of the Hsiung-nu empire.  The whole Hsiung-nu empire may never have counted more than some 3,000,000.  At the time when the population of what became the Wei territory totalled 29,000,000 the capital with its immediate environment had over a million inhabitants.  The figure is exclusive of most of the officials and soldiers, as these were taxable in their homes and so were counted there.  It is clear that this was a disproportionate concentration round the capital.

It was at this time that both South and North China felt the influence of Buddhism, which until A.D. 220 had no more real effect on China than had, for instance, the penetration of European civilization between 1580 and 1842.  Buddhism offered new notions, new ideals, foreign science, and many other elements of culture, with which the old Chinese philosophy and science had to contend.  At the same time there came with Buddhism the first direct knowledge of the great civilized countries west of China.  Until then China had regarded herself as the only existing civilized country, and all other countries had been regarded as barbaric, for a civilized country was then taken to mean a country with urban industrial crafts and agriculture.  In our present period, however, China’s relations with the Middle East and with southern Asia were so close that the existence of civilized countries outside China had to be admitted.  Consequently, when alien dynasties ruled in northern China and a new high civilization came into existence there, it was impossible to speak of its rulers as barbarians any longer.  Even the theory that the Chinese emperor was the Son of Heaven and enthroned at the centre of the world was no longer tenable.  Thus a vast widening of China’s intellectual horizon took place.

Economically, our present period witnessed an adjustment in South China between the Chinese way of life, which had penetrated from the north, and that of the natives of the south.  Large groups of Chinese had to turn over from wheat culture in dry fields to rice culture in wet fields, and from field culture to market gardening.  In North China the conflict went on between Chinese agriculture and the cattle breeding of Central Asia.  Was the will of the ruler to prevail and North China to become a country of pasturage, or was the country to keep to the agrarian tradition of the people under this rule?  The Turkish and Mongol conquerors had recently given up their old supplementary agriculture and had turned into pure nomads, obtaining the agricultural produce they needed by raiding or trade.  The conquerors of North China were now faced with a different question:  if they were to remain nomads, they must either drive the peasants into the south, or make them into slave herdsmen, or exterminate them.  There was one more possibility:  they might install themselves as a ruling upper class, as nobles over the subjugated native peasants.  The same question was faced much later by the Mongols, and at first they answered it differently from the peoples of our present period.  Only by attention to this problem shall we be in a position to explain why the rule of the Turkish peoples did not last, why these peoples were gradually absorbed and disappeared.