THE DRAGON AND THE BLUE PEARL


The horizon of Chinese history lies near the middle of the third
millennium B. C. The first date sinologists dare swear to is 776;
in which year an eclipse of the sun is recorded, that actually
did happen: it is set down, not as a thing interesting in
itself, but as ominous of the fall of wicked kings. Here, then,
in the one place where there is any testing the annals, it
appears they are sound enough; which might be thought to speak
well for them. But our scholars are so damnebly logical, as Mr.
Mantalini would say, that to them it only proves this: you are
to accept no date earlier. One general solar indorsement will not
do; you must have an eclipse for everything you believe, and
trust nothing unless the stars in their courses bear witness.

Well; we have fortunately Halley's Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry
for our familiar 1066; but beware! everything before that is to
be taken as pure fudge!

The fact is there is no special reason for doubting either
chronology or sequence of events up to about 2357 B. C., in which
year the Patriarch Yao came to the throne. He was the first of
those three, Yao, Shun, and Yu, who have been ever since
the patterns for all Chinese rulers who have aspired to be
Confucianly good. "Be like Yao, Shun, and Yu; do as they did";--
there you have the word of Confucius to all emperors and
governors of states.

Yao, it is true, is said to have reigned a full century, or but
one year short of it. This is perhaps the first improbability we
come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a
long time. None of his successors repeated the indiscretion.
Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic
verisimilitude: they must be called faint memories of epochs,
not actual men. The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), was half
man, half dragon; which is being interpreted, of course, an
Adept King;--or say a line of Adept Kings. As for the dates given
him, I suppose there is nothing exact about them; that was all
too far back for memory; it belongs to reminiscence. Before Fo-
hi came the periods of the Nest-Builders, of the Man-Kings, the
Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P'an K'u, who built the
worlds; then, at about two and a quarter million years before
Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One. All
this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at
least that--the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the
West, with our creation six trumpery millenniums ago.

This much we may say: about the time when Yao is said to have
come to the throne a manvantara began, which would have finished
its course of fifteen centuries in 850 or so B. C. It is a
period we see only as through a glass darkly: what is told about
it is, to recent and defined history, as a ghost to a living man.
There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high
civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to
say what they were. To its first centuries are accredited works
of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements
look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of
something actual. Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into
daylight history, not primitive but effete: senile, not
childlike. That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national
prejudice, of course.

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