t least two thousand years old. Several hundred years
before Christ, they say a Chinese kingdom made the present site the
capital, and began building the outer walls; but the Chinese, the
gentler Chinese who had all military spirit crushed out of them five
thousand years before by having to tramp from Mesopotamia to where
they now are in the eighteen provinces, these Chinese, I say, never
had in Peking anything but a temporary trysting-place. For Peking
stands for a sort of blatant barbarianism, mounted on sturdy ponies,
pouring in from the far North; and the history of Peking can only be
said to begin when Mongol-Tartars, who have always been freebooters
and robbers, forced their way in and imposed their militarism on a
nation of shopkeepers and collectors of taxes.

Even before the Christian era, the Chinese chronicles tell of the
pressure of these fierce barbarians from the North being so much felt
and their raids so constant, that Chi Huang-ti, the ruler of the
powerful Chinese feudatory state which laid the foundations of the
present Empire of China, began to build the Great Wall of China and to
fortify old Peking as the only means of stopping these living waves.
The Great Wall took ages to build, for the Northern barbarians always
kept cunningly slipping round the uncompleted ends, and the Mings, the
last purely Chinese sovereigns to reign in Peking, actually added
three hundred miles to this colossal structure in the year 1547, or
nearly two thousand years after the first bricks had been cemented.
That shows you what people they were, and what the contest was.

For hundreds of years the war with the semi-nomadic hordes of the
North continued. Sometimes isolated bands of Tartars broke through the
Chinese defence and enslaved the people, but never for very long;
instinctively by the use of every stratagem the cleverer Chinese
compassed their destruction. While Attila and his Huns were ravaging
Europe in the fifth century, other _Hwingnoo_, or Huns, veritable
scourges of God, forced their way into China. In this fashion, while
China itself was passing through a dozen different forms of
government, and had a dozen capitals--sometimes owning allegiance to a
single Emperor such as those of the T'ang dynasty who added Canton and
the Cantonese to the Empire, sometimes split into petty kingdoms such
as the "Ten States"--this curious frontier war continued and was
handed down from father to son. Chinese industrialism and