n dynasty of Mongols passed away--their strength sapped
by confinement to walled cities because their power was only on the
tented field. Ser Marco Polo, that audacious traveller, never tires of
telling of the magnificence of the Mongol Khans and their resplendent
courts. It requires no Marco Polo to assure us that the thirteenth
century of the Far East was immeasurably in advance of the thirteenth
century of Europe. The vast and magnificent works which remain to this
day, weather-beaten though they be; the fierce reds, the wonderful
greens, the boldness and size of everything, speak to us of an age
which knew of mighty conquests of all Asia by invincible Mongol
horsemen....

The Mongols were succeeded by the Mings--a purely Chinese house; but
the Mings, in some terror of the rough North, since for over four
centuries Tartars or Manchu-Mongols had been the overlords of China,
discreetly established their capital on the Yangtsze and called it
Nanking, or the Southern capital. It was only the third Emperor of the
Mings who dared to remove the court to Peking. His choice was ill made
for his dynasty, since a century and a half had hardly passed before
fresh hordes--the modern Manchus--began to gather strength in the
mountains and valleys to the northeast of Moukden. Fighting
stubbornly, Nurhachu, the founder of this new enterprise, steadily
broke through Chinese resistance in the Liaotung, then a Chinese
province colonised from Chihli, and slowly but surely reached out
towards Peking, the goal which beckons to everyone. The Great Wall,
built eighteen hundred years before as a protection against other
barbarians of the same stock, stopped Nurhachu a hundred times, and
although he captured Moukden and made it a Manchu capital, he died
worn out by half a century of warfare. His son, Tai Tsung, or Tien
Tsung, nothing daunted, took up the struggle, and finding it
impossible to break through the fortifications of the East, near
Shan-hai-kwan, adopted Genghis Khan's route--the passes leading in
from the great grassy plains of Mongolia many hundreds of miles to the
West. Allying himself by marriage with Mongols, the Manchu monarch
began a series of grand raids through their territory in the direction
of Peking. Once he actually reached Peking and sat down in front of
its mighty walls to besiege it. But he found his strength unequal to
the task, and once more was forced to retire. Then this second Manchu
prince died, and was succe