he management of the Hoang Ho, or Yellow river, so often
spoken of as "China's Sorrow," and also of the numerous canals with
which the empire is intersected. (8) This chapter, which treats of the
circulation of money, and its function in the Chinese theory of
political economy, is based upon the establishment in 110 B.C. of
certain officials whose business it was to regularize commerce. It was
their duty to buy up the chief necessaries of life when abundant and
when prices were in consequence low, and to offer these for sale when
there was a shortage and when prices would otherwise have risen
unduly. Thus it was hoped that a stability in commercial transactions
would be attained, to the great advantage of the people. The fourth
division of the _Shih Chi_ is devoted to the annals of the reigns of
vassal princes, to be read in connexion with the imperial annals of
the first division. The final division, which is in many ways the most
interesting of all, gives biographical notices of eminent or notorious
men and women, from the earliest ages downwards, and enables us to
draw conclusions at which otherwise it would have been impossible to
arrive. Confucius and Mencius, for instance, stand out as real
personages who actually played a part in China's history; while all we
can gather from the short life of Lao Tz[)u], a part of which reads
like an interpolation by another hand, is that he was a more or less
legendary individual, whose very existence at the date usually
assigned to him, 7th and 6th centuries B.C., is altogether doubtful.
Scattered among these biographies are a few notices of frontier
nations; e.g. of the terrible nomads known as the Hsiung-nu, whose
identity with the Huns has now been placed beyond a doubt.

Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien's great work, on which he laboured for so many vears
and which ran to five hundred and twenty-six thousand five hundred
words, has been described somewhat at length for the following reason.
It has been accepted as the model for all subsequent dynastic
histories, of which twenty-four have now been published, the whole
being produced in 1747 in a uniform edition, bound up (in the
Cambridge Library) in two hundred and nineteen large volumes. Each
dynasty has found its historian in the dynasty which supplanted it;
and each dynastic history is notable for the extreme fairness with
which the conquerors have dealt with the vanqu