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0063 On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1
中央アジア踏査記 : vol.1
On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1 / 63 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000214
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

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Thus the need for military protection beyond the newly
conquered territory along the northern foot of the Nan-shan
very soon asserted itself. Nor did it find the Chinese un-
prepared. Immediately after the first conquest of that great
natural 'corridor' they had started to establish military
colonies along it and to construct a wall extending to the
west the defensive border-line of the 'Great Wall' which
Shih Huang-ti, the predecessor of the Han dynasty, had
created for protection against Hun inroads.

There can be no doubt that this western extension of the
earlier 'Great Wall' was primarily intended to protect the
newly opened highway into Central Asia. But while the
'Great Wall' of Shih Huang-ti appears to have borne that
purely defensive character which we are accustomed to
associate with the familiar 'Chinese Wall' of late mediaeval
construction, the Emperor Wu-ti's wall was meant to serve
as the instrument of a 'forward policy' conceived on a big
scale. The analogy it thus offers to the earlier *Limes* systems
on the borders of the Roman Empire is most striking. In a
later chapter I shall describe the very interesting remains
of this ancient Chinese *Limes* which I was able to trace and
explore over a total distance of not far from 400 miles
(Figs. 70-4).

Events moved rapidly enough. As so often in history, the
aims of peaceful penetration in the interest of trade and
civilized intercourse called before long for support by politi-
cal influence and military action. It was the not unusual
case of the flag having to protect the trade. From the outset
the Chinese policy of Central-Asian expansion appears to
have fixed its hopes for profitable trade far more upon the
large and fertile territories in what is now Russian Turkistan