To repress the rising power in the north, and to smother the life of the young nation, the Peking government resorted to barbarous cruelties and stern coercion, in which bloodshed was continual. Unable to protect the eastern border of Liao Tung, the entire population of three hundred thousand souls, dwelling in four cities and many villages, were removed westward and resettled on new lands. Fortresses were planned, but not finished, in the deserted land, to keep back the restless cavalry raiders from the north. Thus the foundation of the neutral strip of fifty miles was unconsciously laid, and ten thousand square miles of fair and fertile land, west of the Yalu, was abandoned to the wolf and tiger. What it soon became, it has remained until yesterday—a howling wilderness. (See map on page 155.) Unable to meet these cotton-armored raiders in the field, the Ming emperor ordered, and in 1615 consummated, the assassination of their king. This exasperated all the Manchiu tribes to vengeance, and hostilities on a large scale at once began by a southwest movement into Liao Tung. China had now again to face an invasion greater than the Japanese, for this time a whole nation was behind it. Calling on her vassal, the Eastern Kingdom, to send an army of twenty thousand men, she ordered them to join the imperial army at Hing-king. This city, now called Yen-den, lies about seventy miles west of the Yalu River, near the 42d parallel, just beyond what was “the neutral strip,” and inside the palisades erected later. In the battle, which ensued, the Coreans first faced the Manchius. The imperial legions were beaten, and the Coreans, seeing which way the victory would finally turn, deserted from the Chinese side to that of their enemy. This was in 1619.