CHAPTER III

Summary

HIEN-FUNG—the ‘Abundant Plenty’ — has been reported sick and dead times without end within the last two months. May these reports be incorrect, and may not some dreadful convulsion shake China to pieces?

When beggars die there are no comets seen,

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

What intrigue and wickedness may even at this moment be hatching—set on foot by the presence of the aweinspiring meteor through whose ghost-like substance we are watching the stars? Another comet did so, and we remember reading the old-fashioned tale. We endeavour to recall it.

Nearly a thousand years have been put down to the credit of the present world, and to the land of Sinim in particular, since the son of an obscure scribbler and village pedagogue, too lazy and idle to work in the fields, entered himself on the muster roll of a horde of freebooters, and soon proved an able and desperate associate in every perilous enterprise in which courage and cunning were required. The illustrious Tang dynasty was drawing near the usual Chinese dynastic dissolution, with its long list of wise princes, who had ruled so well, and who had raised the national prosperity to a degree before unknown,—as far beyond that of the Western middle ages as the civilisation of Europe of the present day is superior to the grovelling semi-barbarism of the modern Chinese.