Thus obscure and scanty is the story of this great newly found world of the Spaniards. In the East, on the other hand, were lands whose stories dated, with actual records, thousands of years back. There was one, that wonderland of China, with earliest annals between two and three thousand years before Christ--by no means the oldest annals of humanity, but incomparably older than those of any other empire that still exists. [Sidenote: The permanence of China] That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence. And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it so long together has been guided. Again and again conquerors have forced their way in upon it from the north--rude, uncivilised tribes invading a highly civilised land. Again and again the chiefs of the invaders have established themselves on the throne of China. They and their sons for many generations have governed the land. But the country generally, with its vast extent and its large population, has gone on its way very little troubled by the change of rulers. Those military conquerors have in fact been themselves conquered by the higher civilisation in which they have found themselves. The Chinese themselves appear to have come into the country from the west. Although they always have been a people who held soldiers and the military caste in very low esteem, they gradually pushed out the original natives until their empire had boundaries even more extensive than its present wide limits. {20} It is one of the many wonders of this most singular nation, that though it relied so little on force of arms it gained a very marked respect from all the other peoples of the East. [Sidenote: Confucius] Since the empire grew to be so vast, it is not surprising that the great men far from the centre became very independent, so that the social conditions in the sixth century before Christ have been likened to those feudal conditions which we saw prevailing in Europe at a much later date. Chinese rulers of provinces have been written of as "feudal dukes." And just at that time, when the country was in the disturbed state which such conditions made inevitable, there arose two great teachers of whom the younger, Confucius, exercised a very extraordinary influence over all China, an influence that has force even to-day.