imperial commission appointed to levy duties. In 714 A.D. we hear of a petition of foreign merchants, arriving by way of the southern sea, which is forwarded from the coast in quite modern fashion for the emperor's consideration. It set forth all the precious things which the merchants could bring from the countries of the West, and represented them as only desirous of collecting medicinal drugs and simples. Unfortunately for the traders, they arrived at the beginning of a new reign, when a vigorous attempt had been made to put down the luxury of the court, and the Emperor, after proscribing the use of gold and silver ornaments, had given directions. for a great "burning of the vanities" at the gate of the palace. Hence, when he proposed to send one of the censors to question the strangers, he was reminded of the praiseworthy indifference shown by the ancient kings to useless curiosities and the interested pleas of foreign merchants, and it was concluded to take no further notice of the petition.

Foreign trade continued to exist on sufferance, but so far as the Chinese were concerned, it was limited by the attitude of the Government to a moderate exportation of staple commodities, paid for in foreign coin or precious metals. What China had to sell was much more important to the Western nations than anything she or her rulers could be prevailed upon to buy; and so long as the trade dealt with surplus manufactures, like silk, or natural products, like musk or rhubarb, and did not endanger the local food supply, it was not interfered with. In 794 A.D. complaints were made that trade was leaving Canton for Cochin China, but the traders' schemes for recovering or pursuing it were discouraged by the Government, which opined that there must have been intolerable extortions used to drive it away, or a want of natural inducements to bring it, and quoted the Shoo: "Do not prize strange commodities too much, and persons will come from remote parts."

Arab geographers and travellers of the 9th century show what a development had been reached by foreign commerce under this modified freedom. The Jewish merchants described by Ibn Khordadbeh as speaking Persian, Latin, Greek, Arab, Spanish, Slavonic, and Lingua franca, and trading by sea and land to the remotest regions, had their representatives at Canton; and the four trade routes, enumerated by Sir Henry Yule,1 enabled all the great commercial communities to try their hand at the China trade. The first of these routes led from the Mediterranean over the Isthmus of Suez, and onwards by sea; another reached the Indian sea viâ Antioch, Bagdad and Bussora and the Persian Gulf; a third followed the coast of Africa by land from Tangiers to Egypt and thence by Damascus to Bagdad, while the fourth led south of the Caspian Sea and north of the central Asian desert to the gates of the Great Wall. The Chinese traders either met the Western merchants at Ceylon, or themselves came as far as the mouth of the Euphrates.

1 Cathay, and the Way Thither, vol. ii. p. 559. Another indication of the range of Chinese influence is given by the Chinese version of the Yenisei inscriptions (Acad., Jan. 20, 1894) which shows the monuments (bearing other inscriptions in an unknown alphabet) to have been erected to princes of a Turk dynasty, circ. 730 A. D.

The account of Chinese manners and customs given by two Arab travellers in the middle of the 9th century is particularly interesting, as they are the first eye-witnesses whose impressions we are able to compare with the sketches of the black-haired people, as painted by themselves, upon which we have hitherto been obliged to rely. Their standard of civilization must of course be based upon that of the Caliphate, which in 851 A.D. was already past its prime, but still outwardly magnificent, and in material civilization ahead of any Christian court in the West. Every traveller in China, we are told,1 is furnished with a pass for himself and his goods, so that the latter cannot be carried off. The Chinese "administer justice with great strictness in all their tribunals," and both parties to a suit are warned that they will be beaten if guilty of perjury. When any dearth makes the necessaries of life very dear, "then does the king open his storehouses and sell all sorts of provisions much cheaper than they are to be had at market," and hence no scarcity can be of long continuance.

