Page:China and the Manchus.djvu/65

Rh thought for anything beyond war and the chase, and which had not even a written language of its own, should have conferred more benefits upon the student of literature than all the rest of China's Emperors put together. The literature in question is, of course, Chinese literature. Manchu was the court language, spoken as well as written, for many years after 1644, and down to quite recent times all official documents were in duplicate, one copy in Chinese and one in Manchu; but a Manchu literature can hardly be said to exist, beyond translations of all the most important Chinese works. The Manchu dynasty is an admirable illustration of the old story: conquerors taken captive by the conquered.

At this moment, the term "Kʽang Hsi" is daily on the lips of every student of the Chinese language, native or foreign, throughout the empire. This is due to the fact that the Emperor caused to be produced under his own personal superintendence, on a more extensive scale and a more systematic plan than any previous work of the kind, a lexicon of the Chinese language, containing over forty thousand characters, with numerous illustrative phrases chronologically arranged, the spelling of each character according to the method introduced by Buddhist teachers and first used in the third century, the tones, various readings, etc., etc., altogether a great work and still without a rival at the present day. D