Ancient China Simplified Part 11

The Second Protector, during his wanderings, we know, married first a Tartar wife and then a Ts'i wife, both of whom showed disinterested affection for him, and genuine regard for his rights to the Tsin succession, Yet the ruler of Ts'in supplied him with five more royal girls, of whom one had already been married to the Second Protector's predecessor and nephew, the Marquess of Tsin.

It is but fair to the memory of this uxorious Tsin ruler to say that he only took her over under protest, and under the immediate stress of political urgencies; he ultimately made her his princ.i.p.al spouse at the expressed desire of his ally the Ts'in ruler. He must have later married a daughter of the Emperor too, for, after the succession of a son and grandson, another of his sons named "Black b.u.t.tocks," being the youngest, and also "son of a Chou mother," came to the throne. Thus in those troublous times the honour of imperial princesses evidently did not count for very much at the great va.s.sal courts. The readiness of Ts'in to induce the Tsin ruler to take over his nephew's wife (being a Ts'in princess) accentuates the semi-Tartar civilization of Ts'in at least, if not of Tsin too; for both Hiung-nu (200 B.C.) and Turks (A.D. 500) had a fixed rule that a Khan successor should take over all his predecessor's women, with the single exception of his own natural mother. In the year 630 the King of Ts'u married or carried off two CHeNG sisters (of the imperial clan). The ruler of CHeNG had been insolent to the future Second Protector during his wanderings in the year 637, and, in order to avoid that Protector's vengeance, had been subsequently obliged to throw himself under Ts'u protection. "This ignoring of the rites by the King of Ts'u will result in his failing to secure the Protectors.h.i.+p," it was said. However, these princesses, though of the imperial _Ki_ clan by marriage into it, were really daughters of a CHeNG ruler by two separate Ts'i and Ts'u wives: moreover, previous to the accession of the Hia dynasty (in 2205 B.C.), a Chinese elective Emperor had married the two daughters of his predecessor, whose own son was unworthy to succeed: and, generally, apart from this precedent, the rule against marrying two sisters, even if it existed, seems to have been loosely applied (_cf._ Chapter x.x.xIII.).

In connection with the Cheng succession in 629, it is mentioned that "the wife's sons being all dead, X, being wisest of the secondary wives' or concubines' sons, is most eligible"

(_cf._ Chapter x.x.xVII.).

Great political complications arose in connection with a clever and beautiful princess of Cheng who had had various _liaisons_ with high personages in the state of Ch'en and elsewhere; in the end she was carried off in 589 by a treacherous Ts'u statesman to Tsin; and indirectly this adventure led to his being charged by Tsin with a mission to Wu; to the subsequent entry of Wu into the conclave of federal princes; and to the ultimate sacking of the Ts'u capital by the King of Wu in 506: it is easy to read between the lines that the Kings of Ts'u were considered unusually arbitrary and tyrannical rulers; over and over again we find that their most capable statesmen took service with powers inimical to Ts'u. In 581 the ruler of Cheng, being forcibly detained in Tsin whilst on a political visit there, was temporarily replaced in Cheng by his elder brother, born of an inferior wife.

A marriage between the two states of Sung and Lu having been arranged, the imperial clan states of Lu and Wei had certain duties to perform at the wedding, which took place in 583; and it is recorded that the latter sent "handmaids" The explanation given is a little involved, but it seems to throw some light on the marriage of sisters question. It seems that the legitimate spouse and her "left and right handmaids" were each ent.i.tled to three "cousins or younger sisters" of the same clan-name as themselves, "thus making a total of nine girls, the idea being to broaden the base of succession." Not content with this, Lu sent a special envoy to Sung the next year to "lecture" the princess. It is explained that "women at home are under the power of their father; married, under that of their husbands." Tsin also sent handmaids this year. It is further explained that "handmaids are a trifling matter, and they are only mentioned in this Lu princess case because her marriage turned out so badly." The following year Ts'i despatched handmaids, but, "being of a different clan-name, Ts'i was not ritual in doing so."

The precise functions of these paranymphs, or under-studies of wives, together with the rules governing their selection, are doubtless clearly enough described in the Rites of _Chou_; but we are only dealing here with concrete facts as recorded.

In 526 B.C., when Ts'in gave a princess in marriage to the Ts'u heir, the Ts'u king decided to keep her for himself (see p. 234).

