Chang Ch’ien set out in 139; traversed the desert, and was duly captured by the Huns.  Ten years they held him prisoner; then he escaped.  During those ten years he had heard no news from home:  a new emperor might be reigning, for aught he knew; or Han Wuti might have changed his plans.  Such questions, however, never troubled him:  he was out to find the Yueh Chi for his master, and find them he would.  He simply went forward; came presently to the kingdom of Tawan, in the neighborhood of Yarkand; and there preached a crusade against the Huns.  Unsuccessfully:  the men of Tawn knew the Huns, but not Han wuti, who was too far away for a safe ally; and they proposed to do nothing in the matter.  Chang Ch’ien considered.  Go back to China?—­Oh dear no! there must be real Yueh C’hi somewhere, even if these Tawanians were not they.  On he went, and searched that lonely world until he did find them.  They liked the idea of Hun-hurting; but again, considered China too far away for practical purposes.  He struck down into Tibet; was captured again; held prisoner a year; escaped again,—­and got back to Changan in 126.  A sadder and a wiser man, you might suppose; but nothing of the kind!  Full, on the contrary, of brilliant schemes; full of the wonder and rumor of the immense west.  These he poured into Han Wuti’s most sympathetic ears; and the emperor started now in real earnest upon his Napoleonic career.

The frontier was no longer at the Great Wall.  Only the other day Sir Aurel Stein discovered, in the far west, the long straight furrows traced by the feet of Han Wuti’s sentinels on guard; the piles of reed-stalks, at regular intervals, set along the road for fire-signals; documents giving details as to the encampments, the clothes and arrows served out to the soldiers, the provisions made for transforming armies of conquest into peaceful colonies.  All these things the sands covered and preserved.

And behind these outposts was a wide empire full of splendor outward and inward; full of immense activities, in literature, in engineering, in commerce.  New things and ideas came in from the west:  international influences to reinforce the flaming up of Chinese life.

The moving force was still Taoism; the Blue Pearl, sunk deep in the now sunlit waters of the common consciousness, was flashing its rainbows.  Ts’in Shi Hwangti, for all his greatness, had been an uncouth barbarian; Han Wuti was a very cultured gentleman of literary tastes,—­a poet, and no mean one.  He too was a Taoist; an initiate of the Taoism of the day; which might mean in part that he had an eye to the Elixir of Life; but it also meant (at least) that he had a restless, exorbitant, and gorgeous imagination.  Such, indeed, inflamed the whole nation; which was rich, prosperous, energetic, progressive, and happy.  Ts’in ideas of bigness in architecture had taken on refinement in Chinese hands; the palaces and temples of Han Wuti are of course all lost, but