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CHINA. 



treated him like a common fellow and sent 

 him to Canton to be rid of him. He had no 

 money to pay his traveling expenses, could not 

 go to Canton, and, as he had been generally 

 badly used by his official superiors, he inti- 

 mated his intention of seeking the throne of 

 the kingdom of Anam, to which he claimed to 

 have an hereditary right. He asserted that 

 Anam, under its present government, was a 

 constant menace and danger to China, and this 

 state of things he proposes to put an end to by 

 making himself king. When Anam comes into 

 his hands, he will without the least hesitation 

 pay the tribute which it has been customary 

 for Anam to pay, and freely acknowledge the 

 supremacy of the Ta-Tsing Empire. In October, 

 1878, Li, along with a famous Anamese rebel, 

 gathered together a number of disaffected and 

 unpaid soldiers, set out to recover the throne 

 of his fathers, and notified the Viceroy of Can- 

 ton, Liu-Kunyi, that his designs were not trea- 

 sonable to China. He thereupon proceeded 

 to capture the Chinese city of Tai-Ping-foo, 

 forty miles from the frontier of the Anamese 

 province of Tonquin, and to endear himself to 

 the population by freeing them from all obliga- 

 tion to pay taxes acts somewhat inconsistent 

 with his manifesto to the Tartar General. 

 The Viceroy at once denounced him as a 

 dangerous character, and, thinking his real 

 aim was to make a descent on the turbulent 

 but impoverished provinces of Kweichow and 

 Yunnan, sent three thousand men under four 

 mandarins after him. Seventy-five per cent, 

 of the expedition and three of the commanding 

 officers at once went over to the rebels ; and 

 Li's force, thus augmented, proceeded to cap- 

 ture more Chinese towns. Eventually he 

 moved toward the Tonquin frontier. The 

 Viceroy of Tonquin sent an urgent appeal to 

 the Viceroy of Canton to save him from the 

 rebel, but the Chinese replied that they could 

 do nothing without the imperial sanction. 

 The Imperial Government of Peking merely 

 sent a command that the insurrection be put 

 down at once, and declared that the Viceroy 

 of Canton and the Governor of Kwang-si would 

 beheld responsible for letting a turbulent rebel 

 like Li escape. So an expedition by sea, by 

 way of the fort of Haiphong, was determined 

 on, and in the beginning of December, 1878, 

 a fleet of junks, crowded with soldiery and 

 escorted by three gunboats of foreign type, 

 sailed from Canton. As soon as intelligence 

 of this expedition reached Li, who in the mean 

 while had occupied the southwest districts of 

 Kwang-si and the two frontier divisions of 

 Tonquin, he marched toward the province of 

 Yunnan, no opposition being offered to him any- 

 where. As soon as the government of Hong- 

 Kong was apprised of the outbreak of the in- 

 surrection, the Governor, Mr. Pope Hennessy, 

 forbade the export of arms and munitions of 

 war from Hong-Kong to the mainland. The 

 insurrection was reported at an end in Sep- 

 tember, although Li still remained at large. 



His lieutenant, his family, and his entire stores 

 had fallen into the hands of the Government 

 troops. 



Simultaneously with the insurrection of Li, 

 another rebellion began toward the close of 

 1878 in the island of Hainan, which belongs 

 to the province of Canton, has an area of 

 20,000 square miles, and a population of about 

 2,000,000. The rebellion seems to be a rising 

 of the Hakkas. They are Chinese settlers in 

 the south of China, whose ancestors emigrated 

 many centuries ago from the populous prov- 

 inces of Central and Northern China, and have 

 never been absorbed by the local populations 

 among whom they took up their abode. They 

 do not speak the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, 

 but a patois of mongrel origin ; nor do they, 

 except in rare instances, intermarry with the 

 Chinese of the soil. Some dozen years ago a 

 large number of them, wearied of constant 

 bickerings with their irreconcilable countrymen 

 of the south, migrated to Hainan and settled 

 on government land there. They increased so 

 rapidly that the lands assigned to them are now 

 insufficient for their wants, and this insuffi- 

 ciency of territory and the hostility of the Chi- 

 nese are said to be the chief causes of their 

 rising. In October, 1878, they took up arms 

 to the number of several thousand, and threat- 

 ened the capital, Kiungchow, which is one of 

 the treaty ports, and has a population of about 

 200,000. Hainan is a rich, and on the seaboard 

 districts a fairly prosperous island, which since 

 its opening to foreign trade has developed a 

 most promising trade with Hong-Kong and oth- 

 er ports. They committed horrible atrocities 

 along their line of march, and in January, 1879, 

 defeated the imperial troops within forty miles 

 of Hoihow, the port of Kiungchow. The Tao- 

 tai himself, four officers, and five hundred sol- 

 diers were among the lost. The rebels, how- 

 ever, were repeatedly defeated afterward, and 

 in August finally laid down their arms outside 

 the city of Kiungchow, after mercy had been 

 promised to them. Numbers were deported to 

 Wychow, Hoi-On, and other places, in order 

 to scatter them and prevent their future con- 

 centration in force ; but none, it is said, were 

 executed. The total number of imperial troops 

 dispatched to Hainan to quell the outbreak was 

 twelve hundred, and of these about one hun- 

 dred had fallen in different engagements with 

 the insurgents. The latter are said to have lost 

 upward of a thousand men. 



The province of Kulja, which for a number 

 of years had been administered by Kussia, was 

 restored to China in the latter part of the year. 

 In 1871 the Russian Minister at Peking was 

 instructed by his Government to inform the 

 Chinese authorities that the Russians had been 

 compelled to occupy the province of Kulja by 

 the disorders prevailing among the Mohamme- 

 dans there, and also by the growing strength 

 of the Atalik Ghazi south of the Thian-Shan, 

 both enemies of the Chinese ; but his Govern- 

 ment, he said, had no intention of contesting 



