7. Ancient China meant the Yellow River. Then the Han and the
Hwai. Next the Yang-tsz. Last the Sz Ch'wan tributaries of the
Yang-tsz. It was through the lakes and rivers south of the Yang-
tsz that China at last colonized the south.




CHAPTER I

OPENING SCENES

The year 842 B.C. may be considered the first accurate date in
Chinese history, and in this year the Emperor had to flee from his
capital on account of popular dissatisfaction with his tyrannical
ways: he betook himself northward to an outlying settlement on the
Tartar frontier, and the charge of imperial affairs was taken over
by a regency or duumvirate.

At this time the confederation of cultured princes called China--
or, to use their own term, the Central Kingdom--was a very
different region from the huge mass of territory familiar to us
under those names at the present day. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that civilized China, even at that comparatively advanced
period, consisted of little more than the modern province of Ho
Nan. All outside this flat and comparatively riverless region
inhabited by the "orthodox" was more or less barbaric, and such
civilization as it possessed was entirely the work of Chinese
colonists, adventurers, or grantees of fiefs _in partibus
infidelium_ (so to speak). Into matters of still earlier