Page 339 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

casionally leopards or even a tiger will be flushed. Elephants
are not unknown, but generally the chariot line divides to let
them through when they are encountered. For elephants are
scarce and valuable, potential additions to the army or the tim­
beryards if they can be caught and tamed. But no other animals

are protected. Bears and tapirs, even badgers and quail, go to
swell the bag, which on a favorable day may well number over
three hundred head. After the best of the bag has been set aside
for offerings to the ancestral spirits and for the consumption of
the court, the remainder goes to feed the army and the builders

at work on the new city. Hunting is not only sport and military
exercise; it is also a vital part of the system of supply, second
only to the growing of cereals, and considerably more important
than the herding of domestic animals.
The emperor also leads his army to war. The vassal kings on

the frontier must occasionally' be chastised, to teach them what
vassalage means; and always there are incursions of nomads,
the Ch’iang shepherds of the northwest, to be combatted. Puni­
tive expeditions against Ch’iang encroachment are in fact hunts
on a grander scale, and provide an even better bag: captives for
enslavement and for sacrifice, and sheep for the commissariat.

And the farmers in the frontier provinces are quick to send word
when this human game is sighted.
P’an Keng comes of a long line of emperors, and his empire
is, at least in theory, large. He claims suzerainty over kings who

rule in the deserts of Mongolia to the north and in the forests
beyond the Yangtze-kiang to the south. His realm stretches to the
sea in the east, and to the west an indefinite distance, into the
lands of the nomad shepherds and of the barbarian charioteers
of the Wei valley, beyond where the Yellow River turns north­
ward. But the actual area that he personally rules is much

smaller, from the Yellow River to the northern hills perhaps a
hundred miles, and the same distance to east and west from his

new capital.
His ancestors founded the Shang kingdom (some call it t e
dynasty of Yin) well over two hundred years ago, and in his new
temple stand the tablets of nineteen former emperors of his hne.
At the time when Thothmes I of Egypt (of whom P an Keng as