occurrences as they were brought to his notice, saw no reason whatever why he should doubt the appearance of the dragon any more than he should doubt the reality of the floods or the hailstorm. That the dragon episode could not have happened because dragons did not exist was no more likely to occur to the honest Chinese chronicler than a doubt about the real existence of a personal Devil and a fiery Hell was likely to beset a pious Scottish Presbyterian of the eighteenth century, or than a disbelief in the creation of the world in six days in the year 4004 B.C. was likely to disturb the minds of the pupils of Archbishop Ussher.
The Chinese chronicles from which we derive our knowledge of the past history of Weihaiwei and the adjacent country are those of Wên-têng in four volumes, Jung-ch'êng in four, Ning-hai in six and Weihaiwei (that is, the Wei of Weihai) in two. The first three are printed from wooden blocks in the usual old-fashioned Chinese style, and this means that recently-printed copies are far less clear and legible than the first impressions, which are unfortunately difficult to obtain; the last (that of Weihaiwei) seems to exist in manuscript only, and is consequently very rare. It is from these four works chiefly, though not solely, that the information given in the rest of this chapter, as in many other parts of the book, has been culled; and while endeavouring to include only such details as are likely to be of some interest to the European reader, I trust there will be enough to give him an accurate idea not only of the history of Weihaiwei but also of that prodigious branch of Chinese literature of which these works are typical.
The traditions of Weihaiwei and its neighbourhood take us back to the days of myth. The position of this region at the end of a peninsula which formed, so far as China knew, the eastern limit of the civilised world, made it, as we have seen, the fitting birthplace of legend and marvel. Not content with taking us back to the earliest days of eastern Shantung as a habitable region, the legends assure us of a time when it was completely covered by the ocean. Thousands of years ago, it is said, a Chinese princess was drowned there.[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]
