De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars

by Thomas De Quincey

"'All those who at present compose the nation of the Torgouths, unaffrighted by the dangers of a long and painful march, and full of the single desire of procuring themselves for the future a better mode of life and a more happy lot, have abandoned the parts which they inhabited far beyond our frontiers, have traversed with a courage proof against all difficulties a space of more than ten thousand lys, and are come to range themselves in the number of my subjects. Their submission, in my view of it, is not a submission to which they have been inspired by fear, but is a voluntary and free submission, if ever there was one.... The Torgouths are one of the branches of the Eleuths. Four different branches of people formed at one time the whole nation of the Tchong-kar. It would be difficult to explain their common origin, respecting which indeed there is no very certain knowledge. These four branches separated from each other, so that each became a nation apart. That of the Eleuths, the chief of them all, gradually subdued the others, and continued till the time of Kang Hi to exercise this usurped pre-eminence over them. Tsé-ouang-raptan then reigned over the Eleuths, and Ayouki over the Torgouths. These two chiefs, being on bad terms with each other, had their mutual contests; of which Ayouki, who was the weaker, feared that in the end he would be the unhappy victim. He formed the project of withdrawing himself forever from the domination of the Eleuths. He took secret measures for securing the flight which he meditated, and sought safety, with all his people, in the territories which are under the dominion of the Russians. These permitted them to establish themselves in the country of Etchil [the country between the Volga and the Jaik, a little to the north of the Caspian Sea].... Oubaché, the present Khan of the Torgouths, is the youngest grandson of Ayouki. The Russians never ceasing to require him to furnish soldiers for incorporation into their armies, and having at last carried off his own son to serve them as a hostage, and being besides of a religion different from his, and paying no respect to that of the Lamas, which the Torgouths profess, Oubaché and his people at last determined to shake off a yoke which was becoming daily more and more insupportable. After having secretly deliberated among themselves, they concluded that they must abandon a residence where they had so much to suffer, in order to come and live more at ease in those parts of the dominion of China where the religion professed is that of Fo. At the commencement of the eleventh month of last year [December, 1770] they took the road, with their wives, their children, and all their baggage, traversed the country of the Hasaks [Cossacks], skirted Lake Palkaché-nor and the adjacent deserts; and, about the end of the sixth month of this year [in August, 1771], after having passed over more than ten thousand lys during the space of the eight whole months of their journey, they arrived at last on the frontiers of Charapen, not far from the borders of Ily. I knew already that the Torgouths were on the march to come and make submission to me. The news was brought me not long after their departure from Etchil. I then reflected that, as Ileton, general of the troops that are at Ily, was already charged with other very important affairs, it was to be feared that he would not be able to regulate with all the requisite attention those which concerned these new refugees. Chouhédé, one of the councillors of the general, was at Ouché, charged with keeping order among the Mahometans there. As he found it within his power to give his attention to the Torgouths, I ordered him to repair to Ily and do his best for their solid settlement.... At the same time I did not neglect any of the precautions that seemed to me necessary. I ordered Chouhédé to raise small forts and redoubts at the most important points, and to cause all the passes to be carefully guarded; and I enjoined on him the duty of himself getting ready the necessary provisions of every kind inside these defences.... The Torgouths arrived, and on arriving found lodgings ready, means of sustenance, and all the conveniences they could have found in their own proper dwellings. This is not all. Those principal men among them who had to come personally to do me homage had their expenses paid, and were honorably conducted, by the imperial post-road, to the place where I then was. I saw them; I spoke to them; I invited them to partake with me in the pleasures of the chase; and, at the end of the number of days appointed for this exercise, they attended me in my retinue as far as to Gé-hol. There I gave them a ceremonial banquet and made them the customary presents.... It was at this Gé-hol, in those charming parts where Kang Hi, my grandfather, made himself an abode to which he could retire during the hot season, at the same time that he thus put himself in a situation to be able to watch with greater care over the welfare of the peoples that are beyond the western frontiers of the Empire; it was, I say, in those lovely parts that, after having conquered the whole country of the Eleuths, I had received the sincere homages of Tchering and his Tourbeths, who alone among the Eleuths had remained faithful to me. One has not to go many years back to touch the epoch of that transaction. The remembrance of it is yet recent. And now—who could have predicted it?—when there was the least possible room for expecting such a thing, and when I had no thought of it, that one of the branches of the Eleuths which first separated itself from the trunk, those Torgouths who had voluntarily expatriated themselves to go and live under a foreign and distant dominion, these same Torgouths are come of themselves to submit to me of their own good will; and it happens that it is still at Gé-hol, not far from the venerable spot where my grandfather's ashes repose, that I have the opportunity, which I never sought, of admitting them solemnly into the number of my subjects.'

"Annexed to this general memoir there were some notes, also by the Emperor, one of them being that description of the sufferings of the Torgouths on their march, and of the miserable condition in which they arrived at the Chinese frontier, which De Quincey has quoted at p. 417. Annexed to the Memoir there is also a letter from P. Amiot, one of the French Jesuit missionaries, dated 'Pe-king, 15th October, 1773,' containing a comment on the memoir of a certain Chinese scholar and mandarin, Yu-min-tchoung, who had been charged by the Emperor with the task of seeing the narrative properly preserved in four languages in a monumental form. It is from this Chinese comment on the Imperial Memoir that there is the extract at p. 418 as to the miserable condition of the fugitives.

