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eral treatment at the hands of Chinese local officials. The celebrated Arab traveller of the ninth century, Ibn Wahab, gives a very unfavourable account of the state of affairs at Kanpu. He describes many unjust dealings with the merchants who traded thither, which had gathered the force of a precedent, and he says "that there was no grievance, no treatment so bad but they exercised it upon the foreigners and the masters of the ships." It is stated by him that in consequence of these official abuses and extortions the port had to be finally forsaken, and the "merchants returned in crowds to Siraz and Oman;" but that is evidently an exaggeration, since, as has been shown above, there were at least 120,000 foreign traders at Kanpu in 877. At all events, Ibn Wahab's statement may be accepted as evidence that Chinese local officialdom in the ninth century had already developed the greedy unscrupulous habits now so familiar.

The treatment extended to foreign religions by the Chinese in early eras merits even more careful attention than their attitude towards foreign trade, for there are cogent reasons to think that the international complications which have already involved China in trouble of extreme gravity and which now threaten to disintegrate her empire, must be attributed in great part to unwise methods of Christian propagandism.

The first religion that reached China from abroad was Judaism. According to their own