Tradition places the Golden Age of China so far back as three thousand
years before Christ; for a sober survey of China's early civilization,
it is not necessary to push further back than the tenth century B.C. We
shall find evidence of such an advanced state of civilization at that
later date as to leave no doubt of a very remote antiquity.

The China of those days, known even then as the Middle Kingdom, was
a mere patch on the empire of to-day. It lay, almost lozenge-shaped,
between the 34th and 40th parallels of latitude north, with the upper
point of the lozenge resting on the modern Peking, and the lower on
Si-an Fu in Shensi, whither the late Empress Dowager fled for safety
during the Boxer rising in 1900. The ancient autocratic Imperial system
had recently been disestablished, and a feudal system had taken its
place. The country was divided up into a number of vassal states of
varying size and importance, ruled each by its own baron, who swore
allegiance to the sovereign of the Royal State. The relations, however,
which came to subsist, as time went on, between these states, sovereign
and vassal alike, as described in contemporary annals, often remind the
reader of the relations which prevailed between the various political
divisions of ancient Greece. The rivalries of Athens and Sparta, whose
capitals were only one hundred and fifty miles apart--though a
perusal of Thucydides makes one feel that at least half the world was
involved--find their exact equivalent in the jealousies and animosities
which stirred the feudal states of ancient China, and in the disastrous
campaigns and bloody battles which the states fought with one another.
We read of chariots and horsemanship; of feats of arms and deeds of
individual heroism; of forced marches, and of night attacks in which the
Chinese soldier was gagged with a kind of wooden bit, to prevent talking
in the ranks; of territory annexed and reconquered, and of the violent