I ordered Chouhede to raise
small forts and redoubts at the most important points, and to cause
all the passes to be carefully guarded; and I enjoined on him the duty
of himself getting ready the necessary provisions of every kind inside
these defences.... The Torgouths arrived, and on arriving found
lodgings ready, means of sustenance, and all the conveniences they
could have found in their own proper dwellings. This is not all. Those
principal men among them who had to come personally to do me homage
had their expenses paid, and were honorably conducted, by the imperial
post-road, to the place where I then was. I saw them; I spoke to them;
I invited them to partake with me in the pleasures of the chase; and,
at the end of the number of days appointed for this exercise, they
attended me in my retinue as far as to Ge-hol. There I gave them a
ceremonial banquet and made them the customary presents.... It was at
this Ge-hol, in those charming parts where Kang Hi, my grandfather,
made himself an abode to which he could retire during the hot season,
at the same time that he thus put himself in a situation to be able to
watch with greater care over the welfare of the peoples that are
beyond the western frontiers of the Empire; it was, I say, in those
lovely parts that, after having conquered the whole country of the
Eleuths, I had received the sincere homages of Tchering and his
Tourbeths, who alone among the Eleuths had remained faithful to me.
One has not to go many years back to touch the epoch of that
transaction.
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