Note {2} — Chapter XXXVIII

Note 2.—The history of the Tartar conquerors of China, whether Khitan, Churché, Mongol, or Manchu, has always been the same. For one or two generations the warlike character and manly habits were maintained; and then the intruders, having adopted Chinese manners, ceremonies, literature, and civilization, sank into more than Chinese effeminacy and degradation. We see the custom of employing only female attendants ascribed in a later chapter (lxxvii.) to the Sung Emperors at Kinsay; and the same was the custom of the later Ming emperors, in whose time the imperial palace was said to contain 5000 women. Indeed, the precise custom which this passage describes was in our own day habitually reported of the T’ai-P’ing sovereign during his reign at Nanking: “None but women are allowed in the interior of the Palace, and he is drawn to the audience-chamber in a gilded sacred dragon-car by the ladies.” (Blakiston, p. 42; see also Wilson’s Ever-Victorious Army, p. 41.)