present himself before the Emperor, and he flatly refused to do so; whereupon he received orders to proceed at once to the sea-coast, and take himself off to his own country.  A curious comment on this fiasco was made by Napoleon, who thought that the English Government had acted wrongly in not having ordered Lord Amherst to comply with the custom of the place he was sent to; otherwise, he should not have been sent at all.  “It is my opinion that whatever is the custom of a nation, and is practised by the first characters of that nation towards their chief, cannot degrade strangers who perform the same.”

In 1820 Chia Ch`ing died, after a reign of twenty-five years, notable, if for nothing else, as marking the beginning of Manchu decadence, evidence of which is to be found in the unusually restless temper of the people, and even in such apparent trifles as the abandonment of the annual hunting excursions, always before carried out on an extensive scale, and presenting, as it were, a surviving indication of former Manchu hardihood and personal courage.  He was succeeded by his second son, who was already forty years of age, and whose hitherto secluded life had ill-prepared him for the difficult problems he was shortly called upon to face.

CHAPTER VII—­TAO KUANG

Tao Kuang (glory of right principle), as he is called, from the style chosen for his reign, gave promise of being a useful and enlightened ruler; at the least a great improvement on his father.  He did his best at first to purify the court, but his natural indolence stood in the way of any real reform, and with the best intentions in the world he managed to leave the empire in a still more critical condition than that in which he had found it.  Five years after his accession, his troubles began in real earnest.  There was a rising of the people in Kashgaria, due to criminal injustice practised over a long spell of time on the part of the Chinese authorities.  The rebels found a leader in the person of Jehangir, who claimed descent from one of the old native chiefs, formerly recognized by the Manchu Emperors, but now abolished as such.  Thousands flocked to his standard; and by the time an avenging army could arrive on the scene, he was already master of the country.  During the campaign which followed, his men were defeated in battle after battle; and at length he himself was taken prisoner and forwarded to Peking, where he failed to defend his conduct, and was put to death.

The next serious difficulty which confronted the Emperor was a rising, in 1832, of the wild Miao tribes of Kuangsi and Hunan, led by a man who either received or adopted the title of the Golden Dragon.  At the bottom of all the trouble we find, as usually to be expected henceforward, the secret activities of the far-reaching Triad Society, which seized the occasion to foment into open rebellion the dissatisfaction of the tribesmen with the glaring injustice they were