The native population of Manchuria having been drafted off to garrison and colonise the conquered country, their deserted districts were thrown open to Chinese settlers. The population of the three provinces is mainly Chinese, and, assimilated in government to those of China, they are reckoned as completing the number of twenty-one. Opulent in grain-fields, forests, and minerals, with every facility for commerce, no part of the empire has a brighter future. So thinly peopled is its northern portion that it continues to be a vast hunting-ground which supplies the Chinese market with sables and tiger-skins besides other peltries. The tiger-skins are particularly valuable as having longer and richer fur than those of Bengal.
Of the Manchus as a people, I shall speak later on.[*] Those remaining in their original habitat are extremely rude and ignorant; yet even these hitherto neglected regions are now coming under the enlightening influence of a system of government schools.
[Footnote *: Part II. page [140] and [142]; part III, pages [267-280]]
Mongolia, the largest division of Tartary, if not of the Empire, is scarcely better known than the mountain regions of Tibet, a large portion of its area being covered with deserts as uninviting and as seldom visited as the African Sahara. One route, however, has been well trodden by Russian travellers, namely, that lying between Kiachta and Peking.
In the reign of Kanghi the Russians were granted the privilege of establishing an ecclesiastical mission to minister to a Cossack garrison which the Emperor had captured at Albazin trespassing on his grounds. Like another Nebuchadnezzar, he transplanted them to the soil of China. He also permitted the Russians to bring tribute to the "Son of Heaven" once in ten years. That implied a right to trade, so that the Russians, like other envoys, in Chinese phrase "came lean and went away fat." But they were not allowed to leave the beaten track: they were merchants, not travellers. Not till the removal of the taboo within the last half-century have these outlying dependencies been explored by men like Richthofen and Sven Hedin. Formerly the makers of maps garnished those unknown regions
"With caravans for want of towns."
Sooth to say, there are no towns, except Urga, a shrine for pilgrimage, the residence of a living Buddha, and Kiachta and Kalgan, terminal points of the caravan route already referred to.
Kiachta is a double town—one-half of it on each side of the Russo-Chinese boundary—presenting in striking contrast the magnificence of a Russian city and the poverty and filth of a Tartar encampment. The whole country is called in Chinese "the land of grass." Its inhabitants have sheepfolds and cattle ranches, but neither fields nor houses, unless tents and temporary huts may be so designated. To this day, nomadic in their habits, they migrate from place to place with their flocks and herds as the exigencies of water and pasturage may require.
Lines of demarcation exist for large tracts belonging to a tribe, but no minor divisions such as individual holdings. The members of a clan all enjoy their grazing range in common, and hold themselves ready to fight for the rights of their chieftain. Bloody feuds lasting for generations, such as would rival those of the Scottish clans, are not of infrequent occurrence. Their Manchu overlord treats these tribal conflicts with sublime indifference, as he does the village wars in China.
The Mongolian chiefs, or "princes" as they are called, are forty-eight in number. The "forty-eight princes" is a phrase as familiar to the Chinese ear as the "eighteen provinces" is to ours. Like the Manchus they are arranged in groups under eight banners. Some of them took part in the conquest, but the Manchus are too suspicious to permit them to do garrison duty in the Middle Kingdom, lest the memories of Kublai Khan and his glory should be awakened. They are, however, held liable to military service. Seng Ko Lin Sin ("Sam Collinson" as the British dubbed him), a Lama prince, headed the northern armies against the Tai-ping rebels and afterwards suffered defeat at the hands of the British and French before the gates of Peking.