[Page 114] Other characters are equally fixed in the public mind.  Tsao Tsao, the chief antagonist of Liu Pi, is not merely a usurper:  he is a curious compound of genius, fraud, and cruelty.  Another conspicuous actor is Lue Pu, an archer able to split a reed at a hundred paces, and a horseman who performs prodigies on the field of battle.  He begins his career by shooting his adopted father, like Brutus perhaps, not because he loved Tung Choh less, but China more.

All these and others too numerous to mention may be seen any day on the boards of the theatre, an institution which, in China at least, serves as a school for the illiterate.[*]

[Footnote *:  The stage is usually a platform on the open street where an actor may be seen changing his role with his costume, now wearing the mask of one and then of another of the contending chieftains, and changing his voice, always in a falsetto key, to produce something like variety.]

Liu Pi succeeds, after a struggle of twenty years, in establishing himself in the province of Szechuen; but he enjoys undisturbed dominion in his limited realm for three years only, and then transmits his crown to a youthful son whom he commends to the care of a faithful minister.  The youth when an infant has been rescued from a burning palace by the brave Chang-fi, who, wrapping the sleeping child in his cloak and mounting a fleet charger, cut his way through the enemy.  On reaching a distant point the child was still asleep.  The witty annotator adds the remark, “He continued to sleep for thirty years.”

The minister to whom the boy had been confided, Chu-koh Liang, is the most versatile and inventive genius of Chinese antiquity.  As the founder of the house of Chou discovered in an old fisherman a [Page 115] counsellor of state who paved his way to the throne, so Liu Pi found this man in a humble cottage where he was hiding himself in the garb of a peasant, San Ku Mao Lu, say the Chinese.  He “three times visited that thatched hovel” before he succeeded in persuading its occupant to commit himself to his uncertain fortunes.  From that moment Chu-koh Liang served him as eyes and ears, teeth and claws, with a skill and fidelity which have won the applause of all succeeding ages.  Among other things, he did for Liu Pi what Archimedes did for Dionysius.  He constructed military engines that appeared so wonderful that, as tradition has it “he made horses and oxen out of wood.”

Entrusted by his dying master with the education of the young prince, he has left two papers full of wise counsels which afford no little help in drawing the line between fact and fiction.  Unquestionably Chu-koh Liang was the first man of his age in intellect and in such arts and sciences as were known to his times.  Yet no one invention can be pointed to as having been certainly derived from Chu-koh Liang.  The author of the above-mentioned romance, who lived as late as the end of the thirteenth century, constantly