Only a few years before that, Ts'u had given a princess of her own in marriage to the heir-apparent of one of the petty orthodox states (imperial clan), and the reigning father had had improper relations with her, which in the end led to his murder by his son; thus Ts'u, however delinquent, had already been given a bad example by the imperial clan.

After his humiliating defeat by the King of Wu in 494 B.C., the King of Yiieh introduced a veritable _Lex Julia_ into his dominions, in order to increase the population more quickly, and to prepare for his great revenge. Robust men were forbidden to marry old women, and old men to marry robust women. Parents were punished if girls were not married by the time they were seventeen, and if boys were not married by twenty. _Enceinte_ women had to be placed under the care of public midwives. For every boy born, a royal bounty of two pots of wine and a dog were given: for every girl born, two pots of wine and a sucking-pig;-- the dog, it is explained, being figurative of outdoor, the pig of internal economy. Triplets were to be suckled at the public expense; twins to be fed, when big enough, at the public expense.

The chief wife's son must be mourned, with absence from official duty, for three years; other sons for two; and both kinds of son were to be equally buried with weeping and wailing. Orphans, and the sons of sick or poor widows, were to receive official employment. Distinguished sons were to have their apartments cleansed for them, and had to be well fed and handsomely clothed.

Learned men from other states were to be officially welcomed in the ancestral temple. With reference to this curious law, which is totally un-Chinese in its startling originality, it may be mentioned that it seems to have gradually led to that laxity of morals in ancient Yiieh which is still proverbial in those parts; for, when the First August Emperor was touring over his new empire in 212 B.C., he left an inscription (still on record) at the old Yiieh capital, denouncing the "pig-like adultery" of the region, and, more especially, the remarrying of widows already in possession of children. Only a few years ago, proclamations appeared in this region denouncing the pernicious custom of forcing widows to remarry. Although Kwan-tsz is supposed to have "invented" the Babylonian woman for Ts'i, nothing is said in any ancient Chinese history about common prost.i.tution; nor is female infanticide ever mentioned. In 502 B.C. the Lu revolutionary, already mentioned in Chapter x.x.xVII., who was driven to Tsin by Confucius' astute measures, had, before leaving Lu, formed a plot to murder all the sons, by wives, of the three "powerful families"

who were intriguing against the ducal rights, and to put concubine sons-being creatures of his own-in their place; thus the succession principles applied not only to ruling families, but also to private houses; though, as a matter of fact, these three were all, in their origin, descended from previous ruling dukes.

As explained in Chapters XII. and x.x.xIII., after five generations a fresh "family" is supposed to spring out of the common clan.

In spite of Wu's barbarism, the fact of its belonging, by remote origin, to the imperial clan (through its first: ruler having magnanimously migrated from Chou before Chou conquered China in 1122), made it technically incest for Lu to intermarry with Wu; thus, when in 482 B.C., a Wu princess (evidently forced for political purposes upon Lu) died, her husband, the ruler of Lu, was obliged to refrain from a public burial, as has been explained in Chapter x.x.xIII. on Names.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

It will have been noticed that, even in strictly historical times subsequent to 842 B.C., orthodox China was, _mutatis mutandis_, like orthodox Greece, a petty territory surrounded by a fringe of little-known regions, such as Macedonia, Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Italy; not to say distant Ma.r.s.eilles, and the Pillars of Hercules-all places at best very little visited except by navigators, and even then only by a few specially enterprising navigators or desperate adventurers; though later on Greek influence and Greek colonies soon began to replace the Phoenician, and to exhibit surrounding countries in a more correct and definite light.

