The great wall of China of 217 B.C. was by no means the first of its kind. A century before that date Ts'in built a long wall to keep off the Tartars; and, half a century before that again, Ngwei (one of the three powerful families of Tsin, all made independent princes in 403) had built a wall to keep off its western neighbour Ts'in; both these walls seem to have been in the north part of the modern Shen Si region, and they were possibly portions of the later continuous great wall of the August Emperor, which occupied the forced energies of 700,000 men. There is a statement that the same Emperor set 700,000 eunuchs to work on the palaces and the tomb he was constructing for himself at his new metropolis (moved since 350 B.C. to the city of Hien-yang, north of the river Wei, opposite the present Si-ngan Fu). This probably means, not that eunuchs were common in those times as palace _employés_, but that castration still was the usual punishment inflicted throughout China for grave offences not calling for the penalty of death, or for the more serious forms of maiming, such as foot- chopping or knee-slicing; and that all the prisoners of that degree were told off to do productive work: although humiliatingly deformed, they were still available for the common purposes of native life, and their defenceless and forlorn plight would probably make it an easier matter to handle them in gangs than to handle sound males; and if they died off under the rough treatment of task-masters, they would have no families to mourn or avenge them in accordance with family duty; for a eunuch has no name and no family. The palaces in question were joined by a magnificent bridge on the high-road between Hien-yang and Si-ngan. This very year a German firm has contracted to build an iron bridge over the Yellow River at Lan-thou Fu, where crossed by Major Bruce. CHAPTER XXII CITIES AND TOWNS