The History of China - #270 - Qing 14: From Russia, Rome, and Ningxia With Love

Episode Date: May 18, 2024

Be sure to check out Airwave Media's list of 100 Best podcasts! ThoC is #69 (Nice!): https://blog.feedspot.com/airwave_media_podcasts/ The Kangxi Emperor squashes his beef with the three rebellious feudatories of the south by squashing their traitorous lords, only to have to pivot northward once again to face down... who? The Russians? And the Mongols?! And Tibetans?! And the Catholic Church?! Time Period Covered: 1670-1722 CE Major Historical Figures: Great Qing: The Kangxi Emperor [r. 1661-1722] Crown-Prince Yunreng [1674-1725] Grand Secretary Songgotu [1636-1703] Fan Chengmo, Governor-General of Fujian [1624-1676] Nian Gengyao, Viceroy of Sichuan and Tibet [1679-1726] Mei Wending, mathematician [1633-1721] Tsarist Russia: Tsar Alexis Romanov, "The Quietest" [r. 1645-1676] Tsar Feodor III [r. 1676-1682] Tsar Ivan V [r. 1682-1696] Tsar/Emperor Peter I, "the Great" [r. 1682-1725] Izmailov Roman Catholic Church: Pope Clement XI [1649-1721] Cardinal Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon [1668-1710] Jesuit Missionaires: Fr. Jean-François Gerbillon [1654-1707] Fr. Tomé Pereira [1645-1708] Fr. Joachim Bouvet [1656-1730] Ö löd/Mongol/Dzungar Khanate: Erdeniin Galdan, Boshugtu Khan [r. 1671-1697] Tsewang Araptan [r. 1697-1727] General Chereng Dondub the Elder [d. 1737] Major Works Cited: Perdue, Peter C. (2009). China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Spence, Jonathan D. "The K'ang-Hsi Reign" in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 9: The Ch'ing Dynasty, Part 1: To 1800. Wakeman, Frederic Evans. The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order In Seventeenth-Century China. Wakeman, Frederic Evans. "Romantics,Stoics, and Martyrs In Seventeenth Century China" in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history.

Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 270. From Russia, Rome, and Ningxia, with love. Now Galdan is dead, and his followers have come back to our allegiance. My great task is done. In two years I made three journeys, across deserts combed by wind and bathed with rain, eating every other day in the barren and uninhabited deserts.

One could have called it a hardship, but I never called it that. People all shun such things, but I did not shun them. The constant journeying and hardship has led to this great achievement. I would never have said such a thing had it not been for Galdan. Now, heaven, earth, and ancestors have protected me and brought me this achievement. As for my own life, one can say it is happy. One can say it is fulfilled. One can say I have what I want.

In a few days, in the palace, I shall tell you all about it myself. It is hard to tell it with brush and ink. These are just the main points. The Kangxi Emperor, writing to his son and heir from his mobile war camp outside of Ningxia, June 1697. In our last Qing Dynasty episode, we covered most of the major points of the War of the Three Futatories, which pitted the young and vigorous Kangxi Emperor against three of his most powerful vassal lords in southern China, the ultimately defeated and doomed Wu Sangui, Shang Kexi, and Geng Jingzhong in the 1670s. Today, before moving on to our next section of this ongoing consolidation project along the northern borders, though, I'd on to our next section of this ongoing consolidation project along the

northern borders, though, I'd like to take a brief look back at another player in the southern drama of the feudatories to see it from a somewhat different perspective, that of a man called Fang Chengmo, a Qing loyalist to the very end. Fang Chengmo, son of Fang Wancheng and one of the first scholar-official Chinese bannermen to be selected to enter the three inner courts, had been made a reader into the historiography court after the Xunzhi Emperor died. Cheng Mo was never a healthy man and had requested sick leave in 1664, but was turned down by the Oboi regents because of the nearly unanimous opinion of his other fellow officials who knew of Fang's fine reputation that he had to be kept in government. This was a pattern that was to be repeated. In 1668, Fan was given his first provincial assignment, to become the governor of Zhejiang.