As touches the surrounding regions of ancient China, and the knowledge of it possessed by the orthodox nucleus, such traditions as there are all point to acquaintance with the south and east rather than with the north and west. Persons who are persistently bent on bringing the earliest Chinese from the Tower of Babel by way of the Tarim Valley, are eager to seize upon the faintest tradition, or what seems to them an apparent tradition, in support of these preconceived views; ignoring the obviously just argument that, if we are to pay any attention to mere traditions at all, we must in common fairness give priority in value to such traditions as there are, rather than such traditions as are not, but only as might be. For instance, there was a Chinese tradition that the founder of the Hia dynasty (2205 B.C.) was, in a sense, somehow connected with the barbarous kingdom of Yiieh, inasmuch as the great-great-grandson of the founder of the Hia empire a century later enfeoffed a son by a concubine in that remote region. The earliest Chinese mention of j.a.pan is that it lay to the east of Yiieh, and that the j.a.panese used to come and trade with Yiieh. If the j.a.panese traditions, on the other hand, as first put into independent writing in the eighth century A.D., are worth anything, then the j.a.panese pretend that their ancestors were present at a durbar held by the above-mentioned great-great- grandson of the Hia founder; and they also firmly derive their ruling houses (both king and princes) from the kingdom of Wu. We have seen in former chapters that both Wu and Yiieh, the most ancient capitals of which were within 200 miles of each other, spoke one language, and that both were derived (_i.e._, the administrative caste was derived) from two separate Chinese imperial dynasties. Now, the founder of the Hia dynasty is celebrated above all things for his travels in, and his geography of China, usually called the "Tribute of Yii" (his name),--a still existing work, the real origin of which may be obscure, but which has come down to us in the Book (of History). This geography is not only accurate, but it even now throws great light upon the original direction of river-courses which have since changed; in this work there is not the faintest tradition or indirect mention of any Chinese having ever migrated into China from the west.

There is no foundation, however, for the supposition, favoured by some European writers, that the Nine Tripods (frequently mentioned above) contained upon their surface "maps" of the empire; they merely contained a summary, or a collection of pictures, symbolizing the various tribute nations. On the other hand, there is no trace in the "Tribute of Yii" of any knowledge of China south of the Yarig-tsz River, south of its mouths, and south of its connection with the lakes of Hu Nan. The "province" of Yang Chou is vaguely said to extend from the Hwai River "south to the sea." The "Blackwater" is the only river mentioned which exhibits any knowledge of the west (i.e. of the west half of modern Kan Suh province), and this "Blackwater" was crossed in 984 B.C. by the Emperor Muh.

Then there is the tradition of Vii's predecessor, the Emperor Shun, who, as mentioned in the last chapter, married the two daughters of the Emperor Yao, and is buried at a point just south of the Lake Tung-t'ing, in the modern province of Hu Nan: it is certain that in 219 B.C., when the First August Emperor was on tour, the mountain where the grave lay was pointed out to him at a distance, if he did not actually go up to it. Again, the grandfather of the Warrior King who founded the Chou dynasty in 1122 B.C. was, as already repeatedly pointed out, only a younger brother, his two elder brothers having migrated to the Jungle, and, proceeding thence eastward, founded a colony in Wu (half-way between Nanking and Shanghai). Both Wu and Yiieh, for very many centuries after that, were extremely petty states of only 50 or 60 miles in extent, and for all practical purposes of history may be considered to have been one and the same region, to wit, the flat, ca.n.a.l-cut territory through which the much-disputed Shanghai- Hangchow railway is to run. After the death of the Martial King, when his brother the Duke of Chou was Regent for his son, the duke incurred the suspicion of other brethren and relatives as to his motives, and had to retire for some time to Ts'u, or, as it was then called, the Jungle country, for two years. There is a tradition that a mission from one of the southern Yiieh states found its way to the Duke of Chou, who is supposed to have fitted up for the envoys a cart with a compa.s.s attached to it, in order to keep the cart's head steadily south. This tradition, which only appears as a _tradition_ in one of the dynastic histories of the fifth century A. D., is not given at all in the earlier standard history, and it is by no means proved that the undoubtedly early Chinese knowledge of the loadstone extended to the making of compa.s.ses. Yet, as Renan has justly pointed out in effect, in his masterly evidences of Gospel truth, a weak tradition is better worth considering than no tradition at all.

Besides, there is some slight indirect confirmation of this, for in 880 B.C. or thereabout, a King of Ts'u gave one of his younger sons a Yiieh kingdom bearing almost the same double name as that Yueh kingdom from which the envoys in 1080 B.C. came to the Duke of Chou; in each case the first part of the double name was Yiieh, and the second part only differed slightly. Again, in or about 820, some of the sons of the king exiled themselves to a place vaguely defined as "somewhere south of the Han River," which can scarcely mean anything other than "the country of the Shan or Siamese races," who lived then in and around Yiin Nan, and some of whom are still known by the vague name used as here in 820 B.C.

