Gray Lock strikes two small forts near…

Nian Gengyao’s father Nian Xialing had served as Viceroy of Huguang from 1692 to 1704.

Nian Gengyao himself had in 1700 become a Jinshi (a successful candidate in the imperial examination) and had been selected a bachelor of the Hanlin Academy.

The Banner company to which the Nian family belonged had in March 1709 been assigned to serve Yinzhen, later the Yongzheng Emperor.

A sister of Nian Gengyao became a concubine of Yinzhen about the same time.

Nian had been appointed Governor of Sichuan in October 1709 and had gradually come to the notice of the Kangxi Emperor.

During the sixteen years of his administration, he had quelled several uprisings of the aborigines west of Sichuan.

He had been made Governor-general of Sichuan in 1718 and had been given power to direct military affairs.

Following the appointment of Yinti, another of Kangxi's sons, as Border Pacification General-in-chief, there had been suggestions about Nian's loyalty to Yinzhen.

As General Who Secures the West, Nian Gengyao had taken an active part in supplying Yinti's campaign in Tibet against Tsewang Rabtan.

He had been granted an audience with the elderly Emperor at Rehe in June 1721 and subsequently raised to the rank of Governor-general of Sichuan and Shaanxi.

The new emperor displays a great amount of trust in Han Chinese officials, and appoints many of his protégés to prestigious positions.

After Yinzhen’s ascension to the throne as the Yongzheng Emperor, he grants an audience to Nian Gengyao early in 1723 and awards him a minor hereditary rank and the title of Grand Guardian, and makes his elder brother Nian Xiyao Governor of Guangdong.

As reward for his help in ejecting the Dzungars from Tibet, Nian is elevated z few months later to a duke of the third class.

The Emperor is uncharacteristically informal with him and promotes friendship between Nian and Longkedo, an eminent Manchu-Chinese official.

Longkedo, the third son of Tong Guowei and the younger brother of Kangxi Emperor's third Empress consort, Empress Xiaoyiren, Longkodo had been the Minister in charge of Lifan Yuan during the late Kangxi years, and, concurrently, the General Commandant of the Gendarmerie in Beijing, thus having the military power to control the capital region in times of crises.

His military power makes him an obvious scapegoat in conspiracies, and the Yongzheng Emperor is deeply suspicious of him.

The biggest mystery surrounding Longkodo is the exclusive attention given him by the late Kangxi Emperor during his dying days.

His military support had ensured a non-violent transfer of power between Kangxi and Yongzheng.

After Yongzheng ascended the throne, Longkodo had been given a position on the four-person imperial council, and is the President of the Board of Governance.

Nian becomes commander-in-chief of the forces sent in 1723, to quell the uprising of the Khoshotes of Qinghai under Lobdzan Dandzin.

With the help of the general Yue Zhongqi, Nian wins several victories over the rebels and in a few months quells the revolt, adding Qinghai to the Qing empire.

Nian is thereupon raised to a duke of the first class.

Perm', situated on the banks of the Kama River at the foot of the Ural Mountains, had been first mentioned as a village, Yegoshikha, in 1647, but the history of the modern city of Perm begins with the development of the Ural region by Peter of Russia.

Vasily Tatishchev, appointed by the Russian Tsar, as a chief manager of Ural factories, founds Perm on May 15, 1723, together with ...

...another major center of the Ural region, Yekaterinburg.

The first mention of the town of Khotchino, lying lying fifteen miles (twenty-four kilometers) southwest of St. Petersburg, dates from 1499, when it had been a possession of Novgorod.

Later it had belonged to Livonia and Sweden.

It had been returned to Russia after 1721and in the 1720s belongs to the sister of Peter I the Great, Natalia.

Russia had been territorially divided in 1708, in order to create a more flexible system of control by the central power, into eight guberny, or governments, each under a governor appointed by the tsar and vested with administrative, military, and judicial authority.

These guberny in 1719 had been dissolved into fifty provintsy, or provinces, which in turn had been subdivided into districts.

The census of 1722, however, is followed by the substitution of a poll tax for the previous hearth tax; and this provokes a wave of popular discontent, against which Peter decides to distribute the army regiments (released from active service by the Peace of Nystad) in garrisons throughout the country and to make their maintenance obligatory on the local populations.

Thus comes into being the “regimental districts,” which do not coincide with the administrative.

The regimental commanders, with their own sphere of jurisdiction and their own requirements, add another layer to the already complex system of local authority.

