656 RENAISSANCES

the Southern Empire which they had established did not fall with them,
but passed intact to succeeding dynasties known as the Sung (imperabant
A.D. 420-79), Ts'i (imperabant A.D. 479-501), and Liang (imperabant
A.D. 502-55). It was not till A.D. 555, 244 years after the sack of Loyang
by the Hiongnu in A.D. 311, that any part of the South came under the
rule of a northern state of Eurasian Nomad barbarian origin. In A.D. 555 l
the Liang Empire's capital, Kiangling, on the Middle Yangtse, was
captured by the armies of the 'Western Wei' fraction of the To Pa
Northern Empire; but the consequent break-up of a Southern Empire,
which, by that time, had been a going concern for an unbroken period
of little less than a quarter of a millennium, resulted at the moment in
only a partial southward extension of northern barbarian rule. In
A. D. 555 the middle and upper basins of the Yangtse were duly annexed
by the 'Western Wei', to pass thereafter from the 'Western Wei's* To
Pa hands into the Te Chou's' Hiongnu hands2 in A.D. 557,3 and from
the Pe Chdu's barbarian hands into the Sui's Chinese hands4 in
A.D. 581 ; but, in the Lower Yangtse Valley and on the Southern Sea-
board, an attenuated Southern Empire survived under the Ch'en
Dynasty (imperabant A.D. 5575-8o,) until the extinction of the Ch'en by
the Sui in A.D. 589 at last reunited the whole former domain of the
Han Empire under the rule of an oecumenical Power incubated in the
North.

If we ask ourselves why this conquest of the South by heirs of the
Eurasian Nomad conquerors of the North was so long delayed, the first
answer is that the Prior Han Dynasty, in rounding off their domain
towards the south-west, had created a 'Solid South' which was to prove
impregnable to Nomad assaults.6 In contrast to a long-since dry and
open North, in which Man had won his victory over Water7 as early
as the Shang Age, even a latterly likewise tamed and regulated Yangtse
Basin still presented a network of waterways to hamper the advance of
the Nomad cavalry; and, if some enterprising squadrons were to suc-

change in the socio-economic history of the nation. The risings of "barbarian" settlers,
who were mostly serfs working on land owned by Chinese "mandarin'* lords, as well as
the rebellions of discontented Chinese peasants, drove a vast number of Chinese of the
upper classes, as well as retinues of their supporters, to the south of the Yangtse River.
When the "barbarian" dynasties set up in their northern homes had lasted over a
generation, hopes of regaining the northern domain were practically given up in the
latter years of the Eastern Tsin, and the Chinese refugees in the Lower Yangtse Valley
prepared for a permanent stay. . . . Such an impetus and necessity for migration had
hitherto never been so keenly felt in the history of the Chinese people. The result . . .
was the beginning of a period of rap_id development of the fertile Yangtse Valley, which
ultimately made it the Key Economic Area in China, replacing the Ching-Wei Basin and
Lower Yellow River Valley. This brought ab'out a sharp transformation of Chinese cul-
ture' (Chi, Ch'ao-ting: Key Economic Areas in Chinese History as Revealed in the Develop-
ment of Public Works for Water-Control (London 1936, Allen & Unwin), pp. 107-8
and no). .

1 This is the date given by Franke, O.: Geschichte des Chinesischen Retches, vol. ii
(Berlin and Leipzig 1936, de Gruyter), p. 175. In op. cit., vol. cit., p. 229, however, the
same scholar dates the same event as having happened before the close of the year

A.D. 554.

2 For the Hun origin of Yii-wSn T'ai, the barbarian mayor of the ci-devant barbarian
Western Wei Dynasty's palace who laid the foundations of the parvenu Power that sub-

' '

sequently took the name 'Pe Chou', see Franke, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 236-7.
3 See ibid., p. 235. •+ See ibid., p. 180. s See

6 This point has been noticed already in VI. vii. 357, n. 4.

.

ibid., p. 176.

noticed alread in VI. vii. n. .
7 See II. i, 318-21.