of this rite by
native Christians, and also praying that the Chinese language might be
used in the celebration of mass. K`ang Hsi supported the Jesuits in
the view that ancestral worship was a harmless ceremony; but after much
wrangling, and the dispatch of a Legate to the Manchu court, the Pope
decided against the Jesuits and their Imperial ally. This was too much
for the pride of K`ang Hsi, and he forthwith declared that in future he
would only allow facilities for preaching to those priests who shared
his view. In 1716, an edict was issued, banishing all missionaries
unless excepted as above. The Emperor had indeed been annoyed by another
ecclesiastical squabble, on a minor scale of importance, which had been
raging almost simultaneously round the choice of an appropriate Chinese
term for God. The term approved, if not suggested, by K`ang Hsi, and
indisputably the right one, as shown by recent research, was set aside
by the Pope in 1704 in favour of one which was supposed for a long time
to have been coined for the purpose, but which had really been applied
for many centuries previously to one of the eight spirits of ancient
mythology.

In addition to his military campaigns, K`ang Hsi carried out several
journeys of considerable length, and managed to see something of the
empire beyond the walls of Peking. He climbed the famous mountain,
T`ai-shan, in Shantung, the summit of which had been reached in 219 B.C.
by the famous First Emperor, burner of the books and part builder of the
Great Wall, and where a century later another Emperor had instituted the
mysterious worship of Heaven and Earth. The ascent of T`ai-shan had been
previously accomplished by only six Emperors in all, the last of whom
went up in the year 1008; since K`ang Hsi no further Imperial attempts
have been made, so that his will close the list in connexion with the
Manchu dynasty. It was on this occasion too that he visited the tomb of
Confucius, also in Shantung.

The vagaries of the Yellow River, named "China's Sorrow" by a later
Emperor, were always a source of great anxiety to K`ang Hsi; so much so
that he paid a personal visit to the scene, and went carefully into the
various plans for keeping the waters to a given course. Besides causing
frequently recurring floods, with immense loss of life and property,
this river has a way of changing unexpectedly its bed; so lately as
1856, it turned off at right angles near the city of K`ai-feng, in
Honan