Historic China and Other Sketches Author:Herbert A. Giles General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1882 Original Publisher: Thos. de la Rue Subjects: China History / Asia / General History / Asia / China Travel / Asia / China Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the... more » General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: II. -- THE HANS. B. C. 2OO-A. D. 2OO. It has been stated that the Imperial rule of the Chows over the vassal States which made up the China of those early days, was gradually undermined by the growing power and influence of one of the latter, the very name of which was transformed into a by-word of reproach, so that to call a person a ' man of Ch'in' was equivalent to saying, in vulgar parlance, 'He is no friend of mine.' The struggle between the Ch'ins and the rest of the empire may be likened to the struggle between Athens and the rest of Greece, though the end in each case was not the same. The State of Ch'in vanquished its combined opponents, and finally established a dynasty -- short-lived, indeed, but containing among the few rulers who sat upon the throne, only about fifty years in all, the name of one remarkable man, the ' First Emperor' of a united China. On the ruins of the old feudal system, the landmarks. of which his three or four predecessors had succeeded in sweeping away, the 'First Emperor' laid the foundations of a coherent empire which was to date from himself as its founder. He sent an army of 300,000 men to fight against the Huns. He despatched a fleet to search for some mysterious islands off the coast of China; and this expedition has since been connected seriously with the colonisation of Japan. He built the Great Wall, which is nearly 1,400 miles in length, twenty-two feet in height, and twenty feet in thickness, forming the most prominent artificial ...« less