t of China, in the western part of
the present province of Kansu, and was really a continuation of the
Chinese "Earlier Liang" realm, which had been annexed ten years earlier
(376) by Fu Chien. A year before his great march to the south, Fu Chien
had sent the Tibetan Lue Kuang into the "Earlier Liang" region in order
to gain influence over Turkestan. As mentioned previously, after the
great Hun rulers Fu Chien was the first to make a deliberate attempt to
secure cultural and political overlordship over the whole of China.
Although himself a Tibetan, he never succumbed to the temptation of
pursuing a "Tibetan" policy; like an entirely legitimate ruler of China,
he was concerned to prevent the northern peoples along the frontier from
uniting with the Tibetan peoples of the west for political ends. The
possession of Turkestan would avert that danger, which had shown signs
of becoming imminent of late: some tribes of the Hsien-pi had migrated
as far as the high mountains of Tibet and had imposed themselves as a
ruling class on the still very primitive Tibetans living there. From
this symbiosis there began to be formed a new people, the so-called
T'u-yue-hun, a hybridization of Mongol and Tibetan stock with a slight
Turkish admixture. Lue Kuang had had considerable success in Turkestan;
he had brought considerable portions of eastern Turkestan under Fu
Chien's sovereignty and administered those regions almost independently.
When the news came of Fu Chien's end, he declared himself an independent
ruler, of the "Later Liang" dynasty (386-403). Strictly speaking, this
was simply a trading State, like the city-states of Turkestan: its basis
was the transit traffic that brought it prosperity. For commerce brought
good profit to the small states that lay right across the caravan route,
whereas it was of doubtful benefit, as we know, to agrarian China as a
whole, because the luxury goods which it supplied to the court were paid
for out of the production of the general population.

This "Later Liang" realm was inhabited not only by a few Tibetans and
many Chinese, but also by Hsien-pi and Huns. These heterogeneous
elements with their divergent cultures failed in the long run to hold
together in this long but extremely narrow strip of territory, which was
almost incapable of military defence. As early as 397 a group of Huns in
the central section of the country made themselves independent, assuming
the name of the "Northern Liang" (39