The vagueness of habitat simply means that all south of the Han and Yang-tsz was _terra_ incognita to China proper. There is another tradition, unsupported by standard history, to the effect that the Martial King enfeoffed a faithful minister of the emperor and dynasty he had just supplanted as a va.s.sal in Corea. Here, again, if the emperor's own grandfather, or grand-uncles and trusted friends, could find their way to Wu, and, later, to j.a.pan, not to mention Shan Tung and the Peking plain, it is reasonable to permit a respected adherent of the dethroned monarch to find his way to Corea, the more in that the centre of administrative gravity of Corea was then Liao Tung and South Manchuria--at the utmost the north part of modern Corea--rather than the Corean peninsula.

In the year 649 the First Protector began to boast of having done as much as any of the' three dynasties, Hia, Shang, and Chou, during the 1500 years before him; he then defines the area of his glory, which is circ.u.mscribed by (at the very utmost) the west part of Shan Si, the south part of Ho Nan, the north part of the Peking plain, and the Gulf of "Pechelee." The Second Protector, when he safely reached his ancestral throne after nineteen years of wanderings as Pretender, said to his faithful Tartar henchman and father-in-law: "I have made the tour of the whole world (or whole empire) with you." As a matter of fact, he had been with the Tartars, certainly in central, and possibly also in northern Shan Si; in Ts'i, which means the northern part of Shan Tung and southern part of Chih Li; thence across the four small orthodox states of Sung, Wei, Ts'ao, and CHeNG (which simply means up the Yellow River valley into Ho Nan), to Ts'u; and thence Ts'in fetched him to put him on the Tsin throne. The Emperor was already an obscure figure-head beneath all political notice, and no other parts of what we now call China were known to the Protector, even by name. As we shall see in a later chapter, Confucius covered the same ground, except that he never went to Tsin or to Tartarland.

The first bare mention of Yiieh is in 670 B.C., when the new King of Ts'u, who had a.s.sa.s.sinated his elder brother, and who therefore wished to make amends for this crime and for his father's rude conquests, and to consolidate his position by putting himself on good behaviour to federal China, made dutiful advances to Lu and to the Emperor (these two minor powers then best representing the old ritual civilization). The Emperor replied: "Go on conquering the barbarians and Yiieh, but let the Hia (i.e. orthodox Chinese) states alone." In 601 Ts'u and Wu came to a friendly understanding about their mutual frontiers, and Yiieh was also admitted to the conclave or _entente_; but this was a local act, and had nothing whatever to do with China proper, which first hears of Yiieh as an independent or semi-independent power in 536, when the King of Ts'u, with a string of conquered orthodox Chinese princes in train as his allies, and also a Yiieh contingent, makes war on Wu. In later days there is evidence showing that there was not much general knowledge of China as a whole, and that interstate intercourse was chiefly confined to next-door neighbours. For instance, when Tsin boldly marched an army upon Ts'i in 589 B.C., it was considered a remarkable thing that Tsin chariots should actually gaze upon the sea. In 560, when the Ts'i minister and philosopher, Yen-tsz, was in Ts'u as envoy, and the Ts'u courtiers were playing tricks upon him (as previously narrated in Chapter IX.) he said: "I have heard it stated that when once you get south of the Hwai River the oranges are good. In the same way, we northerners produce but sorry rogues; the genuine article reaches its perfection in Ts'u." Thus, even at this date, the Yang-tsz was regarded much as the Romans of the Empire regarded the Danube--as a sort of vague barrier between _civis_ and _barbarus_. In no sense was the Ts'u capital--at no time were the bulk of the Ts'u dominions--south of that Great River; nor, in fact, were the capitals of Wu and Yiieh south of it either, for one of the three mouths (the northernmost was as now), corresponded to the Soochow Creek and the Wusung River, as they pa.s.s through the Shanghai settlement of to-day; whilst the other ancient mouth entered the sea at modern Hangchow. We have given various other evidence above to show that, even earlier than this, the Yang-tsz was an unexplored region, known, and that only imperfectly and locally, to the Ts'u government alone. In the year 656 B.C. the First Protector called Ts'u to book because, in 1003 B.C., the Emperor had made a tour to the Great River and had never returned (see Chapter XX-XV.). Again, when the imperial power collapsed in 771 B.C., the first Earl of CHeNG (a relative of the Emperor) consulted the imperial astrologer as to where he had better establish his new fief: his own idea was to settle southwards on the borders of the Yang-tsz; but he was dissuaded from this step on the ground that the Ts'u power would grow accordingly as the Chou power declined, and thus CHeNG would all the easier fall a prey to Ts'u in the future if she migrated now so far south. The astrologer makes another observation which supports the view that Ts'u and orthodox China were originally of the same prehistoric stock. He says: "When the remote ancestor of Ts'u did good service to the Emperor (2400 B.C.), his renown was great, yet his descendants never became so flouris.h.i.+ng as those of the Chou family." In 597 B.C., when the Earl of CHeNG really was at the mercy of Ts'u, he said: "If you choose to send me south of the Yang-tsz towards the South Sea, I shall not have the right to object"; meaning, "no exile, however remote, is too severe for my deserts." In 549, when the Tsin generals were marching against Ts'u, they were particularly anxious to find good CHeNG guides who knew the routes well. Finally, in 541, a Tsin statesman made the following observations to a prince (afterwards king) of Ts'u, who was then on a mission to Tsin, by way of ill.u.s.trating for his visitor the conquests and distant expeditions of ancient times:--

