r the new monarch took up the reins of government, and soon began to make his influence felt. Fairly tall and well proportioned, he loved all manly exercises, and devoted three months annua

ast portions of the empire slipping from his grasp; but though at one moment only the provinces of Chihli, Honan, and Shantung were left to him in peaceable possession, he never lost heart. The resources of Wu San-kuei were ultimately found to be insufficient for the struggle, the issue of which was determined partly by his death in 1678, and partly by the powerful artillery manufact

ui and Kiangsu; Kansuh was carved out of Shensi; and Hukuang was separated into Hupeh and Hunan. Formosa, which was finally reconquered in 1683, was made part of the province of Fuhkien, and so remained for some two hundred years, when it was erected into an independent province. Thus, for a time China Proper consisted of nineteen provinces, until the more familiar "eighteen" was recently restored by the

een the two dominions, the Russians giving up possession of both banks. Thus Ya-k?o-sa, or Albazin, was ceded by Russia to China, and some of the inhabitants, who appear to have been either pure Russians or half-castes, were sent as prisoners to Peking, where religious instruction was provided for them according to the r

ed to the Dalai Lama for ordination, but was refused. He then feigned conversion to Mahometanism, though without attracting Mahometan sympathies. In 1689 the Emperor in person led an army against him, crossing the deadly desert of Gobi for this purpose. Finally, after a further expedition and a decisive defeat in

ch, owing to the jealousies aroused, very nearly cost him his life. What he taught was hardly superior to the astronomy then in vogue, which had been inherited from the Mongols, being nothing more than the old Ptolemaic s

rial family. An important question, however, now came to a head, and completely put an end to the hope that China under the Manchus might embrace the Roman Catholic faith. The question was this: May converts to Christianity continue the worship of ancestors? Ricci, the famous Jesuit, who died in 1610, and who is the only foreigner mentioned by name in the dynastic histories of China, was inclined to regard worship of ancestors mo

t ancestral worship was a harmless ceremony; but after much wrangling, and the dispatch of a Legate to the Manchu court, the Pope decided against the Jesuits and their Imperial ally. This was too much for the pride of K?ang Hsi, and he forthwith declared that in future he would only allow facilities for preaching to those priests who shared his view. In 1716, an edict was issued, banishing all missionaries unless excepted as above. The Emperor had indeed been annoyed by another ecclesiastic

219 B.C. by the famous First Emperor, burner of the books and part builder of the Great Wall, and where a century later another Emperor had instituted a mysterious worship of Heaven and Earth. The ascent of T?ai-shan had been previously accomplished by only six Empero

the various plans for keeping the waters to a given course. Besides causing frequently recurring floods, with immense loss of life and property, this river has a way of changing unexpectedly its bed; so lat

oken line of water communication between Peking and Canton. At Hangchow, during one visit, he held an examination of all the (so-called) B.A.'s and M.A.'s, especially to test their poetical skill; and he also did the same at Soochow and Nanking, taking the opportunit

prescribed, the

ausoleum two hundred and seven years later, under very di

h records as we find subsequent to the Christian era, on the understanding that these returns are merely approximate. They could hardly be otherwise, inasmuch as the Chinese count families and not heads, roug

chase, and which had not even a written language of its own, should have conferred more benefits upon the student of literature than all the rest of China's Emperors put together. The literature in question is, of course, Chinese literature. Manchu was the court language, spoken as well as written, for many years after 1644, and

tendence, on a more extensive scale and a more systematic plan than any previous work of the kind, a lexicon of the Chinese language, containing over forty thousand characters, with numerous illustrative phrases chronologically arrange

each of a vast array of subjects is brought into a systematized book of reference, running to many hundred volumes, and being almost a complete library in itself. It was printed, after the death of K?ang Hsi, from movable copper types. The other is, if anything, a still more extraordinary though not su

ound to be mentally deranged, and was placed under restraint. So things went on for several more years, the Emperor apparently unable to make up his mind as to the choice of a successor; and it was not until the last day of his life that he finally decided in favour o