For many centuries--and in this matter history and legend coincide--the peninsular district of Shantung, including Weihaiwei, was inhabited by a non-Chinese race of barbarians. Not improbably they were among the aboriginal inhabitants of the central plains of China, who were driven west, south and east before the steady march of the invading Chinese, or--if we prefer to believe that the latter were an autochthonous race--by the irresistible pressure of Chinese expansion. The eastward-driven section of the aborigines, having been pressed into far-distant Shantung, perhaps discovered that unless they made a stand there they would be driven into the sea and exterminated; so they held their ground and adapted themselves to the new conditions like the Celts in Wales and Strathclyde, while the Chinese, observing that the country was hilly, forest-clad, and not very fertile, swept away to the richer and more tempting plains of the south-west. This may or may not be a correct statement of what actually occurred: all we know for certain is that at the dawn of the historical epoch eastern Shantung was still inhabited by a people whom the Chinese regarded as uncouth foreigners. The name given to them in the _Shu Ching_ is Yü I, words which, if they are to be translated at all, may be rendered as "the barbarians of the hill regions." The period to which the _Shu Ching_ assigns them is that of the more or less mythical Emperors Yao, Shun and Yü, whose reigns are assigned to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries B.C., the Chinese Golden Age. An alternative view of the Yü I is that they were not the people of eastern Shantung, but the inhabitants of one of the Japanese islands. Dr. Legge, again, took the view that Ch'ing Chou, one of the nine provinces into which the Emperor Yü divided the Empire, included the modern kingdom of Korea. As the Yü I are always referred to as inhabiting the most easterly portion of the Empire, Dr. Legge was obliged to assign them to some part of the Korean peninsula[22]; following certain Chinese writers, moreover, he took Yü I to be a place-name, though this surely can only have been by the transference of the name or nickname of a people to their place of habitation. The whole question is hardly worth discussing, for it is almost impossible to disentangle fact from myth in respect of any of the alleged events of that far-off age; though, on the whole, it seems improbable that Yü's Empire--presuming that Yü was an historical personage--ever extended as far as some patriotic Chinese commentators would like to make out, or ever included any portion of either Korea or Japan. The great K'ang Hsi dictionary definitely states that the Yü I country "is the present Têng-chou," which includes the north-eastern section of Shantung all the way to the Promontory. The dictionary also describes it as "the place where the sun rises." An interesting point in connection with the Yü I is that it was to their country that the