"The Emperor Shun (who married Yao's two daughters, and employed the founder of the Hia dynasty as his minister) was obliged to imprison the prince of the Three Miao (in Hu Nan; the savages of Hu Nan and Kwei Chou provinces are still called _Miao_); the Hia dynasty had to deal with quarrels in (modern) Shan Tung and Shen Si; the Shang dynasty had to do the same in (modern) Kiang Su; the early Chou monarchs the same in (modern) North Kiang Su and South Shan Tung: but, now that there are no able emperors, all the va.s.sals are at loggerheads. Wu and P'uh (the supposed Shan or Siamese region above referred to) are giving you trouble; but it is no one's concern but yours."

From all this it is quite plain, though the Chinese historians and philosophers never seem to have discerned it clearly themselves, that the cultivated or orthodox Chinese, that is, the group of closely related monosyllabic and tonic tribes which alone possessed the art of writing, and thus inevitably took the lead and gradually civilized the rest, covered but a very small area of ground even at the time of Confucius' death in 479 B.C., and were completely ignorant of everything but the bare names of all the regions surrounding this orthodox nucleus, which nucleus was therefore rightly called the "Central State," as China is, by extension, now still called.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP

1. Si-ngan Fu (and Hien-yang opposite, on the north bank of the River Wei), marked with circles in a lozenge, were the capitals of China, off and on, from 220 B.C. for over a thousand years. The ancient capital of the Chou dynasty, forsaken in 771 B.C., is marked with a cross in a circle and is west of Si-ngan. In 771 B.C. the Emperor fled east to his "east capital" (founded 300 years before that date), which then became the sole metropolis, called _Loh_ (from the river on which it stands); it is also marked with a cross inside a circle and is practically the modern Ho-nan Fu; it has, off and on, been the capital of all China, alternately with Si-ngan Fu, in later times.

2. The ford where the first Chou Emperor (122 B.C.) made an appointment with all his va.s.sals is marked by two dotted lines across the Yellow River.

3. The two dots in a half-circle mark the spot whither Tsin "summoned" the Emperor to the durbar of 632 B.C. After this, Tsin obtained from the Emperor cession of the strip between the Yellow River and the Ts'in River (nothing to do with Ts'in state).

4. There is a second River Loh separating Ts'in state from Tsin state. The territory between this River Loh and the Yellow River was alternately held by Tsin and Ts'in.

5. The territory between the more southerly River Loh and the Yellow River and River I was the shorn imperial appanage after Ts'in had in 771 B.C. obtained the west half; after Tsin in 632 had obtained the remaining north half; and after Ts'u had nibbled away the petty orthodox va.s.sals south of lat.i.tude 34".]

CHAPTER XL

TOMBS AND REMAINS

The Chinese, with the single exception of their Great Wall, have always been flimsy builders, and there is accordingly very little left in the way of monuments to prove the antiquity of their civilization. Mention has already been made of the tombs of the Emperors Shun and Yii (2200 B.C.). The tomb of another Hia dynasty emperor (1837 B.C.) lay twenty miles north of Yung-ning in Ho Nan,' where Ts'in, in 627 B.C., was annihilated by Tsin (see p.

