Note 653 — Chapter VIII

This stupendous work, on which about 1,000,000 hands are said to have been engaged for five years, possesses great ethnical as well as political importance. Running for over 1500 miles across hills, valleys, and rivers along the northern frontier of China proper, it long arrested the southern movements of the restless Mongolo-Turki hordes, and thus gave a westerly direction to their incursions many centuries before the great invasions of Jenghiz-Khan and his successors. It is strange to reflect that the ethnological relations were thus profoundly disturbed throughout the eastern hemisphere by the work of a ruthless despot who reigned only twelve years, and in that time waged war against all the best traditions of the empire, destroying the books of Confucius and the other sages, and burying alive 460 men of letters for their efforts to rescue those writings from total extinction.