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CHINA AND THE MANCHUSIV
K`ANG HIS
The Emperor Shun Chih was
succeeded by his third son, known by his year-title as K`ang Hsi (lasting prosperity), who was only eight years
old at the time of his accession. Twelve years later 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
annually to hunting. Large bright eyes lighted up his face, which was pitted
with smallpox. Contemporary observers vie with one another in praising his wit,
understanding, and liberality of mind. He was not twenty when the three
feudatory princes broke into open rebellion. Of these, Wu San-kuei, the virtual founder of the dynasty, who had been
appointed in 1659, was the chief; and it was at his instigation that his
colleagues who ruled in Kuangtung and Fuhkien determined to throw off their allegiance and set up
independent sovereignties. Within a few months, K`ang Hsi found vast 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 manufactured
for the Imperial forces by the Jesuit missionaries, who were then in high
favour at court. The capital city of Yünnan was taken
by assault in 1681, upon which Wu San-kuei's son
committed suicide, and the rebellion collapsed. From that date the Manchus
decided that there should be no more "princes" among their Chinese
subjects, and the rule has been observed until the present day.
Under the Emperor K`ang Hsi a re-arrangement of the empire was planned and carried
out; that is to say, whereas during the Mongol dynasty there had only been
thirteen provinces, increased to fifteen by the Mings,
there was now a further increase of three, thus constituting what is known as
the Eighteen Provinces, or China Proper. To effect this, the old province of Kiangsan was divided into
the modern Anhui 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 transfer of
Formosa to Japan. In addition to the above, the eastern territory, originally
inhabited by the Manchus, was divided into the three provinces already
mentioned, all of which were at first organized upon a purely military basis;
but of late years the administration of the southernmost province, in which
stands Mukden, the Manchu capital, has been brought more into line with that of
China Proper.
In 1677 the East India Company established an agency
at Amoy, which, though withdrawn in 1681, was re-established in 1685. The first
treaty with Russia was negotiated in 1679, but less than ten years later a
further treaty was found necessary, under which it was agreed that the river
Amur was to be the boundary-line between 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 rules of the orthodox church. All the descendants of these Albazins probably perished in the destruction of the
Russian college during the siege of the Legations in 1900. Punitive expeditions
against Galdan and Arabtan carried the frontiers of the empire to the borders of Khokand and Badakshan, and to the confines of Tibet.
Galdan was a khan of the Kalmucks, who succeeded in
establishing his rule through nearly the whole of Turkestan, after attaining
his position by the murder of a brother. He attacked the Khalkas,
and thus incurred the resentment of K`ang Hsi, whose subjects they were; and
in order to strengthen his power, he applied 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 1693, Galdan became a fugitive, and died three years afterwards.
He was succeeded as khan by his nephew, Arabtan, who soon
took up the offensive against China. He invaded Tibet, and pillaged the monasteries as far as Lhasa; but was ultimately driven back by a
Manchu army to Sungaria, where he was murdered in
1727.
The question of the calendar early attracted attention
under the reign of K`ang Hsi.
After the capture of Peking in 1644, the Manchus had employed the Jesuit
Father, Schaal, upon the Astronomical Board, an
appointment which, 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
system, already discarded in Europe. In 1669, a Flemish Jesuit Father from
Courtrai, named Verbiest, was placed upon the Board,
and was entrusted with the correction of the calendar according to more recent
investigations.
Christianity was officially recognized in 1692, and an
Imperial edict was issued ordering its toleration throughout the empire. The
discovery of the Nestorian tablet in 1625 had given a considerable impulse, in spite of its heretical associations, to Christian
propagandism; and it was estimated that in 1627 there were no fewer than
thirteen thousand converts, many of whom were highly placed officials, and even
members of the Imperial 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 more as a civil
than a religious rite. He probably foresaw, as indeed time has shown, that
ancestral worship would prove to be an insuperable obstacle to many inquirers,
if they were called upon to discard it once and for all; at the same time, he
must have known that an invocation to spirits, coupled with the hope of
obtaining some benefit therefrom, is worship pure and simple, and cannot be
explained away as an unmeaning ceremony.
Against the Jesuits in this matter were arrayed the
Dominicans and Franciscans; and the two parties fought the question before
several Popes, sometimes one side carrying its point, and sometimes the other.
