Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 661

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A New History of Chind.

DEC.

that conquest, they perfidiously turned their arms against the king of China, who kept his court in a city belonging to the province of Honan, bordering upon the Yellow river. This prince, being terrified by the neighborhood of those barbarians, fled in all haste to the city of Hangchow in the province of the Chěkeäng, where he settled his court. Of which the han no sooner had intelligence, but he crossed the Yellow river, and after little or no resis- tance inade himself master of the provinces of Honan, Nanking, and Chě- keäng, and consequently of the village of Hangchow, which M. Polo calls Kimsai. Thereupon the king of China fled into the province of Fuhkeen, and from thence into that of Kwangtung, where having embarked himself with a design to seek out foreign shelter, he suffered shipwreck in the gulf of the island of Hainan, and there miserably perished, so that all the rest of China submitted voluntarily to the Grand Han." page 19.

The independent mountaineers, in Szechuen, Yunnan, Kweichow and Kwangse, he says, pay no tribute to the emperor, nor yield him any obedience, being governed by absolate princes, whom the Chi- nese call 'local lords,' and 'local officers.' Their towns are, for the most part, so environed with high mountains and steep rocks' as if nature had taken a particular care of their fortification.' Within these mountains lie extensive fields and plains and many towns and villages. Though they speak the Chinese, they have a particular language also, and their manners and customs are likewise somewhat different from those of the sous of Han.' Nevertheless, adds our au- thor, 'their complexion and the shape of their bodies are altogether alike; but as to their courage, you would think them to be quite another nation: the Chinese stand in fear of them, so that after se veral trials, which they have made of their prowess, they have been forced to let them live at their own liberty, and to consent to a free traffic and commerce with them.' He gives an account of one of the chiefs, who with an army of forty thousand men, was beguiled and destroyed by a Chinese usurper: of this catastrophe he himself was an eye-witness.

Magaillans also discourses about the nature and merits of the Chi- nese language, notices particularly the tones and aspirates, and says that he who will industriously, and under a good method, apply himself to the study of it, may be able in a year's time to understand and speak it very well;' and that those then employed in the mis- sion were at the end of two years, so perfect in the language that they were able to confess, catechize, preach, and compose, with as much ease as in their own native tongue. He then proceeds to say,

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"That there is no question to be made of this apparent truth. when we consider the great number of books which the fathers have made and translat