y as
1411 the canals had been repaired, and from 1415 onward all the traffic
of the country went by the canals, so evading the Japanese peril. This
ended the short chapter of Chinese naval history.

These travels of Cheng Ho seem to have had one more cultural result: a
large number of fairy-tales from the Middle East were brought to China,
or at all events reached China at that time. The Chinese, being a
realistically-minded people, have produced few fairy-tales of their own.
The bulk of their finest fairy-tales were brought by Buddhist monks, in
the course of the first millennium A.D., from India by way of Central
Asia. The Buddhists made use of them to render their sermons more
interesting and impressive. As time went on, these stories spread all
over China, modified in harmony with the spirit of the people and
adapted to the Chinese environment. Only the fables failed to strike
root in China: the matter-of-fact Chinese was not interested in animals
that talked and behaved to each other like human beings. In addition,
however, to these early fairy-tales, there was another group of stories
that did not spread throughout China, but were found only in the
south-eastern coastal provinces. These came from the Middle East,
especially from Persia. The fairy-tales of Indian origin spread not only
to Central Asia but at the same time to Persia, where they found a very
congenial soil. The Persians made radical changes in the stories and
gave them the form in which they came to Europe by various
routes--through North Africa to Spain and France; through
Constantinople, Venice, or Genoa to France; through Russian Turkestan to
Russia, Finland, and Sweden; through Turkey and the Balkans to Hungary
and Germany. Thus the stories found a European home. And this same
Persian form was carried by sea in Cheng Ho's time to South China. Thus
we have the strange experience of finding some of our own finest
fairy-tales in almost the same form in South China.

10 _Struggles between cliques_

Yung-lo's successor died early. Under the latter's son, the emperor
Hsuean Tsung (1426-1435; reign name Hsuean-te), fixed numbers of
candidates were assigned for the state examinations. It had been found
that almost the whole of the gentry in the Yangtze region sat at the
examinations; and that at these examinations their representatives made
sure, through their mutual relations, that only their members should
pass, so that the candidates from the north