At length, in 1698, a fresh petition was forwarded by the Jesuit order in
China, asking the Pope to sanction the practice of this rite by native
Christians, and also praying that the Chinese language
might be used in the celebration of mass. K`ang Hsi supported the Jesuits in the view that 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 ecclesiastical
squabble, on a minor scale of importance, which had been raging almost
simultaneously round the choice of an appropriate Chinese term for God. The
term approved, if not suggested, by K`ang Hsi, and indisputably the right one, as shown by recent
research, was set aside by the Pope in 1704 in favour of one which was supposed
for a long time to have been coined for the purpose, but which had really been
applied for many centuries previously to one of the eight spirits of ancient
mythology.
In addition to his military campaigns, K`ang Hsi carried out several
journeys of considerable length, and managed to see
something of the empire beyond the walls of Peking. He climbed the famous
mountain, T`ai-shan, in Shantung, the summit of which
had been reached in 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 the mysterious worship of Heaven and Earth. The ascent of T`ai-shan had been previously accomplished by only six
Emperors in all, the last of whom went up in the year 1008; since K`ang Hsi no further Imperial
attempts have been made, so that his will close the list in connexion with the
Manchu dynasty. It was on this occasion too that he visited the tomb of
Confucius, also in Shantung.
The vagaries of the Yellow River, named "China's
Sorrow" by a later Emperor, were always a source of great anxiety to K`ang Hsi; so much so that he
paid a personal visit to the scene, and went carefully into 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 lately as 1856, it turned off at right angles
near the city of K`ai-fêng, in Honan, and instead of
emptying itself into the Yellow Sea about latitude 34º, found a new outlet in
the Gulf of Peichili, latitude 38º.
K`ang Hsi several times visited
Hangchow, returning to Tientsin by the Grand Canal, a
distance of six hundred and ninety miles. This canal, it will be
remembered, was designed and executed under Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century, and helped to form an almost unbroken 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 opportunity, while at Nanking, to visit the mausoleum of the founder of the
Ming dynasty, who lies buried near by, and whose
descendants had been displaced by the Manchus. Happily for K`ang Hsi's complacency, the book of fate is hidden from
Emperors, as well as from subjects,—
All but the page prescribed, their present state and
he was unable to foresee another visit paid to that mausoleum two hundred and
seven years later, under very different conditions, to which we shall come in
due course.
The census has always been an important institution in
China. Without going back so far as the legendary golden age, the statistics of
which have been invented by enthusiasts, we may accept unhesitatingly such
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, roughly allowing five souls to each household. This plan yields
a total of rather over fifty millions for the year
A.D. 156, and one hundred and five millions for the fortieth year of the reign
of K`ang Hsi, 1701.
No record of this Emperor, however brief, could fail
to notice the literary side of his character, and his extraordinary
achievements in this direction. It is almost paradoxical, though absolutely true, that two Manchu Emperors, sprung from a
race which but a few decades before had little thought for anything beyond war
and the 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 down to quite recent times all official
documents were in duplicate, one copy in Chinese and one in Manchu; but a
Manchu literature can hardly be said to exist, beyond translations of all the
most important Chinese works. The Manchu dynasty is an admirable illustration
of the old story: conquerors taken captive by the conquered.
At this moment, the term "K`ang Tsi" is daily on the lips of every student of
the Chinese language, native or foreign, throughout the empire. This is due to
the fact that the Emperor caused to be produced under his own personal
superintendence, 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
arranged, the spelling of each character according to the method introduced by
Buddhist teachers and first used in the third century, the tones, various
readings, etc., etc., altogether a great work and still without a rival at the
present day.
It would be tedious even to enumerate all the various
literary undertakings conceived and carried out under the direction of K`ang Hsi; but there are two
works in particular which cannot be passed over. One
of these is the huge illustrated encyclopædia in which everything which has ever been said upon 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 such a voluminous work. It is a concordance to all literature; not of words, but of phrases. A student meeting
with an unfamiliar combination of characters can turn to its pages and find
every passage given, in sufficient fullness, where the phrase in question has
been used by poet, historian, or essayist.
The last years of K`ang Hsi were beclouded by family troubles. For some kind of intrigue, in which magic played a prominent
part, he had been compelled to degrade the Heir Apparent, and to appoint
another son to the vacant post; but a year or two later, this son was found 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 of his fourth son. Dying in 1723,
his reign had already extended beyond the Chinese cycle of sixty years, a feat
which no Emperor of China, in historical times, had ever before achieved, but
which was again to be accomplished, before the century was out, by his
grandson.
Kang hsi and Literature. Notwithstanding the demands made upon him by long-continued rebellion and
warfare, Kang hsi may be regarded as one of the most
munificent patrons Chinese literature ever possessed.