His concern for famine relief, tax reduction, and post-war land reclamation led him to take extensive tours of the province, which only served to physically weaken him even more. But once again, when he requested in 1671 to be allowed to take some sick leave, the public requests to keep him in office were so numerous that Kangxi again turned down his plea. In fact, during the winter of the following year, Fan was promoted again to the Governor-Generalship of Fujian. Instead of proceeding directly south, however, Fang Shunmo now asked for an imperial audience, reaching Beijing late in the summer of 1673. Kang Qi received him with a great concern, and a physician was sent from the court to see to his illness before the audience, and when Fang Chengmo presented himself at the palace,

he was greeted with warmth and affection. Now, by this point, the emperor had already received Geng Jingzhong's resignation, and so told Fang Chengmo of his intention to dissolve the feudatory altogether and recall Geng to the capital. Fan's assignment was obviously a difficult one under such delicate circumstances, and as such, Kangxi was sure to see his governor general off with special attention and fanfare. Upon his leaving, Governor General Fan was presented with clothes which the emperor himself had worn, with horses, and with a private bodyguard of 80 Mongol soldiers. It was only a short time after Fang Chengmo reached Fuzhou and to take on his new post that news came of Wu Sangui's rebellion. While Geng Jingzong showed signs of restlessness, Fan tried rapidly to build up his own military force as the province's governor general.

He asked the throne for permission to cease disbanding forces in the province, suggested the formation of Tuntian military colonies under his official supervision, and requested that Geng be ordered to transfer two companies to his own personal command. But it soon became obvious that Geng was likely to move before these measures could be actually carried out. Fan Chengmo thought of summoning the garrison commanders throughout the province to Fuzhou on the pretext of reviewing them as a new governor-general, and at one point even tried to flee to Zhangzhou or Quanzhou, where he might escape Geng's military forces. On April 21, 1674, however, Geng took up arms against the Qing, pronouncing himself as marshal

of his armies and restoring Ming customs in Fuzhou. Fang Chengmo and his followers were seized and then thrown into prison, and Geng sent one wing of his army under Zheng Yangxin into Zhejiang, where it broke through to the coast in June and personally led another wing into Jiangxi, reaching Poyang Lake by the end of July 1674. Meanwhile, at Chaozhou, across the southern border in Guangdong, General Liu Jingzhong joined with Geng's rebellion on May 25th, 1674. The Kangxi Emperor's reaction was initially conciliatory. On July 4th, the throne issued a special decree promising Geng Jingzhong a pardon and high position if he surrendered.

The Emperor's great fear, of course, was that Geng would now ally himself with the Taiwanese-based forces of Zheng Jing, Koxinga's son. Fortunately for the Manchus, Geng and Zheng were not able to come to terms. In fact, in 1674 and 1676, because of disagreements over previous exchanges, Zheng Jing's naval forces actually raided Amoy and other cities along the Fujian coastline. At the time of the initial uprising, however, this was not a likely outcome, and the court in Beijing waited anxiously for a response. When there was none forthcoming, on July 28, 1674, forces of the Green Standard Regiment were detached from Jiangnan to Hangzhou, and overall responsibility for the campaigns against Geng was given to Nurhaci's grandson, Giesu, the Prince Kang. Nevertheless, General Zhenyangxing's soldiers were doing so well in

their attacks on northern parts of the province, by the end of the year, only Hangzhou remained in Giesu's hands, and Geng Jingzhong was gaining so many victories in eastern Jiangxi that Kangxi actually considered coming to terms with the Zheng regime in Taiwan. That summer and fall of 1674, then, saw the dynasty at its lowest point since the capture of Beijing three decades earlier. Most of South China was in the hands of the rebels. Wu Sangui was suggesting that Kangxi either commit suicide or return to the northeast where he would be allowed to take Korea for himself. And even the Dalai Lama was proposing that China be partitioned at the Yangtze River like it was the Three Kingdoms or something. Yet it must be said that even at this low watermark for the Kangxi government,

the Manchus yet retained the loyalty of the vast majority of Han Chinese overall. Partly, this was because of the spectacle of Wu Sangui, who had betrayed the Ming for the Qing and now was turning coat again in the most opportunistic way possible, which was so distasteful. Moreover, Wu Sangui's rates of taxation were known to be onerous on the population, to the point of crushing. And in the northwest, Wang Fuchun found it nearly impossible to find other food or reinforcements for his army. In 1675, then, the civil war was really only tactically being won by the three feudatories. The strategic balance would be determined by the material resources of each side, plus the ability of Kangxi to retain the allegiance of his Han field

commanders, especially in the strategic northwest from which the main thrust downward into Sichuan and Hubei would have to come. In 1676, thanks to the crucial support of the key Chinese green standard and banner commanders of the northwestern provinces, the strategic balance began to shift in favor of the Qing throne. On July 11th, beleaguered and impoverished, Wang Fucheng surrendered to the Qing, opening the way for a government attack upon Sichuan and releasing troops for Hubei to be used against Wu Sangui, who to this point continued to keep the Governor General Fang Chengmo in prison within Fuzhou. When he and his men had been first thrown into jail in 1674, Fan Chengmo had tried to starve himself to death and thus end his life immediately. Before long, however, he changed his

