As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the Julian-Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure of Wang-Cheng, who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole supremacy and in 221 assumed the title of Shi (literally equivalent to “Augustus”) and the Cæsar-name Hwang-ti. He founded the “_Pax Serica_,” as we may call it, carried out a grand social reform in the exhausted Empire, and--as promptly as Rome[45]--began to build his “_Limes_,” the famous Great Wall, for which in 214 he annexed a part of Mongolia. He was the first, too, to subdue the barbarians south of the Yang-tse, in a series of large-scale campaigns followed and confirmed by military roads, castles, and colonies. But “Roman,” too, was his family history--a Tacitean drama with Lui-Shi (Chancellor and stepfather of the Emperor) and Li-Szu, the great statesman (the Agrippa of his day, and unifier of the Chinese script), playing parts, and one that quickly closed in Neronic horrors. Followed then the two Han dynasties (Western, 206 B.C.-A.D. 23; Eastern, A.D. 25-220), under which the frontiers extended more and more, while in the capital eunuch-ministers, generals, and soldiery made and unmade the rulers at their pleasure. At certain rare moments, as under Wu-ti (140-86) and Ming-ti (58-76), the Chinese-Confucian, the Indian-Buddhist, and the Classical-Stoic world-forces approached one another so closely in the region of the Caspian that they might easily have come into actual touch.[46] Chance decreed that the heavy attacks of the Huns should break themselves in vain upon the Chinese “Limes,” which at each crisis found a strong emperor to defend it. The decisive repulse of the Huns took place in 124-119 under the Chinese Trajan, Wu-ti; and it was he, too, who finally incorporated Southern China in the Empire, with the object of obtaining a route into India, and built a grand embattled road to the Tarim. And so the Huns turned westward, and in due course they appear, impelling a swarm of Germanic tribes, in face of the Limes of the Roman world. This time they succeeded. The Roman Imperium collapsed, and thus two only of the three empires continued, and still continue, as desirable spoil for a succession of different powers. To-day it is the “red-haired barbarian” of the West who is playing before the highly civilized eyes of Brahman and Mandarin the rôle once played by Mogul and Manchu, playing it neither better nor worse than they, and certain like them to be superseded in due course by other actors. But in the colonization-field of foundering Rome, on the other hand, the future Western Culture was ripening underground in the north-west, while in the east the Arabian Culture had flowered already.