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. It 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.

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

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