cheerful people, with a peculiar sense of humour and a still greater
conviction of the inferiority of women. To show their contempt for
them, it is still recorded that they used to slit the back of their
wives and drink their blood to give them strength. For two and a half
centuries the Khitans, under the style of the Liao or Iron dynasty,
maintained their position by the use of the sword, and then succumbing
to the sapping influence of Chinese civilisation, they in turn were
unable to resist a second Manchu-Mongol horde, the Kins. The Kins,
under the style of the Silver dynasty, reigned in Northern China for a
term of years, but there was nothing of a permanent character in their
rule, since they were uncouth barbarians who soon drank themselves to
death and destruction.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Genghis Khan, the great
Mongol, born in the bleak Hsing-an Mountains, gathered together all
the restless bands of Mongolia, and sweeping down on Peking drove out
the Kins and established the purely Mongol dynasty of the Yuan. Up
till then Peking had consisted of what is to-day the Chinese city, or
the older outer city. Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, fixed his
residence definitively in Peking in 1264, and began building the
_Ta-tu_, or Great Residence--the Tartar city of to-day. The Chinese
city is oblong; the Tartar city is squat and square and overlaps and
dominates the northern walls of the older city. Kublai Khan, by
building the Tartar city on the northern edge of the Chinese city and
fortifying it with immense strength, may be said to have fitted the
spear-head on to the Chinese shaft, and to have given the key-note to
the policy which exists to this day--the policy of the North of China
dominating the South of China.

In time the Yuan dynasty of Mongols passed away--their strength sapped