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a table." In case one might raise the question of the Mongol experience, as perhaps a singular exception, Sun elsewhere explicitly affirmed that they too were absorbed by the Chinese, thanks to the fact that "the character of the Chinese race was higher than that of other races." In making this point Sun incidentally raises a further historical question when he says that the Ming dynasty "fell twice" to the Manchus.*
Of course, one might surmise that some of Sun's historical distortions are generalizations intended for forensic effect. The exaggerated assimilation concept may be in this category, as well as such claims as "Everyone in China, beginning with emperors and kings, and ending with the common people, even robbers and pirates, all have been able to value and delight in literature as an art."5
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But such observations by Sun, as well as the stress on China's erstwhile moral power for absorption, are also part of a more general idealized appreciation of the past in which history and mythology blend indistinguishably together. As a matter of fact, history seems to be, for Sun, an almost dimensionless pastiche to which reference might be made indiscriminately. Thus the manifold allusions to the legendary emperors and to other historical personalities and folk heroes, without the slightest demonstrated concern for accuracy or authenticity. The "Emperor Fu-Shi" wrote the "Eight Diagrams," thus initiating the Chinese written language. Of all the emperors throughout Chinese history only “Yao, Shun, Yu, T'ang, Wen Wang and Wu Wang" were the ones "who shouldered the responsibility of government for the welfare and happiness of the people." The statement "you have all read a good deal of Chinese history; I am sure almost everyone here has read particularly The Story of the Three Kingdoms," with striking ingenuousness prefaces a brief story illustrating Chu-kuo Liang's "splendid character," but neglects to suggest the difference between evidence provided by historical documentation and the imaginative renditions of fictional literature. Recounting the contributions of the legendary figures of Sui Jen Shih, Shen Nung, Hsien Yuan and Yu Ch'ao Shih, respectively the alleged inventors of cooking, medicine, clothing and housing. Sun declared: "So in Chinese history we find not only those could fight becoming king; anyone with marked ability, who had made new discoveries or who had achieved great things for mankind, could become king and organize the