He climbed the famous mountain, T`ai-shan, in Shantung, the summit of which had been reached in 219 B.C.
by the famous First Emperor, burner of the books and part builder of the Great Wall, and where a century later another Emperor had instituted the mysterious worship of Heaven and Earth.

The ascent of T`ai-shan had been previously accomplished by only six Emperors in all, the last of whom went up in the year 1008; since K`ang Hsi no further Imperial attempts have been made, so that his will close the list in connexion with the Manchu dynasty.

It was on this occasion too that he visited the tomb of Confucius, also in Shantung.
The vagaries of the Yellow River, named "China's Sorrow" by a later Emperor, were always a source of great anxiety to K`ang Hsi; so much so that he paid a personal visit to the scene, and went carefully into the various plans for keeping the waters to a given course.

Besides causing frequently recurring floods, with immense loss of life and property, this river has a way of changing unexpectedly its bed; so lately as 1856, it turned off at right angles near the city of K`ai-feng, in Honan, and instead of emptying itself into the Yellow Sea about latitude 34ｺ, found a new outlet in the Gulf of Peichili, latitude 38ｺ.
K`ang Hsi several times visited Hangchow, returning to Tientsin by the Grand Canal, a distance of six hundred and ninety miles.

This canal, it will be remembered, was designed and executed under Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century, and helped to form an almost unbroken line of water communication between Peking and Canton.