ABSTRACT
The village headman had become valiant emperor of all China by weighing the words of others, and although he was contemptuous of scholars at the outset. The Chinese claim that Mao has been the outstanding figure of his day, and there is little doubt that Han Kao-tsu was the outstanding figure of his. All the kingdoms of China now submitted to Liu Pang except that of Lu, but he magnanimously refrained from massacring its inhabitants in the usual way. Nonetheless, most of the men he appointed were scholars, and they were the forerunners of the great Chinese civil service of educated Confucian "mandarins" that would still be running the empire at the turn of the twentieth century. For all his brutality, Chinese say, Hsiang Yu was not relentless enough. The free lance who wants to be king must be ready to spend money like water and cut people down like hemp.
