The cyclic impulse had been working mainly on spiritual and intellectual planes:  Ssema Tsien, the Father of Chinese History, gives gloomy pictures of things economic.*

“When the House of Han arose,” says Ssema, “the evils of their predecessors had not passed away.  Husbands still went off to the wars; old and young were employed in transporting food, production was almost at a standstill, and money was scarce.  The Son of Heaven had not even carriage horses of the same color; the highest civil and military authorities rode in bullock carts; the people at large knew not where to lay their heads.  The coinage was so heavy and cumbersome that the people themselves started a new issue at a fixed standard of value.  But the laws were lax, and it was impossible to prevent the grasping from coining largely, buying largely, and then holding for a rise in the market.  Prices went up enormously:”—­it sounds quite modern and civilized, doesn’t it?—­“rice sold at a thousand cash per picul; a horse cost a hundred ounces of silver.”

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* The passages quoted are taken from Dr. Giles’s work on
Chinese Literature.
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Under the Empress Liu Chi and her successors these conditions were bettered; until, when a half cycle had run its course, and Han Wuti had been some twenty years on the throne, prosperity came to a culmination.  Says Ssema Tsien: 

“The public granaries were well-stocked; the government treasuries full...  The streets were thronged with the horses of the people, and on the highroads, whole droves were to be seen, so that it became necessary to forbid the public use of mares.  Village elders ate meat and drank wine.  Petty government clerkships lapsed from father to son, and the higher offices of state were treated as family heirlooms.  For a spirit of self-respect and reverence for the law had gone abroad, and a sense of charity and duty towards one’s neighbor kept men aloof from disgrace and crime.”

There had been in Kansuh, the north-westernmost province of China Proper, a people called the Yueh Chi or White Scythians, whom the Huns had driven into the far west; by this time they were carving themselves an empire out of the domains of the Parthians, and penetrating into north-west India, but Han Wuti knew nothing of that.  All that was known of them was, that somewhere on the limits of the world they existed, and were likely to be still at loggerheads with their ancient foes the Huns.  Han Wuti had now been on the throne seven years, and was and had been much troubled by the Hun problem:  he thought it might help to solve it if those lost Yueh Chi could be raked up out of the unknown and made active allies.  To show the spirit of the age, I will tell you the story of Chang Ch’ien, the general whom he sent to find them.