We shall find evidence of such an advanced state of civilization at that later date as to leave no doubt of a very remote antiquity.
The China of those days, known even then as the Middle Kingdom, was a mere patch on the empire of to-day.

It lay, almost lozenge-shaped, between the 34th and 40th parallels of latitude north, with the upper point of the lozenge resting on the modern Peking, and the lower on Si-an Fu in Shensi, whither the late Empress Dowager fled for safety during the Boxer rising in 1900.

The ancient autocratic Imperial system had recently been disestablished, and a feudal system had taken its place.

The country was divided up into a number of vassal states of varying size and importance, ruled each by its own baron, who swore allegiance to the sovereign of the Royal State.

The relations, however, which came to subsist, as time went on, between these states, sovereign and vassal alike, as described in contemporary annals, often remind the reader of the relations which prevailed between the various political divisions of ancient Greece.