realm, the distinction between civil and military administration was abolished.  At the head of the province were a civil and also a military governor, and both were supervised by a controller directly responsible to the emperor.  Since there was naturally a continual struggle for power between these three officials, none of them was supreme and none could develop into a sort of feudal lord.  In this system we can see the essence of the later Chinese administration.

[Illustration:  3 Bronze plaque representing two horses fighting each other.  Ordos region, animal style. From V. Griessmaier:  Sammlung Baron Eduard von der Heydt, Vienna 1936, illustration No. 6.]

[Illustration:  4 Hunting scene:  detail from the reliefs in the tombs at Wu-liang-tz’u. From a print in the author’s possession.]

[Illustration:  5 Part of the ‘Great Wall’. Photo Eberhard.]

Owing to the centuries of division into independent feudal states, the various parts of the country had developed differently.  Each province spoke a different dialect which also contained many words borrowed from the language of the indigenous population; and as these earlier populations sometimes belonged to different races with different languages, in each state different words had found their way into the Chinese dialects.  This caused divergences not only in the spoken but in the written language, and even in the characters in use for writing.  There exist to this day dictionaries in which the borrowed words of that time are indicated, and keys to the various old forms of writing also exist.  Thus difficulties arose if, for instance, a man from the old territory of Ch’in was to be transferred as an official to the east:  he could not properly understand the language and could not read the borrowed words, if he could read at all!  For a large number of the officials of that time, especially the officers who became military governors, were certainly unable to read.  The government therefore ordered that the language of the whole country should be unified, and that a definite style of writing should be generally adopted.  The words to be used were set out in lists, so that the first lexicography came into existence simply through the needs of practical administration, as had happened much earlier in Babylon.  Thus, the few recently found manuscripts from pre-Ch’in times still contain a high percentage of Chinese characters which we cannot read because they were local characters; but all words in texts after the Ch’in time can be read because they belong to the standardized script.  We know now that all classical texts of pre-Ch’in time as we have them today, have been re-written in this standardized script in the second century B.C.:  we do not know which words they actually contained at the time when they were composed, nor how these words were actually pronounced, a fact which makes the reconstruction of Chinese language before Ch’in very difficult.