might begin their new life of farmer reservists with the happiest start imaginable.

Some of these men who obeyed the Governmental summons to the Manchurian fields had no idea of making a permanent stay on the farms the Government had provided for them. In many cases the men started out of Peking all alone, leaving their families behind in the city. The more the Government helped them, the lazier they became. By the time they had spent the capital funds in silver given them to start the farming business they were ready to run away. Many of them succeeded in stealing away from the new colonies and returned home to Peking.

Just about this time the country suffered from various uprisings and civil wars and the whole alluring scheme of hitting two birds with one stone, of rescuing agricultural Manchuria from returning to its wild state and at the same time solving the trying problem of giving something to do to the ever-increasing idle hands of Bannermen in Peking, was completely smashed. The Government, however, never gave up its pet scheme in utter despair, even though its troubles grew faster than a snowball. All through the tortuous days of civil war the Chinese rarely neglected to take advantage of any opportunity that came their way to smuggle themselves into Manchuria. It was not difficult for them to slip through, now that the country was everywhere disordered, and they passed in like so many eels through muddy waters.

This increase of the Chinese invasion into Manchuria made the Peking court feel more keenly than ever the imperative necessity of planting the Bannermen back on the soil of Manchuria. With the end of the civil war, therefore, the Government returned to the same old job in the same old way. But time and again the old, old story of utter failure was repeated. On the other hand,

in the face of all sorts of exclusion measures by the Government, the Chinese who stole into Manchuria kept on increasing in number. There was nothing mysterious in this. No race known to history has ever beaten the Chinese in patience and persistence of striving for the thing their hearts desired. Aside from that, there was the whip of real and stern starvation driving them out from the congested districts of Chihli and Shantung into the open fields of Manchuria. As if that were not enough, there was another factor. Native Manchurians who owned the land liked the Chinese workmen to come into Manchuria. Why? For just one all-sufficient reason: they could turn over the farm lands to the Chinese and enjoy their simple life by the sweat of somebody else's brow.

In 1784 Chinese succeeded in entering the northern valley of the Liao River where the stream takes a turn toward the south and joins the East Liao. Seven years later saw the beginning of the movement of Chinese into the Changchun and Nungan district which laid the foundation of the present-day prosperity of the City of Changchun. When the Peking Government woke up to the presence of a large Chinese community in that section it was too late. There were more than 2,300 Chinese families in the section then, all working the land as petty tenant farmers. Their industry formed a large part of the economic prosperity of the country. It was utterly impossible to drive them out: it would have spelled a catastrophe to the whole countryside. All the ! Government could do was to restrict the Chinese activities to a definite section of the land. So about the year 1800 the Government established an administrative office at Changchun to look after the Chinese colony. The opening up of the Changtu district followed close on the heels of the opening of the Changchun section. A special officer was detailed to watch over the Chinese there in

1806. After that a large number of Chinese made their way into the very imperial holdings all about Mukden. Not so many years later new Chinese immigrants into the Changchun section went over the 10,000 mark. The flood-gate was open wide at last.

REAL CONQUEROR: THE CHINESE COOLIE

These Chinese workers entered Manchuria literally with empty hands. They were not armed. No shrewd diplomacy, no overpowering prestige of a mighty state backed them: they were nothing more than so many outcasts of a subject race, driven by starvation. They had no governmental subsidy such as the Manchu Bannermen had; nobody gave them free land or free seeds. They entered a strange land without a guide, without protection. Official kicks met their faces every way they turned. And they conquered.

Without a banner, without an oration-without three cents' worth of firecrackers. And the quality of their victory was such that beside it the near-world Empire of Kublai Khan turned into a soap bubble at the end of a child's clay pipe.

The Yuan Dynasty, which he had founded at Peking in 1260 A.D., was thrown upon the junk-pile of Empires precisely one hundred years later, in 1360. There are few historians to-day who choose to waste their leisure on its rusty relics. There is no heroic year in the chronicle of Manchuria that bugles the entrance of her conqueror, the Shantung Coolie, into the Eastern Three Provinces. But we know that even back in the days of the Kingdom of Kaoli there were Chinese farmer settlements in the valley of the Liao which Kaoli warriors used to raid and loot. Ever since, Chinese have kept on filtering into Manchuria-kicked, despised, "excluded," and discriminated against. And the result?