The High Priest, Ma Tesing, Who May
Be Considered As The Prime Instigator Of The Movement, Was Executed Or
Poisoned In 1874 At The Instigation Of Some Of The Chinese Officials.
Yang
Yuko, the most successful of all the generals, only enjoyed a brief tenure
of power.
It was said that he was dissatisfied with his position as
commander-in-chief, and aspired to a higher rank. He also was summoned to
Pekin, but never got further than Shanghai, where he died, or was removed.
But although quiet gradually descended upon this part of China, it was
long before prosperity followed in its train.
About six years after the first mutterings of discontent among the
Mohammedans in the southwest, disturbances occurred in the northwest
provinces of Shensi and Kansuh, where there had been many thousand
followers of Islam since an early period of Chinese history. They were
generally obedient subjects and sedulous cultivators of the soil; but they
were always liable to sudden ebullitions of fanaticism or of turbulence,
and it was said that during the later years of his reign Keen Lung had
meditated a wholesale execution of the male population above the age of
fifteen. The threat, if ever made, was never carried out, but the report
suffices to show the extent to which danger was apprehended from the
Tungan population. The true origin of the great outbreak in 1862 in Shensi
seems to have been a quarrel between the Chinese and the Mohammedan
militia as to their share of the spoil derived from the defeat and
overthrow of a brigand leader.
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