effects of the soft silks, the rich foods, and the excesses of the Sung culture; so much so that when Genghis Khan and his rugged hordes rose in the up-country of the Onon River, the once sturdy ranks of Kin warriors were laid down as a ripened field.

It was once more the slimy, double-crossing diplomacy of the Chinese that brought about the destruction of the Kingdom of Kin. The Chinese entered again into a secret alliance, this time with Genghis Khan against the Kin, precisely as they had joined the Kin to stab the Pohai in the back. The advance of the Mongol conqueror swept Manchuria and crushed the Kingdom of Kin in the dust. That did not help the Chinese much, however. The same Mongol hordes trampled China under the same old iron heels quite as thoroughly as they trampled Manchuria. When Kublai Khan established himself at Peking in 1264, the far-sung Dynasty of Sung was no more. It had gone its way to join the memory of the Kingdom of Kin in the common grave of dead empires.

ory.

The Mongols gave the Chinese the first foreign dynasty in their history-the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongol Empire of the Great Kublai Khan was the nearest approach to a World Empire known to human memIt turned the most ambitious achievements of European empire merchants, such as Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, into a collection of childish laughs by comparison. But it, too, like all other human bubbles, went rather quickly. A young bonze-that is to say, a priest -poor and plebeian, drove the Mongols out of China and put it once more under a Chinese dynasty, the Ming.

The greatest of all conquerors defeated, subjugated, trampled down the men of the Kin; but the Manchu tribesmen were never annihilated. In the days of the Ming Dynasty in China the posterity of the men who had carried the name of Kin over the northern half

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of China were known under their old tribal name of Nucheng (Nuchih of occidental writers). One group of them, called Haisi Nucheng, was still in possession of the western portion of the valley of the Sungari, from the present Petuna to Harbin. Another group, which dominated the section of the country from the east of the Changpai range to the valley of the Hurka, all about the Sansing district, was called Chienchou Nucheng. There was still another group of Nucheng over both banks of the Amur-the Wild Nucheng of contemporary chroniclers.

These Nuchengs woke up one fine day and found their leader in a chieftain called Nuerhachih (the Noorhachu or Nurhachu of some of the occidental writers) who was based in the castle at Hotuala. His tribesmen knew him under the ferocious name of "Dragon-Tiger General." The days of the Ming Dynasty were numbered. In 1616 Nuerhachih rose against the Ming, calling his domain the Kingdom of Later Kin. He took Mukden, Liaoyang, and Kaiyuan and drove the Chinese before him in the valley of the Liao. But he never was able to break through Shanhaikwan and the Eternal Wall. At his death, in 1626, his fourth son succeeded him. This young man became famous as the founder of the Taching Dynasty. In 1636 he changed the name of his state from the Kingdom of Later Kin to Taching. This leader also gave the name of Manchuria to the land of Nuchengs for the first time in history. The name of Manchuria, therefore, dates from 1636.

TAITSUNG'S FOREIGN POLICY

At the time when Nuerhachih rose at the head of the Nuchengs and founded the state of the Later Kin he and his people had an abiding respect for their neighbor to the west, the posterity of Kublai Khan and his Mon

gols. About the first large move Nuerhachih made was to enter into an alliance with them, a defensive and offensive alliance, in the latter-day diplomatic parlance. The Manchu leader's eyes were ever centered on the conquest of Peking. It was an adroit move and served him admirably all through his struggle with the Chinese.

With his neighbors to the east, the people of Chosen, he had a great deal of trouble before he could bind them in a friendly tie. The dwellers in the Chosen peninsula east of the Yalu did not think much of the Manchu at first. They had watched the Nuchengs making their difficult way over the Liao valley. They saw that the Manchu always stopped at the Eternal Wall. Therefore they rather sided with the Ming Chinese than with their Manchu neighbors. That did not please the Manchu leader at all. There was just one thing which could gain the respect of the Chosen people-a stiff licking in a pitched battle. In 1628, Taitsung, son of Nuerhachih, seized the first difference that arose between his people and their Chosen neighbor and invaded Chosen. ended in a treaty which was not entirely satisfactory to the Nuchengs. It was more unsatisfactory than the Nuchengs believed, for the Chosen ruler had no intention of fulfilling its terms. This soon ended in a second invasion of Chosen by the Manchu and a second treaty, one of the cardinal articles of which was a pledge by Chosen to break off absolutely from the Ming Chinese; that Chosen would send its forces promptly on a specified day, when the Manchu would rise to attack the Ming Dynasty.

It

Thus fortified on both east and west frontiers, the Manchu was ready to act.

But it was not Taitsung, the founder of the Taching Dynasty, who destroyed the Ming régime in China. That was wrecked from within. A rebel chief called Li Tzecheng took Peking, and the last of the Ming Em