decades passed, and it broke and wasted in foam in the far west:  in what we may call the Very First Battle of the Marne, when Aetius defeated Attila in 451.  I can but think of one thing better he might have done:  shipped them eastward to the remote Pacific Islands; but it is too late to suggest that now.  But I wonder what would have happened if Pan Chow had succeeded in reaching his arm across, and grasping hands with Trajan?  He had not died; the might of China had not begun to recede from its westward limits, before the might of Rome under that great Spaniard had begun to flow towards its limits in the east.

Through the bulk of the second century China remained static, or weakening.  Her forward urge seems to have ended with the death of Pan Chow, or at the end of the half-cycle Han Kwang-wuti began in 35.  We might tabulate the two concurrent Han cycles, for the sake of clearness, and note their points of intersection, thus: 

—­Western Han Cycle, 130 years

—­Eastern Han Half-Cycle, 65 yrs

—­35 A.D.  Opened by Han Kwang-wuti.

—­A static and consolidating time until 67 A.D., thirteen decades from the death of Han Chaoti.  Introduction of Buddhism in 65.

—­The period of Pan Chao’s victories; the Golden Age of the
Eastern Hans, lasting until (about): 

—­100 A. D. the end of the Eastern Han ‘Day’; death of Pan Chow.

—­Continuance of Day under this, and supervention of Night under this Cycle, produce: 

—­A static, but weakening period until: 

—­165, the year in which a new Eastern Han Day should begin.  A weak recrudescence should be seen.

—­197:  the year in which the main or original Han Cycle should end.  We should expect the beginnings of a downfall.  By or before: 

—­230, the end of the second, feeble, Eastern Han Day, the downfall would have been completed.

Now to see how this works out.

The first date we have to notice is 165.  Well; in the very scant notices of Chinese history I have been able to come on, two events mark this date; or rather, one marks 165, and the other 166.  To take the latter first:  we saw that at a momentous point in Roman history,—­in the year of Nerva’s accession, 96,—­China tried to discover Rome.  In 166 Rome actually succeeded in discovering China.  This year too, as we shall see, was momentous in Roman history.  You may call it a half cycle after the other; for probably the ambassadors of King An-Tun of Ta Ts’in who arrived at the court of Han Hwanti at Loyang in 166, had been a few years on their journey.  You know King An-tun better by his Latin name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.