ven with the Roman Empire.[7] Their
relations with India had a profound effect upon their religion, as well
as upon that of Japan, since they led to the introduction of Buddhism.
Relations with Rome were chiefly promoted by the Roman desire for silk,
and continued until the rise of Mohammedanism. They had little
importance for China, though we learn, for example, that about A.D. 164
a treatise on astronomy was brought to China from the Roman Empire.[8]
Marcus Aurelius appears in Chinese history under the name An Tun, which
stands for Antoninus.

It was during this period that the Chinese acquired that immense
prestige in the Far East which lasted until the arrival of European
armies and navies in the nineteenth century. One is sometimes tempted to
think that the irruption of the white man into China may prove almost as
ephemeral as the raids of Huns and Tartars into Europe. The military
superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are
tempted to think; and our superiority in civilization is a mere
delusion. Our histories, which treat the Mediterranean as the centre of
the universe, give quite a wrong perspective. Cordier,[9] dealing with
the campaigns and voyages of discovery which took place under the Han
dynasty, says:--

The Occidentals have singularly contracted the field of the
history of the world when they have grouped around the people of
Israel, Greece, and Rome the little that they knew of the
expansion of the human race, being completely ignorant of these
voyagers who ploughed the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, of
these cavalcades across the immensities of Central Asia up to the
Persian Gulf. The greatest part of the universe, and at the same
time a civilization different but certainly as developed as that
of the ancient Greeks and Romans, remained unknown to those who
wrote the history of their little world while they believed that
they, were setting forth the history of the world as a whole.

In our day, this provincialism, which impregnates all our culture, is
liable to have disastrous consequences politically, as well as for the
civilization of mankind. We must make room for Asia in our thoughts, if
we are not to rouse Asia to a fury of self-assertion.

After the Han dynasty there are various short dynasties and periods of
disorder, until we come to the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907). Under this
dynasty, in its prosperous day