Within the country the period that followed was one of reaction and restoration.  The massacres of the preceding years had so reduced the population that there was land enough for the peasants who remained alive.  Moreover, their lords and the money-lenders of the towns were generally no longer alive, so that many peasants had become free of debt.  The government was transferred from Sian to Loyang, in the present province of Honan.  This brought the capital nearer to the great wheat-producing regions, so that the transport of grain and other taxes in kind to the capital was cheapened.  Soon this cleared foundation was covered by a new stratum, a very sparse one, of great landowners who were supporters and members of the new imperial house, largely descendants of the landowners of the earlier Han period.  At first they were not much in evidence, but they gained power more and more rapidly.  In spite of this, the first half-century of the Later Han period was one of good conditions on the land and economic recovery.

8 Hsiung-nu policy

In foreign policy the first period of the Later Han dynasty was one of extraordinary success, both in the extreme south and in the question of the Hsiung-nu.  During the period of Wang Mang’s rule and the fighting connected with it, there had been extensive migration to the south and south-west.  Considerable regions of Chinese settlement had come into existence in Yuennan and even in Annam and Tongking, and a series of campaigns under General Ma Yuean (14 B.C.-A.D. 49) now added these regions to the territory of the empire.  These wars were carried on with relatively small forces, as previously in the Canton region, the natives being unable to offer serious resistance owing to their inferiority in equipment and civilization.  The hot climate, however, to which the Chinese soldiers were unused, was hard for them to endure.

The Hsiung-nu, in spite of internal difficulties, had regained considerable influence in Turkestan during the reign of Wang Mang.  But the king of the city state of Yarkand had increased his power by shrewdly playing off Chinese and Hsiung-nu against each other, so that before long he was able to attack the Hsiung-nu.  The small states in Turkestan, however, regarded the overlordship of the distant China as preferable to that of Yarkand or the Hsiung-nu both of whom, being nearer, were able to bring their power more effectively into play.  Accordingly many of the small states appealed for Chinese aid.  Kuang-wu Ti met this appeal with a blank refusal, implying that order had only just been restored in China and that he now simply had not the resources for a campaign in Turkestan.  Thus, the king of Yarkand was able to extend his power over the remainder of the small states of Turkestan, since the Hsiung-nu had been obliged to withdraw.  Kuang-wu Ti had had several frontier wars with the Hsiung-nu without any decisive result.  But in the years around A.D. 45 the Hsiung-nu had suffered