mind. It wasn't so much that he changed his mind about martyrdom, it was just that starving to death was too underwhelming of a way to go. Rather, as the weeks and then months of captivity passed, Fan began to prepare himself for a more spiritually transcending martyrdom. To those around him, his fellow imprisoned secretaries and followers, he spoke aloud of his hopes that the Buddha himself would deliver them through their ordeal. Practicing meditation, he also used tombs like Biqiu, which is a Buddhist mendicant capable of performing miracles, and Shaman, or a Buddhist monk, to describe himself and his followers. And on the walls of his cell, which he called Menggu, or Valley of Darkness, Fang Chengmo wrote in charcoal of the great Qu Yuan of the 3rd century BC,

that famous warring state official from Qu who, upon being unable to prevent the chaos embroiling his country, ultimately committed suicide in protest by wading into the Miluo River while carrying a stone, and who still is honored annually as a part of the Dragon Boat Festival. Fan Chengmo read and re-read Qu Yuan's most famous poem, Li Sao, or The Lament. The whole poem is some 373 lines long, making it one of the longest poems ever yet recovered from pre-imperial China. All of which is to say, I will not be reading the whole thing here, but here's an excerpt from the end. Quote, It is now done. In all the kingdom there is no man, no man who knows me. Then why should I care for that city, my home? Since no one will join me in making good rule,

I will go off to seek where Peng and Xian dwell. End quote. Fan Chengmo was especially obsessed with Qu Yuan's self-sacrifice, and he again and again discussed the suicide with one of his secretaries, a man named Ji Yongren, who stimulated his fascination for that haunting southern poet statesman.

Qu Yuan, Fan posited, by taking his own life, had achieved a special kind of spiritual and historical immortality, a destiny Fan Chengmo now considered to be his own as well. He wrote to Ji Yongren, In his prison cell, Fan began to regard his own clothing, which again had been given to him personally by the emperor,

as symbols of Confucian loyalty and of familial piety. On the first and fifteenth day of each month, Fan would put on the hat which the emperor had given him and on the garment that he'd been wearing the last time he'd been seen with his mother, making obeisances of loyalty to his ruler and of piety to his parents. His frail and sickly body became for him a vessel of sacrifice to the two supreme objects of his intense devotion. Quote, My body has been given to the service of my ruler. The body that belongs to my parents is now the body that belongs to my ruler. The ancients have said, When the ruler is distressed, the minister is ashamed. When the

ruler is ashamed, the minister dies. End quote. While Fan Chengmo passed his days inside the Fuzhou prison nurturing his will to achieve Confucian martyrdom as an exemplary Qing loyalist, his captor, Geng Jingzong, was learning that Jiesu had moved south against Ma Jiayu's forces at Chuzhou. In September 1676, the Manchu prince took that city, and Geng Jingzong began to realize that there was very little time remaining for him to come to terms with the Qing commander. If he were to surrender, however, it was important not to have witnesses to his earlier perfidy, capable of testifying against him at some future date. On October 22nd, therefore, Geng ordered that Fang Chengmo and his retainers be killed, and on that night the rebels' executioners entered the prison to carry out their mission. The deadly moment for which Fang Chengmo had been preparing himself for the last 700 days came at last. Garbed in his now sacred hat and robe, he received his executioners with quiet dignity. But when one of them contemptuously knocked from

his head the emperor's hat, Fan's composure turned to rage. His manacled hands flailed out and trapped the blasphemer's throat, the fetters nearly strangling the man before the guards could save him. Then, as the now impressed assassins kept their silence and distance, Fan quietly replaced his hat, arranged his robe, turned to face the direction of Beijing, and knelt. Slowly, he performed nine kowtows, offering his body in sacrifice, as he praised aloud his mother and his ruler in the capital to the north.

It was only when Fan Chengmo had completed his ritual that the assassins stepped forward and cut him down. That same night, they killed 53 of his followers, and the next morning they tried to conceal their deed by secretly taking the corpses to a deserted area and burning them. A few weeks later, after the city of Yanping fell to Giesu on November 9th, 1676, Gan Jingzhong surrendered to the Qing and offered to support its cause against the other feudatories. With the imbroglio of the southern feudatories finally put to bed, the Kangxi Emperor, now nearing his 30th birthday, at last had enough breathing space to, hmm, pivot and face the other border and territorial disputes threatening the consolidation of his great empire. At this point, he and his bannermen

