K'ANG HSI
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 Kiangnan 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 around 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 campaign, 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 a 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 34°, found a new outlet in the Gulf of
Peichili, latitude 38°.
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 Hsi" 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.