of a capital and a court which since the time of
Liu Yuean had been regarded as the indispensable entourage of a ruler who
claimed imperial rank, the local production of the Chinese peasants was
not enough. All the government officials, who were Chinese, and all the
slaves and eunuchs needed grain to eat. Attempts were made to settle
more Chinese peasants round the new capital, but without success;
something had to be done. It appeared necessary to embark on a campaign
to conquer the fertile plain of eastern China. In the course of a number
of battles the Hsien-pi of the "Later Yen" were annihilated and eastern
China conquered (409).

Now a new question arose: what should be done with all those people?
Nomads used to enslave their prisoners and use them for watching their
flocks. Some tribal chieftains had adopted the practice of establishing
captives on their tribal territory as peasants. There was an opportunity
now to subject the millions of Chinese captives to servitude to the
various tribal chieftains in the usual way. But those captives who were
peasants could not be taken away from their fields without robbing the
country of its food; therefore it would have been necessary to spread
the tribes over the whole of eastern China, and this would have added
immensely to the strength of the various tribes and would have greatly
weakened the central power. Furthermore almost all Chinese officials at
the court had come originally from the territories just conquered. They
had come from there about a hundred years earlier and still had all
their relatives in the east. If the eastern territories had been placed
under the rule of separate tribes, and the tribes had been distributed
in this way, the gentry in those territories would have been destroyed
and reduced to the position of enslaved peasants. The Chinese officials
accordingly persuaded the Toba emperor not to place the new territories
under the tribes, but to leave them to be administered by officials of
the central administration. These officials must have a firm footing in
their territory, for only they could extract from the peasants the grain
required for the support of the capital. Consequently the Toba
government did not enslave the Chinese in the eastern territory, but
made the local gentry into government officials, instructing them to
collect as much grain as possible for the capital. This Chinese local
gentry worked in close collaboration with the Chinese of