SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 667
on the sacred soil of the original homeland of the Sinic culture in the
North was thus coeval with the first overt establishment there of bar-
barian successor-states of the United Tsin; and this Herodian move-
ment reached its totalitarian climax in the Sinomane measures taken in
A.D. 494-6 by an ex-barbarian ruler of a temporarily reunited North
whose To Pa provenance was disguised under the dynastic name *Wei*
and the throne-name Hiao Wen-ti.1

This intensive and progressive Sinification of the immigrant bar-
barian squatters in the North, who established successor-states of the
United Tsin Empire there in and after the beginning of the fourth
century of the Christian Era, is the cultural background of the adminis-
trative unification of the South with the North of a nascent Far Eastern
World in the seventh century by the joint endeavours of a T'ang heir
of these Sinophil barbarian war-lords in the North and a Confucian
imperial civil service which had succeeded in preserving its continuity
during a post-Han social interregnum and which welcomed an oppor-
tunity of co-operating with the Northern ruler of a reunited empire in
giving practical effect to cultural and administrative ideals that T'ai
T'sung shared with the litterati. The survival of the Sinic culture in
the South during this age is adequately explained, as we have seen, by
the impregnability of the southern fortress which had been provided
for a senile Sinic Society by far-sighted and energetic Prior Han empire-
builders. But how are we to explain the same Sinic culture's contem-
porary survival in the North, where the open plains of the Wei Basin
and the Lower Yellow River Basin had been swept by the icy blast of
a Eurasian Nomad whirlwind in spite of the massive artificial windbreak
that had been erected, for the protection of this northern homeland of
the Sinic culture, by the Titans who had built the Great Wall ? An
answer to this question may perhaps be yielded by a further pursuit of
our comparative study of post-Sinic and post-Hellenic history.

If we explore this synoptic view, the first point that we shall notice
is that, in the first phase of the interregnum following the break-up of
a Sinic universal state, all the fragments of a now dissolved Han
Empire's former domain still remained provisionally exempt, during
a period of grace which lasted for more than a century, from seeing
the calamity of partition capped by the still more grievous calamity of
falling under barbarian rule. In the Age of the Three Kingdoms (dsm-
cabant A.D. 221-263/80), the Northern successor-state of the Han Empire,
as well as its two southern rivals, was a work of native Sinic hands;
and here, at the very outset, the courses of these two comparable
episodes of post-Sinic history and post-Hellenic history diverged oa
lines which placed the Sinic Society at a relative advantage over its
Hellenic contemporary; for a corresponding chapter of Hellenic history
that had the same opening quickly took a different turn.

When in A.D. 395 a post-Diocletianic Roman Empire was divided
into two indigenous successor-states as a consequence of Theodosius I's

barian, parochial and oecumenical, alike—do-vert to the end of Sinic history and through-
out the subsequent course of Far Eastern history until the abolition of the imperial
regime in China in AO>. 1911. l See V. v. ~