30). The tomb (long. 115, lat. 33) of the King of Ts'u who died in 689 B.C. was pillaged about 500 years later, but landslips defeated the thieves' objects. The First Protector's tomb, seven miles south of his capital in Shan Tung--the town still marked on the maps as Lin-tsz--was desecrated in A.D. 312. A small pond of mercury was found inside, besides arms, valuables, and the bones of those buried with him. The palace of the Ts'u king of 617 B.C.,--son of the one whose death that year was respectfully chronicled by Confucius--is still the yam&. or _protorium_ of the district magistrate at King-thou Fu, and can perhaps even yet be seen from any pa.s.sing steamers that circulate above the treaty- port of Sha-shf. There is a doubt about the date of this king's tomb (d. 593); some place it near the palace, others over 100 miles north, near the modern city of Siang-yang. It is possible that, after the sacking of the capital by Wu, in 506, the bodies of former kings were at once removed to the new temporary capital (far to the north) to which the old name was given. For instance, it is certain that the king who died in 545 was buried quite close to the capital (King-thou Fu). Ki-chah's tomb, with Confucius'

inscription upon it in ancient character, is still shown at a place ten miles west of Kiang-yin (where the modern forts are, below Nanking) and twenty miles east of Ch'ang-chou; probably the new "British" railway pa.s.ses quite close to the place, as do the steamers: for the past 400 years sacrifices have been annually offered to Ki-chah's memory: as Confucius never visited Wu, the inscription, if genuine, must have been sent thither. The tomb of Ki-chah's nephew, King of Wu, is still to be seen outside one of the gates of Soochow; or, rather, the temple built on the site is there, for the tomb itself was desecrated and pillaged by the armies of Yueh, when they sacked the capital in 482. There was, originally, a triple copper coffin, a small pond, and some water birds made of gold (probably symbolic of sport), arms, valuables, etc.; but nothing is said of human beings having been sacrificed.

It was said (2000 years ago) that elephants had been employed in carrying the earth and building materials for this tomb. In 506 the vengeful Ts'u officer who had fled to Wu, and had incited the King of Wu to do all he could to ruin Ts'u, actually opened the royal grave, in or near the capital, and flogged the corpse of the dead king who had so grievously offended him and his family.

In the year 501 the original bow and sceptre given by the warrior king to his brother, the Duke of Chou, founder of the State of Lu, was stolen from its resting-place, but was luckily recovered the following year. Incidentally this statement is of value; for when the King of Ts'u, as narrated above, was making his demands upon the Emperor, one of his grievances was that he possessed no relics of the founder such as the presents which had been made by him to Ts'i, Lu, Yen, Tsin, and other favoured states of no greater status than his own. The above are only a few instances out of many which show how, from age to age, the Chinese have seen with their own eyes things which in the vista of the distance now seem to us uncertain and incredible. As usual, Ts'in gives us nothing in the way of antiquity; another proof that, until she conceived the idea of conquering China, she was totally unknown (internally) to orthodox China. Confucius' own house, temple, grave, and park form an absolutely unbroken link with the past. There are remains and the relics of the Duke of Chou in the immediate neighbourhood, and it must not be forgotten that the Duke of Chou and his ritual system were Confucius' models: as Confucius insisted, "I am only a transmitter of antiquity." Moderns, and especially foreigners, have forgotten or reck nothing about the Duke of Chou; yet his remains and temples were just as much a matter of visible history to Confucius as Confucius' grounds are to us. Each successive generation in China alludes to existing antiquities, or to contemporaneous objects which have since become antiquities, with the quiet confidence of those who actually possess, and who doubt not of their possessions. The very _lacunae_ are pointed out by themselves--no scepticism of ours is required; for whenever any historian, or any less formal writer, has outstepped the bounds of truth or probability, the critics are immediately there, and they always frankly say what they believe. In a word, the Chinese doc.u.ments, be they iron, stone, wood, silk, paper, buildings, or graves; and their traditions, are the sole evidence we possess: Chinese critics were the sole critics of that evidence; and they are the sole light by which we foreigners can become critics. The great Chinese defect in criticism is the failure to work out general principles, and to criticize constructively as well as a.n.a.lytically. Their history is a rule of thumb, hand to mouth, diary sort of arrangement, like a vast museum of genuine but uncla.s.sified and unticketed objects. But there is no good reason whatever for our doubting the genuineness of either traditions or doc.u.ments beyond the point of scepticism to which native Chinese doubts go, for it must be remembered that no foreigner possesses one tenth of the ma.s.s of Chinese learning that the professional literatus easily a.s.similates. All we can do is to re-group, and extract principles.

