open, before the beginning of the Christian era, to Persian and other traders from the West.^ Such interest was felt in these relations that somewhat later Chinese annals record numerous embassies from Ta-tsin (or Great China), bringing tributes, as they express it, and asking the benefits of trade. As early as the second century, M. Aurelius turned to China from his Parthian conquests, to secure the nobler unities of commerce ; binding the ends of the known world by interchange of courtesies and gifts.^ References to Indian and Persian relations in much earlier times than any of these might be given,^ but the details are of doubtful value. The Chinese must have been too much occupied in guarding their borders from barbarous tribes, and in developing their own immense territory, to seek intercourse with distant countries. A vast rim of desert intervened on one side, an ocean on the other. It is not strange that their earliest records make no mention of distant trading marts, nor that we are indebted to the eager and inquisitive Arabs for the first important notices of their commercial relations with the West. Their very name, old as it must be, is of unknown origin; by some supposed to be the native Tsin, by others the name given the empire by the Hindus, who connected it with the Annamese peninsula {Cochin).^ Nevertheless, it is certain that their industry was the first to open up the wilds of Central Asia, and to civilize its wandering hordes. It is the glory of their Han emperor — Wuti — to have established a secure commerce with the opposite border of the continent in the second century B.C. ; with one hand suppressing predatory tribes, and with the other protecting the regular movements of trading caravans to more distant lands.
For early relations of China with the West, see Lassen^ s hid. A Iterth. II. 606-620 ; Notes and Queries, June, 1870: Gibbon, ch. xl.
Pauthier, Relat. Polit. de la Chine av. les Puiss. Occid. p. 17-18.
Ibid. p. 14 ; Martin's China, I. p. 257.
Mayers in Chin. Rev., May and June, 1875.
