To the honour of the Chinese it must be admitted that they showed themselves more civilised than the Greeks.  The Persian invasion was provoked by the murder of ambassadors by the Athenians.  Of such an act there is no recorded instance among the warring states of China.  It was reserved for our own day to witness in Peking that exhibition of Tartar ferocity.  The following two typical incidents from the voluminous chronicles of those times may be appropriately presented here: 

A BRAVE ENVOY

The Prince of Ts’in, a semi-barbarous state in the northwest, answering to Macedonia in Greece, had offered to give fifteen cities for a kohinoor, a jewel belonging to the Prince of Chao (not Chou).  Lin Sian Ju was sent to deliver the jewel and to complete the transaction.  The conditions not being complied with, he boldly put the jewel into his bosom and returned to his own state.  That he was allowed to do so—­does it not speak as much for the morality of Ts’in as for the courage of Lin?  The latter is the accepted type of a brave and faithful envoy.

HEROES RECONCILED

Jealous of his fame, Lien P’o, a general of Chao, announced that he would kill Lin at sight.  The latter took pains to avoid a meeting.  Lien P’o, taxing him with cowardice, sent him a challenge, to which Lin responded, “You and I are the pillars of our [Page 99] state.  If either falls, our country is lost.  This is why I have shunned an encounter.”  So impressed was the general with the spirit of this reply that he took a rod in his hand and presented himself at the door of his rival, not to thrash the latter, but to beg that he himself might be castigated.  Forgetting their feud the two joined hands to build up their native state much as Aristides and Themistocles buried their enmity in view of the war with Persia.

As the Athenian orators thundered against Macedon so the statesmen of China formed leagues and counterplots for and against the rising power of the northwest.  The type of patient, shrewd diplomacy is Su Ts’in who, at the cost of incredible hardships in journeying from court to court, succeeded in bringing six of the leading states into line to bar the southward movement of their common foe.  His machinations were all in vain, however; for not only was his ultimate success thwarted by the counterplots of Chang Yee, an equally able diplomatist, but his reputation, like that of Parnell in our own times, was ruined by his own passions.  The rising power of Ts’in, like a glacier, was advancing by slow degrees to universal sway.  In the next generation it absorbed all the feudal states.  Chau-siang subjugated Tung-chou-Kiun, the last monarch of the Chou dynasty, and the House of Chou was exterminated by Chwang-siang, who, however, enjoyed the supreme power for only three years (249-246 B. C).

[Page 100] CHAPTER XIX