by tedious commercial negotiations.  But if China was to be conquered and ruled there must exist a state organization of equal authority to hers; the Hsiung-nu ruler must himself come forward as Son of Heaven and develop a court ceremonial similar to that of a Chinese emperor.  Thus the basis of the organization of the Hsiung-nu state lay in its rivalry with the neighbouring China; but the details naturally corresponded to the special nature of the Hsiung-nu social system.  The young Hsiung-nu feudal state differed from the ancient Chinese feudal state not only in depending on a nomad economy with only supplementary agriculture, but also in possessing, in addition to a whole class of nobility and another of commoners, a stratum of slavery to be analysed further below.  Similar to the Chou state, the Hsiung-nu state contained, especially around the ruler, an element of court bureaucracy which, however, never developed far enough to replace the basically feudal character of administration.

Thus Kao Tsu was faced in Mao Tun not with a mere nomad chieftain but with the most dangerous of enemies, and Kao Tsu’s policy had to be directed to preventing any interference of the Hsiung-nu in North Chinese affairs, and above all to preventing alliances between Hsiung-nu and Chinese.  Hsiung-nu alone, with their technique of horsemen’s warfare, would scarcely have been equal to the permanent conquest of the fortified towns of the north and the Great Wall, although they controlled a population which may have been in excess of 2,000,000 people.  But they might have succeeded with Chinese aid.  Actually a Chinese opponent of Kao Tsu had already come to terms with Mao Tun, and in 200 B.C.  Kao Tsu was very near suffering disaster in northern Shansi, as a result of which China would have come under the rule of the Hsiung-nu.  But it did not come to that, and Mao Tun made no further attempt, although the opportunity came several times.  Apparently the policy adopted by his court was not imperialistic but national, in the uncorrupted sense of the word.  It was realized that a country so thickly populated as China could only be administered from a centre within China.  The Hsiung-nu would thus have had to abandon their home territory and rule in China itself.  That would have meant abandoning the flocks, abandoning nomad life, and turning into Chinese.  The main supporters of the national policy, the first principle of which was loyalty to the old ways of life, seem to have been the tribal chieftains.  Mao Tun fell in with their view, and the Hsiung-nu maintained their state as long as they adhered to that principle—­for some seven hundred years.  Other nomad peoples, Toba, Mongols, and Manchus, followed the opposite policy, and before long they were caught in the mechanism of the much more highly developed Chinese economy and culture, and each of them disappeared from the political scene in the course of a century or so.