acity of the government armies as through the loss of the rebels'
fleet of boats in a typhoon.

In 1517 a new favourite of the emperor's induced him to make a great
tour in the north, to which the favourite belonged. The tour and the
hunting greatly pleased the emperor, so that he continued his
journeying. This was the year in which the Portuguese Fernao Pires de
Andrade landed in Canton--the first modern European to enter China.

In 1518 Wang Yang-ming, the philosopher general, crushed a rising in
Kiangsi. The rising had been the outcome of years of unrest, which had
had two causes: native risings of the sort we described above, and loss
for the gentry due to the transfer of the capital. The province of
Kiangsi was a part of the Yangtze region, and the great landowners there
had lived on the profit from their supplies to Nanking. When the capital
was moved to Peking, their takings fell. They placed themselves under a
prince who lived in Nanking. This prince regarded Wang Yang-ming's move
into Kiangsi as a threat to him, and so rose openly against the
government and supported the Kiangsi gentry. Wang Yang-ming defeated
him, and so came into the highest favour with the incompetent emperor.
When peace had been restored in Nanking, the emperor dressed himself up
as an army commander, marched south, and made a triumphal entry into
Nanking.

One other aspect of Wang Yang-ming's expeditions has not yet been
studied: he crushed also the so-called salt-merchant rebels in the
southernmost part of Kiangsi and adjoining Kwangtung. These
merchants-turned-rebels had dominated a small area, off and on since
the eleventh century. At this moment, they seem to have had connections
with the rich inland merchants of Hsin-an and perhaps also with
foreigners. Information is still too scanty to give more details, but a
local movement as persistent as this one deserves attention.

Wang Yang-ming became acquainted as early as 1519 with the first
European rifles, imported by the Portuguese who had landed in 1517. (The
Chinese then called them Fu-lang-chi, meaning Franks. Wang was the first
Chinese who spoke of the "Franks".) The Chinese had already had mortars
which hurled stones, as early as the second century A.D. In the seventh
or eighth century their mortars had sent stones of a couple of
hundredweights some four hundred yards. There is mention in the eleventh
century of cannon which apparently shot with a charge of a sort of
gunpowder.