[Illustration:  16 The imperial summer palace of the Manchu rulers, at Jehol. Photo H. Hammer-Morrisson.]

[Illustration:  17 Tower on the city wall of Peking. Photo H. Hammer-Morris son.]

In Turkestan, where Turkish Mohammedans lived under Chinese rule, conditions were far from being as the Chinese desired.  The Chinese, a fundamentally rationalistic people, regarded religion as a purely political matter, and accordingly required every citizen to take part in the official form of worship.  Subject to that, he might privately belong to any other religion.  To a Mohammedan, this was impossible and intolerable.  The Mohammedans were only ready to practise their own religion, and absolutely refused to take part in any other.  The Chinese also tried to apply to Turkestan in other matters the same legislation that applied to all China, but this proved irreconcilable with the demands made by Islam on its followers.  All this produced continual unrest.

Turkestan had had a feudal system of government with a number of feudal lords (beg), who tried to maintain their influence and who had the support of the Mohammedan population.  The Chinese had come to Turkestan as soldiers and officials, to administer the country.  They regarded themselves as the lords of the land and occupied themselves with the extraction of taxes.  Most of the officials were also associated with the Chinese merchants who travelled throughout Turkestan and as far as Siberia.  The conflicts implicit in this situation produced great Mohammedan risings in the nineteenth century.  The first came in 1825-1827; in 1845 a second rising flamed up, and thirty years later these revolts led to the temporary loss of the whole of Turkestan.

In 1848, native unrest began in the province of Hunan, as a result of the constantly growing pressure of the Chinese settlers on the native population; in the same year there was unrest farther south, in the province of Kwangsi, this time in connection with the influence of the Europeans.  The leader was a quite simple man of Hakka blood, Hung Hsiu-ch’uean (born 1814), who gathered impoverished Hakka peasants round him as every peasant leader had done in the past.  Very often the nucleus of these peasant movements had been a secret society with a particular religious tinge; this time the peasant revolutionaries came forward as at the same time the preachers of a new religion of their own.  Hung had heard of Christianity from missionaries (1837), and he mixed up Christian ideas with those of ancient China and proclaimed to his followers a doctrine that promised the Kingdom of God on earth.  He called himself “Christ’s younger brother”, and his kingdom was to be called T’ai P’ing ("Supreme Peace").  He made his first comrades, charcoal makers, local doctors, peddlers and farmers, into kings, and made himself emperor.  At bottom the movement, like all similar ones before it, was not religious but social; and it produced a great