the princes above mentioned, who were veritable scions of the Imperial
stock, should be entered as "brave men" and not as "rebels," and that
the Emperor, to whose reign we are now coming, graciously granted his
request.

In the year 1661 Shun Chih, the first actual Emperor of the Ch`ing
dynasty, "became a guest on high." He does not rank as one of China's
great monarchs, but his kindly character as a man, and his magnanimity
as a ruler, were extolled by his contemporaries. He treated the Catholic
missionaries with favour. The Dutch and Russian embassies to his court
in 1656 found there envoys from the Great Mogul, from the Western
Tartars, and from the Dalai Lama. China, in the days when her
civilization towered above that of most countries on the globe, and when
her strength commanded the respect of all nations, great and small,
was quite accustomed to receive embassies from foreign parts; the first
recorded instance being that of "An-tun" = Marcus Aurelius _Anton_inus,
which reached China in A.D. 166. But because the tribute offered in this
case contained no jewels, consisting merely of ivory, rhinoceros-horn,
tortoise-shell, etc., which had been picked up in Annam, some have
regarded it merely as a trading enterprise, and not really an embassy
from the Roman Emperor; Chinese writers, on the other hand, suggest that
the envoys sold the valuable jewels and bought a trumpery collection of
tribute articles on the journey.

By the end of Shun Chih's reign, the Manchus, once a petty tribe of
hardy bowmen, far beyond the outskirts of the empire, were in undoubted
possession of all China, of Manchuria, of Korea, of most of Mongolia,
and even of the island of Formosa. How this island, discovered by the
Chinese only in 1430, became Manchu property, is a story not altogether
without romance.