From The First Day Of His
Illness Its Gravity Seems To Have Been Appreciated, And An Unfavorable
Issue Expected.
On February 25, a grand council was held in the emperor's
bed-chamber, and the emperor wrote in his bed an edict proclaiming his
fourth son his heir and chosen successor.
Taoukwang survived this
important act only a very short time, but the exact date of his death is
uncertain. There is some reason for thinking that his end was hastened by
the outbreak of a fire within the Imperial City, which threatened it with
destruction. 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.
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