The acceptance of a religious creed by a people already endowed with civil arts can never be as profoundly efficient to inspire a national development as when there comes to barbarians, with religion, a first knowledge also of all the things which make for material enlightenment. Adopted Christianity could not save the gilded, educated Rome, which enthroned it, from a direful fall. But given to the invading barbarians, with all the retinue of Roman
quoted by Rockhill, which would seem to establish the existence as early as the year 600 A.D. of a woman-governed country, lying in Eastern Tibet, and near to the territory occupied by the Tu-Ku-Hun (Fanni) immigrants. The difficulty presented by this record lies in the fact that the queen is reported as living in a nine-storied house, and her subjects as occupying smaller, yet considerable buildings. It seems incredible that a people capable of such engineering as is involved in the construction of great buildings should be without a written language. If this woman's kingdom existed as reported, if it had a written language, then the larger Tibetan state, whose organisation must have included the domains of the legendary queens would not have stood in need of an imported alphabet ; and, further, a nine-storied civilisation could fairly be expected to leave some record of its existence, written or traditional, among the people who are its direct descendants. Yet, apparently only the Chinese learned of the extraordinary society which they report as having its seats adjacent to those of the other sixth-century peoples, the TuKu-Hun and the T'ang Hsiang. Both of these are described by the same records as living in tents, signifying a rude, nomadic life strongly contrasted with the civil development suggested by the royal " sky-scraper." If this record bore a later date ; if its insertion in the Sui annals were due to an error of a century, then we might believe that Chinese travellers found an accidental case of woman's rule, following the introduction of Indian and Chinese learning and art ; and that an obsequious chronicler exaggerated the rôle of some transient female royalty, out of compliment to the great Empress Woo How, or her domineering daughter-in-law, who, between them, governed China for almost the whole of the century 650-750 A.D.
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