Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 693

1250.

Travels of M. Huc.

651

THE French mission at Peking, which flourished under the first emperors of the Tartar-Manchú dynasty, was broken up and almost totally dispersed, by the frequent persecutions of Kiáking, who ascend- ed the throne in 1799. The missionaries themselves were either put to death or driven out of the empire, while the converts hastened beyond the Great Wall, to search for peace and tranquillity in the deserts of Mongolia, where the Mongols permitted them to cultivate, here and there, small tracts of land.

After the lapse of some time, the missionaries succeeded in gathering together the scattered members of their flock, and took up their abode with them in the "Grass-lands” (tsáu-ti ); and in 1842, the Pope nominated an apostolic vicar to all Mongolia, whose residence was at Si-wan,* a Chinese village north of the Great Wall, and one day's journey from Siuen-hwá fút. In the year 1844, two missionaries, Messrs. Huc and Gabet, were commissioned by the said vicar of Mongolia to explore, and, if possible, to determine the extent and limits of the vicariat! And it is to a journey undertaken with such strange objects in view, that we are indebted for one of the most remarkable narratives of travel in "Tartary, Tibet, and China,” that has appeared since of the days the “Lettres Edifiantes et Cu- rieuses,” or of more modern and authentic narratives. But while we have, in the pages of Huc, the merits of a Du Halde, a Barrow, a De Guignes, and a Turner, with, in some respects, advantages over al his predecessors; whether it is that so much is really marvelous in those remote and central lands, or that such isolation and remoteness beget a superstitious love of the strange and the wonderful, it is im- possible to peruse the narrative of this last wanderer in Tartary and Tibet, and not be reminded of those incredible statements which were so much criticised in Renaudot's translation from the Arabic, till confirmed by Marco Polo; or to see revived before us that which has been deemed romance and exaggeration in Mendez Pinto, Juan Gonzales de Mendoza, and Athanasius Kircher, and for recording which even Du IIalde has been taxed with credulity. It is, however, extremely difficult to separate the true from the exaggerated, and the romantic from the hyperbolic, in what relates to China. A knowledge of Eastern manners and habits-of the subserviency and pliability of the missionary character, not in all, but in the generality of cases-and

[* Siuenhwa fu is the chief town of the department of the same name, lying within the Wall Siwan is in the inferior department, or circuit of Kaupeh táu, which includes a vast region inhabited by Mongolian shepherds, who settle on the tsáu-lf, or grass-lands found in the Desert.]

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