those captives who were peasants could not be taken away from their fields without robbing the country of its food; therefore it would have been necessary to spread the tribes over the whole of eastern China, and this would have added immensely to the strength of the various tribes and would have greatly weakened the central power.  Furthermore almost all Chinese officials at the court had come originally from the territories just conquered.  They had come from there about a hundred years earlier and still had all their relatives in the east.  If the eastern territories had been placed under the rule of separate tribes, and the tribes had been distributed in this way, the gentry in those territories would have been destroyed and reduced to the position of enslaved peasants.  The Chinese officials accordingly persuaded the Toba emperor not to place the new territories under the tribes, but to leave them to be administered by officials of the central administration.  These officials must have a firm footing in their territory, for only they could extract from the peasants the grain required for the support of the capital.  Consequently the Toba government did not enslave the Chinese in the eastern territory, but made the local gentry into government officials, instructing them to collect as much grain as possible for the capital.  This Chinese local gentry worked in close collaboration with the Chinese officials at court, a fact which determined the whole fate of the Toba empire.

The Hsien-pi of the newly conquered east no longer belonged to any tribe, but only to military units.  They were transferred as soldiers to the Toba court and placed directly under the government, which was thus notably strengthened, especially as the millions of peasants under their Chinese officials were also directly responsible to the central administration.  The government now proceeded to convert also its own Toba tribes into military formations.  The tribal men of noble rank were brought to the court as military officers, and so were separated from the common tribesmen and the slaves who had to remain with the herds.  This change, which robbed the tribes of all means of independent action, was not carried out without bloodshed.  There were revolts of tribal chieftains which were ruthlessly suppressed.  The central government had triumphed, but it realized that more reliance could be placed on Chinese than on its own people, who were used to independence.  Thus the Toba were glad to employ more and more Chinese, and the Chinese pressed more and more into the administration.  In this process the differing social organizations of Toba and Chinese played an important part.  The Chinese have patriarchal families with often hundreds of members.  When a member of a family obtains a good position, he is obliged to make provision for the other members of his family and to secure good positions for them too; and not only the members of his own family but those of allied families and of