After ten years of internal reorganization, his reign became a succession of wars, almost all of which were brought to a successful conclusion.  His generals led a large army into Nepaul and conquered the Goorkhas, reaching a point only some sixty miles distant from British territory.  Burma was forced to pay tribute; Chinese supremacy was established in Tibet; Kuldja and Kashgaria were added to the empire; and rebellions in Formosa and elsewhere were suppressed.  In fifty years the population was nearly doubled, and the empire on the whole enjoyed peace and prosperity.  In 1750 a Portuguese embassy reached Peking; and was followed by Lord Macartney’s famous mission and a Dutch mission in 1793.  Two years after the venerable emperor had completed a reign of sixty years, the full Chinese cycle; whereupon he abdicated in favour of his son, and died in 1799.

CHAPTER XI—­CHINESE AND FOREIGNERS

A virtue which the Chinese possess in an eminent degree is the rather rare one of gratitude.  A Chinaman never forgets a kind act; and what is still more important, he never loses the sense of obligation to his benefactor.  Witness to this striking fact has been borne times without number by European writers, and especially by doctors, who have naturally enjoyed the best opportunities for conferring favours likely to make a deep impression.  It is unusual for a native to benefit by a cure at the hands of a foreign doctor, and then to go away and make no effort to express his gratitude, either by a subscription to a hospital, a present of silk or tea, or perhaps an elaborate banner with a golden inscription, in which his benefactor’s skill is likened to that of the great Chinese doctors of antiquity.  With all this, the patient will still think of the doctor, and even speak of him, not always irreverently, as a foreign devil.  A Chinaman once appeared at a British Consulate, with a present of some kind, which he had brought from his home a hundred miles away, in obedience to the command of his dying father, who had formerly been cured of ophthalmia by a foreign doctor, and who had told him, on his deathbed, “never to forget the English.”  Yet this present was addressed in Chinese:  “To His Excellency the Great English Devil, Consul X.”

The Chinaman may love you, but you are a devil all the same.  It is most natural that he should think so.  For generation upon generation China was almost completely isolated from the rest of the world.  The people of her vast empire grew up under influences unchanged by contact with other peoples.  Their ideals became stereotyped from want of other ideals to compare with, and possibly modify, their own.  Dignity of deportment and impassivity of demeanour were especially cultivated by the ruling classes.  Then the foreign devil burst upon the scene—­a being as antagonistic to themselves in every way as it is possible to conceive.  We can easily see,