perors hanged himself in the Third Moon of 1644. Taitsung had died very suddenly, about half a year before the Ming Emperor's death. Taitsung's son, a mere infant, succeeded him. The real power of the Manchu was in the hand of the younger brother of Taitsung, who acted as a sort of Regent to the boy sovereign. It was he who led his 100,000 Manchu stalwarts into the region west of the Liao River to complete the work of his elder brother-the conquest of China.

The Ming commander, Wu Sankwei, who had been detailed to crush the Nucheng forces of Manchuria, was at Shanhaikwan. He had received the details of the fall of Peking and of the suicide of his master. General Wu took a heroic step: he turned to his enemy the Manchu chieftain and asked for his assistance to crush the rebel Li at Peking and thus avenge the death of his master the Ming Emperor. The Manchu leader complied with the request of General Wu forthwith, and together they marched against the rebel at Peking, which they entered unopposed in May, 1644. The infant Manchu Emperor moved his capital from Mukden to Peking in September.

The Manchu dynasty of Taching was proclaimed over all China on the first of October of the year 1644.

MANCHURIA UNDER TACHING DYNASTY

With the Manchu Dynasty upon the dragon throne at Peking, the decline of Manchuria began. It came about in two ways. When Nuerhachih in the quiet of his Castle in Hotuala first dreamed of extending his sway over the fruitful provinces of China Proper, he did not put in all his time just to enjoy the rose tint of his dream. Instead, he went out and formed his Eight Banners, whose fame was destined to cover the battlefields of northern China. Each one of the Eight Banners had 7,500 picked

warriors under it, an army corps of 60,000 men who were the flower of Manchuria's fighters. The Eight Banners were constantly and continuously recruited. Nuerhachih had a large force of trusted officers out in every district and section of Manchuria for no other business than to gather the strong and the brave out of the young men of Manchuria.

When the Manchu emperor went into China his Eight Banners followed him there. They were the trusted guardians of the throne, the foundation of his power. The ranks of the Banners were filled with the selected men from all over Manchuria: not a single Chinese was allowed to join them. The recruiting went on in season and out of season, year in and year out. The constant and persistent drain on Manchuria's young-manhood told in the end. Farms went back to weeds. There were only old men and women and weaklings left in the Nucheng villages in the valleys of the Yalu and the Tumen, around Sansing in the valley of the Sungari, and on the Liao and the Nonni plains. All the towns and cities of Manchuria were more than half dead, and the traveler through them in those days thought of mildew more than of anything else. All Manchuria was threatened with depopulation. That was one thing. Then there was another.

To the valley of the Liao, in the present South Manchuria, there had come many industrious farmer immigrants from China who had cultivated the fields there. As the whole of the Liao valley-by far the most fertile agricultural section in the whole of Manchuria in those days as it is to-day-turned into battlefields where the Manchu forces fought the Chinese back and forth and time and again, the Chinese farmers fled for their lives. By the time the Manchu Dynasty had gained the dragon throne hardly one tenth of the cultivated fields of the Liao valley remained under the hoe.

Farms were not the only things which were deserted. The enterprising among the Manchus left for Peking and other trade centers of the Chihli Province, so emptying the Manchurian markets.

The situation became so serious that even the victorydrunk Peking court of the Taching woke up to the danger. Imperial orders went out of Peking to all the local authorities in Manchuria to take measures to encourage farming among the people. Laws were framed and promulgated for the same end. The Government took upon itself to parcel out the abandoned lands among the nomad or floating population and to anybody who would cultivate them, free of charge.

That was in 1644. Seven years later, the Government issued orders to allot the abandoned or undeveloped land outside of Shanhaikwan to farmers, and to provide them with special protection under local administrative offices. Rank and monetary rewards were offered to large contractors called Chaotou, according to the number of farmers they induced to settle down on the deserted farms of Manchuria. The Government furnished the farmers with seeds and with feed, and loaned 20 head of cattle to each group of 100 farmers. All these strenuous efforts failed, however. Seeing their failure, the Government in 1668 repealed the laws and regulations favoring the farmers.

The seductive offerings of the Government at Peking to cover the deserted fields of Manchuria were not made to Chinese farmer colonists. These were rigorously excluded from the soil sacred to the reigning house of the Taching. The Manchu did not wish their homeland polluted by the subject Chinese; and when the Government found it well-nigh impossible to carry out the exclusion law to the letter along the border north of Shanhaikwan, it devised a primitive form of passports, or identification cards, without which a stranger could not

pass through the barrier into Manchuria. This made it difficult for Chinese to invade their natal land.

The attrition of Manchuria went on apace. It presented the strange aspect of a country getting emptier and deader with every season that came and went, until it practically disappeared from the history of the Far East for nearly two-hundred years, while yet the Manchu Dynasty at Peking was lording it over the Eighteen Provinces of China Proper.

EXCLUSION POLICY OF THE MANCHU DYNASTY

Back of the obstinate exclusion policy of the Manchu there were two reasons. One was sentimental, racial, as has been mentioned above. The Manchu did not wish their soil degraded under the feet of the subject Chinese; they did not wish the purity and integrity of their race polluted by mixing with foreigners. The fighting clans of Manchuria especially, and with considerable justice, feared that the keen fighting edge of the Manchu race would be blunted if their young blades mingled too freely with the race of farmers and market men from the south.

There was another reason, too-the reason which made the exclusion of the Chinese from Manchuria more rigorous and more persistent. That reason was economic. Manchuria had from time out of mind been famous for her wild ginseng. This modest herb was prized by the Chinese and the other peoples of the East for its medicinal virtues. It had been one of the three chief products of Manchuria. It had enjoyed a high rank always among the export commodities of the country. Now the gathering of ginseng was the monopoly of the reigning house of Manchuria and of its nobilities. It was one of the chief sources of their revenue. Neither the common people nor even the Banner men of Manchuria had the privilege of gathering the precious herb.

It was one of the shining articles which excited the cupidity of the Chinese who smuggled themselves into Manchuria. The more rigorous the law of prohibition against the gathering of ginseng, the more active and aggressive became the Chinese in gathering and smuggling out the treasure herbs by stealth and underhanded methods. The ginseng grew in remote regions of the Changpai mountains, an ideal place for thieving operations. The Chinese were clever and wide awake, and the Manchu guards had the traditional habit of nodding on the job. The result of the whole thing was that the income of the Manchu lords suffered considerably from the Chinese thieves. The Chinese greed was much stronger, cleverer, and more aggressive than all the laws and edicts of the Manchu court. When the Peking Government in 1663, a year after the ascension of the famous Emperor Kanghsi to the throne, made it more difficult than ever for the Chinese to steal into Manchuria through the pass in the Eternal Wall at Shanhaikwan, by transferring the right of issuing passports from the local office at Shanhaikwan to the Central Military Department at Peking, the Chinese took to boats and smuggled themselves overseas at the site of present Port Arthur and at the mouth of the Yalu on the Yellow Sea.

HOW THE CHINESE CONQUERED MANCHURIA

In the end, however, and of course, it was the Chinese who conquered the homeland of their conquerors. The first break came not from the Chinese but from the Manchus from within the famous Bannermen, the foundation of Manchu power.

It was not the Chinese who broke the spirit of the Bannermen: it was poverty. Two things came to pass which brought about the financial troubles of the Manchu