In time the Yuan dynasty of Mongols passed away—­their strength sapped by confinement to walled cities because their power was only on the tented field.  Ser Marco Polo, that audacious traveller, never tires of telling of the magnificence of the Mongol Khans and their resplendent courts.  It requires no Marco Polo to assure us that the thirteenth century of the Far East was immeasurably in advance of the thirteenth century of Europe.  The vast and magnificent works which remain to this day, weather-beaten though they be; the fierce reds, the wonderful greens, the boldness and size of everything, speak to us of an age which knew of mighty conquests of all Asia by invincible Mongol horsemen....

The Mongols were succeeded by the Mings—­a purely Chinese house; but the Mings, in some terror of the rough North, since for over four centuries Tartars or Manchu-Mongols had been the overlords of China, discreetly established their capital on the Yangtsze and called it Nanking, or the Southern capital.  It was only the third Emperor of the Mings who dared to remove the court to Peking.  His choice was ill made for his dynasty, since a century and a half had hardly passed before fresh hordes—­the modern Manchus—­began to gather strength in the mountains and valleys to the northeast of Moukden.  Fighting stubbornly, Nurhachu, the founder of this new enterprise, steadily broke through Chinese resistance in the Liaotung, then a Chinese province colonised from Chihli, and slowly but surely reached out towards Peking, the goal which beckons to everyone.  The Great Wall, built eighteen hundred years before as a protection against other barbarians of the same stock, stopped Nurhachu a hundred times, and although he captured Moukden and made it a Manchu capital, he died worn out by half a century of warfare.  His son, Tai Tsung, or Tien Tsung, nothing daunted, took up the struggle, and finding it impossible to break through the fortifications of the East, near Shan-hai-kwan, adopted Genghis Khan’s route—­the passes leading in from the great grassy plains of Mongolia many hundreds of miles to the West.  Allying himself by marriage with Mongols, the Manchu monarch began a series of grand raids through their territory in the direction of Peking.  Once he actually reached Peking and sat down in front of its mighty walls to besiege it.  But he found his strength unequal to the task, and once more was forced to retire.  Then this second Manchu prince died, and was succeeded by a tiny grandson of five.  The regent appointed by the Manchu nobles owed his final success to the fact that he was called in by the Chinese generals commanding the coveted Shan-hai-kwan gates to rescue Peking from the hands of Chinese insurgents, who had everywhere arisen; and in 1644, after seventy years of warfare, the Manchus seated themselves on the Dragon Throne, in defiance of the wishes of the people, but backed up by a vast concourse of Manchus and Mongols, and half the fierce blades of Eastern Asia.