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Unsuccessfully: the men of Tawn knew the Huns, but not Han wuti, who was too far away for a safe ally; and they proposed to do nothing in the matter. Chang Ch'ien considered. Go back to China? Oh dear no! there must be real Yueh C'hi somewhere, even if these Tawanians were not they. On he went, and searched that lonely world until he did find them.
"rice sold at a thousand cash per picul; a horse cost a hundred ounces of silver." * The passages quoted are taken from Dr. Giles's work on Chinese Literature. Under the Empress Liu Chi and her successors these conditions were bettered; until, when a half cycle had run its course, and Han Wuti had been some twenty years on the throne, prosperity came to a culmination.
He changed his name on coming to the throne, and perhaps several times afterwards: thus we speak of the great emperors Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong; who might, however, be called more exactly, Liu Ch'e, who was emperor during the period Wuti of the Han Dynasty; Li Shihmin, who filled the throne during the T'ang period called Taitsong.
There had been in Kansuh, the north-westernmost province of China Proper, a people called the Yueh Chi or White Scythians, whom the Huns had driven into the far west; by this time they were carving themselves an empire out of the domains of the Parthians, and penetrating into north-west India, but Han Wuti knew nothing of that.
Diviciacos, whose dominions included Gaul and Britain; they looked back to his reign as a period of great splendor and national strength. He lived, they said, about a hundred years before Caesar's coming or was contemporary with Han Wuti. But the empire of the Celtic Kings was already far fallen, before it was confined to Gaul, Britain, and perhaps Ireland.
Between 67 and 100, or when the two cycles coincide, I should look for great things and doings; for some echo or repetition of the glories of Han Wuti, perhaps for a finishing and perfecting of his labors. From then on till 197 I should expect static, but weakening conditions: static mainly till 165, weakening rapidly after. Advise me, please, if this is clear.
"Where all is emptiness," said Bodhidharma, "nothing can be called holy." A neat compliment, thinks good externalist Wuti, may improve things. "If nothing can be called holy," says he, "who is it then that replies to me?" holiness being a well-known characteristic of Bodhidharma himself. Who answered merely: "I do not know"; and went his ways.
It was just when the reign of Han Wuti was drawing towards a sunset a little clouded, you remember Ssema Ts'ien's strictures as to the national extravagance and its results, that the Crest-Wave egos began to come in in Rome. Cicero, eldest of the lights of the great cycle of Latin literature, would have been about twenty when Han Wuti died in 86.
In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure of his identity.
All that was known of them was, that somewhere on the limits of the world they existed, and were likely to be still at loggerheads with their ancient foes the Huns. Han Wuti had now been on the throne seven years, and was and had been much troubled by the Hun problem: he thought it might help to solve it if those lost Yueh Chi could be raked up out of the unknown and made active allies.
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