In their campaign against the prevailing lawlessness and violence, neither Confucius nor Mencius was able to make any headway. Their preachings fell on deaf ears and their peaceful admonitions were passed unheeded by men who held their fiefs by the strength of their right arms, and administered the affairs of their principalities surrounded by the din of war. The feudal system and the dynasty of the Chows were tottering when Confucius died although it was more than two hundred years after when Ch’in acquired the supremacy.
MANCHURIAN MINISTERS.
The nine centuries covered by the history of the Chows were full of stirring incidents in other parts of the world. The Trojan war had just been brought to an end and Æneas had taken refuge in Italy from the sack of Troy. Early in the dynasty Zoroaster was founding in Persia the religion of the Magi, the worship of fire which survives in the Parseeism of Bombay. Saul was made king of Israel and Solomon built the temple of Jerusalem. Later on Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans and Romulus laid the first stone of the Eternal City. Then came the Babylonic captivity, the appearance of Buddha, the conquest of Asia Minor by Cyrus, the rise of the Roman Republic, the defeats of Darius at Marathon and of Xerxes at Salamis, the Peloponnesian War, the retreat of the Ten Thousand, and Roman conquests down to the end of the first Punic war. From a literary point of view the Chow dynasty was the age of the Vedas in India; of Homer, Æschylus, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Aristotle and Demosthenes in Greece; and of the Jewish prophets from Samuel to Daniel; and of the Talmud as originally undertaken by the scribes subsequent to the return from the captivity in Babylon.
It has been stated that the imperial rule of the Chows over the vassal states which made up the China of those early days, was gradually undermined by the growing power and influence of one of the latter, the very name of which was transformed into a byword of reproach, so that to call a person “a man of Ch’in” was equivalent to saying in vulgar parlance, “He is no friend of mine.” The struggle between the Ch’ins and the rest of the empire may be likened to the struggle between Athens and the rest of Greece though the end in each case was not the same. The state of Ch’in vanquished its combined opponents, and finally established a dynasty, short-lived[short-lived] indeed, but containing among the few rulers who sat upon the throne, only about fifty years in all, the name of one remarkable man, the first emperor of the united China.
GREAT WALL OF CHINA.
On the ruins of the old feudal system, the landmarks of which his three or four predecessors had succeeded in sweeping away, Hwang Ti laid the foundations of a coherent empire which was to date from himself as its founder. He sent an army of 300,000 men to fight against the Huns. He dispatched a fleet to search for some mysterious islands off the coast of China; and this expedition has since been connected with the colonization of Japan. He built the Great Wall which is nearly fourteen hundred miles in length, forming the most prominent artificial object on the surface of the earth. His copper coinage was so uniformly good that the cowry disappeared altogether from commerce with this reign. According to some, the modern hair pencil employed by the Chinese as a pen was invented about this time, to be used for writing on silk; while the characters themselves underwent certain modifications and orthographical improvements. The first emperor desired above all things to impart a fresh stimulus to literary effort; but he adopted singularly unfortunate means to secure this desirable end. For listening to the insidious flattery of courtiers, he determined that literature should begin anew with his reign. He therefore issued orders for the destruction of all existing books, with the exception of works treating of medicine, agriculture and divination and the annals of his own house; and he actually put to death many hundreds of the literati who refused to comply with these commands. The decree was obeyed as faithfully as was possible in case of so sweeping an ordinance and for many years a night of ignorance rested on the country. Numbers of valuable works thus perished in a general literary conflagration, popularly known as “the burning of the books;” and it is partly to accident and partly to the pious efforts of the scholars of the age, that posterity is indebted for the preservation of the most precious relics of ancient Chinese literature. The death of Hwang Ti was the signal for an outbreak among the dispossessed feudal princes, who, however, after some years of disorder, were again reduced to the rank of citizens by a successful peasant leader who adopted the title of Kaou Ti, and named his dynasty that of Han, with himself its first emperor.
From that day to this, with occasional interregnums, the empire has been ruled on the lines laid down by Hwang Ti. Dynasty has succeeded dynasty but the political tradition has remained unchanged, and though Mongols and Manchoos have at different times wrested the throne from its legitimate heirs, they have been engulfed in a homogeneous mass inhabiting the empire, and instead of impressing their seal upon the country, have become but the reflection of the vanquished. The stately House of Han ruled over China for four hundred years, approximately from 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. During the whole period the empire made vast strides towards a more settled state of prosperity and civilization, although there were constant wars with the Tartar tribes to the north and the various Turkish tribes on the west. The communications with the Huns were particularly close, and even now traces of Hunnish influence are discernible in several of the recognized surnames of the Chinese. This dynasty also witnessed the spectacle, most unusual in the east, of a woman wielding the imperial sceptre; and hers was not a reign calculated to inspire the people of China with much faith either in the virtue or the administrative ability of the sex. In Chinese history however, her place is that of the only female sovereign who ever legitimately occupied the throne.
