Page:Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society - Volume 1.djvu/42

 of the northern half of modern China; but which, after the lapse of not much more than four centuries, was doomed again to be divided into three or four parts.

, the First Emperor, as his name seems to import, had hardly established his authority, when the Tartars, or barbarians of the north, began to make incursions over the extensive frontiers. The Emperor succeeded in driving them back into their desarts, and then employed the united resources of his dominions in the erection of the vast Wall, which has existed during a space of two thousand years, and remains to this day a stupendous, though nearly useless, monument of the ambitious disposition of this prince. As if determined, however, to have a counterpoise to the reputation which this great work entitled him to, or influenced by a spirit not unlike that by which Erostratus was inspired, when he burned the Ephesian temple, the same Emperor issued a general order that all the books of the learned should be cast into the flames. Though a great many, of course, escaped this sweeping sentence, his memory is execrated by the literati of China.

It is stated in the history of that period, that Japan was colonized from China during the same dynasty; and there appears to myself some grounds for giving credit to the record. The union of the different states under his single authority, and the magnificent turn of mind that prompted Chi-Hoang-ti to carry into execution such a work as the Great Wall, were most likely to urge him to schemes of colonization, which are sometimes very analogous to those of conquest; and the extension of his new dominions to the shores of the Eastern Sea was still farther calculated to suggest such ideas. I am well aware that the Japanese have been asserted by some to have peopled their islands as early as the 13th century before Christ, and that those people are said to disdain the very idea of being descended from the Chinese. If, however, we remark the striking similarity that exists between the persons, the manners, the dispositions, and the policy of the two nations, we cannot but recognize them to be of one family; and the fact of the Japanese making use of the Chinese written language, and