INTRODUCTORY NOTICES. 
21 
probably the daughter of the Turgut Chief, Ayuka. 1 Tse-Wang-Rabtan 
was no doubt the most powerful chief of the Zunghar dynasty, and he is 
said to have been able to put from 40,000 to 60,000 men in the field. 2 
Tse-Wang-Rabtan’s successor was a son named Galdan Chiring, the 
child of a Durbet wife. On assuming the chiefship, his first act was to 
put his step-mother to death together with all her children. He seems 
then to have taken up the hereditary war of his people against the Mongols 
under Chinese protection, and to have attained some success; but in 1734, 
the strife was terminated by the intervention of the Grand Lama. 3 At the 
accession of Kien Lung to the Chinese throne in 1735, 4 * Galdan Chiring 
sent envoys to Peking to offer tribute and make submission, and for the 
rest of his life ( i.e ., till 1745) lived in peace with the Empire. “ Charmed 
with my benevolence,” writes Kien Lung, “ Galdan was faithful to his 
promises. But Achan, his son, the perfidious Achan, did not follow in his 
footsteps. He advanced with giant strides on a career of crime . . . and 
was regarded by the chiefs of the different hordes as a monster of whom 
it was necessary to purge the earth.” 6 This estimate of the character of 
Galdan Chiring’s successor is borne out by the view of our Turk! author, 
as will be seen below; but there is little to record of him, for his relations 
soon began to conspire against him, and finally capturing him, they put 
out his eyes and threw him into prison. 
The sovereignty over the Zunghars now fell to the chief of the conspira¬ 
tors against Achan, viz., to his half-brother, the son of a concubine of Galdan 
Chiring’s. He was a Lama and his name is usually given as Dardsha, 
though the Emperor Kien Lung, in his memoir, invariably calls him “ the 
Lama Torgui.” Whatever Torgui (or perhaps Torgl) may have signified, 
it seems likely that it was the name by which this chief was usually 
known, for it is also the one—in the form of “ Lama Taji”—by which he 
is spoken of in Muhammad Sadiq’s text. In consequence of his illegiti¬ 
mate birth, Dardsha’s accession was only partially acquiesced in by his 
people, or by the princes of his father’s house, and it was not long before a 
1 Howorth, 1, p. 049. 
8 Ib. t p. 646. 
3 Ib. } p. 649. 
4 The reigns of the three Manchu Emperors of China with whom vve are concerned 
here, were:— 
Kang Hi ....... from 1661 to 1722 
Yung Ching (son) ...... from 1722 to 1735 
Kien Lung (son) ...... from 1735 to 1795 
Those of Kang Hi and Kien Lung are regarded, by the Chinese, as the most glorious 
of modern times, resulting, as they did, in a great extension of the Empire. 
6 Amiot, p. 339. 
