But the women who came to the ruler of the earth were not strange and mysterious, they were ordinary and commonplace even though he had his choice of the women of his Empire. He brooded over the matter and came to the conclusion that the strange and mysterious woman must be the girl he had met herding ducks in the dusk of the evening. Then he sent out to the part of the country where he had wandered that night and demanded the daughters of the farmer.
The good man was highly honoured and dressed his girls in their finest clothes to appear before their Emperor, but, and they must have been bitterly disappointed, though they were pretty girls, there was nothing strange about them, they were as ordinary as all the other women who occupied, the women's quarters. He had seen many, many, like them. Again he sent back to the farm and they said there were no other women there but the girl who herded the ducks, and it could not be she because she spoke to no one.
“That,” said the Emperor, “is the girl,” and he ordered her to be properly arrayed and brought before him at once.
Alas for the glamour that comes with the dusk of the evening. The girl had grown up without any comeliness and when she was brought before the Emperor he turned away disgusted. Nevertheless, for his dream's sake, he married her and gave her a fine house to live in, but he had nothing to do with her, she was his wife only in name.
And the duck-herd girl, come to high estate, pined because she did not find favour in the sight of her lord, she never ceased to pray for his smiles, and at last she so worked upon him that one night he did send for her. She was his wife, her shame had gone from her. And presently, it was rumoured that the duck-herd girl was to become a mother. But the Emperor was angry, he could not believe the child was his, and he turned Her out to wander, desolate and forlorn, upon the hills. At first she despaired, but presently she took courage, had she not been raised from a duck-herd to an Emperor's wife, and was she not to bear his son, and by her faith in herself she persuaded some shepherds who tended their sheep upon the other side of the valley from the wall that surrounded the Emperor's pleasure-grounds to take her in, and here her son was born.
And that night the Emperor dreamed another dream. He dreamed that a most illustrious son had been born to him that very night. He sent to make inquiries and the only one of his wives or concubines who had borne a son that night, was the woman he had driven from him with contumely. So he took her back with honour, and his dream—both his dreams were fulfilled, for the son that was born to him that night among the hills was the illustrious Ch'ien Lung, the man who at eighty-three still sat upon the Dragon Throne when George III. of England sent Lord Macartney on an embassy to China in 1793.
And Ch'ien Lung was a good son to his mother at least, and because she was a pious woman, and he was born amidst those sheltering hills, he built there a series of temples to the glory of God and for her pleasure.