The philosopher Christian Wolff  is ousted from his first chair at Halle in 1723 in one of the most celebrated academic dramas of the eighteenth century.

Born in Breslau, Silesia, in modest circumstances, Wolff had studied first mathematics and physics at the University of Jena, to which he had soon added philosophy.

He had qualified in 1703, has Privatdozent in the University of Leipzig, where he lectured till 1706, when he had been called as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy to Halle.

He had earlier made the acquaintance of the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, of whose philosophy his own system is a modification.

In Halle, Wolff had limited himself at first to mathematics, but on the departure of a colleague he had added physics, and presently included all the main philosophical disciplines.

The claims that Wolff advanced on behalf of the philosophic reason, however, had appeared impious to his theological colleagues.

Halle is the headquarters of Pietism, which, after a long struggle against Lutheran dogmatism, has itself assumed the characteristics of a new orthodoxy.

Wolff's professed ideal is to base theological truths on evidence of mathematical certitude, and strife with the Pietists had broken out openly in 1721, when Wolff, on the occasion of laying down the office of pro-rector, had delivered an oration "On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese,” in which he had praised the purity of the moral precepts of Confucius, pointing to them as an evidence of the power of human reason to attain by its own efforts to moral truth.

His enemies had gained the ear of the king Frederick William I and represented to him that, if Wolff's determinism were recognized, no soldier who deserted could be punished, since he would only have acted as it was necessarily predetermined that he should.

This so enraged the king that he had at once deprived Wolff of his office, and commanded him to leave Prussian territory within forty-eight hours or be hanged.

Wolff passes into Saxony the same day.

Bono, an Akan state of West Africa, located between the forests of Guinea and the savannas of the Sudan in what is now Brong-Ahafo Region in the Republic of Ghana, had probably been founded about 1450, and its rise was undoubtedly connected with the developing gold trade of Bighu, a Malian Muslim or Dyula commercial center forty miles (sixty-four kilometers) to the northwest.

From there Muslim traders came to Bono soon after its foundation, and many members of the royal household were later converted to Islam.

The kings of Bono are said to have played a major role in the gold-mining industry: both Obunumankoma (flourished from about 1450–75) and 'Ali Kwame (flourished from about 1550 to 60) are thought to have introduced new mining techniques from the western Sudan to the Akan fields, and Owusu Aduam (flourished around 1650) is reported to have completely reorganized the industry.

The gold from the Akan fields, passed through the entrepôts of the western Sudan along the trade routes of the Sahara to the terminal ports of North Africa and from there to Europe and elsewhere.

Bono has engaged in wars with Sumalia Ndewura Jakpa of Gonja and is finally subjugated in 1722–23 by Opoku Ware of the Asante empire.

Louis XV had been betrothed in 1721 to his first cousin, Marianne Victoria of Bourbon, daughter of Philip V of Spain and his second wife Elizabeth Farnese.

The eleven-year-old king had found no interest in the arrival in Paris of his future wife, the three-year-old Spanish infanta, who only bored him.

The young king and the court had in June 1722 returned to Versailles, where they will stay until the end of the reign.

Louis XV had in October of the same year been officially crowned in Reims Cathedral.

The king, as he turns thirteen on February 15, 1723, is declared of majority by the Parlement of Paris, thus ending the Régence.

The king leaves the Duke of Orléans in charge of state affairs.

Cardinal Dubois, close confident of the regent, had made prime minister in 1722, but on the the death of Dubois in August 1723, Orléans becomes first minister; however, he himself dies in December of the same year.

Following the advice of his aged tutor, André-Hercule de Fleury, Louis appoints his cousin Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon, Prince of Condé, to replace the late Orléans.

Louis grants fresh privileges to the Mississippi Company, which had reorganized and opened for business in 1722.

Among these are the monopoly of sale of tobacco and coffee, and the right to organize national lotteries.

It can again tap the capital markets and raise capital by issue of shares and bonds.

Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit sent on a scientific and exploratory mission to Canada, where he had previously stayed, he traveled up the St. Lawrence River in 1720, passed through the Great Lakes, made the portage to the Mississippi River, survived shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico, and visited the island of Santo Domingo.

Returning home to France, he has written Histoire de Saint-Domingue (1730), based on manuscript memoirs of P. Jean-Baptiste Le Pers and original sources, and Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France (1744; in English 1769; tr. J. G. Shea, 1866-1872), the latter especially of permanent value.