Peace negotiations at once began, though the concert of Powers was difficult to keep in tune. Russia, indeed, soon withdrew to pursue her own separate ends. The main results were that certain guilty officials were to be punished, the importation of arms was to be forbidden for a term of years, the customary examinations were to be suspended for five years, the Tsung-li Yamên or make-believe Foreign Office was to be replaced by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Wai-wu-pu), and an indemnity of 450,000,000 taels1 was to be distributed among the Powers. Of this last, a number of the missions concerned refused to accept their share, feeling that the blood shed was not to be valued in coin. The United States generously remitted the balance of its own share, after payment of the actual damages suffered. This balance the Chinese Government has used for the establishment of the Tsing Hua College and for the education of Chinese youths in the United States.

During the occupation of Peking by the Allies, the EmpressDowager, taking with her the Emperor, endeavored to save as much face as possible by withdrawing to the western capital, Si-ngan-fu. In October the court once again returned to Peking, and the Empress did her best to appear in her old spirits, but the last bulwark of the Manchu domination was finally broken. Those years after the return must have been crowded with the ghosts of persons as well as of plans undone. Perhaps the Dowager's new affectation of being conciliatory to foreigners was not all insincere. Perhaps she had really come to the conclusion that there was something in the Western civilization she had flouted. At all events, she sent abroad the Imperial Commission of 1905 to study out a system of parliamentary government. She made also promises for the convocation of a National Assembly in 1908, published edicts against opium in 1906, ordered the old system of examinations to cease from 1906, and raised Confucius to the same rank as Heaven and Earth. It was too late to save the dynasty. On November 14, 1908, according to the official account, the Emperor passed from his 1 A tael is an ounce of silver, worth on the average about half a dollar.

troubled life. And within twenty-four hours the last great representative of the clan which had ruled China so long, the resolute old woman who had done her best, according to her lights, to save her land from spoliation, followed her nephew to the shades of their ancestors. Which of the two actually died first is not known, but the Empress-Dowager lived officially for a day in order to project her shadow still further over the history of her country by the nomination of the four-year-old Prince P'u-yi as Emperor, under the title of Hsuan-tung.

So the old prophecy of the Song of the Cakes was called to mind. There was once again on the Dragon Throne a child in the arms of his mother.

CHAPTER XIV

RUSSIAN ADVANCES IN ASIA

In a previous chapter we followed the earlier stages of the eastward march of the Muscovite Empire The Russian was pioneer by racial habit." In Yermak, with his broad shoulders, his sturdy frame, his eagle glance, was to be discerned the typical Russian pioneer. Under leadership such as his the van of conquest and colonization was ever on the move. For a summer month or two, afloat on rafts of logs, the colonists followed the streams farther and farther to the east; then in the long winter months, buried in the snow, they dreamed of still further advance. Thrusting ahead as the season allowed, resting when the winter forbade, they gained more and more Asiatic territory. Their goal came in sight when in 1636 they came at last within sight of the Sea of Okhotsk They might have cried, like the immortal Ten Thousand of Xenophon "The sea! The sea!"

Nearly a century later (in 1727) the Treaty of Kiakhta gave to the Russian explorers the title to vast regions north of the Amur. Then for a hundred years there was comparatively little change either in policy or in extension of territory. But increase of population came both by colonization and by an iniquitous exile system. Of this we hear as early as 1582, and from that date onward we see overmuch of both the crudity and the cruelty of this method of punishing disaffection. Art and literature alike have added pathos to the farewells taken at the famous boundary post on the Urals, and to the begging song of the exiles from post to post :

"For the sake of Christ,

Have pity on us, O our fathers!
Don't forget the unwilling travelers!
Don't forget the long-imprisoned!
Feed us, O our fathers, help us!

Feed us, help the poor and needy!" 1

Some improvements in the way of administration came with 1754, and various other administrative changes were made in the early nineteenth century up to the establishment of the Bureau of Exile in 1823, but the revelations of Mr. Kennan at the close of the century show what awful depths of infamy were unplumbed almost to our own day. One still shudders at the horrors of the march, of the dungeon and the torture least, the horror of the forwarding prison at Tomsk.

not

In contrast with this slow tide of human agony, crawling reluctantly eastward, we have also in view the wave of westward Chinese migration, which had been deliberately planned by the Chinese emperors to counteract Russian aggression. Tao-kuang, for instance, to replenish an empty treasury, put up for sale many of the public lands of Manchuria, especially in the province of Kirin. The consequence was that Chinese immigrants flocked into the new fields in such numbers that they rapidly transformed whole districts, "so that to-day Manchuria is to all intents and purposes exactly similar to the other northern provinces of China proper.'

"2

While wave and counter-wave were thus more or less silently intermingling different streams of humanity, Russian policy was becoming increasingly and more consciously concerned with Western Asia. Illustrations are to be found in such episodes as the war with Persia in 1827 and the conquest of the Caucasus.

There is something epic about the clash which came about in that "mighty simmering-pot of nations" which stretches eastward from the Caspian into Central Asia. Out from these

1 See Noble, Russia and the Russians, p. 205.
'Putnam Weale, Manchu and Muscovite.

regions had flowed the devastating hordes which again and again terrorized Europe. It was natural that there should be some return wave of those peoples, at length emancipated from the Tatar yoke. The initiative was taken by the Cossacks of the Urals, and almost from the beginning of the eighteenth century we have a series of incidents which form part of a great epic of subjugation. In 1715 Peter the Great sent an expedition under Bekovich, apparently in response to an invitation from the Khan of Khiva, to assume a protectorate. The expedition was treacherously attacked, and massacred to In 1731 retaliatory campaigns forced the Kirghiz of the Middle Horde to surrender their territory to Russia. Now for the first time the Muscovite obtained the coveted foothold within the boundaries of the Khiva and Bokhara Khanates.

a man.

The beginning of the nineteenth century (1803) saw the submission of the tribes on the eastern shores of the Caspian. In 1832 the Little Horde in its turn submitted to the Orenberg government, and about the same time the Western Kirghiz were incorporated into the government of West Siberia.

Things were thus moving quite prosperously for Russia in Central Asia when the outbreak of the Crimean War suddenly transferred the interests of Asiatic Russia to the Far East. It was the Crimean War which gave the opportunity for a new and successful attempt to reach the Amur. The hero of this attempt was Nicolas Muravieff, a man who was said to unite "the wisdom of the statesman with the skill of the diplomatist, and something of the dash and enterprise of the explorer.' As early as 1847, when Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, Muravieff had explored the mouth of the Amur and the Sea of Okhotsk. He also, through Captain Nevelsky, established in 1851 certain posts on the island of Sakhalin, and in 1852 founded the city of Nikolaievsk. When war was declared between Great Britain and France and Russia, Muravieff was sent out to prevent the seizure of Kamchatka by the British. He used the opportunity to follow the stream of the Amur from the transbaikal province. He reached Aigun with over a thousand