Lion and Dragon in Northern China. Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

[21] She was then miraculously turned into a bird called a ching wei, and devoted herself in her new state of existence to wreaking vengeance on the cruel sea for having cut short her human life. This she did by flying to and fro between land and sea carrying stones in her beak and dropping them into the water one by one until, by degrees, they emerged above the surface and formed dry land. Thus her revenge for the drowning incident was complete: she punished the sea by annihilating it.

      For many centuries—and in this matter history and legend coincide—the peninsular district of Shantung, including Weihaiwei, was inhabited by a non-Chinese race of barbarians. Not improbably they were among the aboriginal inhabitants of the central plains of China, who were driven west, south and east before the steady march of the invading Chinese, or—if we prefer to believe that the latter were an autochthonous race—by the irresistible pressure of Chinese expansion. The eastward-driven section of the aborigines, having been pressed into far-distant Shantung, perhaps discovered that unless they made a stand there they would be driven into the sea and exterminated; so they held their ground and adapted themselves to the new conditions like the Celts in Wales and Strathclyde, while the Chinese, observing that the country was hilly, forest-clad, and not very fertile, swept away to the richer and more tempting plains of the south-west.

      

This may or may not be a correct statement of what actually occurred: all we know for certain is that at the dawn of the historical epoch eastern Shantung was still inhabited by a people whom the Chinese regarded as uncouth foreigners. The name given to them in the Shu Ching is Yü I, words which, if they are to be translated at all, may be rendered as "the barbarians of the hill regions." The period to which the Shu Ching assigns them is that of the more or less mythical Emperors Yao, Shun and Yü, whose reigns are assigned to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries B.C., the Chinese Golden Age. An alternative view of the Yü I is that they were not the people of eastern Shantung, but the inhabitants of one of the Japanese islands. Dr. Legge, again, took the view that Ch'ing Chou, one of the nine provinces into which the Emperor Yü divided the Empire, included the modern kingdom of Korea. As the Yü I are always referred to as inhabiting the most easterly portion of the Empire, Dr. Legge was obliged to assign them to some part of the Korean peninsula[22]; following certain Chinese writers, moreover, he took Yü I to be a place-name, though this surely can only have been by the transference of the name or nickname of a people to their place of habitation. The whole question is hardly worth discussing, for it is almost impossible to disentangle fact from myth in respect of any of the alleged events of that far-off age; though, on the whole, it seems improbable that Yü's Empire—presuming that Yü was an historical personage—ever extended as far as some patriotic Chinese commentators would like to make out, or ever included any portion of either Korea or Japan. The great K'ang Hsi dictionary definitely states that the Yü I country "is the present Têng-chou," which includes the north-eastern section of Shantung all the way to the Promontory. The dictionary also describes it as "the place where the sun rises." An interesting point in connection with the Yü I is that it was to their country that the Emperor Yao (2357 B.C.) is said to have sent one of the Imperial Astronomers to "observe the heavens." The heavens of those days must have been well worth observing, for Chinese legends say there were then ten suns,[23] which all rose out of a prodigious abyss of hot water. At one time, it was said, nine of the suns sat every day in the lower branches of a great tree that grew in the land of Fu-sang, and one sat on the topmost branch; but in the time of Yao all the suns climbed up together to the top of the tree and made everything so uncomfortably hot that the Emperor shot at them and succeeded in destroying nine. Since then the world has had to content itself with a single sun.[24]

Assuming that the ordinary interpretations of the Shu Ching are correct, it appears that in the Golden Age of Yao the office of Astronomer-Royal, as we should say, was an exclusive perquisite of two families surnamed Hsi and Ho. Four members of these privileged families were sent to establish observatories in the four quarters of the Empire, east, west, south, and north, in order that they might "deliver respectfully the seasons to the people." The passage of the Shu Ching in which this matter is mentioned[25] is of great scientific interest on account of its astronomical details, and of great importance as establishing the reliability of early Chinese records. The only point that concerns us here is that one of the astronomers—namely, the second of three of the privileged Ho brothers—was sent to a tract of country called Yang Ku—"the Valley of Sunlight"—in the territory of the Yü I. His special duty it was to "receive as a guest the rising sun, and to adjust and arrange the labours of the Spring." Monopoly and absence of competition seem to have had their inevitable result; the privileged families of Hsi and Ho fell into utter disgrace, and were charged with having "neglected the ordering of the seasons and allowed the days to get into confusion,"—and all this because they gave themselves up to the pleasures of wine and female society instead of keeping a careful watch on the movements of the heavenly bodies. The Hsi and Ho had evidently become magnates of no small importance, for it was necessary to send an army to punish them. Their main offence, as we gather from the Shu Ching,[26] was that they made some sad blunder in connection with an eclipse, and the penalty attached to an offence of this nature was death. The only point with reference to all this that bears upon our subject is that the eastern observatory, presided over by one of the Ho family, was probably situated somewhere in the extreme eastern part of the Shantung peninsula: and though it is open to sceptics to declare that the astronomer, the observatory, and the Emperor himself were all figments of the Chinese imagination, it is equally open to any one to hold, though quite impossible for him to prove, that the Yang Ku—the Vale of Sunlight—was no other than the sandy strip of sun-bleached territory that lies between the sombre rocks of the Shantung Promontory and the most easterly hills of Weihaiwei.[27]

      

      Whether the people of this district were or were not called the Barbarians of the Hill Regions at the dawn of Chinese history, or whether in their territory there was or was not a place called the Vale of Sunlight, does not affect the undoubted truth of the statement that the Shantung peninsula was up to historic times inhabited by a race, or the remnants of a race, that was not Chinese. We may be sure, from what we know of the boundaries and inter-relations of the various Chinese states in the Confucian epoch (that is, the sixth century B.C.), that if Confucius himself had travelled from his native state of Lu through that of Ch'i and so on in a north-easterly direction until he reached the sea, he would have been obliged to engage an interpreter to enable him to communicate with the inhabitants of the district we now know as Weihaiwei.

      We may presume without rashness that as time went on these Eastern barbarians gradually assimilated themselves with, or were assimilated by, their civilised Chinese neighbours. The process was probably a long one, for we do not hear of the establishment of ordinary Chinese civil government until the epoch of the Han dynasty, about 200 B.C. Perhaps the legendary journeys of Ch'in Shih Huang-ti, the "First Emperor," which, as we have seen, are supposed to have taken place a few years earlier, really represent some great military achievement whereby the far-eastern barbarians were for the first time brought under the Chinese yoke. The local annals mention the fact that during the Chou dynasty, which preceded that of Ch'in Shih Huang-ti and held the throne of China from 1122 B.C. to 255 B.C., the present district of Wên-têng (including Weihaiwei) formed part of the Mou-tzŭ country; but it must have been an independent or semi-independent state, for no Chinese administrators are mentioned. Later on there was an hereditary marquisate of Mou-p'ing, which extended over much of the country we are considering.

The dynasty founded by the "First Emperor" divided the whole Empire as it then was into thirty-six chün or provinces, and Wên-têng formed part of the Ch'i province. At last, in the sixth year of Kao Tsu of the Han dynasty (201 B.C.), a Chinese magisterial district