from all taxes and contributions. The success of this policy soon enabled him to invest Peking with a very large army. The Emperor, preferring death to being taken by the rebels, retired with his only daughter, whom he first stabbed, and then put an end to his own existence with a cord, A.D. 1643. Thus perished the last Chinese Emperor; and the spot where he died was pointed out to the late Sir George Staunton in 1793*. The way in which a comparatively small nation of Tartars possessed themselves of China will now appear.

On the death of the Emperor, the usurper met with universal submission, both at Peking and in the provinces, with the exception of the General Woosankwei, who commanded an army near Eastern Tartary. The latter fortified himself in a city which he commanded, and was presently besieged by the successful rebel, who showed him his father in chains, threatening to put him to death if the town was not surrendered. The father exhorted his son to hold out, and submitted to his fate; upon which Woosankwei, to revenge his death, as well as that of the Emperor, made peace with the Manchows, and called them in to his assistance against the rebels. The usurper was in this manner soon defeated; but the Tartar King proceeding to the capital, was so well received there, and conducted matters with such dexterity, that he at length found no difficulty in taking upon himself the sovereignty. Being seized with a mortal sickness, he had time to appoint his son Shun-chy, then a boy, as his successor, A.D. 1644, and thus commenced the Manchow Tartar dynasty, of which the sixth Emperor is now reigning.

Several cities of the south still held out against this foreign government, and particularly the maritime province of Fokien, which was not subdued Embassy, vol. ii. p. 121.

until some years afterwards. The conquered Chinese were now compelled to shave the thick hair, which their nation had been accustomed to wear from the most ancient times as a cherished ornament, and to betake themselves to the Tartar fashion of a long plaited tress, or tail. In other respects, too, they were commanded to adopt the Tartar habit, on pain of death; and many are said to have died in preference to submission. Their new rulers must, indeed, have felt themselves sufficiently strong before they issued such an order. Many are the changes which may be made in despotic countries, without the notice, or even knowledge, of the larger portion of the community; but an entire alteration in the national costume affects every individual equally, from the highest to the lowest, and is perhaps, of all others, the most open and degrading mark of conquest. It can never be submitted to, except by a people who are thoroughly subdued; nor ever imposed, except by a government that feels itself able to carry a measure, which is perhaps resorted to principally for the purpose of trying, or of breaking, the spirit of the conquered. The ancient Chinese costume is now very exactly represented on the stage of their theatre, to which it is exclusively confined.

Such was the repugnance of the Chinese to the Tartar rule, that during the eighteen years of the first Emperor's reign a portion of the south remained unsubdued, and a very formidable opponent to the new dynasty existed on the sea. This was Ching-sheloong, father to the maritime leader Koshinga, whom we have already had occasion to mention as the person who took Formosa from the Dutch. According to the policy always adopted, of effecting by compromise what cannot be accomplished by force, Shunchy offered him honours and rewards at Peking, on condition that he would submit. The father accepted

the invitation, leaving his fleet with his son, and was well received; but Koshinga remained true to the Chinese cause, and subsequently co-operated with the adherents to the late dynasty on shore, committing great ravages with his fleet along the coast. Kang-hy, the second Tartar Emperor, adopted the vigorous measure of compelling his subjects in the six maritime provinces to retire thirty Chinese ly, or three leagues inwards from the coast, on pain of death. Thus, at the expense of destruction to a number of towns and villages, and of loss to the inhabitants, the power and resources of Koshinga were reduced, and his grandson was at length prevailed on to give up Formosa to the Emperor, and accept the gift of a title for himself, A.D. 1683.

The final establishment of the Manchow Tartars in China is doubtless attributable, in no small measure, to the personal character of Kang-hy, who is perhaps the greatest Monarch that ever ruled the country, and who had the singular fortune to reign for sixty years. By his hunting excursions beyond the Great wall, when he really proceeded at the head of a large army, he kept up the military character of the Tartars; while at the same time his vigilant care was not wanting in the south. During the year 1689, he proceeded along the grand canal to Nanking, and thence to the famous city of Soochow. At that opulent and luxurious place it is said that carpets and silk stuffs being laid along the streets by the inhabitants, the Emperor dismounted, and made his train do the same, proceeding thus to the palace on foot, in order that the people's property might not be injured.

His liberal and enlightened policy was strikingly displayed on two occasions of foreign intercourse. First, in the boundary and commercial treaty with Russia, of which Père Gerbillon has given an account, and

which was consequent on a dispute that occurred at the frontier station of Yacsa. Gerbillon was sent by Kanghy (whose numerous favours to the Catholic mission have already been noticed) to assist the negotiation as translator; and his detail of the expedition is given in the fourth volume of Du Halde. The mission proceeded in 1688, but circumstances prevented its completion until the following year; for the Eleuths or Kalmucs being then at war with the Kalka Tartars, and the route of the expedition lying along the country of the latter, it was thought prudent at first to return. The second instance, is that embassy in 1713 to the Khan of the Tourgouth Tartars, then settled on the north bank of the Caspian, of which a translation has been given by the present Sir George Staunton from the original Chinese. This is the most remote expedition that has ever been undertaken from China in modern times; and the details of the journey, with the Emperor's own instructions for the conduct of his ambassador, are especially curious. Kanghy subsequently gained considerable glory by the conquest of the above-mentioned Eleuths, who had long given great trouble in the regions about Thibet; and the exploits and triumphs of the Emperor's army having been pourtrayed by a French missionary, in a series of skilful drawings, these were sent by the desire of Kanghy to Paris, and there engraved on copper-plates: they contain a very faithful representation of Chinese and Tartar costumes and court ceremonies, and are by far the best things of the kind in existence.

Yoong-ching, the immediate successor of this great Emperor, was remarkable for little else than for his violent persecution of the Catholic priests, who had certainly rendered themselves sufficiently obnoxious, by their imprudent conduct, to the rulers of China. Kien-loong, who succeeded in 1736, and who, like

his great predecessor, Kanghy, had the unusual fortune to reign for sixty years, was no unworthy inheritor of the fame and dominion of his grandfather. He encouraged the Chinese learning by cultivating it in his own person, and some of his poetical compositions are considered to possess intrinsic merit, independently of their being the productions of an Emperor. The principal military transaction of his reign, remarkable upon the whole for its peaceful and prosperous course, was an expedition against the Meaou-tse, the race of mountaineers already described on the borders of Kuei-chow, and not far removed from the Canton province. The Emperor boasted that they were subdued; but there is reason to believe that this hardy people, intrenched in the natural fortifications of their rude and precipitous mountains, lost little of the real independence which they had enjoyed for ages, and that they were triumphati magis quam victi." They have never submitted to the Tartar tonsure, the most conclusive mark of conquest; and their renewed acts of hostility, as late as the year 1832, gave serious alarm and trouble to the Peking Government.

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The first British embassy ever sent to China was received by Kien-loong in 1793, and the liberal conduct of that Monarch, in dispensing with the performance of the prostration on the part of Lord Macartney, contrasts strongly with the petty species of trickery by which that Tartar act of homage, called the Ko-tow, was sought to be extorted from Lord Amherst in 1816, by his successor Kea-king; or rather by the ministers, for the Emperor subsequently disavowed his knowledge of their proceedings. It has been reasonably supposed that Kien-loong, at the end of a long and prosperous reign, felt sufficiently assured or his own power and greatness to dispense with such a ceremony; and that the authority of his son having been shaken by frequent insurrections, and even by