Ki Tsze and his colonists were simply the first immigrants to the country northeast of China, of whom history speaks. He found other people on the soil before him, concerning whose origin nothing is known in writing. The land was not densely populated, but of their numbers, or time of coming of the aborigines, or whether of the same race as the tribes in the outlying islands of Japan, no means yet in our power can give answer. Even the story of Ki Tsze, when critically examined, does not satisfy the rigid demands of modern research. Mayers, in his “Chinese Reader’s Manual” (p. 369), does not concede the first part of the Chow dynasty (1122 B.C.–255 A.D.) to be more than semi-historical, and places the beginning of authentic Chinese history between 781 and 719 B.C., over four centuries after Ki Tsze’s time. Ross (p. 11) says that “the story of Kitsu is not impossible, but it is to be received with suspicion.” It is not at all improbable that the Chō-sen of Ki Tsze’s founding lay in the Sungari valley, and was extended southward at a later period. It is not for us to dissect too critically the tradition concerning the founder of Corea, nor to locate exactly the scene of his labors. Suffice it to say that the general history, prior to the Christian era, of the country whose story we are to tell, divides itself into that of the north, or Chō-sen, and that of the south, below the Ta-tong River, in which region three kingdoms arose and flourished, with varying fortunes, during a millennium. We return now to the well-established history of Chō-sen. The Great Wall of China was built by Cheng, the founder of the Tsin dynasty (B.C. 255–209), who began the work in 239 A.D. Before his time, China had been a feudal conglomerate of petty, warring kingdoms. He, by the power of the sword, consolidated them into one homogeneous empire and took the title of the “First Universal Emperor” (Shi Whang Ti). Not content with sweeping away feudal institutions, and building the Great Wall, he ordered all the literary records and the ancient scriptures of Confucius to be destroyed by fire. Yet the empire, whose perpetuity he thought to secure by building a rampart against the barbarians without, and by destroying the material for rebellious thought within, fell to pieces soon after, at his death, when left to the care of a foolish son, and China was plunged into bloody anarchy again. One of these petty kingdoms that arose on the ruins of the empire was that of Yen, which began to encroach upon its eastern neighbor Chō-sen. In the later days of the Ki Tsze family, great anarchy prevailed, and the last kings of the line were unable to keep their domain in order, or guard its boundaries.