mass-armies with frightful social upheavals, and out of it came the "Roman" state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780 and 1580, of which the last century was the "Hyksos" time. The Classical experienced it from Chasronea (338), and, at the high pitch of horror, from the Gracchi (133) to Actium (31 B.C). And it is the destiny of the West-European-American world for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
During this period the centre of gravity changes — as from Attica to Latium, so from the Hwang-ho (at Ho-nan-fu) to the Yang-tse (modern province of Hu-pei). The Si-Kiang was as vague for the Chinese savants of those days as the Elbe for the Alexandrian geographer, and of the existence of India they had as yet no notion.
As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the Julian-Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure of Wang-Cheng, who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole supremacy and in 221 assumed the title of Shi (literally equivalent to "Augustus") and the Cæsar-name Hwang-ti. He founded the "Pax Serica" as we may call it, carried out a grand social reform in the exhausted Empire, and — as promptly as Rome[1] — began to build his "Limes," the famous Great Wall, for which in 114 he annexed a part of Mongolia. He was the first, too, to subdue the barbarians south of the Yang-tse, in a series of large-scale campaigns followed and confirmed by military roads, castles, and colonies. But "Roman," too, was his family history — a Tacitean drama with Lui-Shi (Chancellor and stepfather of the Emperor) and Li-Szu, the great statesman (the Agrippa of his day, and unifier of the Chinese script), playing parts, and one that quickly closed in Neronic horrors. Followed then the two Han dynasties (Western, 206 B.C-A.D. 23; Eastern, A.D. 25-220), under which the frontiers extended more and more, while in the capital eunuch-ministers, generals, and soldiery made and unmade the rulers at their pleasure. At certain rare moments, as under Wu-ti (140-86) and Ming-ti (58-76), the Chinese-Confucian, the Indian-Buddhist, and the Classical-Stoic world-forces approached one another so closely in the region of the Caspian that they might easily have come into actual touch.[2]
Chance decreed that the heavy attacks of the Huns should break themselves in vain upon the Chinese "Limes," which at each crisis found a strong emperor to defend it. The decisive repulse of the Huns took place in 124-119 under the Chinese Trajan, Wu-ti; and it was he, too, who finally incorporated Southern China in the Empire, with the object of obtaining a route into India, and built a grand embattled road to the Tarim. And so the Huns turned westward, and
- ↑ In the case of Rome, the idea of a fixed frontier against the barbarian emerged soon after the defeat of Varus, and the fortifications of the Limes were laid down before the close of the first century of our era. — Tr.
- ↑ For at that time imperialistic tendencies found expression even in India, in the Maurya and Sunga dynasty; these, however, could only be confused and ineffective, Indian nature being what it was.
