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The God that is to be sincerely worshiped must, as this world goes, be able now and then to do some little thing for his vicegerent on earth; and Heaven did precious little in those days for the weakling King-pontiff puppets at Honanfu. A mad world, my masters! * Ancient China Simplified: E. Harper Parker; also much drawn on.
He tells us all we know, or think we know, about Laotse: that he was born in a village in southern Honan; kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517; and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the Tao Teh King with the Keeper of the Pass on the frontier; and then goes on to say that there were two other men "whom many regarded as having been the real Laotse"; one of the Lao Lai, a contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a "Grand Historiographer of Chow," Tan by name, who lived some century and a quarter later.
It is a very human and at last a very pathetic figure this Man that did save his people. Due west from Lu, and on the road thence to Honanfu the Chow capital, lay the Duchy of Wei; whither now he turned his steps. He had no narrow patriotism: if his own Lu rejected him, he might still save this foreign state, and through it, perhaps, All the Chinas.
In five years he had acquired some two thousand pupils: seventy or eighty of them, as he said, "men of extraordinary ability." It was that the Doors of the Lodge had opened, and its force was flowing through him in Lu, as it was through the Old Philosopher in Honanfu. Also he had taken a special course in music theory under a very famous teacher. "At thirty he stood firm."
I said that you should find better chances for study in the Royal Library at Honanfu, could you get together the means for journeying thither, than anywhere else in Chu Hia.
The time will come when our 'Anglo-Saxon' history will be written thus: England sent out colonies, and presently the colonies grew stronger and more populous than England; and it will be enough, without mention of the Pitts and Lincolns, the Washingtons and Gladstones, that now make it seem so full and important. By 850 the balance of power had left or was leaving the Chow king at Honanfu.
There at Loyang, which is Honanfu, we see him wandering rapt through palaces and temples, examining the sacrificial vessels, marveling at the ancient art of Shang and Chow. But for a few vases, it is all lost. He did interview Laotse; we cannot say whether only once or more often.
I keep on hearing in his words accents that sound familiar. When he was at Loyang Honanfu one of the things that struck him most was a bronze statue in the Temple of the Imperial Ancestors, with a triple, clasp on its mouth. One does not wonder.
The final comment on the interview is given by a Japanese writer thus: "Can an elephant associate with rabbits?" For the rest, he spent the remaining years of his life in a cave-temple near Honanfu; and died after appointing a Chinaman his successor.
The dynasty, as thus re-established by Kwang-wuti, is known as that of the Eastern Hans; for this reason: just as late in the days of the Roman empire, Diocletian was stirred by cyclic flowing east-ward to move his capital from Rome to Nicomedia, Constantine changed it afterwards to Byzantium, so was Han Kwang-wuti to move his from Changan in Shensi, in the west, eastward to Loyang or Honanfu, the old Chow capital, in Honan.
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