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Cold winds whistled up and down the Toba. Once or twice on clear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the cold pressure of the northwest wind as he stood in the open; and through his field glasses he could see the Inlet and the highroads of the sea past the Inlet's mouth all torn by surging waves that reared and broke in flashing crests of foam.
The Mu-jung were driven to this step mainly because they had been continually attacked from southern Manchuria by another Hsien-pi tribe, the Yü-wen, the tribe most closely related to them. The Mu-jung made use of the period of their so-called subjection to organize their community in North China. South of the Toba were the nineteen tribes of the Hsiung-nu or Huns, as we are now calling them.
In addition to this, their herds gradually deteriorated, for less and less use was made of them; for instance, horses were little required for the campaign against South China, and there was next to no fighting in the north. In contrast with the impoverishment of the Toba, the Chinese gentry grew not only more powerful but more wealthy.
As we have seen already, he annexed the "Earlier Yen" realm of the proto-Mongols , but he also annihilated the Chinese "Earlier Liang" realm and in the same year the small Turkish Toba realm. This made him supreme over all north China and stronger than any alien ruler before him.
The Kao family, which may have been originally a Hsien-pi family, had its estates in eastern China and so was closely associated with the eastern Chinese gentry, who were the actual rulers of the Toba State. In 534 this group took the impotent emperor of their own creation to the city of Yeh in the east, where he reigned de jure for a further sixteen years.
The campaigns that followed were hard and long-drawn-out struggles, especially against South China, where there was no booty, because the enemy retired so slowly that they could take everything with them. The Toba therefore began to be impoverished, because plunder was the main source of their wealth.
Abruptly, a bend is turned, and great mountains bar the way, peaks that lift from tidewater to treeless heights, formidable ranges bearing upon their rocky shoulders the lingering remains of a glacial age. The Inlet ends there, the seaway barred by these frowning declivities. Hollister remembered the head of Toba after a fashion. He had the lay of the land in his mind.
For a few years they had continued their old sacrifices to Heaven; then another course opened to them. The Toba, together with many Chinese living in the Toba empire, were all captured by Buddhism, and especially by its shamanist element.
This was connected, of course, with the fact that to the early fourth century the Buddhist monks were foreigners who, in the view prevalent in the Far East, owed only a limited allegiance to the ruler of the land. The Buddhist monks at the Toba court now submitted to the emperor, regarding him as a reincarnation of Buddha. Thus the emperor became protector of Buddhism and a sort of god.
The Sung emperors who followed were as impotent as their predecessors and personally much more repulsive. Nothing happened at court but drinking, licentiousness, and continual murders. From 460 onward there were a number of important risings of princes; in some of them the Toba had a hand.
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