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[[underline]] Chapter XIII. [[/underline]] 271.

[[underline]] Legend of a Battle between the Chinese and the Hsiung-nu. [[/underline]]
During the evening, carefully avoiding leading questions (fatal in that type of investigation), we learned from the local people that a legend existed among them of a great battle fought long ago on the neighboring plain between the Chinese and the Hsiung-nu.
  Whether this belief was literary in origin, or whether it was a bit of genuine folk-memory, we had no means of telling; but it had all the marks of the latter.  It was not, at any rate, a mere telescoping together, a symbolizing,  of the perennial struggle between the steppe and the sown.  For our informants, by no means [[insertion]] ^[[s]] [[/insertion]]acholars or antiquarians, further told us that actual relics of the combat, in the form of bronze weapons---chiefly daggers, knives, and arrowpoints---were constantly being plowed up on the site of the battle.
This information was of decided interest, not alone for itself but in its broader implications as well; for it suggested that the incessant struggles between the Chinese and the nomads had already commenced while one people or the other---most likely, both---were still in their Bronze Age. [[superscript]] (243) [[/superscript]]
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[[superscript]] (243) [[/superscript]] There are indications that the Bronze Age survived somewhat longer in Inner Asia than it did, for example, among the more advanced peoples of the Near East.  Thus Herodotus (I, 215) tells us that the Massagetae, living in what was later Russian Turkistan, h^[[a]]d bronze but not iron, early in the 5th century B.C.  And some of the Minussinsk bronzes (see below, page 272) may well be later still; in regard to the probable date of the latter, [[underline]] cf. [[/underline]] the [[underline]] Antiq. Jnl [[/underline]] , vol. X, 1930: Ellis H. Minns, "Small Bronzes from Northern Asia", page 7.
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[[underline]] The Antique-Shops of Kuei-hua Ch'ĂȘng. [[/underline]]
Accordingly we devoted most of the following day to systematic searching of the antique-shops of the town.  As a rule we had difficulty in making their proprietors understand at first just what it was