son of barbers. Just so, a soldier's son
becomes a soldier. The armies of the Flowery
Land are composed of the posterity of those
warriors who accompanied the present dynasty
of Tartar emperors, and of those who unsuccessfully
resisted the Mantchou invasion. This causes
the division of the army into the two great
classes of the Tartar and the Chinese soldiery;
the Tartars being subdivided again. Of these
classes the Tartars rank the highest: their
generals take precedence; to their valour is
committed the care of the emperor's person,
the sacred city of Pekin, and the standard
of the Imperial Dragon. They are better
armed and better clad than the Chinese soldier,
and their pay is higher. While a Chinese
soldier of infantry (the cavalry is entirely Tartar)
receives three taels a month, a Tartar foot
soldier receives four, and a trooper four and
a half, besides an allowance for forage. A tael
may average from six to seven shillings. Three
taels a month, or from eighteen to twenty-one
shillings, for a Chinese soldier, at first sight
seems most liberal pay, considering how frugal
the people are, and how cheap the rice, and
fish, and nondescript vegetables on which they
subsist. But, this handsome salary of the
soldier only exists on paper. Probably the
full amount is drawn from the Pekin treasury,
but it melts like snow in the sun, as it passes
through the hands of innumerable officials.
When the clerks are gorged with plunder, the
military mandarin has to be satisfied. Lucky is
the soldier if he receive one tael, or from six to
seven shillings, for his monthly subsistence; and
even this wretched pittance is often months in
arrear. Of course, if this were all he had to
look to, even the proverbial obedience of the
Chinaman would fail; the poor starved wretch
would run away, turn pirate, robber, rebel,
anything. But if the soldier sees but little of the
emperor's money, the emperor asks for but
little of the soldier's time. Accordingly, the
private soldier is in his leisure moments a boatman,
a labourer, or a watchman to merchants'
warehouses and barges. He gets leave of absence,
and helps to gather in the rice and bean crop, for
his relations, or for any one who will pay him.
Here, again, comes in the military mandarin, to
whose hands two-thirds of his men's pay are
sticking already, and he claims a share in the profits
of labour. It is said that Yen-Lin-Ti, the very
general who so chivalrously abandoned the
unhappy city of Nankin to the Taiping rebels,
made a constant practice of hiring out the regiments
under his command, as leaf pickers in the
tea-groves. Imagine the Buffs, or the Forty-
second, employed in agriculture, or working on the
railways, to halve their wages with a prudent
colonel! Also, there are towns, villages, and tracts
of land, which belong to certain hereditary regiments,
and which are farmed and inhabited by
them. A town on the Yang-tse belonged to
the long-descended corporation of the Tartar
Bannermen, who were the privileged guardians
of the "little" Dragon standard, and who,
though numbering ten thousand men, and holding
a strong-walled city, shamefully succumbed
at the first assault of the Taipings, who
butchered them like sheep in the horrible sack of
the place. It was razed, and sown with salt.

The Chinese soldier is very variously armed.
Strict etiquette requires him to be provided
with a shield and a helmet—generally carved
and painted into the shape of some fantastic
monster—two swords, a bow and arrows, a
matchlock, and a spear. But instead of this
embarrassing load or weapons, the soldier has
usually a gun, or a bow, and perhaps a sword:
or, it may be, only a club, like Harlequin's
sword of lath. The defensive part of his equipment
is generally forthcoming; a man may have
a defective matchlock, or bone-tipped arrows, or
a worthless sword; but he has usually a quilted
linen cuirass, a conical wooden helmet carved
into a griffin's head, and a shield of such gaudy
ugliness that it would frighten an English child
into fits. The Tartars have good swords,
however—long, two-edged, and cutting-- and are
mostly well provided with efficient matchlocks,
or, what is almost as good, the national bow.
Their cavalry are reported to be well mounted
and armed with cuirasses of quilted leather, or
brass mail, helmets, long furred boots, and a
perfect arsenal of weapons, chiefly missile.

The Tartar army has several subdivisions.
Besides those numerous Tartar cohorts which
have been naturalised in the rich lowlands,
there are, in the imperial pay, the brigades, or
hordes (Or-da or O-da is the local name), of
the Mongolians, who border on the great
unexplored desert of Sha-mo: or, as the Thibet people
call it, Gobi. There are the tribes of Chinese
Turkistan, said to be singularly warlike and
hardy; the Oghuzes, or Irghuzes, a Mongol
race verging on the valley of the Amoor;
choicest and most valued of all, the horsemen of
Mantchouria, of the same stock as the imperial
family, and who may be called the emperor's
clansmen, the most trusted and faithful of his
followers. These Mantchou troops, who are
reported to consist of two hundred thousand
fighting men, on the lowest computation, form
the emperor's real dependence, furnish his
body-guard, and afford perhaps the only stable
bulwark the imperial dynasty possesses. They
do not, it is said, consist exclusively of
horse, but have a due proportion of infantry
and artillery, well trained by Russian deserters,
who are sure of high pay and good treatment
if competent drill-sergeants. Those were
Mantchou troops who in 1850, on the borders
of China, signally repulsed, by a dauntless front
and a fire of murderous accuracy, the Russian
brigade which was in pursuit of the emigrating
tribes of Kipzak Tartars. Mantchou
troops, and Mantchou troops alone, have hitherto
succeeded in barring the road to Pekin against
the victorious Taiping insurgents, who have twice
threatened to seize the Grand Canal and starve
or storm the capital, but have met with more
than their match. Finally, if unvarying Chinese
information is to be believed, those were Mantchou
veterans who, under their famous general