was a wise measure, preventing their getting into endless trouble with the natives-and to insure protection for the throne. The Bannermen were not allowed to move out of the specified localities. They were absolutely forbidden to follow a commercial activity of any kind; they were not allowed to intermarry with the ChiAnd by the ordinance issued in the seventh year of Emperor Shunchih, they were absolutely forbidden to sell their land-holdings.

nese.

But when men need money badly it usually makes them think. It actually forced the Manchu warriors to that rather effeminate and uncommon exercise. Out of their profound meditation they came up with a scheme of leasing called tienti. It was simply a long-term leasing and often ended in the loss of the property in a way with which we of the highly civilized present are thoroughly familiar. The loss of land happened to the Manchu Bannermen with almost monotonous regularity, as a matter of historic fact. The Bannermen type of Manchus came from herdsmen ancestors who loved to fold their tents quite as much as to pitch them beside singing brooks in pastures new. They were strangers to that land-hunger to which a farming race like the Chinese is heir. The loss of their lands weighed lightly upon them. It was a regular thing for a Manchu Bannerman to turn over his land to a Chinese tenant farmer, make him do the work, and get a certain percentage of the yield without lifting a finger. But once his land was leased, it was practically good-by for the Manchu.

There was another thing which drove the Bannermen into a bitter struggle. Their number increased scandalously in the kindly atmosphere of Peking. The 80,000 of the year 1644 increased to 120,000 toward the close of the seventeenth century, in the days of Emperor Kanghsi. What was particularly alarming was not so much the increase of the Bannermen themselves.

It was the increase of idlers and dependents in the families of the Manchu warriors. Only the eldest sons among them could succeed their fathers as Bannermen. The younger sons became so many parasites. The same thing happened to the members of the Manchu nobility. The aristocrats who moved into Peking with the first Emperor of the Taching Dynasty numbered about 2,000. That was quite a handsome crowd, as armies of parasites go, but they multiplied like flies.

PLANTING BANNERMEN IN MANCHURIA

Just what to do with the steadily increasing army of these idlers became one of the really big questions of the Manchu statesmen. Why not plant these superfluous Bannermen on the choice sections of Manchuria's productive fields? The Peking court acted upon it. In 1744 the Government picked 3,000 men out of the dependents and idlers in the families of the Eight Bannermen and sent them to two points in the Province of Kirin in Manchuria-the two sections in the upper reaches of the Sungari where the soil was fertile and had the advantage of the ready transportation facilities of the river. The paternal Manchu court at Peking was extremely kind to these sons of Bannermen. To every family commanded to depart for Kirin the Government gave a sum of money to prepare itself for the journey. All along the line of its travel back to its natal soil, the Government provided it with carts and horse-feed. As soon as the colonists reached the land provided for them, the Government gave them a certain amount of silver to start them in business; gave them a plot of land and a house to live in. The Government did not stop there. It gave them seeds and implements, even to the harness for the cattle to work the fields with, and looked after their needs to the smallest detail, that they

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