People with other habits and ideals, e. g. the Romans, might, probably would, have developed South China on other lines, but the Chinese developed it in the same way as the land to the north, and, once the initial difficulties were overcome, it was found to be every whit as suitable for the peculiar Chinese civiliza tion. It is not a mere coincidence that the first governor of Sechwan, after it was annexed to the Northern Empire, is remembered not for any schemes of conquest but for his great irrigation works, and that his son and successor is even more famous for the same reason, having had one of the most magnificent temples in China raised in his honour.
The Han dynasty ruled while the Roman Empire was most flourishing, and though there are many differences there is a certain similarity in the problems which con fronted each. In each case there was a greatly expanded empire which demanded some means of holding it together, some means by which communication could be kept up between the various parts. The Romans, as we have seen, invented roads. To the Chinese, accus tomed to water, it was much more natural that they should turn to account the great Yangtse-Kiang with all its tributaries, one of the most magnificent water ways in the world. This helped to bind together the whole of what otherwise might have been split into smaller units. The smaller units do exist, for the most part river basins small and large, but the great river to which they all look has bound them together. In the south the Si-Kiang played a similar though a less important part.
The result is twofold. On the one hand, we find that the smallest river basins form the smallest political divisions which are the most permanent features in all Chinese history, and the largest river basins form provinces which, though under different names, reappear again and again at successive periods of re-organization. On the other hand, we find that river communication is looked on as the one natural way of carrying on trade. The idea has been so forced on the minds of the Chinese by the supreme excellence of some waterways that the rest, though far less suited for traffic, are by infinite toil pressed into service. It is significant that even now the Chinese call such roads as do exist " dry ways " the natural sequence to the idea that the way is a wet way, a river. Thus China is specially a land of rivers, not only in the sense that rivers flow through it, but in the sense that its history has been greatly affected by this controlling fact, just as we have seen that the histories of other lands have been affected by other controlling facts.
It is significant, too, that when China did break up at the close of the Han Dynasty in A.D. 220, as did the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, it did not break into almost numberless units, but into three parts only : (i) the original China in the north, (ii) the Lower Yangtse, and (iii) Sechwan separated from the Lower Yangtse by the great series of rapids above the modern Ichang. It is significant, too, that even that separation lasted but little more than a generation. China was held together not by a governing power from a centre, but by the oneness of its people, who had the same ideals of life, the same customs, because the geographical facts were essentially the same, or had been made so.
In another way the conditions of China were similar to those of Rome. Rome broke up because of direct and indirect attacks from without, from the plain. She defended herself by taking the Rhine and the Danube as a defence, and by building forts to keep out invading tribes by force of arms. Similar conditions compelled the Chinese, even as early as the Tsin Dynasty, to build a great wall along their north-west front, to protect the only frontier open to attack from the nomad tribes of the semi-arid plateau. It is again significant of the Chinese attitude of mind, however, that in the west, where the river, the Hwang-Ho, was no road and was quite unfitted for irrigation, it was never used as a defence, but trust was put in the wall.
Let us now consider more particularly the influence of the plateau on Chinese history. In its northern por tion, at any rate, the plateau is not a desert comparable to the Sahara, but is rather a steppeland with wastes stretching over great tracts. On the less arid districts nomad peoples have lived since history began, and from it have come down by the only way, the valley of the Wei and Hwang-Ho, on to the plains of China. Such steppe people, as we have seen in ancient Assyria, in lands overrun by Mohammedans, and in more modern Russia, because of their daring and endurance bred into them by their nomad life, are generally able to conquer and rule an agricultural people.