appears as a _tradition_ in one of the dynastic histories of
the fifth century A. D., is not given at all in the earlier
standard history, and it is by no means proved that the
undoubtedly early Chinese knowledge of the loadstone extended to
the making of compasses. Yet, as Rénan has justly pointed out in
effect, in his masterly evidences of Gospel truth, a weak
tradition is better worth considering than no tradition at all.
Besides, there is some slight indirect confirmation of this, for
in 880 B.C. or thereabout, a King of Ts'u gave one of his younger
sons a Yiieh kingdom bearing almost the same double name as that
Yüeh kingdom from which the envoys in 1080 B.C. came to the Duke
of Chou; in each case the first part of the double name was Yiieh,
and the second part only differed slightly. Again, in or about
820, some of the sons of the king exiled themselves to a place
vaguely defined as "somewhere south of the Han River," which can
scarcely mean anything other than "the country of the Shan or
Siamese races," who lived then in and around Yiin Nan, and some of
whom are still known by the vague name used as here in 820 B.C.
The vagueness of habitat simply means that all south of the Han
and Yang-tsz was _terra_ incognita to China proper. There is
another tradition, unsupported by standard history, to the effect
that the Martial King enfeoffed a faithful minister of the emperor
and dynasty he had just supplanted as a vassal in Corea. Here,
again, if the emperor's own grandfather, or grand-uncles and
trusted friends, could find their way to Wu, and, later, to Japan,
not to mention Shan Tung and the Peking plain, it is reasonable to
permit a respected adherent of the dethroned monarch to find his
way to Corea, the more in that the centre of administrative
gravity of Corea was then Liao Tung and South Manchuria--at the
utmost the north part of modern Corea--rather than the Corean
peninsula.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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