The Chinese "have gold, silver, pearls, silk, and rich stuffs in great abundance, but they consider them only as movables and merchandise, and copper pieces are the only current coin.": The men "adorn their girdles" with these things and with tortoise-shell, and ivory, and these girdles and rich apparel used to be buried with their kings and princes; "but this custom is now no more" because of thieves who dug them up. The same writer says that there is no land tax in China—a mistake which would be excusable if his inquiries were limited to the commercial towns of which the statement would be true. Another remark is very significant of the difference between China and other Oriental countries where diseased mendicancy is so common that the absence of it strikes a traveller with surprise : "Scarce a one-eyed or a blind person is to be seen or any one subject to the likę afflictions. " 4

The populousness of the fertile plains was then as now an object of remark; the villages seemed so close as almost to touch, and the cocks answer each other continuously from hamlet to hamlet for 100 leagues together. The people "are divided among themselves into families and tribes like the Arabs and some other nations, and they know each other by the difference of their descents. No one marries in his own tribe, and a man of one family espouses not a woman of the same; but as if, for example, a man of the family of Robayat marries into that of Modzar, and inversely a Modzar conjoins with a Robayat. They are of opinion that such alliances add to the nobility of the children." The last sentence seems to show that tradition had not yet lost sight of the reason which had led to the general adoption of the rule, under the Chow Dynasty, when intermarriages within the narrow limits of the hamlet were, if unchecked, almost sure to result in physical degeneracy. Allowing for a moderate

1 Ancient Accounts of India and China by two Mahommedan travellers who went to those parts in the 9th century, translated from the Arabic by Eusebius Renaudot, p. 26. 3 lb., p. 20.

2 Ib., p. 24.

4 Ib., p. 37.

5 lb., p. 62. Cf. Mencius, Life and Works, p. 161.

proportion of travellers' wonders and misunderstandings, there can be no doubt that our two Arabs saw and admired a China very like that of later travellers, and corresponding in external features to that which is more completely portrayed by native historians.

The first of the memoirs was written in 851 A.D.: by 877, according to the second writer, the Arab trade with China was interrupted by the internal troubles which had "put a stop to the justice and righteousness there formerly practised." Two rebel armies were, in fact, ravaging Southern China, and one of the rebels, having vainly demanded to be installed as governor of Canton, besieged and captured that rich and populous town; and, according to the Arab account, massacred the whole of its large foreign population, of Jews, Mahommedans, Christians, and Parsees. As many as 100,000 are said to have perished, and the numbers are defended on the ground that an accurate register of the strangers was kept for the sake of the poll tax levied on them. It is scarcely possible, however, that so large a foreign colony should have been tolerated in a single town, and the numbers given may have included both the Chinese servants of the foreigners and all the natives exclusively engaged in dealings with them. The fall of the Tang Dynasty, which followed in 908 A.D., cooperated with the decline of the Arab power to break off the growing intercourse between South China and the Western nations by way of the Indian seas. The journey was too long to be undertaken without the assurance of a peaceful market, while the supply of merchandise itself must have fallen short for the time, as the rebel armies are accused of the supreme barbarism of cutting down the mulberry trees.

$ 3. LITERATURE, ORTHODOXY, AND BUDDHISM.

It may be doubted whether the political influence of the literati stood as high during this period as under the Hans. They had to contend for the maintenance of their spiritual authority against Buddhists and Taoists, and both they and their rivals had comparatively little to do with the other struggle being waged meanwhile between courtiers, condottieri, and feudalizing nobles for the spoils of empire. Confucianism alone was not compromised in the disasters of the dynasty, since it alone had not contributed to produce them. The system of examination as a means of selecting officers was not condemned, for it had not been fairly tried, though the machinery of the examinations themselves had been elaborated, as if in preparation for a time when its importance would be more fully recognised.

The so-called Imperial College consisted of six higher schools, to which youths were admitted between the ages of 14 and 19; the total curriculum extended at furthest over 10 years. The first school received 300 students, and corresponded to that in which the emperor's sons were anciently supposed to receive their education along with the sons of higher officers of State; it was open to the sons of lower, and the sons,

grandsons and great-grandsons of higher officers. The second school, or "Great College," admitted 500 sons or remote descendants of inferior officers. The third, or 66 College of the four gates," received 1,300 students -500 drawn from the class of landowners and inferior officials, while 800 were "men of the people" distinguished in the examinations held all over the kingdom. The fourth, or school of laws, had only 50 students, and the schools of writing and arithmetic only 30 each, all of whom were taken either from among the people or the sons of the lower officers, and these were doubtless intended to provide a kind of technical training for clerks on the permanent staff of Government boards.1

The actual number of the students probably fluctuated with the imperial liberality and the reputation of the schools, and it was said to have reached 10,000 in the reign of Tai-tsong (629-649). Students of the great college who distinguished themselves might be promoted to the college of superior dignity nominally reserved to the sons of high officers. In 729 A.D. we meet with the complaint that correct pronunciation was more attended to than the meaning of words, and Han-yu pleads for less respect of persons and greater strictness in the examinations. But the purely literary and unpractical character of the tests was not yet acquiesced in. Three papers, so to speak, were set-one in the classics, one to test the candidate's style and literary attainments, and one containing five questions relating to affairs of the day,2-to one of which the famous denunciation of the eunuchs was an answer.

