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-shêng 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'êng" (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. 34ø 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. 114ø 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. 37ø, long. 118ø 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 fainéant_ 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 CHÊNG (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 CHÊNG. Both these states were

of the highest caste, the Earl of CHÊNG 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 CHÊNG 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 CHÊNG 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

CHÊNG's political action, it was insisted that the ruler of CHÊNG

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 CHÊNG, 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 daïs 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 CHÊNG,

ostensibly to complete the carrying out of a marriage agreed upon

by treaty between Ts'u and CHÊNG. 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 daïs 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 CHÊNG (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

_rusés_, 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 CHÊNG, got the ruling

Earl of CHÊNG 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. 95ø, lat. 40ø), 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

Bienaimé, 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).