CHAPTER XLI

THE TARTARS

It is important to insist on the very close relations that existed between the Chinese and the Tartars from the very earliest times.

All that we are told for certain is that they were north and west of the older dynasties, and especially in occupation of the Upper Wei River, on the lower part of which the old metropolis of Si- ngan Fu lies; which means that they were exactly where we find them in Confucian times, and where we find them now, except that they have been pushed a little further back, and that Chinese colonists have appropriated most of the oases. The Chou ancestor who died in 1231, _i.e._ the father of the founders of Wu, and the great-grandfather of the founder of the Chou dynasty (1122), had to abandon to the encroaching Tartars his appanage on the Upper King River (a northern tributary of the Wei, which runs almost parallel with it, and joins it at Si-ngan Fu), and was obliged to move southwards to the Upper Wei River. For nearly 1000 years previous to this, his ancestors, who had originally been forced to fly to the Tartars in order to avoid the misgovernment of the third Hia emperor, had lived among and had, whilst continuing the Chinese art of cultivating, partly become Tartars; for in 1231 B.C. the migrating host is said to have renounced Tartar manners, and to have devoted themselves seriously to building and cultivating; from which it necessarily follows that Tartar manners must for some time have been definitely adopted by the Chou family. The grandson of the migrator, the father of the Chou founder, had various little wars with a tribe called the Dog Tartars. Over 1000 years after that first flight to Tartardom, we have seen that the Emperor Muh, great-grandson of the Chou founder, not only had brushes with the Tartars, but extended his tours amongst them to the Lower Tarim Valley, Turfan, Harashar, and possibly even as far as Urumtsi and Kuche; but certainly no farther. Two hundred years later, again, the then ruling Emperor was defeated by the Tartars in (modern) Central Shan Si province, and the descendant in the sixth generation of the Ts'in Jehu who had conducted the Emperor Muh's chariot into Tartarland, only just succeeded in saving the Emperor's life; but this family of Chao, which was thus (_cf._ p. 206) of one and the same descent with the Ts'in family, subsequently found its account in abandoning the imperial interest altogether, and in serving the rising princ.i.p.ality of Tsin (Shan Si), where it became one of the "six families," three of which six in 403 B.C. were ultimately recognized by the Emperor as independent rulers. As we have said over and over again, in 772 B.C. the Chou Emperor, through female intrigues, got into trouble with the Tartars, and was killed: his successor had to move the metropolis east to (modern) Ho-nan Fu, thus abandoning the western part of his patrimony--the semi-Tartar half--to Ts'in. Thus Ts'in in 771 B.C. was to the Chou Emperors what Chou, previous to 1200 B.C., had been to the Shang Emperors.

We now come to strictly historical times, and we shall have no difficulty in showing that even then--h _fortiori_ in times not strictly historical--the various Tartar tribes were still in practical possession of the whole north bank of the Yellow River, all the way from the Desert to the sea. In fact, in 494 B.C., when the King of Wu sent a giant's bone to Lu for further explanation, Confucius said that the "Long Tartars" (who had frequent fights with Lu in the seventh century B.C.) used to extend south-east into (modern) Kiang Su, almost as far as the mouth of the Yang-tsz River: he also says that, had it not been for the energy of the First Protector and his statesman adviser, the philosopher Kwan- tsz of Ts'i, orthodox China would certainly have become Tartarized. It was Confucius also whose learning enabled him to recognize a (Manchu) arrow found in the body of a migrating goose.

In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the Tartars made repeated and obstinate attacks upon Yen (Peking plain), Ts'i (coast Chih Li and north Shan Tung), Wei (south Chih Li and north Ho Nan), Sung (extreme east Ho Nan), Ts'ao (central Ho Nan), and the Emperor's territory (west Ho Nan). This situation explains to us why the Protector system arose in China, in compet.i.tion with the waning imperial power. Ts'in and Tsin, being already half Tartar themselves, were always well able to cope with and even to annex the Tartar tribes in their immediate vicinity; but orthodox China was ever a prey to the more easterly Tartar attacks; and thus the Emperors, threatened by Ts'u to their south, and in a measure also by Ts'in and Tsin to their north and west, not only could not any longer protect their orthodox va.s.sals lying towards the east from Tartar attacks, but could not even protect themselves.

