In many respects the conquering Tartars have been themselves conquered by the people over whom they set themselves to rule.  They have adopted the language, written and colloquial, of China; and they are fully as proud as the purest-blooded Chinese of the vast literature and glorious traditions of those past dynasties of which they have made themselves joint heirs.  Manchu, the language of the conquerors, is still kept alive at Peking.  By a fiction, it is supposed to be the language of the sovereign; but the emperors of China have now in their youth to make a study of Manchu, and so do the official interpreters and others whose duty it is to translate from Chinese into Manchu all documents submitted to what is called the “sacred glance” of His Majesty.  In a similar sense, until quite a recent date, skill in archery was required of every Bannerman; and it was undoubtedly a great wrench when the once fatally effective weapon was consigned to an unmerited oblivion.  But though Bannermen can no longer shoot with the bow and arrow, they still continue to draw monthly allowances from state funds, as an hereditary right obtained by conquest.

Of the nine emperors of the Manchu, or Great Ch’ing dynasty, who have already occupied the dragon throne and have become “guests on high,” two are deserving of special mention as fit to be ranked among the wisest and best rulers the world has ever known.  The Emperor K’ang Hsi (Khahng Shee) began his reign in 1662 and continued it for sixty-one years, a division of time which has been in vogue for many centuries past.  He treated the Jesuit Fathers with kindness and distinction, and availed himself in many ways of their scientific knowledge.  He was an extraordinarily generous and successful patron of literature.  His name is inseparably connected with the standard dictionary of the Chinese language, which was produced under his immediate supervision.  It contains over forty thousand words, not a great number as compared with European languages which have coined innumerable scientific terms, but even so, far more than are necessary either for daily life or for literary purposes.  These words are accompanied in each case by appropriate quotations from the works of every age and of every style, arranged chronologically, thus anticipating to some extent the “historical principles” in the still more wonderful English dictionary by Sir James Murray and others, now going through the press.  But the greatest of all the literary achievements planned by this emperor was a general encyclopaedia, not indeed on quite such a colossal scale as that one produced under the Ming dynasty and already described, though still of respectable dimensions, running as it does in a small-sized edition to 1,628 octavo volumes of about 200 pages to each.  The term encyclopaedia must not be understood in precisely the same sense as in Western countries.  A Chinese encyclopaedia deals with a given subject not by providing