On the banks of the Mi-lo a fisherman met him, and asked him the cause of his trouble.—"All the world is foul," answered Ch'u Yuan, "and I alone am clean."—"If that is so," said the fisherman, "why not plunge into the current, and make its foulness clean with the infection of your purity? The Man of Tao does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adjusts himself to them." Ch'u Yuan took the hint: leaped into the Mi-lo;—and yearly since then they have held the Dragon-boat Festival on the waters of Middle China to commemorate the search for his body.— Just how much of this is in the Li Sao,—where the poem ends,— I do not clearly gather from Professor Giles's account; but the whole story appears to me to be a magnificent Soul Symbol: of that Path which leads you indeed on dragon flights to the borders of the Infinite, but whose end, rightly considered, is in this world, and to be as it were drowned in the waters of this world, with your cleanness infecting them to be clean,—and lighting them for all future ages with beauty, as with little dragon-boats luminous with an inner flame. Ch'u Yuan had followers in that and the next century; but perhaps his greatness was hardly to be approached for a thousand years.
But we were still in Tiger-time, and with quite the worst of it to come. Here lay the Blue Pearl scintillating rainbows up through the heavy atmosphere; but despite its flashing and up-fountaining those strange dying-dolphin hues and glories, you could never have told, in Tiger-time, what it really was. The Dragon was yet a long way off; though indeed it must be allowed that flight, when Chwangtse wrote and Ch'u Yuan sung, was surprised with the far churr of startling wings under the stars. Ears intent to listen were surprised; but only for a moment;— there was that angry howling again from the northern hills and the southern forests: the two great Tigers of the world face to face, tails lashing;—and between them and in their path, Chow quite prone,—the helpless Black-haired People trembling or chattering frivolously. Not for such an age as that Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan wrote, but indeed you may say for all time. What light from the Blue Pearl could then shine forth and be seen, would, in the thick fog and smoke-gloom, take on wild fantastic guise; which, as we shall see, it did:—but what Chwangtse had written remained, pure immortality, to kindle up better ages to come. When China should be ready, Chwangtse and the Pearl would be found waiting for her. The manvantara had not yet dawned; but we may hurry on now to its dawning.
The Crest-Wave was still in India when China plunged into the abyss from which her old order of ages never emerged. Soon after Asoka came to the throne of Magadha, in 284 B.C., Su Tai, wise prime minister to the Lord of Chao, took occasion to speak— seriously to his royal master as to the latter's perennial little wars with Yen.* "This morning as I crossed the river," said he, "I saw a mussel open its shell to the sun. Straight an oyster-catcher thrust in his bill to eat the mussel; which promptly snapped the shell to and held the bird fast.—'If it doesn't rain today or tomorrow,' said the oyster-catcher, 'there'll be a dead mussel here.'—'And if you don't get out of this by today or tomorrow,' said the mussel, 'there'll be a dead oyster-catcher.' Meanwhile up came a fisherman and carried them both off. I fear Ts'in will be our fisherman."
——— * The tale is taken from Dr. H.A. Gile's Chinese Literature. ———
Which duly came to pass. Even in Liehtse's time Ts'in characteristics were well understood: he tells a sly story of a neighboring state much infested by robbers. The king was proud of a great detective who kept them down; but they soon killed the Pinkerton, and got to work again. Then he reformed himself,—and the robbers found his kingdom no place for them. In a body they crossed the Hoangho into Ts'in;—and bequeathed to its policy their tendencies and aptitudes.
Ts'in had come to be the strongest state in China. Next neighbor to the Huns, and half Hun herself, she had learned warfare in a school forever in session. But she had had wise rulers also, after their fashion of wisdom: who had been greatly at pains to educate her in all the learning of the Chinese. So now she stood, an armed camp of a nation, enamored of war, and completely civilized in all external things. Ts'u, her strongest rival, stretching southward to the Yangtse and beyond, had had to deal with barbarians less virile than the Huns; and besides, dwelling as Ts'u did among the mountains and forests of romance, she had some heart in her for poetry and mysticism, whereas Ts'in's was all for sheer fighting. Laotse probably had been a Ts'u man; and also Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan; and in after ages it was nearly always from the forests of Ts'u that the great winds of poetry were blown. Still—he had immense territories and resources, and the world looked mainly to her for defense against the northern Tiger Ts'in. Soon after Su Tai told his master the parable of the mussel and the oyster-catcher the grand clash came, and the era of petty wars and raidings was over. Ts'u gathered to herself most of the rest of China for her allies, and there was a giant war that fills the whole horizon, nearly, of the first half of the third century B. C. New territories were involved: the world had expanded mightily since the days of Confucius. "First and last," says Ssema Tsien, "the allies hurled a million men against Ts'in." But to no purpose; one nation after another went down before those Hun-trained half-Huns from the north-west. In 257 Chau Tsiang king of Ts'in took the Chow capital, and relieved Nan Wang, the last of the Chows, of the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu, the symbols of his sacred sovereignty; —the mantle of the Caliphate passed from the House of Wen Wang and the Duke of Chow.