"On a comparison of De Quincey's splendid paper with the Chinese documents, several discrepancies present themselves; the most important of which perhaps are these:—(1) In De Quincey's paper it is Kien Long himself who first descries the approach of the vast Kalmuck horde to the frontiers of his dominions. On a fine morning in the early autumn of 1771, we are told, being then on a hunting expedition in the solitary Tartar wilds on the outside of the great Chinese Wall, and standing by chance at an opening of his pavilion to enjoy the morning sunshine, he sees the huge sheet of mist on the horizon, which, as it rolls nearer and nearer, and its features become more definite, reveals camels, and horses, and human beings in myriads, and announces the advent of, etc. etc.! In Kien Long's own narrative he is not there at all, having expected indeed the arrival of the Kalmuck host, but having deputed the military and commissariat arrangements for the reception of them to his trusted officer, Chouhédé; and his first sight of any of them is when their chiefs are brought to him, by the imperial post-road, to his quarters a good way off, where they are honorably entertained, and whence they accompany him to his summer residence of Gé-hol. (2) De Quincey's closing account of the monument in memory of the Tartar transmigration which Kien Long caused to be erected, and his copy of the fine inscription on the monument, are not in accord with the Chinese statements respecting that matter. 'Mighty columns of granite and brass erected by the Emperor Kien Long near the banks of the Ily' is De Quincey's description of the monument. The account given of the affair by the mandarin Yu-min-tchoung, in his comment on the Emperor's Memoir, is very different. 'The year of the arrival of the Torgouths,' he says, 'chanced to be precisely that in which the Emperor was celebrating the eightieth year of the age of his mother the Empress-Dowager. In memory of this happy day his Majesty had built on the mountain which shelters from the heat (Pi-chou-chan) a vast and magnificent miao, in honor of the reunion of all the followers of Fo in one and the same worship; it had just been completed when Oubaché and the other princes of his nation arrived at Gé-hol. In memory of an event which has contributed to make this same year forever famous in our annals, it has been his Majesty's will to erect in the same miao a monument which should fix the epoch of the event and attest its authenticity; he himself composed the words for the monument and wrote the characters with his own hand. How small the number of persons that will have an opportunity of seeing and reading this monument within the walls of the temple in which it is erected!' Moreover the words of the monumental inscription in De Quincey's copy of it are hardly what Kien Long would have written or could have authorized. 'Wandering sheep who have strayed away from the Celestial Empire in the year 1616' is the expression in De Quincey's copy for that original secession of the Torgouth Tartars from their eastern home on the Chinese borders for transference of themselves far west to Russia, which was repaired and compensated by their return in 1771 under their Khan Oubaché. As distinctly, on the other hand, the memoir of Kien Long refers the date of the original secession to no farther back than the reign of his own grandfather, the Emperor Kang Hi, when Ayouki, the grandfather of Oubaché, was Khan of the Torgouths, and induced them to part company with their overbearing kinsmen the Eleuths, and seek refuge within the Russian territories on the Volga. In the comment of the Chinese mandarin on the Imperial Memoir the time is more exactly indicated by the statement that the Torgouths had remained 'more than seventy years' in their Russian settlements when Oubaché brought them back. This would refer us to about 1700, or, at farthest, to between 1690 and 1700, for the secession under Ayouki.

"The discrepancies are partly explained by the fact that De Quincey followed Bergmann's account,—which account differs avowedly in some particulars from that of the Chinese memoirs. In Bergmann I find the original secession of the ancestors of Oubaché's Kalmuck horde from China to Russia is pushed back to 1616, just as in De Quincey. But, though De Quincey keeps by Bergmann when he pleases, he takes liberties with Bergmann too, intensifies Bergmann's story throughout, and adds much to it for which there is little or no suggestion in Bergmann. For example, the incident which De Quincey introduces with such terrific effect as the closing catastrophe of the march of the fugitive Kalmucks before their arrival on the Chinese frontier,—the incident of their thirst-maddened rush into the waters of Lake Tengis, and their wallow there in bloody struggle with their Bashkir pursuers,—has no basis in Bergmann larger than a few slight and rather matter-of-fact sentences. As Bergmann himself refers here and there in his narrative to previous books, German or Russian, for his authorities, it is just possible that De Quincey may have called some of these to his aid for any intensification or expansion of Bergmann he thought necessary. My impression, however, is that he did nothing of the sort, but deputed any necessary increment of his Bergmann materials to his own lively imagination."

1 1. The first three paragraphs of the essay, comprising the formal introduction, are intentionally rather more picturesque and vivacious in style than the ordinary narrative that follows. If these paragraphs be read consecutively aloud, the student will surely feel the sweep and power of De Quincey's eloquence. Attention may well be directed to the author's own apparent interest in his subject because of its appeal to the imagination (p. 1, l. 4), of the romantic circumstances (p. 1, l. 11), of its dramatic capabilities (p. 2, l. 8), of its scenical situations (p. 3, l. 8). Throughout the essay effort should be made to excite appreciation of the significance of words, and De Quincey's mastery in the use of words may be continually illustrated. In paragraph 1, note the fitness of the word velocity (l. 12) and the appropriateness of the epithets in almighty instincts (l. 17), life-withering marches (l. 18), gloomy vengeance (l. 19), volleying thunders (p. 2, l. 1).

1 5. Tartar. Originally applied to certain tribes in Chinese Tartary, but here used for Mongolian. Look up etymology and trace relation of the word to Turk.—steppes. A Russian word indicating large areas more or less level and devoid of forests; these regions are often similar in character to the American prairie, and are used for pasturage.

1 6,7. terminus a quo, terminus ad quem. The use of phrases quoted from classic sources is frequent in De Quincey's writings. Note such phrases as they occur, also foreign words. Is their use to be justified?

1 18. leeming. The lemming, or leming. A rodent quadruped. "It is very prolific, and vast hordes periodically migrate down to the sea, destroying much vegetation in their path."—Century Dictionary.

1 22. Miltonic images. "Miltonic" here characterizes not only images used by Milton, but images suggestive of his as well. Yet compare: