CHAPTER XXXIX. GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

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 circumscribed 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 assassinated 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 pass 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 flourishing 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 illustrating for his visitor the conquests and distant expeditions of ancient times: -