The remembrance of it is yet recent. And now--who could
have predicted it?--when there was the least possible room for
expecting such a thing, and when I had no thought of it, that one of
the branches of the Eleuths which first separated itself from the
trunk, those Torgouths who had voluntarily expatriated themselves to
go and live under a foreign and distant dominion, these same Torgouths
are come of themselves to submit to me of their own good will; and it
happens that it is still at Ge-hol, not far from the venerable spot
where my grandfather's ashes repose, that I have the opportunity,
which I never sought, of admitting them solemnly into the number of my
subjects.'
"Annexed to this general memoir there were some notes, also by the
Emperor, one of them being that description of the sufferings of the
Torgouths on their march, and of the miserable condition in which they
arrived at the Chinese frontier, which De Quincey has quoted at p.
417. Annexed to the Memoir there is also a letter from P. Amiot, one
of the French Jesuit missionaries, dated 'Pe-king, 15th October,
1773,' containing a comment on the memoir of a certain Chinese scholar
and mandarin, Yu-min-tchoung, who had been charged by the Emperor with
the task of seeing the narrative properly preserved in four languages
in a monumental form. It is from this Chinese comment on the Imperial
Memoir that there is the extract at p. 418 as to the miserable
condition of the fugitives.
"On a comparison of De Quincey's splendid paper with the Chinese
documents, several discrepancies present themselves; the most
important of which perhaps are these:--(1) In De Quincey's paper it is
Kien Long himself who first descries the approach of the vast Kalmuck
horde to the frontiers of his dominions.
Pages:
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121