Through his efforts and encouragement some stupendous literary enterprises
were brought to a successful consummation. Of these the works most deserving
of mention are two large concordances printed in forty-four and
thirty-six volumes respectively; an encyclopaedia in forty-four volumes;
another, illustrated, in sixteen hundred and twenty-eight volumes of two
hundred pages each; and, chief in fame if not in
importance, the great Dictionary containing 44,439 characters arranged
under the two hundred and fourteen radicals. This was the work of
thirty literati who were kept busy for a number of years. For the printing of Government publications Kang hsi ordered the engraving of 250,000 copper types.
The Sacred Edict. The Shun Yu, or Sacred
Edict, is perhaps the best known of the writings attributed personally to
Kang hsi. It consists of sixteen maxims,
corresponding with the sixteen years of the youthful sovereign who
composed them. Each maxim consists of seven ideographs and the whole
is proclaimed twice a month. It is supposed to be committed to memory and
a versified form has been issued for the use of children. These sixteen
moral maxims, which, as Dr. Giles observes, are
commonplace enough in themselves, are as follows:
· 1. Pay attention to filial and fraternal
duties.
The issuing of the Shun Yu may perhaps be
best regarded as the effort of an enthusiastic boy, placed in a position
of great responsibility, and anxious to do something towards promoting a
return to the virtues of the “good old times.”
P’u Sung ling. With the encouragement of the Emperor it may readily be supposed that many would be
disposed to try their own hand at literature. This is indeed the case,
although the most famous works of the reign belong to a category not
highly regarded by the literati, viz.: the Novel. The “Strange
Stories” of P’u Sung ling, to
take only one example, are exceedingly entertaining. The writer was born
in A. D. 1622, took his first degree in 1641 and completed
the book by which he is known in 1679. For some years it circulated
only in manuscript, as the author was too poor to have it printed.
The printed work did not appear till 1740. As illustrating the variety of
interest in the “Strange Stories,” we may quote Dr. Giles.4 “There is a Rip Van Winkle story,
with the pathetic return of the hero to find, as the Chinese poet says—
“City and suburb as of old,
But hearts that loved us long since cold.”
There is a sea-serpent story and a story of a
big bird or rukh; also a story about a Jonah, who, in obedience to an order flashed by lightning
on the sky when the junk was about to be swamped in a storm, was
transferred by his fellow-passengers to a small boat, and cut adrift. So
soon as the unfortunate victim had collected his senses and could
look about him, he found that the junk had capsized and that every soul
had been drowned.”
The Reforms of Kang hsi. The Emperor during his reign made many earnest attempts
at reform. Among these was the effort to suppress the practice
of foot-binding among the women. The origin of the practice,
which is unknown to the Manchu women and to the Hakkas of the south,
is doubtful. Some ascribe it to the desire to remove reproach from a
certain club-footed Empress. Some see its origin in feminine envy of
the “lily” feet of a famous royal mistress; and others again in the masculine
desire to prevent the ladies of the household from gadding about. It
is possible also that the practice was meant to show immunity from (and
therefore superiority to) the necessity of field labor,
as in the case of the long fingernails of the men. In any case it has
been the cause of untold sufferings and Kang hsi’s effort was one in the direction of real humanity. Custom, however, was too
strong for the royal command or the example of the Manchu women to
overcome. It is said that even to-day, after all the efforts of the “Anti-foot-binding
Societies” there are still seventy million women in China with bound feet.
More successful was Kang hsi in the prohibition of the immolation of women at the funerals of
the great. Shun chih, it will be remembered, had
sacrificed thirty slave-women at the tomb of his favorite.
Under similar circumstances, Kang hsi intervened
to prevent the destruction of four, and his wishes were in this respect
complied with.
We may add to this account of the reforms of Kang hsi that the Emperor justly prided
himself upon the “royal rice” a species which he discovered
could be cultivated as far north as Peking, and which he therefore
believed must add to the welfare of his subjects.
Death of Kang hsi. In A. D.
1722 the aged sovereign celebrated an unique festival
in the Palace of the Heavenly Purity. It was the sixtieth year of his
reign, and therefore marked the completion of a cycle of rule. In honor of the occasion Kang hsi invited all men in the Empire over sixty years of age to be his guests at
Peking. How many found it possible to accept we know not, but the
occasion cannot have lacked interest and picturesqueness. Soon after the
conclusion of the festivities Kang hsi went
beyond the Great Wall to hunt leopards. While on this expedition he
took cold and died, after a brief illness, on Dec. 20, 1722.
V
YUNG CHÊNG AND CH`IEN LUNG
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