These activities along the coast led the Chinese to the belief that basically all foreigners who came by ships were “barbarians”; when towards the end of the Ming epoch the Japanese were replaced by Europeans who did not behave much differently and were also pirate-merchants, the nations of Western Europe, too, were regarded as “barbarians” and were looked upon with great suspicion.  On the other side, continental powers, even if they were enemies, had long been regarded as “states”, sometimes even as equals.  Therefore, when at a much later time the Chinese came into contact with Russians, their attitude towards them was similar to that which they had taken towards other Asian continental powers.

3 Social legislation within the existing order

At the time when Chu Yuean-chang conquered Peking, in 1368, becoming the recognized emperor of China (Ming dynasty), it seemed as though he would remain a revolutionary in spite of everything.  His first laws were directed against the rich.  Many of the rich were compelled to migrate to the capital, Nanking, thus losing their land and the power based on it.  Land was redistributed among poor peasants; new land registers were also compiled, in order to prevent the rich from evading taxation.  The number of monks living in idleness was cut down and precisely determined; the possessions of the temples were reduced, land exempted from taxation being thus made taxable—­all this, incidentally, although Chu had himself been a monk!  These laws might have paved the way to social harmony and removed the worst of the poverty of the Mongol epoch.  But all this was frustrated in the very first years of Chu’s reign.  The laws were only half carried into effect or not at all, especially in the hinterland of the present Shanghai.  That region had been conquered by Chu at the very beginning of the Ming epoch; in it lived the wealthy landowners who had already been paying the bulk of the taxes under the Mongols.  The emperor depended on this wealthy class for the financing of his great armies, and so could not be too hard on it.

Chu Yuean-chang and his entourage were also unable to free themselves from some of the ideas of the Mongol epoch.  Neither Chu, nor anybody else before and long after him discussed the possibility of a form of government other than that of a monarchy.  The first ever to discuss this question, although very timidly, was Huang Tsung-hsi (1610-1695), at the end of the Ming dynasty.  Chu’s conception of an emperor was that of an absolute monarch, master over life and death of his subjects; it was formed by the Mongol emperors with their magnificence and the huge expenditure of their life in Peking; Chu was oblivious of the fact that Peking had been the capital of a vast empire embracing almost the whole of Asia, and expenses could well be higher than for a capital only of China.  It did not occur to Chu and his supporters that they could have done without imperial state and splendour; on the contrary, they