"The Emperor Shun (who married Yao's two daughters, and employed the founder of the Hia dynasty as his minister) was obliged to imprison the prince of the Three Miao (in Hu Nan; the savages of Hu Nan and Kwei Chou provinces are still called _Miao_); the Hia dynasty had to deal with quarrels in (modern) Shan Tung and Shen Si; the Shang dynasty had to do the same in (modern) Kiang Su; the early Chou monarchs the same in (modern) North Kiang Su and South Shan Tung: but, now that there are no able emperors, all the vassals are at loggerheads. Wu and P'uh (the supposed Shan or Siamese region above referred to) are giving you trouble; but it is no one's concern but yours." From all this it is quite plain, though the Chinese historians and philosophers never seem to have discerned it clearly themselves, that the cultivated or orthodox Chinese, that is, the group of closely related monosyllabic and tonic tribes which alone possessed the art of writing, and thus inevitably took the lead and gradually civilized the rest, covered but a very small area of ground even at the time of Confucius' death in 479 B.C., and were completely ignorant of everything but the bare names of all the regions surrounding this orthodox nucleus, which nucleus was therefore rightly called the "Central State," as China is, by extension, now still called. [Illustration: MAP 1. Si-ngan Fu (and Hien-yang opposite, on the north bank of the River Wei), marked with circles in a lozenge, were the capitals of China, off and on, from 220 B.C. for over a thousand years. The ancient capital of the Chou dynasty, forsaken in 771 B.C., is marked with a cross in a circle and is west of Si-ngan. In 771 B.C. the Emperor fled east to his "east capital" (founded 300 years before that date), which then became the sole metropolis, called _Loh_ (from the river on which it stands); it is also marked with a cross inside a circle and is practically the modern Ho-nan Fu; it has, off and on, been the capital of all China, alternately with Si-ngan Fu, in later times. 2. The ford where the first Chou Emperor (122 B.C.) made an appointment with all his vassals is marked by two dotted lines across the Yellow River. 3. The two dots in a half-circle mark the spot whither Tsin "summoned" the Emperor to the durbar of 632 B.C. After this, Tsin obtained from the Emperor cession of the strip between the Yellow River and the Ts'in River (nothing to do with Ts'in state). 4. There is a second River Loh separating Ts'in state from Tsin state. The territory between this River Loh and the Yellow River was alternately held by Tsin and Ts'in. 5. The territory between the more southerly River Loh and the Yellow River and River I was the shorn imperial appanage after Ts'in had in 771 B.C. obtained the west half; after Tsin in 632 had obtained the remaining north half; and after Ts'u had nibbled away the petty orthodox vassals south of latitude 34".] CHAPTER XL TOMBS AND REMAINS