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Updated: June 10, 2025
Although a comparatively small province in comparison to Tobolsk on one side and Yeneseisk on the other, it contains an area of half a million square miles, and, excluding Russia, is bigger than any two countries of Europe together. It contains a rural population of 725,000-130,000 natives, chiefly Tartars and Kalmucs, and 30,000 troops. Here Godfrey was landed, and marched to the prison.
Here he remembered the Germans with whom he fought at Wilno, and be knew that even the Tartars were less cruel. The coming dawn interrupted his thoughts. The day was bright but cold. Evidently Macko felt better, because he was breathing more regularly and more quietly. He did not awaken until the sun was quite warm; then he opened his eyes and said: "I am better. Where are we?"
We travelled near a month after this, the ways being not so good as at first, though still in the dominions of the emperor of China; but lay, for the most part, in villages, some of which were fortified, because of the incursions of the Tartars. The person that I spoke to to get me a camel, would have gone and fetched it for me; but I, like a fool, must be officious, and go myself along with him.
As a durable monument to the mighty exodus of the Kalmucks, the most remarkable circumstance of the kind in the whole history of nations, the emperor Keen Lung ordered to be erected on the banks of the Ily, at the margin of the steppes, a great monument of granite and brass, bearing an inscription to the following effect: By the Will of God, Here, upon the brink of these Deserts, Which from this Point begin and stretch away, Pathless, treeless, waterless, For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many mighty Nations, Rested from their labors and from great afflictions Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall, And by the favor of KEEN LUNG, God's Lieutenant upon Earth, The Ancient Children of the Wilderness, the Torgote Tartars, Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar, Wandering sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial Empire in the year 1616, But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow, Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.
If China in part or in whole was sometimes conquered by Tartars, it is only fair to state that the greatest of the native sovereigns more than once reduced the extramural Tartars to subjection. Between the two races there existed an almost unceasing conflict, which had the effect of civilizing the one and of preventing the other from lapsing into lethargy.
They leave Pulo Condore, designing for Manila, but are driven off from thence, and from the Isle of Prata, by the Winds, and brought upon the Coast of China. Isle of St. John, on the Coast of the Province of Canton; its Soil and Productions, China Hogs, &c. The Inhabitants; and of the Tartars forcing the Chinese to cut off their Hair. Their Habits, and the little Feet of their Women.
Of this slave trade, which flourished down to 1783, when the Crimea was finally conquered and annexed by Russia, we have a graphic account by an eye-witness, a Lithuanian traveller of the sixteenth century. "Ships from Asia," he says, "bring arms, clothes, and horses to the Crimean Tartars, and start on the homeward voyage laden with slaves.
Nobody knew but ourselves what we were pursued for; but as it was usual for the Mogul Tartars to go about in troops in that desert, so the caravans always fortify themselves every night against them, as against armies of robbers; and it was therefore no new thing to be pursued.
Tartars, Mongols, Little Russians, Chinamen, Japanese, French officers, British officers, peasants and fashionable women, schoolboys, officials, actors and artists and business men and priests and sailors and beggars and hawkers and, guarding them all, friendly, urbane, filled with a pleasant self-importance that seemed at that hour the simplest and easiest of attitudes, the Police.
So much were they surprised at our undauntedness, that they retired about a hundred roods from us. In the mean while we loaded our pieces again, and sallying out, secured four or five of their horses, whose riders we found were killed, and perceived them to be Tartars.
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