Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/98

 and unmarried at the time of the coming of her envoys; that she possessed skill in magic arts, by which she deluded her people; that she had a thousand female attendants, but suffered no man to see her face except one official, who served her meals and acted as a means of communication with her subjects; and that she dwelt in a palace with lofty pavilions surrounded by a stockade and guarded by soldiers.

Only three instances of direct official communication with China during the first thousand years of Japan's supposed national existence imply very scanty access to the great fount of Far-Eastern civilisation. Yet, from another point of view, these embassies are significant. For when Japan sent her first envoys to Loyang, the then capital of the Middle Kingdom, she had never been invaded by her neighbour's forces, nor ever even threatened with invasion, and in the complete absence of tangible displays of military prowess—the only universally recognised passport to international respect in those epochs—the homage that China received from the island empire bears eloquent testimony to the position the former held in the Orient. In truth she towered gigantic above the heads of Far-Eastern States in everything that makes for national greatness. The close of the third century saw the rise of the Han dynasty and the completion of the magnificent engineering works at the Shensi metropolis; works which still