es to repeople the districts which had been laid waste by war.
Peking was built, and in 1421 the seat of government was transferred
thither, where it has remained ever since. A new Penal Code was drawn
up. Various military expeditions were despatched against the Tartars,
and missions under the charge of eunuchs were sent to Java, Sumatra,
Siam, and even reached Ceylon and the Red Sea. The day of doubt in
regard to the general accuracy of Chinese annals has gone by; were it
otherwise, a recent (1911) discovery in Ceylon would tend to dispel
suspicion on one point. A tablet has just been unearthed at Galle,
bearing an inscription in Arabic, Chinese and Tamil. The Arabic is
beyond decipherment, but enough is left of the Chinese to show that the
tablet was erected in 1409 to commemorate a visit by the eunuch Cheng
Ho, who passed several times backwards and forwards over that route. In
1411 the same eunuch was sent as envoy to Japan, and narrowly escaped
with his life.

The emperor was a warm patron of literature, and succeeded in bringing
about the achievement of the most gigantic literary task that the
world has ever seen. He employed a huge staff of scholars to compile an
encyclopaedia which should contain within the compass of a single
work all that had ever been written in the four departments of (1)
the Confucian Canon, (2) history, (3) philosophy, and (4) general
literature, including astronomy, geography, cosmogony, medicine,
divination, Buddhism, Taoism, handicrafts and arts. The completed work,
over which a small army of scholars--more than two thousand in all--had
spent five years, ran to no fewer than 22,877 sections, to which must
be added an index occupying 60 sections. The whole was bound up (Chinese
style) in 11,000 volumes, averaging over half-an-inch in thickness, and
measuring one foot eight inches in length by one foot in breadth. Thus,
if all these were laid flat one upon another, the column so formed would
rise considerably higher than the very top of St. Paul's. Further, each
section contains about twenty leaves, making a total of 917,480 pages
for the whole work, with a grand total of 366,000,000 words. Taking
100 Chinese words as the equivalent of 130 English, due to the greater
condensation of Chinese literary style, it will be found that even the
mighty river of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ "shrinks to a rill" when
compared with this overwhelming specimen of Chinese industry.

It was never printe