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?

To-day, 564 years after the passing of the greatest empire the world has ever seen into nothing more than the vaguest sort of nightmare, we face this outstanding fact: More than 90 per cent. of the total population of the present-day Manchuria are the descendants of the humble Chinese who stole into the country.

Just what, then, was their weapon which proved ever so much more powerful than the sword? It was not the pen, certainly. Most of the Chinese coolie founders of the agricultural empire of Manchuria could not write their own names. There is no miracle connected with their achievement, either. The answer is as simple as it is apparent. It was the ability of the Chinese coolie to live on cheap, coarse food-such food as is given to cattle in other lands-the Manchurian millet called kaoliang, beans, and pickled vegetables. Not only that but thriving on it. Even to this very day the physique, the power of physical endurance, of the Chinese coolie is the eternal wonder of the Japanese. Beside the Chinese coolie the Japanese workmen are pale and puny. With all the sensational and scandalous rise in living expenses in the Far East in recent years, I found, last year, the coolies in Manchuria were living on seven cents a day.

When the Chinese entered Manchuria they walked with the furtive steps of a thief. Indeed, they were lawbreakers-criminals in the eyes of the Manchu law. They bowed in the dust before the Manchu landlord: got the job of a petty farm laborer. Their one passion seemed to be patient, eternal toil. Nothing stopped

financial power. But they When their Manchu landthey spoke, for they were When the land changed

them in their work. And in that manner they laid the foundation of economic and never made speeches over it. lords wished to lease the land ready to put up the money. hands, it was from the hand of the original Manchu

owner into that of a Chinese tenant farmer. Settled on their own piece of land, they called across the Yellow Sea to their kinfolk whom they had left in their home villages in Shantung. The kinfolk came and joined them. The history of the Agricultural Development of Manchuria is merely the story of the Shantung Coolie, nothing more.

ENTER CHINESE MERCHANTS, ALSO

The Chinese merchants from Chihli followed the farmers from Shantung into Manchuria. Unlike the penniless coolie farm laborers, these merchants had their main stores in the various cities of the Metropolitan Province of Chihli. They entered Manchuria and there opened many branch stores at various important towns and cities. These stores carried almost all the simple life necessities of the Chinese farmer, so that he could step into one of them and get all his needs supplied at one shop. These stores also carried cotton goods, patent medicines, and other articles in answer to the demands of Manchu natives. In no time at all they were the masters of Manchurian markets. And as masters they have continued ever since in the face of other nationals entering, led by Russians and Japanese in recent years.

The Shantungese who crossed over to Manchuria were not all farmers. A large number of them went up the Yalu into the Changpai mountains for the secret gathering of ginseng. While hunting for the precious herb many of them stumbled on gold-bearing alluvium in the Chiapikou district. The miners and ginseng-hunters built up the flourishing community of more than 25,000 people at Chiapikou, in the heart of the mountain.

MANCHURIA OFFICIALLY OPENED TO CHINESE

IMMIGRATION

In 1803 under Emperor Chiaching one section of Manchuria was officially opened to Chinese immigration. Under the same Emperor the Chinese in Manchuria gained legal status of a sort and were graduated from the outlaw class. And in 1813 even the Bannermen in outlying districts were placed under the prefectual administration, which governed the Chinese and Manchus alike. In 1852 the law was promulgated which granted to the Chinese free and legal purchase and sale of properties with the Manchu, so that a Chinese could buy a piece of land from a Manchu without going through the elaborate fiction of a lease. This law, however, was restricted to China Proper and did not extend to Manchuria. The Manchurian restriction remained more or less effective until 1905, when it was nullified by the Military Governor of Mukden.

Toward the middle of the Nineteenth Century China was in the turmoil of a civil war. To fill her cup of bitterness came also the foreign trouble. The British forced the opium war and walked away with the Treaty of Nanking of August, 1842, and the island Hongkong. In less than twenty years after that, in 1860, the allied forces of France and Britain marched into Peking, and the Court fled to Jehol. The Peking Government had no time to think of Manchuria, let alone bother with the Chinese immigration there. When the Central Government at Peking thought of Manchuria at all it was in terms of getting some funds out of it.

The Peking treasury had been so repeatedly and riotously squeezed and pumped, because of both civil wars and foreign wars, that it looked about as nourishing as a dried-up drinking-hole in the Gobi desert. A bright idea struck the Peking statesmen: Why not dig revenue