Besides the Cullen Minister, the Uliastai General also governed the four tribes of Khalkha Mongolia in the Northern Desert, while the administrative seat of the Khalkha Left Wing Banner was in Cullen.
The Uliastai General was stationed in Uliastai. The post had been established to suppress the Dzungaria rebellion, and only after the Cullen Minister was appointed did his jurisdiction shrink to the lands west of Cullen. The first Uliastai General was named Celing. He was Genghis Khan's eighteenth-generation descendant and was granted the title Prince Chaoyong for his valor in battle. He guarded the Northern Desert until his death and played an important role in keeping the northern frontier peaceful.
Celing's descendants were raised by the imperial court and became scholars proficient in Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chinese. Although his three sons successively held the post of Uliastai General, none served for long. Those who followed were other Mongol princes and nobles, until in 1780 under Qianlong, Manchus began taking the position.
The Son of Heaven enjoyed every sacred privilege; one could sense this from forms of address such as "Lord of Ten Thousand Years." For an emperor, whether granting privileges or stripping them away, all such power had to rest in his hands alone. All the nation's wealth and revenue were held by the emperor as though they were his private property, because in principle, the entire country belonged to him: "All land beneath Heaven belongs to the king."
Freedom was a completely foreign concept in Great Qing. Officials within the Forbidden City even regarded it as an honor to be "granted" permission to walk in a certain place. To them, Macartney taking a stroll through the Old Summer Palace was deeply "forbidden." Though the Old Summer Palace truly was a garden, no matter how European its Western-style