Page:A history of Chinese literature - Giles.djvu/90

 78 CHINESE LITERATURE

one day advising the King of Chao to put an end to his ceaseless hostilities with the Yen State. " This morning," said he, " when crossing the river, I saw a mussel open its shell to sun itself. Immediately an oyster-catcher thrust in his bill to eat the mussel, but the latter promptly closed its shell and held the bird fast. ' If it doesn't rain to-day or to-morrow/ cried the oyster- catcher, 'there will be a dead mussel.' 'And if you don't get out of this by to-day or to-morrow,' retorted the mussel, ' there will be a dead oyster-catcher.' Mean- while up came a fisherman and carried off both of them. I fear lest the Ch'in State should be our fisherman."

The new Emperor was in many senses a great man, and civilisation made considerable advances during his short reign. But a single decree has branded his name with infamy, to last so long as the Chinese remain a lettered people. In B.C. 13, a trusted Minister, named Li Ssu, is said to have suggested an extraordinary plan, by which the claims of antiquity were to be for ever blotted out and history was to begin again with the ruling monarch, thenceforward to be famous as the First Emperor. All existing literature was to be de- stroyed, with the exception only of works relating to agriculture, medicine, and divination ; and a penalty of branding and four years' work on the Great Wall, then in process of building, was enacted against all who refused to surrender their books for destruction. This plan was carried out with considerable vigour. Many valuable works perished; and the Confucian Canon would have been irretrievably lost but for the devotion of scholars, who at considerable risk concealed the tablets by which they set such store, and thus made possible the discoveries of the following century and the

�� �