e state with
a European power. Jesuit missionaries played a part in the negotiations
as interpreters. Owing to the difficulties of translation the text of
the treaty, in Chinese, Russian, and Manchurian, contained some
obscurities, particulary in regard to the frontier line. Accordingly, in
1727 the Russians asked for a revision of the old treaty. The Chinese
emperor, whose rule name was Yung-cheng, arranged for the negotiations
to be carried on at the frontier, in the town of Kyakhta, in Mongolia,
where after long discussions a new treaty was concluded. Under this
treaty the Russians received permission to set up a legation and a
commercial agency in Peking, and also to maintain a church. This was the
beginning of the foreign Capitulations. From the Chinese point of view
there was nothing special in a facility of this sort. For some fifteen
centuries all the "barbarians" who had to bring tribute had been given
houses in the capital, where their envoys could wait until the emperor
would receive them--usually on New Year's Day. The custom had sprung up
at the reception of the Huns. Moreover, permission had always been given
for envoys to be accompanied by a few merchants, who during the envoy's
stay did a certain amount of business. Furthermore the time had been
when the Uighurs were permitted to set up a temple of their own. At the
time of the permission given to the Russians to set up a "legation", a
similar office was set up (in 1729) for "Uighur" peoples (meaning
Mohammedans), again under the control of an office, called the Office
for Regulation of Barbarians. The Mohammedan office was placed under two
Mohammedan leaders who lived in Peking. The Europeans, however, had
quite different ideas about a "legation", and about the significance of
permission to trade. They regarded this as the opening of diplomatic
relations between states on terms of equality, and the carrying on of
trade as a special privilege, a sort of Capitulation. This reciprocal
misunderstanding produced in the nineteenth century a number of serious
political conflicts. The Europeans charged the Chinese with breach of
treaties, failure to meet their obligations, and other such things,
while the Chinese considered that they had acted with perfect
correctness.

4 _Culture_

In this K'ang-hsi period culture began to flourish again. The emperor
had attracted the gentry, and so the intelligentsia, to his court
because his uneducated Manchus could not