We have now arrived at what is usually called the Six Kingdom Period, or, if we include Ts'in, against whose menacing power the six states were often in alliance, the period of the Seven Kingdoms. These were the three equally powerful states of Ngwei, Han, and Chao (this last very Tartar in spirit, owing to its having absorbed nearly all the Turko-Tartar tribes west of the Yellow River mouth); the northernmost state of Yen, which seems in the same way to have absorbed or to have exercised a strong controlling influence over the Manchu-Corean group of tribes extending from the Liao River to the Chao frontier; Ts'u, which now had the whole south of China entirely to itself, and managed even to amalgamate the coast states of Yiich in 334; and finally Ts'i. In other words, the orthodox Chinese princes, whose comparatively petty principalities in modern Ho Nan province had for several centuries formed a sort of cock-pit in which Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u fought out their rivalries, had totally disappeared as independent and even as influential powers, and had been either absorbed by those four great powers (of which Tsin and Ts'i were in reconstituted form), or had become mere obedient vassals to one or the other of them. In former times Tsin had been kinsman and defender; but now Tsin, broken up into three of strange clans, herself afforded an easy prey to Ts'in ambition; the orthodox states were in the defenceless position of the Greek states after Alexander had exhausted Macedon in his Persian wars, and when their last hope, Pyrrhus, had taught the Romans the art of war: they had only escaped Persia to fall into the jaws of Rome. In the middle of the fourth century B.C. all six powers began to style themselves _wang_, or "king," which, as explained before, was the title borne by the Emperors of the Chou dynasty. Military, political, and literary activities were very great after this at the different emulous royal courts, and, however much the literary pedants of the day may have bewailed the decay of the good old times, there can be no doubt that life was now much more varied, more occupied, and more interesting than in the sleepy, respectable, patriarchal days of old. The "Fighting State" Period, as expounded in the _Chan-Kwoh Ts'eh,_ or "Fighting State Records," is the true period of Chinese chivalry, or knight- errantry. CHAPTER XXIV KINGS AND NOBLES