the all-healer, has now reconciled the descendants of the innovators to submit to what was originally so detested a custom, and no Chinaman would now feel happy without his pig-tail. [Illustration: FIG. 53.--CHINESE BRONZES. (_Univers Pittoresque._)] Writing of the Chinese before the hated edict was promulgated, Father Alvarez Semedo says: "Men and women alike let their hair, generally black, grow to a great length, which is why the name of the 'kingdom of the people with black hair' is sometimes given to China. The natives," adds this observer, "have little black eyes and small noses; they think our big prominent noses very ugly; the Chinese look upon them in fact as a regular deformity. They grow very small beards, and do not care for them to be thick, all they are anxious about is that they should be black, which is the most common colour; still they do not object to red hair as the people of Thebes used to do; they wear their hair long, and let it grow just as nature makes it, never cutting it. They give more attention to the arrangement of their coiffure than any other nation of the world; they would rather not have a single hair on their chins than lose one from their polls." Now the care expended on their luxuriant locks by the ancestors of the modern Chinese is generally concentrated on the once-hated pig-tail; but in the case of old men with grand-children, on long moustaches, and what is known as the pointed Imperial beard. It is very evident that when the Portuguese father quoted above was in China, the Celestials had never seen the English, whom they call the red devils, on account of the auburn hair of so many of them. Had they done so the author would never have said, "They do not object to red hair!" CHAPTER XIII The Founder of the Ch'ing dynasty--A broken-hearted widower--The Louis XIV. of China--The Will of Kang-Hy--Young-t-Ching appointed his successor--The character of the new Emperor--Mission of Lord Macartney--He refuses to perform the Ko-too, or nine prostrations;--Interview with Young-t-Ching--Results of the Mission to England--Accession of Kien-Long--He resolves to abdicate when he has reigned sixty years--Accession of Taou-Kwang--The beginning of the end--An adopted brother--War against China declared by England--The Pekin Treaty--Prince Hassan goes to visit Queen Victoria--The Regents and Tung-Che--Foreign Ministers compel the young Emperor to receive them. We have already, in telling the story of missionary effort in China, referred to the various Emperors of the reigning dynasty who occupied the throne in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but a few further details will be interesting, throwing as they do a light upon the present state of politics in China, where the Empire is tottering to its fall; menaced by invaders, who, though they come preaching peace, will eventually change the country far more completely than did the fire and sword of the Tartar hordes.