would trade the jungles and mountains of Yunnan and Fujian for the hills and steppes of northern Manchuria and Mongolia. However, they would not be facing only the tribes and banners of their former fellow step-riders, but a new, and to at least this point in Chinese and Manchurian history, alien force that had been steadily advancing eastward in an empire building all their own for the prior century. They had just conquered the Siberian tribes, and thereby hit the Pacific Ocean at a cost as of the 1640s, right about the same time that the Manchus were neck-deep in conquering China itself. Little wonder, then, that it took the Qing government a fair amount of time to notice, much less turn and attempt to counter,

this now looming threat to their sparsely populated ancestral homelands along the banks of the Amur River. Yet, by the bye, the Kangxi Emperor would, now for the first time, be dealing with the Russians directly, under the banner of the several Romanov Tsars throughout this period. First, Alexis the Quietest, who ran from 1645 to 1676, but then his three sons, first Theodore III from 1676 to 1682, then his younger brother, Ivan V, from 1682 to 1696, alongside both of their younger half-brother, he who would eventually be known as Peter the Great, until Ivan's death, at which point it would just be Peter from then on out. Regardless, none of these Russian potentates would be abandoning their post in Moscow to oversee this far-flung series of border skirmishes at the frozen edge of the world. So, sorry, but we're not going to have Peter the Great sitting across the table from the Kangxi Emperor hashing out some treaty. Oh well.

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The History of Egypt podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, apps, and websites. Come, visit ancient Egypt and experience a legendary culture. Domestic consolidation and frontier stability were intimately linked as aspects of politics in the Kangxi Emperor's thinking. Soon after chain troops captured Taiwan in 1683, the Emperor began to direct his energies toward the problems with Russia on the northern border. He underscored his sense of the interconnectedness between the earlier anti-rebel campaigns and the projected

Russian ones by summoning two officers who had served under Zheng Chenggong and under Wu Songhui respectively, and ordering them to join the forces of Duke Pengchun in Ninggueta. These officers were accompanied by 500 soldiers who had been part of Zheng's Taiwan garrison force. Qing-Russian relations during this period passed through three distinct phases, first awareness, then confrontation, and finally settlement. It was only in the mid-17th century that the Russians became aware that the Qing had conquered China and that the Amur regions were therefore controlled by the emperor in Beijing. At the same time, the Qing gradually realized that the Tsar of Oluosi,

that is to say, Mandarin for Russia, also ruled the Luocha, that is, settlers and raiders in the Amur region. Before this, contact had mainly been between caravan traders, and the Russians knew far more about the Mongols than they did of the Ming. The settlements or cities of Nurchinsk and Albazin were founded in 1658 and 1665, respectively. The early diplomatic contacts reflect this lack of knowledge. A Qing official came to Nurchinsk in 1670 to discuss the problem represented by Gan Timur, a Solun tribesman who'd settled under Russian protection.

In return, the officer in charge of Nurchinsk dispatched the Cossack Milovanov as an envoy with instructions to secure the submission of the Bogdakan, there still being no clear awareness that the Qing Emperor ruled China and the Amur regions. The Spathar-Mileskiu embassy of 1675-76, officially sent by the Tsar, ran into trouble for two reasons once it reached Beijing. First off, the embassy would not kowtow before the Qing Emperor, which is something that would be repeated several times by several different embassies, probably most infamously in the course of the disastrous McCartney Expedition, a little more than a century later as sent by the British

monarchy. The second issue was that it was actually not authorized to discuss territorial problems in the Amur region, which was the one topic that the Qing actually wanted to discuss. Agitated by news of a growing number of settlers moving along the Amur River and around their chansk in Albazin, the Kangxi Emperor sent letters to the Tsar in an attempt to work out the relationship between these settlers and the Russian state. In the absence of good maps on either side, the cumulative pressures from churchmen and civilian settlers, and with the further complicating factors of the numbers of Russian deserters from border stockades, the settlement of grievances was slow and confusing. Qing hostility to the idea of Russian fortifications on the border was implacable,

despite the reasonable benefits accruing from Russian trade. Late in 1682, the Kangxi Emperor ordered Generals Langtan and Pengcun to undertake reconnaissance missions in the Amur region from their carefully prepared and staffed bases in Ninguda and Wula. The result of this foray was the conclusion that 3,000 troops equipped with 20 cannon could probably overwhelm the wooden walls of Albazin, though they would have to be conveyed and serviced by river transport. After various delays, caused in part by the Kangxi Emperor's extreme caution and in part by the incompetence amounting to virtual insubordination by the local commander Sabsu, Albazin was seized on June 26, 1685. Its wooden walls were burned and 600 defenders captured. Most were allowed to retreat