It was Ts'i that drove back the Mongol-Manchu tribes and rescued Yen in 662; it was the Ts'i ruler who led a coalition of princes against other groups of Tartars and placed back on his ancestral throne the ruler of Wei, who had been driven from his country by Tartars in 658; it was the First Protector, ruler of Ts'i, who managed to pacify the more westerly Tartars we find persistently menacing the Emperor in 648; to whose rescue the Tartars came in 642, when a coalition of orthodox Chinese princes shamelessly took advantage of the First Protector's death to attack Ts'i during the mourning period. Now it was that the Second Protector, still a refugee among his Tartar relatives, started for Ts'i, his original idea being to replace the philosopher Kwan-tsz as adviser to the First Protector; but, shortly after he reached Ts'i, the First Protector died, and it was only by stratagem that his friends succeeded in rescuing the future Second Protector from the arms of his Ts'i Delilah and his _d'elices de_ Capue. His chief adviser, and at the same time his brother-in-law from a Tartar point of view, was the lineal descendant of the Chao man who had saved the Emperor in 800 B.C. He set out, _via_ the orthodox states, for his own country. These petty orthodox states, such as Wei, Cheng, and Ts'ao, which did not then see their way to profit politically by the Pretender's visit, paid the penalty of their meanness and their rudeness to him later on. Sung was polite, as at that time Sung and Ts'u were both aiming at the Protectors.h.i.+p.

Ts'u's hospitality was bluff and good-natured, the King being too strong to fear, and too unsophisticated to intrigue after Chinese fas.h.i.+on. Just then news coming from Ts'in that the Pretender's brothers had all resigned or died, and that his chance had now come, the Pretender hurried to Tsin, regained his throne, and was acclaimed Protector of China exactly at the critical moment when a strong hand was urgently required to check the particular ambitions of Ts'in, Ts'i, and Ts'u. Ts'u was too barbarous; Sung was too pedantic; Tsin alone had unrivalled experience both of Tartars and Eastern barbarians, and also of Southern barbarians (Ts'u). Probably it was only the fact of the Tsin ruling family bearing the same clan-name as the Emperor that had decided Tsin throughout to be orthodox Chinese instead of Tartar. The Tartar family into which the Second Protector had married as a comparatively young man was, however, also of the imperial clan- name, i.e. it was of orthodox Chinese origin, but (even like the Chou imperial family at one time) it had adopted Tartar customs. A large number of the one thousand or more petty Chinese princ.i.p.alities, attached not directly to the Emperor, but to the greater va.s.sals as mesne lords, were in the same predicament; that is to say, they were of Chinese origin, but they had found that it paid them best to adopt barbarian ways. It was exactly as though Scipio should settle in Carthage, and become a Carthaginian: C'sar in Gaul, and adopt Gallic customs; and so on with other Roman adventurers who should find a comfortable _gite_ in Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, or even in Britain and Germany.

The main point upon which to fix the attention is this. The Chinese nucleus was very small, and only by rudely thrusting aside incompetent emperors and fussy ritual did it succeed in emanc.i.p.ating itself from Tartar bondage. That this is not an exaggerated view is additionally plain from the fact that Tartars have, even since Confucian times, ruled more and longer than have Chinese over North China; the Mongols (1260-1368) were the first Tartars to rule over all China, and nominally over all West Asia; the Manchus (1643-1908) are the first Tartars to rule all China, all Manchuria, and all Mongolia, at all effectively; and they have even added parts of Turkestan, with Tibet, Nepaul, and other countries over which the Peking imperial Mongol influence was always very shadowy.

CHAPTER XLII

MUSIC

In these pictures of ancient Chinese life which we are endeavouring to present, the idea is to repeat from every point of view the main characteristics of that life, so that a strange and unfamiliar subject, very loosely depicted in the straggling annals of antiquity, may receive fresh rays of light from every possible quarter, and thus stand out clearer as a connected whole.