By an edict of 706 A.D. the payment to be made by scholars to their teachers was laid down.3 Tuition has always been cheap in China, where the remuneration of the learned professions is still as nearly on a level with that of the mechanical arts as it was in medieval Europe; and the presents of silk, wine, and meat required from the students were very modest in amount. The reason for prescribing the payment probably was that the State had hitherto paid the teachers' salary, and that it was an innovation for the professors to depend on the students' fees. The imperial library was founded in 723 A.D., but the funds at its disposal must have been scanty, as the buildings when injured by rain were not repaired. The famous Han-lin college, which now furnishes the imperial historiographers, examiners, and directors of public instruction, was founded in 740 A.D. to "answer the emperor's questions about language and literature."4 The period was one of considerable literary activity, and the brilliant original writings of the day distracted attention from the mechanical cares of bibliography, so that many works of repute were found to have disappeared when the erudite compilers and commentators of the Sung Dynasty began. their researches. Ssema-tching, who flourished at this period, is the first

1 L'Instruction publique en Chine, p. 256.

2 Ib., pp. 276-9.

3 lb., p. 283.

Ib., p. 305. Pauthier gives 712 A.D. as the date of the foundation. plete constitution might easily occupy a generation.

But its com

historian, at least the first whose works survive, who gives an account of the legendary period preceding the sufficiently mythical emperor Fou-hi.

In 736 A.D. an important change was made, which on the one hand raised the standard of the examinations and on the other diminished the chances of the successful candidates obtaining office. The direction of the examinations was transferred from the "minister of Offices" to the minister of Rites, presumably because the former allowed extraneous circumstances to weigh in the bestowal of degrees. But as the bestowal of office still rested with the department by which the officers were employed, a constant feud between the two was kept up for several centuries. Candidates who had passed successfully the examination conducted by the Board of Rites were only thereby qualified for appointment to office; their actual nomination for active service rested with the Board of Offices, which, not being able to employ all the successful candidates, used its discretionary powers of rejection in a way which the mass of graduates resented as unfair, even when preceded by a third examination.1

In the middle of the 8th century orthodoxy was exposed to a danger like that which threatened under the Souy Dynasty, when public examinations were held in the works of Buddhist theology. Hiouen-tsong's partiality for Taoism showed itself by the attempt to add the works of Lao-tze to the official literature, and between 741 and 763 A.D., students were allowed to "take up" the works of this philosopher, either instead of or in addition to the regular classics.2 In the next reign this concession was revoked, and we hear no more of Taoist degrees till the beginning of the 12th century; but learning was affronted by the appointment of an ambitious eunuch as examiner, and scholarship was so ill paid, that professors complained they had to eke out their salaries by taking to agriculture. That the importance of success in the examinations on the whole continued to increase, is proved by the precautions first taken at this time, by order of the Empress Wu-heou, to prevent favouritism or corruption, by concealing the authorship of the papers given in.

The career of Hiouen-thsang, the famous traveller, who was born 602 A.D., is thoroughly illustrative of the mixed tendencies of the age. His father had wisely withdrawn from office in view of the prevailing disorder, and passed his time in private study. His grandfather had presided over the Imperial College under the Thsi Dynasty, and received by way of salary the taxes of an important town; and his great-grandfather had held a governorship under the most enlightened of the northern dynasties, the Yuen Wei. He thus belonged by birth to the class from which successful students and officers are drawn, and he was taught to read by his father out of the classical books. But one of his elder brothers had entered a Buddhist convent, and saw in the grave and studious boy an excellent recruit for the propagation of the same faith. And while still under thirteen, he was diverted from the study of the classics to that of Buddhist books of devotion. Soon afterwards, the emperor issued a sudden decree, com1 L'Instruction publique en Chine, p. 310.

2 Ib., p. 289.