completed when Oubaché and the other princes of his nation arrived at
Gé-hol. In memory of an event which has contributed to make this same
year forever famous in our annals, it has been his Majesty's will to
erect in the same _miao_ a monument which should fix the epoch of the
event and attest its authenticity; he himself composed the words for
the monument and wrote the characters with his own hand. How small
the number of persons that will have an opportunity of seeing and
reading this monument within the walls of the temple in which it is
erected!' Moreover the words of the monumental inscription in De
Quincey's copy of it are hardly what Kien Long would have written or
could have authorized. 'Wandering sheep who have strayed away from the
Celestial Empire in the year 1616' is the expression in De Quincey's
copy for that original secession of the Torgouth Tartars from their
eastern home on the Chinese borders for transference of themselves far
west to Russia, which was repaired and compensated by their return in
1771 under their Khan Oubaché. As distinctly, on the other hand, the
memoir of Kien Long refers the date of the original secession to no
farther back than the reign of his own grandfather, the Emperor Kang
Hi, when Ayouki, the grandfather of Oubaché, was Khan of the
Torgouths, and induced them to part company with their overbearing
kinsmen the Eleuths, and seek refuge within the Russian territories on
the Volga. In the comment of the Chinese mandarin on the Imperial
Memoir the time is more exactly indicated by the statement that the
Torgouths had remained 'more than seventy years' in their Russian
settlements when Oubaché brought them back. This would refer us to
about 1700, or, at farthest, to between 1690 and 1700, for the
secession under Ayouki.

"The discrepancies are partly explained by the fact that De Quincey
followed Bergmann's account,--which account differs avowedly in some