The Event Was Duly Notified To The Chinese People In A
Proclamation By His Successor, In Which He Dilated On The Virtues Of His
Predecessor, And Expressed The Stereotyped Wish That He Could Have Lived A
Hundred Years.
Taoukwang was in his sixty-ninth year, having been born on September 12,
1781, and the thirty years over which his reign had nearly extended were
among the most eventful, and in some respects the most unfortunate, in the
annals of his country.
When he was a young man, the power of his
grandfather, Keen Lung, was at its pinnacle, but the misfortunes of his
father's reign had prepared him for the greater misfortunes of his own,
and the school of adversity in which he had passed the greater portion of
his life had imbued him only with the disposition to bear calamity, and
not the vigor to grapple with it. Yet Taoukwang was not without many good
points, and he seems to have realized the extent of the national trouble,
and to have felt acutely his inability to retrieve what had been lost. He
was also averse to all unnecessary display, and his expenditure on the
court and himself was less than that of any of his predecessors or
successors. He never wasted the public money on his own person, and that
was a great matter. His habits were simple and manly.
Although Taoukwang's reign had been marked by unqualified misfortune, he
seems to have derived consolation from the belief that the worst was over,
and that as his authority had recovered from such rude shocks it was not
likely to experience anything worse. He had managed to extricate himself
from a foreign war, which was attended with an actual invasion of a most
alarming character, without any diminution of his authority. The symptoms
of internal rebellion which had revealed themselves in more than one
quarter of the empire had not attained any formidable dimensions, and
seemed likely to pass away without endangering the Chinese constitution.
Taoukwang may have hoped that while he had suffered much he had saved his
family and dynasty from more serious calamities, and that on him alone had
fallen the resentment of an offended Heaven. The experience of the next
fifteen years was to show how inaccurately he had measured the situation,
and how far the troubles of the fifteen years following his death were to
exceed those of his reign; for just as he had inherited from his father,
Kiaking, a legacy of trouble, so did he pass on to his son an inheritance
of misfortune and difficulty, rendered all the more onerous by the
pretension of supreme power without the means to support it.
The accession of Prince Yihchoo - who took the name of Hienfung, which
means "great abundance," or "complete prosperity" - to the throne
threatened for a moment to be disturbed by the ambition of his uncle, Hwuy
Wang, who, it will be remembered, had attempted to seize the throne from
his brother Taoukwang. This prince had lived in retirement during the last
years of his brother's reign, and the circumstances which emboldened him
to again put forward his pretensions will not be known until the state
history of the Manchu dynasty is published. His attempt signally failed,
but Hienfung spared his life, while he punished the ministers, Keying and
Muchangah, for their supposed apathy, or secret sympathy with the aspirant
to the imperial office, by dismissing them from their posts. When Hienfung
became emperor he was less than twenty years of age, and one of his first
acts was to confer the title of Prince on his four younger brothers, and
to associate them in the administration with himself. This was a new
departure in the Manchu policy, as all the previous emperors had
systematically kept their brothers in the background. Hienfung's brothers
became known in the order of their ages as Princes Kung, Shun, Chun, and
Fu, and as Hienfung was the fourth son of Taoukwang, they were also
distinguished numerically as the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth
princes. Although Hienfung became emperor at a time of great national
distress, he was so far fortunate that an abundant harvest, in the year
1850, tended to mitigate it, and by having recourse to the common Chinese
practice of "voluntary contributions," a sufficiently large sum was raised
to remove the worst features of the prevailing scarcity and suffering. But
these temporary and local measures could not improve a situation that was
radically bad, or allay a volume of popular discontent that was rapidly
developing into unconcealed rebellion.
An imperial proclamation was drawn up by the Hanlin College in which
Hienfung took upon himself the whole blame of the national misfortunes,
but the crisis had got far beyond a remedy of words. The corruption of the
public service had gradually alienated the sympathies of the people.
Justice and probity had for a time been banished from the civil service of
China. The example of the few men of honor and capacity served but to
bring into more prominent relief the faults of the whole class. Justice
was nowhere to be found; the verdict was sold to the highest bidder. The
guilty, if well provided in worldly goods, escaped scot-free; the poor
suffered for their own frailties as well as the crimes of wealthier
offenders. There was seen the far from uncommon case of individuals
sentenced to death obtaining substitutes for the capital punishment.
Offices were sold to men who had never passed an examination, and who were
wholly illiterate, and the sole value of office was as the means of
extortion. The nation was heavily taxed, but the taxes to the state were
only the smaller part of the sums wrung from the people of the Middle
Kingdom. How was honor, or a sense of duty, to be expected from men who
knew that their term of office must be short, and who had to receive their
purchase money and the anticipated profit before their post was sold again
to some fresh and possibly higher bidder?
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 109 of 188
Words from 110260 to 111272
of 191255