this direction. It is almost paradoxical, though absolutely true, that
two Manchu Emperors, sprung from a race which but a few decades before
had little thought for anything beyond war and the chase, and which
had not even a written language of its own, should have conferred more
benefits upon the student of literature than all the rest of China's
Emperors put together. The literature in question is, of course, Chinese
literature. Manchu was the court language, spoken as well as written,
for many years after 1644, and down to quite recent times all official
documents were in duplicate, one copy in Chinese and one in Manchu; but
a Manchu literature can hardly be said to exist, beyond translations of
all the most important Chinese works. The Manchu dynasty is an
admirable illustration of the old story: conquerors taken captive by the
conquered.

At this moment, the term "K`ang Tsi" is daily on the lips of every
student of the Chinese language, native or foreign, throughout the
empire. This is due to the fact that the Emperor caused to be produced
under his own personal superintendence, on a more extensive scale and
a more systematic plan than any previous work of the kind, a lexicon of
the Chinese language, containing over forty thousand characters, with
numerous illustrative phrases chronologically arranged, the spelling of
each character according to the method introduced by Buddhist teachers
and first used in the third century, the tones, various readings, etc.,
etc., altogether a great work and still without a rival at the present
day.

It would be tedious even to enumerate all the various literary
undertakings conceived and carried out under the direction of K`ang Hsi;
but there are two works in particular which cannot be passed over. One
of these is the huge illustrated encyclopædia in which everything which