westward to Narchansk. Others, however, were shipped back to Beijing, some by force and some at their own request. There, under the quote-unquote protection of the Qing government, they were merged with a Russian proto-banner company that had been inaugurated in 1685. They were allowed to maintain their own Russian Orthodox church, and in some cases, they took Chinese wives and formed the nucleus of a small Russian community that maintained itself as a kind of commercial and diplomatic listening post into the 19th century. The banner company itself, later in the Kangxi reign, came under the overall command of the powerful Grand Secretary Maa. The Kangxi Emperor had taken

the military logistics of the 1685 Russian campaign extremely seriously, ordering the preparation of grainboats and transportation teams of draft animals, drilling troops in river-based combat, and deploying reserves into the northern regions. He was correspondingly overjoyed at the news of the decisive Qing victory. Therefore, he was all the more astonished to hear that Russian settlers and troops had returned to Albazine in September of 1686, rebuilt the walls, this time with earth, harvested crops, and killed patrolling Qing troops. A new siege of Albazine was ordered, to be directed by Sabsu in conjunction with Ma La and Peng Cun, whose troops were reinforced by veteran troops from Fujian,

presumed to be adept at cannon and river warfare. But the Albazanians defended their fort stubbornly through the summer and autumn of 1686, and late in that year, having received peace feelers in the form of a letter from the Tsar, the Kangxi Emperor ordered the siege raised and decided to seek a diplomatic solution. The Russian and Chinese negotiators met at the mutually agreed-on town of Nertensk in August of 1689. In the absence of qualified interpreters on either side, the Kangxi Emperor selected two Jesuit missionaries, Jean-François Gerbillon and Tomé Perreria, to accompany his delegates, giving them the temporary rank of colonel. With the knowledge of Latin and Manchu, the Jesuits were able to communicate

with both sides in the dispute. The delegation included two of the Kangxi Emperor's uncles, Songgotu and Tongguogang, as well as General Ma La. The Russian staff was led by Fedor Alexeevich Golovin and Ivan Astafyevich Vlaslov, who served respectively as the commanders of Ostrakhan and of Nurchansk. Shuttling between the Manchu and Russian delegations, the two Jesuits prepared a multilingual document that delineated the frontier between Nerchansk and Albazin, stipulated the destruction of Albazin as a settlement, thus giving the Qing a dominating position on the Amur River,

arranged for formalized procedures in handling fugitives, permitted transborder trade to those holding valid passports for that purpose, and agreed that ambassadors would be received by each country in a correct manner. These interlocking agreements had the additional effects of rendering any Russian aid to the border tribes of Olodz extremely unlikely. The Kangxi Emperor, taking great interest in the Albazin campaigns and Nerchansk negotiations, worked over the projected routes in detail and discussed the campaigns at length. From the time that the Treaty of Narcansk was signed, he gradually shifted in his feelings toward the Russians

until he ended up with a distinctly favorable attitude. In 1693, for example, at the time of the Eids mission, he can still note in an edict that Russians are, quote, narrow-minded, obstinate, and their argument is slow. By 1700, he had learned more about them, and was particularly pleased that they had not backed the Olaid Galdan. So he wrote that, the people of Russia are loyal and respectful. In 1712, Tulesen, sent by the Kangxi Emperor as an envoy to Turgut Khan, was instructed to proceed to St. Petersburg if an invitation

was forthcoming, and to, quote, conform to the customs and ceremonies, end quote, of the Russians as necessary. Though nothing did come of these plans, when Izmailov came to Beijing in 1720, the Kangxi Emperor was fairly familiar with such subjects as Russian geography and Russian drinking habits, such as he referred laughingly to the Russian habit of throwing glasses to the ground after a toast, as well as some of the personal idiosyncrasies of Tsar Peter.

Clearly, he'd done his homework. The threat of any Russian alliance with potential enemies of the Qing in the northwest was removed by the Narchangsk Treaty, as the Russians immediately showed by rejecting feelers from the Uluds concerning a joint anti-Qing campaign. The Kangxi Emperor was thus free to now move against Galdan, the leader of the Ullads. Galdan was a brilliant military strategist, who had defeated a broad range of Koshote, Khalkha, and Muslim enemies across a band of country

stretching from Kashgar and Yarkand to Hami and Turfan. That is to say, much of the northwestern border of modern China. Galdan's power was all the more dangerous in that he had been trained as a lama in Lasha under the fifth Dalai Lama, and hence had considerable spiritual authority among the Olads and other devout Buddhist Mongols. And yes, when I say Olads, understand that that is a branch of Mongols. By 1690, Galadhan had moved down the Keralan River into Jehol, and was potentially in a position to threaten Beijing itself. The Kangxi Emperor, perhaps flushed with the military and diplomatic victories of the previous decade,

