The new ruler of Ts'i officially proclaimed himself Protector in the year 679 B.C., which is one of the fixed dates in Chinese history about which there is no cavil or doubt, He soon found himself embroiled in war with the Tartars, who were raiding both the state to his north in the Peking plain, and also the minor state, south of the Yellow River, that his predecessor has protected specially in 688. This was the state of Wei (imperial clan), through or near the capital town of which, near the modern Wei-hwei Fu, the Yellow River then ran northwards. The way these successive Protectors of China afterwards exercised their preponderant influence in a general sense was this: When it appeared to them, or when any orthodox vassal state complained to them, that injustice was being done; whether in matters of duty to the Emperor, right of succession, legitimacy of birth, great crime, or inordinate ambition; the recognized Protector summoned a durbar, usually somewhere within the territory of the central area, or China proper as previously defined, and consulted with the princes, his colleagues, as to what course should be pursued. A distinction was drawn between "full-dress durbars" and "military durbars"; the etiquette in either case was very minute, and external behaviour at least was exquisitely courteous, though treachery was far from rare, and treaties never lasted long unbroken. But to return to the First Protector. Towards the end of his glorious reign of forty-three years the Marquess of Ts'i grew arrogant, vainglorious, and licentious, so much so that his western neighbour, the powerful state of Tsin, declined to attend the durbars. Of the other great powers Ts'in (to the west of Tsin) was much too far off to take active part in these parliaments; Ts'u was too busy in spreading civilization among the barbarous states or tribes south of the Yang-tsz. The Emperor was practically a _roi fainéant_ by this time, and, curiously enough, less is known of what went on within his dominions or appanage after the western half of it fell to Ts'in in 771, than of what transpired in the territories of his three menacing vassals to the north, north-west, and north-east, and of his half- civilized satrap to the south. The fact is, all four rising powers were now carefully engaged in watching each other, and in playing a profound political game around their prey. This prey was the eastern half of the Emperor's original domain (the western half now, since 771 B.C., belonging to Ts'in) and the dozen or so of purely Chinese, highly cultured, vassal states making up the rest of modern Ho Nan province, together with small parts or wedges of modern Chih Li, Shan Tung, An Hwei, and Kiang Su. From first to last none of these ritual and literary states showed any real fight; there is hardly a single record of a really crushing victory gained by any one of them. The fighting instincts all lay with the new Chinese, that is, with the Chinese adventurers who