imposing taxation on it.  Instead of this, the bulk of the long-distance traffic passed through the Ordos region, a little farther north, avoiding the Ch’i-fu state, which seemed to the merchants to be too insecure.  The Ch’i-fu depended mainly on cattle-breeding in the remote mountain country in the south of their territory, a region that gave them relative security from attack; on the other hand, this made them unable to exercise any influence on the course of political events in western China.

Mention must be made of one more state that rose from the ruins of Fu Chien’s empire.  It lay in the far west of China, in the western part of the present province of Kansu, and was really a continuation of the Chinese “Earlier Liang” realm, which had been annexed ten years earlier (376) by Fu Chien.  A year before his great march to the south, Fu Chien had sent the Tibetan Lue Kuang into the “Earlier Liang” region in order to gain influence over Turkestan.  As mentioned previously, after the great Hun rulers Fu Chien was the first to make a deliberate attempt to secure cultural and political overlordship over the whole of China.  Although himself a Tibetan, he never succumbed to the temptation of pursuing a “Tibetan” policy; like an entirely legitimate ruler of China, he was concerned to prevent the northern peoples along the frontier from uniting with the Tibetan peoples of the west for political ends.  The possession of Turkestan would avert that danger, which had shown signs of becoming imminent of late:  some tribes of the Hsien-pi had migrated as far as the high mountains of Tibet and had imposed themselves as a ruling class on the still very primitive Tibetans living there.  From this symbiosis there began to be formed a new people, the so-called T’u-yue-hun, a hybridization of Mongol and Tibetan stock with a slight Turkish admixture.  Lue Kuang had considerable success in Turkestan; he had brought considerable portions of eastern Turkestan under Fu Chien’s sovereignty and administered those regions almost independently.  When the news came of Fu Chien’s end, he declared himself an independent ruler, of the “Later Liang” dynasty (386-403).  Strictly speaking, this was simply a trading State, like the city-states of Turkestan:  its basis was the transit traffic that brought it prosperity.  For commerce brought good profit to the small states that lay right across the caravan route, whereas it was of doubtful benefit, as we know, to agrarian China as a whole, because the luxury goods which it supplied to the court were paid for out of the production of the general population.

This “Later Liang” realm was inhabited not only by a few Tibetans and many Chinese, but also by Hsien-pi and Huns.  These heterogeneous elements with their divergent cultures failed in the long run to hold together in this long but extremely narrow strip of territory, which was almost incapable of military defence.  As early as 397 a group of Huns in the central section of the country made themselves