Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/164

tude shown towards Christian travellers by the Chinese sovereigns (Tang dynasty, 618-907), and it mentions an imperial edict of 638 a. d. according toleration to the Christian religion. If anything further were needed to illustrate the demeanour of the Chinese towards foreign traders, travellers, and religious propagandists, it is furnished by the fact that at the close of the eighth century four thousand foreign families then living in Hsian, were allowed to settle permanently in China, their homeward route across Asia being barred by Thibetans who had occupied Turkestan. It is notable that shortly before this time the first conspicuous excess was committed by strangers in the Chinese realm when (758 a. d.) a party of Arabs and Persians made a filibustering attack upon Canton, pillaging and burning some warehouses in the city.

The reader may be reminded parenthetically that the topographical conditions existing along the trans-Asian routes to north China were very different two thousand years ago from what they are to-day. This fact has been vividly illustrated by investigations recently undertaken in Chinese Turkestan, which formerly lay on the commercial route between China and the West, and which was freely traversed by Grecian and Roman traders at least two centuries before the Christian era. Excavations now in progress tend to prove that a high state of culture existed among the people of that region, that the art influences of