Encouraged By
This Success He Sought To Rally Those Tribes To His Side By Imputing
Minister Intentions To Keen Lung.
His emissaries declared that Keen Lung
wished to deprive them all of their rank and authority, and that he had
summoned Amursana to Pekin only for the purpose of deposing him.
To
complete the quarrel, Amursana declared himself King of the Eleuths, and
absolutely independent of China. But the energy and indignation of Keen
Lung soon exposed the hollowness of these designs, and the inadequacy of
Amursana's power and capacity to make good his pretensions. Keen Lung
collected another army larger than that which had placed him on his
throne, to hurl Amursana from the supremacy which had not satisfied him
and which he had grossly abused.
The armies of Keen Lung traversed the Gobi Desert and arrived in Central
Asia, but the incapacity of his generals prevented the campaigns having
those decisive results which he expected. The autocratic Chinese ruler
treated his generals who failed like the fickle French Republic. The
penalty of failure was a public execution. Keen Lung would accept nothing
short of the capture of Amursana as evidence of his victory, and Amursana
escaped to the Kirghiz. His celerity or ingenuity cost the lives of four
respectable Chinese generals, two of whom were executed at Pekin and two
were slain by brigands on their way there to share the same fate.
Emboldened by the inability of the Chinese to capture him, Amursana again
assembled an army and pursued the retiring Chinese across the desert,
where he succeeded in inflicting no inconsiderable loss upon them.
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