seems to have seen this new crisis as a chance to further improve his own prestige and that of his ruling house. In what was for him an unprecedented military gesture, in 1690, he commissioned his own two half-brothers, Fu Quan and Chang Ning, as the commanding generals of the anti-Galadan force, dispatching Fu Quan with an army north through the pass of Gubei Ko and Chang Ning with a second force through the Xifeng Ko pass. The emperor also sent his eldest son, Yun Yi, as an assistant to Fu Quan, and was himself preparing to join the forces in the field when he was stricken by illness. This campaign, as it turned out, would be botched, with Galdan holding off the imperial forces at Ulan Butong, and with the Kangxi Emperor's uncle, Tongguogang, among those killed. By 1696, the Kangxi Emperor was ready for another campaign against Galdan, this time assuming personal command of the Qing forces, and again commissioning his two half-brothers as generals.

This time, he made considerably more careful logistical preparations, and delegated most of the power to two of the most outstanding generals of the era, Fi Yanggu, the brother of the Xunji Emperor's beloved consort from the Dongguo clan, who was garrison commander of Guihua Cheng in northwestern Sanshi, and Shunshu Kou, once a bodyguard of the Regent Dorgon and now commander-in-chief at Ningxia in Gangsu. With the exception of the abandoned 1690 adventure, this was the first and only military campaign upon which the Kangxi Emperor embarked in person. Not only had the feud against Galdan apparently taken on the qualities of a personal vendetta, but now at 42 years old, the emperor seemed to

have felt especially bold and healthy. He enjoyed drawing up meticulous rules for the order of march, the conduct of his troops, the pitching of tents, the posting of patrols, the grazing of pack animals, and the tracking of Galdan soldiers via telltale signs of hoof prints and horse dung. In vivid letters to the Empress Dowager Xiao Hui, he described his travels along the Gobi Desert and the conditions of abandoned Olud campsites, where dead women and children lay among the hastily abandoned fishing nets, saddles, leather skins of Kumis, and Buddhist scriptures. In the ensuing battle at Jiao Modo, near the western end of the

Keralan River, Galdan's troops were routed, his wife killed, and his son seized by the Muslim bag of Hami, although Galdan himself escaped were routed, his wife killed, and his son seized by the Muslim bag of Hami, although Galdan himself escaped with a remnant of his army. During the 1696 campaigns, the Qing government had been left in the care of the Kangxi Emperor's second son, the 22-year-old heir apparent Yunzhang, and throughout the campaign, the Emperor showed his concern and affection for his son, as can be seen by their Manchu correspondence. Even if he had some worries about Yunzeng's performance in his duties, the emperor made it clear that he planned to continue the chase of Galdan in the following year.

In the spring of 1697, as the Qing troops pushed further west to the very edges of the Altai Mountains where Galdan had fled, the Kangxi emperor set off again with a smaller retinue. The emperor was in fine spirits, and as a small batch of letters to his favored eunuch Gu Wensheng showed, he took delight in the hard riding, the new foods he tasted, especially the white noodles and sun-dried muskmelons, and a large number of Galdan's former supporters who surrendered to the Qing. The Emperor was near Ningxia when he heard news of Galdan's death, and in a hurried letter to Gu Wensheng on the 17th day of the 4th lunar month 1697, he expressed his joy, which I read at the beginning of this episode, but I will now do so again.

He wrote, quote, Now Galdan is dead, and his followers have come back to our allegiance. My great task is done. In two years, I made three journeys across deserts combed by wind and bathed with rain, eating every other day, and in the barren and uninhabited deserts. One could have called it hardship, but I never called it that. People all shun such things, but I did not shun them. The constant journeying and hardship has led to great achievement.

I would never have said such a thing had it not been for Galdan. Now heaven, earth, and ancestors have protected me and brought me this achievement. As for my own life, one can say it is happy, one can say it is fulfilled, one can say I have what I wanted. In a few days, in the palace, I shall tell you all about it myself. It is hard to tell it with brush and ink. These are just the main points. In a Manchu message to his son, Yun Zheng, the emperor showed concern that the campaign not be seen as the kind of self-glorifying enterprise that Ming emperors had so wastefully and unsuccessfully waged in the northwest a century and more before. Referring to that most feckless and personally immoral of the Ming emperors, the Kangxi emperor told his son that, quote, Clearly, the emperor thought that the Oled problem was solved, and that he had avoided the bungling that had plagued his Ming predecessors. As the Kangxi Emperor celebrated his victories and forged new alliances with the Mongol leaders to consolidate his gains just made by the military