The world had crumbled to pieces: there had been changes of dynasty before, but never (in known history) a change like this. The Chows had been reigning nearly nine hundred years; but their system had been in the main the same as that of the Shangs and Hias, and of Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu: it was two millenniums, a century, and a decade old. A Chinaman, in Chau Tsiang's place, would merely have reshaped the old order and set up a new feudal-pontifical house instead of Chow; which could not have lasted, because old age had worn the old system out. But these barbarians came in with new ideas. A new empire, a new race, a new nation was to be born.
Chau Tsiang died in 251; and even then one could not clearly foresee what should follow. In 253 he had performed the significant sacrifice to Heaven, a prerogative of the King-Pontiff: but he had not assumed the title. Resistance was still in being. His son and successor reigned three days only; and his son, another nonentity, five years without claiming to be more than King of Ts'in. But when this man died in 246, he left the destinies of the world in the hands of a boy of thirteen; who very quickly showed the world in whose hands its destinies lay. Not now a King of Ts'in; not a King-Pontiff of Chow;—not, if you please, a mere wang or king at all;—but Hwangti, like that great figure of mythological times, the Yellow Emperor, who had but to sit on his throne, and all the world was governed and at peace. The child began by assuming that astounding title: Ts'in Shi Hwangti, the First August Emperor: peace to the ages that were past; let them lie in their tomb; time now should begin again!—Childish boyish swank and braggadocio, said the world; but very soon the world found itself mistaken. Hwangti;—but no sitting on his throne in meditation, no letting the world be governed by Tao, for him!
If you have read that delightful book Through Hidden Shensi, by Mr. F. A. Nichols, the city of Hienfang, or Changan, or, by its modern name, Singanfu or Sian-fu in Shensi, will be much more than a name to you. Thither it was that the Dowager Empress fled with her court from Pekin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion; there, long ago, Han Wuti's banners flew; there Tang Taitsong reigned in all his glory and might; there the Banished Angel sang in the palace gardens of Tang Hsuantsong the luckless: history has paid such tribute of splendor to few of the cities of the world. At Hienfang now this barbarian boy and Attila-Napoleon among kings built his capital;—built it right splendidly, after such ideas of splendor as a young half-Hun might cherish. For indeed, he had but little and remote Chinese heredity in him; was of the race of Attila and Genghiz, of Mahmoud of Ghazna, Tamerlane, and all the world-shaking Turkish conquerors. —Well, but these people, though by nature and function destroyers, have been great builders too: building hugely, monumentally, and to inspire awe, and not with the faery grace and ephemeral loveliness of the Chinese;—though they learned the trick of that, too,—as they learned in the west kindred qualities from the Saracens. Grand Pekin is of their architecture; which is Chinese with a spaciousness and monumental solemnity added. Such a capital Ts'in She Hwangti built him at Hien fang or Changan. In the Hall of audience of his palace within the walls he set up twelve statues, each (I like this barbarian touch) weighing twelve thousand pounds. Well; we should say, each costing so many thousand dollars; you need not laugh; I am not sure but that the young Hun had the best of it. And without the walls he built him, too, a Palace of Delight with many halls and courtyards; in some of which (I like this too) he could drill ten thousand men.
All of this was but the trappings and the suits of his sovereignty: he let it be known he had the substance as well. No great strategist himself, he commanded the services of mighty generals: one Meng-tien in especial, a bright particular star in the War-God's firmament. An early step to disarm the nations, and have all weapons sent to Changan; then, with these, to furnish forth a great standing army, which he sent out under Meng-tien to conquer. The Middle Kingdom and the quondam Great Powers were quieted; then south of the Yangtse the great soldier swept, adding unknown regions to his master's domain. Then rorth and west, till the Huns and their like had grown very tame and wary;—and over all these realms the Emperor spread his network of fine roads and canals, linking them with Changan: what the Romans did for Europe in road-building, he did for China.