. Good lands, however, were divided according to the method introduced by the Chou dynasty; that is to say, six feet formed a "fathom," 100 fathoms an "acre," 100 "acres" the allotment of one family; these English terms are, of course, only approximately correct. Nine families still formed a hamlet or "well," and they cultivated together 1000 "acres," the central hundred going to pay the imposts. Taxes, direct and indirect, were fixed with exactitude, and also the number of war-chariots that each parish had to furnish; the number of horses; their value, age, and colour; the number of armoured troopers and foot soldiers, with a return of their cuirasses and shields. Regarding this colour classification, of the horses, it may be mentioned that the Tartars, in the second century B.C., were in the habit of equipping whole regiments of cavalry on mounts of the same colour, and it is, therefore, possible that this practice may have been imitated in South China; but Ts'u never once herself engaged in warfare with the Tartars; at all events with Tartars other than Tartars brought into Chinese settlements.

Long before this, the philosopher-statesman Kwan-tsz of Ts'i had so developed the agriculture, fisheries, trade, and salt gabelle, and had governed the country in such a way that his State, hitherto of minor importance, soon took the lead amongst the Chinese powers for wealth and for military influence. His classification of the people was into scholars, artisans, traders, and agriculturalists. He is generally credited with having introduced the "Babylonian woman" into the Ts'i metropolis, in order that traders, having sold their goods there, might leave as much as possible of their money behind in the houses of pleasure.
There are many accounts of the luxury of this populous city, where "every woman possessed one long and one short needle," and where a premium levied upon currency, fish, and salt was applied to the relief of the poor and (!) to the rewarding of virtue. Kwan-tsz also maintained a standing army, or perhaps a militia force, of 30,000 men; but he was careful so to husband his strength that Ts'i should not have the external appearance of dominating; his aim was that she should rather hold her power in reserve, and only use it indirectly: as we have seen, his master was, in consequence of Kwan-tsz's able administration, raised to the high position of the first of the Five Protectors.

From this it will be plain that there was considerable commercial activity in China even before the time of Confucius: there was quite a string of fairs or market towns extending from the imperial reserve eastwards along the Yellow River to Choh-thou (still so called, south of Peking), which was then the most northernly of them: apparently each considerable state possessed one of these fairs. The headwaters of the River Hwai system were served by the great mart (now called Yii Chou) belonging to the state of Cheng. As with our own histories, Chinese annals consist chiefly of the record of what kings and grandees did, and mention of the people is only occasional; and, even then, only in connection with the policy of their leaders.

As soon as the second of the Protectors, the Marquess of Tsin, was seated on his ancestral throne (637), his first act was to reduce the tolls and make the roads safer; to facilitate trade, and to encourage agriculture. Also to "make friends of the eleven great families" (already mentioned twice in preceding pages), whose development, however, in time led to the collapse of this princely power, and to its division between three of the "great families." A century after this, a minister of the Ts'u state praised very highly the efficiency of the Tsin administration. "The common people are devoted to agriculture; the merchants, artisans, and menials are all dutiful." For the conveyance of grain between the Ts'in and the Tsin capitals, both carts and boats were requisitioned, from which we must assume that there were practicable roads of some sort for two-wheeled vehicles. In the year 546, when some important reserves were made by Tsin at the Peace Conference, an express messenger was sent from Sung to the Ts'u capital to take the king's pleasure: this means an overland journey from the sources of the Hwai to the modern treaty port of Sha-shr above Hankow.