campaigns, he shifted his focus again, now, to the European Catholic missionaries residing in Beijing. The Jesuits, led by Fathers Gherbion and Pereira, had gained significant prestige for their part in the Neuchatn negotiations. This, combined with a high regard that other members in the group of five French Jesuits who had arrived in 1687 had already won for their ongoing help to the emperor in the Bureau of Astronomy and in the field of medicine, such as curing the emperor of his malarial fever in 1693 via quinine. This would make the 1690s the high point of Jesuit initiative and success in the entire history of their China mission. The so-called Edict of Toleration, issued in 1692,

won them permission to preach more widely in China and to build churches in certain cities. Emboldened by these signs of imperial favor and encouraged by the Kangxi Emperor to undertake the effort, Father Joachim Bouvet returned to France from Beijing in 1693 and embarked on a major recruiting effort to bring more Jesuits with scientific and technical skills to China. In a lengthy report on the Kangxi Emperor, written in 1697 and presented to Louis XIV, Bouvet praised the extraordinary martial and moral attainments of the Qing ruler and pointed out that if China were to be converted to the Christian faith within the lifetime of Louis XIV, an act that would bring untold glory on Louis himself, it would only be by reaching the heart of the Kangxi Emperor using the technical achievements of Western civilization.

As Bouvet expressed it, quote, The experience of more than a century has made us realize that the scientists are the principal natural means that God has wished missionaries to use, up to the present time, to introduce and to plant a true faith in China. This emperor being absolute, one can say that his conversion would have such a powerful effect that in its wake would follow the conversion of the whole of this vast empire. End quote. The success of Buffet's venture, which resulted in the return of the Amphitrite in 1698, brought several talented French Jesuits to China.

It was followed by a second voyage on the same vessel by Jean de Fontenay, who returned in 1701 with eight more missionaries. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Western scientific concepts were being heard at the Qing court. The Jesuits laid missionary work on a firm layer of technical and mathematical expertise. By the 1690s, mathematicians like Mei Wending were collaborating with senior officials like Li Guangdi on calendrical and other works. Mei wrote detailed treatises comparing Western and Chinese systems of calculation and tried to sort out what he considered were the superior aspects of Western techniques. At the same time, provincial Chinese generals had learned enough about firearms to be manufacturing their own.

Craftsmen in Beijing were making clocks, which the Kangxi Emperor considered better than imported ones. The Kangxi Emperor's role in the dissemination of the Western mathematics and his own skill in this discipline were widely written up by the Jesuits in their letters back to Europe. The Jesuits had their own reasons for portraying the Kangxi Emperor as a sage ruler on the verge of conversion to Christianity, and it's almost certain that his knowledge was much less than they claimed. Nevertheless, even if we work strictly within the limits of Chinese source materials, we find that the Kangxi Emperor made attempts to patronize Western science. He consistently appointed Jesuit astronomers to the calendrical departments in Beijing,

and read and commented on Mei Wending's work, and summoned Mei's grandson to come and work at court. He publicly praised Western algebra, and showed how it could be used to increase the accuracy of local land surveys. He conducted experiments in connection with river conservancy, in which his sons and various senior officials were introduced to the basic science of surveying and the calculation of water volumes and currents. And he learned to play some western music on the harpsichord. Ironically, at the moment of greatest success, the Jesuit role was already being undercut from within the church establishment itself. Angered, it reports that Jesuits in China were going even further than Matteo Ricci a century before in accommodating Christian practices to the Chinese rites. In 1701, Pope Clement XI ordered a special papal legation,

led by Bishop and later Cardinal Maillard de Tournon, to go to China and investigate the situation there. The de Tournon mission, which arrived in Beijing in December of 1705, precipitated a crisis in which the Kangxi Emperor, sensing a threat to the whole spectrum of imperial prerogatives in the Pope's claims to spiritual primacy over the Jesuits in China, angrily backtracked from his former policies and demanded that the Jesuits in China accept his own interpretations of the correct stance towards rites and ceremonies. A series of well-documented first-hand accounts of these meetings in Chinese, Manchu, and various Western languages

gives us good insight into the tougher and more intransigent side of the Kangxi Emperor's character, as well as his mounting anger towards Maier de Tonon and de Tonon's incompetent assistants. The results for the Jesuits was about as catastrophic as you could possibly imagine, and it amounted to a binary choice, which in just about any other context would be a schismatic event for the church. It amounted to either signing a certificate of acceptance of the Kangxi Emperor's pronouncement on the rites, which were known as the Piao, in which case they faced excommunication, or they could refuse to sign the Piao and face expulsion from Great Qing entirely.

