capital there were whole quarters inhabited only by aliens from western and eastern Turkestan and from India.  With the traders came Buddhist monks; trade and Buddhism seemed to be closely associated everywhere.  In the trading centres monasteries were installed in the form of blocks of houses within strong walls that successfully resisted many an attack.  Consequently the Buddhists were able to serve as bankers for the merchants, who deposited their money in the monasteries, which made a charge for its custody; the merchants also warehoused their goods in the monasteries.  Sometimes the process was reversed, a trade centre being formed around an existing monastery.  In this case the monastery also served as a hostel for the merchants.  Economically this Chinese state in Kansu was much more like a Turkestan city state that lived by commerce than the agrarian states of the Far East, although agriculture was also pursued under the Earlier Liang.

From this trip to the remote west we will return first to the Hun capital.  From 329 onward Shih Lo possessed a wide empire, but an unstable one.  He himself felt at all times insecure, because the Huns regarded him, on account of his humble origin, as a “revolutionary”.  He exterminated every member of the Liu family, that is to say the old shan-yue family, of whom he could get hold, in order to remove any possible pretender to the throne; but he could not count on the loyalty of the Hun and other Turkish tribes under his rule.  During this period not a few Huns went over to the small realm of the Toba; other Hun tribes withdrew entirely from the political scene and lived with their herds as nomad tribes in Shansi and in the Ordos region.  The general insecurity undermined the strength of Shih Lo’s empire.  He died in 333, and there came to the throne, after a short interregnum, another personality of a certain greatness, Shih Hu (334-349).  He transferred the capital to the city of Yeh, in northern Honan, where the rulers of the Wei dynasty had reigned.  There are many accounts of the magnificence of the court of Yeh.  Foreigners, especially Buddhist monks, played a greater part there than Chinese.  On the one hand, it was not easy for Shih Hu to gain the active support of the educated Chinese gentry after the murders of Shih Lo and, on the other hand, Shih Hu seems to have understood that foreigners without family and without other relations to the native population, but with special skills, are the most reliable and loyal servants of a ruler.  Indeed, his administration seems to have been good, but the regime remained completely parasitic, with no support of the masses or the gentry.  After Shih Hu’s death there were fearful combats between his sons; ultimately a member of an entirely different family of Hun origin seized power, but was destroyed in 352 by the Hsien-pi, bringing to an end the Later Chao dynasty.

2 Earlier Yen dynasty in the north-east (proto-Mongol; 352-370), and the Earlier Ch’in dynasty in all north China (Tibetan; 351-394)