For hundreds of years the war with the semi-nomadic hordes of the North continued.  Sometimes isolated bands of Tartars broke through the Chinese defence and enslaved the people, but never for very long; instinctively by the use of every stratagem the cleverer Chinese compassed their destruction.  While Attila and his Huns were ravaging Europe in the fifth century, other Hwingnoo, or Huns, veritable scourges of God, forced their way into China.  In this fashion, while China itself was passing through a dozen different forms of government, and had a dozen capitals—­sometimes owning allegiance to a single Emperor such as those of the T’ang dynasty who added Canton and the Cantonese to the Empire, sometimes split into petty kingdoms such as the “Ten States”—­this curious frontier war continued and was handed down from father to son.  Chinese industrialism and socialism, content to accept whatever form of government Chinese strong men succeeded in imposing, instinctively kept up an iron resistance to these Northern invaders.  Such was the fear inspired, that a proverb coined thousands of years ago is still current.  “Do not fear the cock from the South, but the wolf from the North,” it says.  Everybody is always quoting this saying.  I have heard it twice to-day.

It was not until the tenth century that the Tartars finally broke through and established themselves definitively on Chinese soil.  The Khitans, a Manchu-Tartar people, springing from Central Manchuria, then captured Peking and made it their capital.  The Khitans were a cheerful people, with a peculiar sense of humour and a still greater conviction of the inferiority of women.  To show their contempt for them, it is still recorded that they used to slit the back of their wives and drink their blood to give them strength.  For two and a half centuries the Khitans, under the style of the Liao or Iron dynasty, maintained their position by the use of the sword, and then succumbing to the sapping influence of Chinese civilisation, they in turn were unable to resist a second Manchu-Mongol horde, the Kins.  The Kins, under the style of the Silver dynasty, reigned in Northern China for a term of years, but there was nothing of a permanent character in their rule, since they were uncouth barbarians who soon drank themselves to death and destruction.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Genghis Khan, the great Mongol, born in the bleak Hsing-an Mountains, gathered together all the restless bands of Mongolia, and sweeping down on Peking drove out the Kins and established the purely Mongol dynasty of the Yuan.  Up till then Peking had consisted of what is to-day the Chinese city, or the older outer city.  Kublai Khan, Genghis’s grandson, fixed his residence definitively in Peking in 1264, and began building the Ta-tu, or Great Residence—­the Tartar city of to-day.  The Chinese city is oblong; the Tartar city is squat and square and overlaps and dominates the northern walls of the older city.  Kublai Khan, by building the Tartar city on the northern edge of the Chinese city and fortifying it with immense strength, may be said to have fitted the spear-head on to the Chinese shaft, and to have given the key-note to the policy which exists to this day—­the policy of the North of China dominating the South of China.