which only the confidential state historiographer had access. He was supposed to withhold information on what he had entered in these records from any one among his contemporaries, not excepting even the sovereign and his ministers. The histories of the several dynasties were not written until some time after their fall, when certain historians of the succeeding dynasty were commissioned to compile them from materials taken over with their archives. This system has worked well enough in China; and we have scarcely any more reason to find fault with its results than we have with historical works in the West. We meet with exaggerated views, of course; and differences of opinion have in China, as they have with us, given rise to volumes of criticisms; but the apologies for misjudged characters are probably not more frequent in Chinese history than they are in that of Rome.
At the head of the twenty-four Histories stands as the oldest and best the Ski-ki by Ssi-ma Ts'ien, the Herodotus of China, who died about 85 B.C. It describes the history of China as accepted by native scholars from the time of Huang-ti, supposed to have lived about 2700 years B.C., down to the time of the emperor Wu-ti. Ssi-ma Ts'ien was a contemporary of the celebrated general Chang K'ien, the Columbus of the Chinese, who traveled to the banks of the Oxus, and, after a visit to the Indo-Scythian court and the Greek kingdom of Bactria, was the first to tell his countrymen that the world contained some other countries inhabited by civilized nations like the Chinese. Chang K'ien's report is reproduced in the Shi-ki. It inaugurates a new era in Chinese art and culture, the era of foreign. Western Asiatic, and even Greek influences by way of Bactria and the Tarim basin. The gigantic work of translating the Shi-ki into French has been successfully undertaken by Professor Ed. Chavannes of Paris.
The remaining dynastic histories are arranged on an almost uniform plan. They are mostly introduced by a series of
