Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period/Ho-lin
HO-lin 和琳 (T. 希齋), d. Sept., 1796, a member of the Niuhuru clan and the Plain Red Banner, was the younger brother of the notorious Ho-shên [q. v.]. In 1777 he was made a clerk in the Board of Civil Office and after various promotions was appointed director of a department. In 1786 he was sent to Hangchow as acting superintendent of the Imperial Manufactories. In the following year he was made a censor and later was sent to inspect grain transport along a section of the Grand Canal in Shantung. After remaining at the latter post for five years, he was appointed a vice-president of the Board of War (1791) and, early in 1792, concurrently deputy lieutenant general of the Chinese Plain Blue Banner. In the same year (1792) he was sent to Tibet to assist in the campaign against the Gurkas (see under Fu-k'ang-an), managing for a time the transportation of supplies from Szechwan to the Tibetan armies. Before long he was ordered to assist in the direction of Tibetan civil affairs, and although toward the end of 1792 he was promoted to a presidency in the Board of Works he remained for some time in Tibet as Imperial Resident (1792–94). From 1794 to 1795 he served as governor-general of Szechwan. In 1795 he joined Fu-k'ang-an in the infamous campaign against the Miao, and reported false victories to the emperor who in consequence bestowed upon him many honors, including an hereditary earldom of the first class with the designation Hsüan-yung (宣勇伯). Ho-lin did not live to see the conclusion of the campaign, since he died in September 1796 while with the army in Hunan. His rank was posthumously raised to a dukedom of the first class and his tablet was placed in the Imperial Ancestral Temple. A special shrine was ordered to be erected at his home.
In 1799, however, when Ho-shên's downfall occurred, all of Ho-lin's honors were posthumously taken from him, for the apparently just reason that he had done nothing to merit them, and that they had come to him merely because of the influence of his powerful brother. Ho-lin's son, Fêng-shên-i-mien 豐伸宜(伊)綿 (T. 存谷), who had inherited his father's dukedom in 1796 was deprived of that rank, but was given the minor rank of Yün-ch'i-yü which was later raised to Ch'ing-Ch'ê tu-yü of the third class. A printed copy of Ho-lin's collected poems, entitled 芸香堂詩集 Yün-hsiang t'ang shih-chi, 2 chüan, is preserved in the Library of Congress.
[1/325/6b; 2/29/23b; 3/191/24a; 33/44/11b; Chao-lien [q. v.], Hsiao-t'ing tsa-lu, passim.]
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