r centuries more,
came together and was great again. Fifteen hundred years after
Ts'in Shi Hwangti had founded China, her manvantara then having
ended, and her whole creative cycle run through, she fell to the
Mongols. Fifteen hundred years after Julius Caesar had founded
his empire, the last wretched remnant of it fell to the Turks.
But China first compelled her conquerors to behave like Chinamen,
and then, after a century, turned them out. The Turks never
became Greek or Roman, and so far have not quite been turned out.
The roman empire disappeared, and never reunited;--that is what
has been the matter with Europe ever since. Europe, in her
manvantara, has wasted three parts of her creative force in wars
and disunion. But China, even in her pralaya, became a strong,
united power again under the Mings (1368-1644)--the first of
them--a native dynasty. Conquered again, now by the Manchus, she
mader her conquerors behave like Chinamen,--imposed on them her
culture;--and went forth under their banners to conquer. The
European pralaya (630-1240) was a time barren of creation in art
and literature, and in life uttterly squalid and lightless The
Chinese pralaya, after the Mongol Conquest, took a very long time
to sink into squalidity. The arts, which had died in Europe long
before Rome fell, lived on in China, though with ever-waning
energy, through the Mongol and well into the Ming time: the
national stability, the force of custom, was there to carry them
on. What light, what life, what vigor was there in Rome or
Constantinople a century and a half after Alaric or Heraclius?
But Ming Yunglo, a century and a half after the fall of Sung,
reigned in great splendor; sent his armies conquering to the
Caspian, and his navies to the conquest of Ceylon, the discovery
of Africa, the gathering in of the tribute of the Archipelago and
the shores of the Indian Ocean. Until the end of the eighteenth
century the minor arts and crafts--pottery and bronzes--of which
there was nothing to speak of in Europe in the corresponding
European age--were flourishing wonderfully; and in the
seventeenth and eighteeenth centuries, under Kanghi and Kienlung,
China was once more a great military power. She chased and
whipped the Goorkhas down through the Himalays and into India,
only twenty years before England fought difficult and doubtful
campaigns with those fierce little mountaineers. You may even
say she has been better off in her pral