grandson Wu Shih-fan, defeated.  The end of the rule of Wu San-kui and his successor marked the end of the national governments of China; the whole country was now under alien domination, for the simple reason that all the opponents of the Manchus had failed.  Only the Manchus were accredited with the ability to bring order out of the universal confusion, so that there was clearly no alternative but to put up with the many insults and humiliations they inflicted—­with the result that the national feeling that had just been aroused died away, except where it was kept alive in a few secret societies.  There will be more to say about this, once the works which were suppressed by the Manchus are published.

In the first phase of the Manchu conquest the gentry had refused to support either the Ming princes or Wu San-kui, or any of the rebels, or the Manchus themselves.  A second phase began about twenty years after the capture of Peking, when the Manchus won over the gentry by desisting from any interference with the ownership of land, and by the use of Manchu troops to clear away the “rebels” who were hostile to the gentry.  A reputable government was then set up in Peking, free from eunuchs and from all the old cliques; in their place the government looked for Chinese scholars for its administrative posts.  Literati and scholars streamed into Peking, especially members of the “Academies” that still existed in secret, men who had been the chief sufferers from the conditions at the end of the Ming epoch.  The young emperor Sheng Tsu (1663-1722; K’ang-hsi is the name by which his rule was known, not his name) was keenly interested in Chinese culture and gave privileged treatment to the scholars of the gentry who came forward.  A rapid recovery quite clearly took place.  The disturbances of the years that had passed had got rid of the worst enemies of the people, the formidable rival cliques and the individuals lusting for power; the gentry had become more cautious in their behaviour to the peasants; and bribery had been largely stamped out.  Finally, the empire had been greatly expanded.  All these things helped to stabilize the regime of the Manchus.

2 Decline in the eighteenth century

The improvement continued until the middle of the eighteenth century.  About the time of the French Revolution there began a continuous decline, slow at first and then gathering speed.  The European works on China offer various reasons for this:  the many foreign wars (to which we shall refer later) of the emperor, known by the name of his ruling period, Ch’ien-lung, his craze for building, and the irruption of the Europeans into Chinese trade.  In the eighteenth century the court surrounded itself with great splendour, and countless palaces and other luxurious buildings were erected, but it must be borne in mind that so great an empire as the China of that day possessed very considerable financial strength, and could support this luxury.  The wars were