For the emperor himself, the confrontation reinforced the view that foreigners from the West were interfering meddlers who must be subject to the direction of the Qing court and not allowed to gain an independence that they would only abuse. He maintained the same tough attitude with another papal legate, Cardinal Mezzobarba, who came to Beijing in 1620 in an attempt to reopen the issue. The Jesuits, accordingly, became more than ever court figures after 1706, washed over and ordered around by the staff of the imperial household and performing services on demand for the emperor. Other Westerners who came to Beijing at this time, such as the Dutch and the Portuguese, far from being allowed the small measure of initiative and trade that the Russians had been allowed after Nechansk, were closely supervised and limited in scope. The previously

conventional tributary system that was instituted in Canton, as far away from Beijing as possible, was similarly circumscribed and supervised, and much of the extra revenues accruing were treated as imperial perquisites and flowed directly into the imperial household treasury. Handling Western relations in the Kangxi reign period never gained the status of foreign policy to be managed by the bureaucracy. It remained a matter of court affairs, designed for the emperor's personal edification, amusement, or enrichment. The emperor's Manchu language exchanges with his court officials in the Wuyingtian, who were specifically assigned to handle Westerners, show his skepticism over the

Westerners' levels of Chinese scholarship. Even Father Bouvet's life work on the I Ching, which the Jesuit himself regarded as the pinnacle of his attainments, was described by the emperor in his private comments as an essentially incomprehensible jumble of misunderstood textual and historical references. The emperor remained watchful enough to instruct his agents to find out which Chinese scholars, if any, were helping the Frenchman with his scholarship. In fairness to the foreigners, it should be added that the emperor also considered a bilingual Manchu Chinese edition of the I Ching prepared by his own court scholars at the time to be, quote, a complete muddle or shunhu tu, end quote. Beijing palace organization, and if the Russians received embassies like that of Tulesan with tactful politeness while building up their modest religious and linguistic presence in Beijing, the same was by no means true of the Uluds in the northwest. The defeat of Galdan,

apparently so triumphant in its completeness, gave the Qing forces only a brief respite. In 1715, the new Ulud leader, Tsowang Arap Tan, attacked Khammy in force. In 1717, his cousin, Charyang Dondob, achieved the astonishing feat of marching an army through the Kunlun Mountains and seizing control of Tibet. Having failed to gain control of the new Dalai Lama, who was held captive by Qing forces in Sining, or to control his own troops who looted Lamist temples and homes, Tseung Arop Tan could not use Lamism as a cohesive device for the scattered Olaz to reawaken the possibility of a major alliance with the Mongols that might have in some way be turned against the Qing. Nevertheless, Charing Don Do's successes galvanized the Kangxi Emperor into action. In 1719, he dispatched his 14th son, Yun Di, to supervise campaigns and sinning in Laja, which Qing forces occupied in 1720.

With the support of both Tibetans and the Kokonor Mongols, the Qing government successfully established its own claimant as the 7th Dalai Lama. After the main armies commanded by Generals Ye Xin and Garbi had withdrawn, the emperor ordered a strong garrison force left in Laja, thus inaugurating the very first period of direct Qing and thus Chinese intervention in Tibetan life and politics. 1720. Several of the Ola Lamas installed by Tsao-Wang Arap-Tan were executed, and sections of eastern Tibet were put under the direct rule of Nian Gung-Yau, the governor-general of Sichuan, who at this time was one of the Kangxi Emperor's favorites. Despite their Tibetan military successes, however, the Qing armies were not able to fully break Olaid power, and even in Tibet itself, there were bitter protests against

the costs of the Qing garrisons. At the time of the Kangxi Emperor's death in 1722, though most of China's borders were certainly secure in a conventional sense, in Tibet and its borderlands, the Qing remained embroiled in a costly and logistically complex struggle from which no easy extrication appeared possible. That is where we will leave it for this time. That is to say, a stabilized Russo-Ching border, Catholic missionaries having overstepped their authority and worn out their welcome, stuffed safely back into their boxed-in cantons by Imperial writ. And so, next time, we will be returning with Kangxi back from his military campaigns across the Northwest Territories to Beijing and the Forbidden City to look at how he,

now in his mid-reign and mid-life, and having consolidated his physical realm, will continue to manage and control it from the throne, and to save it from the political factions. Oh, please save us from the political factions that has ever threatened to tip the precarious peace into chaos. Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters

in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.