The Times of yesterday has a curiously powerful article on
the fate of the Panthay kingdom, in Western China. The Sultan's capital, Talifoo, was a city strongly fortified, and surrounded at a distance of 30 (?) miles by another line of forts, the vacant space within being employed to grow provisions. The Chinese, with their reorganised army of 200,000 men, partly armed, we believe, with rifles, bought an entrance into the inner ring, and reduced the central city by famine. The Sultan, Soleiman, after poisoning his wives and, it is said, his children—but this must mean female children only—offered to surrender himself, and was carried in his stately palanquin a corpse to the Chinese General's tent. The latter, however, quite unmoved, ordered the slaughter of the whole population, men, women, and children, who, to the number of 50,000, were at once put to death. Colossal crimes of this kind usually bring their own retribution, and we should not wonder if this did, their complete success tempt- ing the ruling Chinese to a similar massacre of all the barbarian strangers in their ports. If it does, Europe will have a great task to perform,—the final termination of this dynasty, followed either by the dismemberment of China, or the elevation of an Emp?ror with a totally different spirit. Does anybody at the India Office know where the paper is in which the Llamas formally offer to conquer China if Lord Auckland will lend them artillery and 10,000 horsemen ? We want nothing of China, if the catastrophe comes, but an island, but that we must have.
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