HIST 270 · Chinese History · Chapter 16 · Lecture 1
The Gate in the Wall: The Banner State, the Conquest, and the Loyalists
Background for the lecture "The Gate in the Wall": Nurhaci and the banners, Hong Taiji's Qing, Shanhaiguan and the conquest, the queue, the loyalists, and the banner garrisons · 1583–1683
Act I: A Banner State (Review Question 1)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 16, "The Manchus," pp. 270–272. Reading-guide sentence (p. 271): "Each banner was made up of a set of military companies but included the families and slaves of the soldiers as well."
Heirs of the Jin
The Manchus descended from the Jurchens, whose Jin dynasty had ruled north China from 1127 until the Mongols destroyed it in 1234 (slide C). By the sixteenth century the Jurchens had lost the Jin script but kept the hairstyle: the front of the head shaved and the rest of the hair worn in a long braid, the queue. They lived in what is loosely called Manchuria, in small settlements along the Ming border, and many of their chiefs held Ming titles and trading licenses. The Ming managed them in the usual frontier way, by rewarding some chiefs and setting them against others.
Ebrey's best evidence for this world comes from a Korean envoy, Sin Ch'ung-il, who visited Nurhaci's headquarters in the winter of 1595–1596 (slide D). He found villages of twenty households or fewer, people who fished, hunted for pelts, gathered pine nuts and ginseng and grew grain, and men who never left home unarmed. He also found that Nurhaci already employed men from Ming Liaodong who could read and write Chinese. The point for students is the one slide G makes: this was a tribal society, in which a man's first loyalty belonged to his own chief. A state builder had to replace that loyalty with loyalty to himself.1
Nurhaci, 1583–1626
Nurhaci (1559–1626) became the leader of one Jianzhou Jurchen group in 1583, at twenty-four, after his father and grandfather were killed in a Ming-backed feud (slide E). Over the next three decades he defeated or absorbed his rivals, married into Mongol and Jurchen ruling houses, and traded ginseng, pearls and furs on a large scale. He knew the Ming well. He led a tribute embassy to Beijing in 1590, and when Japan invaded Korea in 1592 he offered troops to help the Ming. The Ming and the Korean court both declined. Ebrey says he made the offer "the next year" after 1590 (p. 271), which would be 1591, before the invasion began. The offer belongs to 1592, and slide E now gives that year, with the textbook's version in the instructor notes.2
In 1599 Nurhaci had scholars adapt the Mongol alphabet to write the Jurchen language, a script that became Manchu. In 1616 he proclaimed himself khan of a revived Jin state, usually called the Later Jin. Two years later, in 1618, he issued the "Seven Grievances" against the Ming and took the border town of Fushun. Ebrey compresses the two steps into one, saying that in 1616 he "declared war on the Ming Empire by calling himself khan of the revived Jin Dynasty and listing his grievances" (p. 271). The proclamation and the declaration of war were two years apart. In 1619 his armies crushed a large Ming expedition at Sarhu; in 1621 they overran Liaodong; and in 1625 he moved his capital to Mukden (Shenyang). He died in 1626, a few months after his first serious defeat, at Ningyuan, where Ming gunners using European-style cannon bought through Macao held the walls.
The banners
The banners were Nurhaci's central invention (slide H). Each was a large unit identified by a color: yellow, white, red and blue, then the same colors with borders, for eight in all by about 1615. A banner was made up of companies (Manchu niru, "arrow") of a few hundred men, each under a captain whose post was hereditary. As the reading-guide sentence says, a banner held not only soldiers but their families and their slaves. It was at once an army, a register of population, a system of land allotment and a social order. A person was born into a banner, and the banner, not the village or the clan, now organized his life.3
Nurhaci also used the banners to break up old loyalties (slide I). When he defeated another Jurchen group, he distributed its members among several banners "to lessen their potential for subversion" (Ebrey, p. 271). Chinggis Khan had done the same with defeated tribes. The effect was to make the banner chief, and above him the khan, the only patron who mattered. Ebrey's account emphasizes this design. Historians add one qualification: the banner princes, Nurhaci's sons and nephews, each controlled a banner as a kind of property, and much of the politics of the next generation was a struggle between the khan and these princes. Hong Taiji spent his reign reducing their power.
Names, and the state Hong Taiji built
The names in this story are easy to confuse, and slide F sorts them. Jurchen is the older name of the people. Jin was the name of their twelfth-century dynasty and of Nurhaci's revived state of 1616. Manchu (Manju) and Qing were both chosen by Nurhaci's son and successor, Hong Taiji (1592–1643). In 1635 he forbade the old name Jurchen and decreed that his people be called Manju. In 1636 he proclaimed the Qing ("pure") dynasty and took the title of emperor. The textbook's word "adopted" (p. 270) blurs this: the name was imposed by decree, under Hong Taiji, as part of making a new people for a new state. Slide F now dates the name to Hong Taiji's decree of 1635.4
Hong Taiji made the Jin a state on the Chinese model. He set up six boards on the Ming pattern, used Chinese officials while trying to train a multiethnic elite, subdued Korea in 1627 and 1636–1637, and drew the Chahar Mongols into his orbit. He organized Mongol banners and then Chinese banners (Manchu ujen cooha, Chinese Hanjun), made up largely of Liaodong Chinese who had surrendered or been captured. By 1642 there were eight of each, and so by 1644, as slide J says, twenty-four banners in all. The Chinese banners brought something the Manchus lacked: artillery. They cast and served the cannon that would batter Ming walls. Ebrey says Hong Taiji died in 1643 "at age forty-six" (p. 271). He was born in 1592 and died at fifty, as slide NN's notes now say. The more important point, made on slide NN, is that his death left a five-year-old heir, Fulin (the Shunzhi emperor), with Dorgon as regent. At first there were two regents, Dorgon and his cousin Jirgalang, but Dorgon soon pushed Jirgalang aside.
Act II: The Gate and the Choice (Review Question 2)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Manchus" and "Ming Loyalism," pp. 272–273. Reading-guide sentence (p. 272): "Wu opened the gates of the Great Wall to let the Manchus in, and within a couple of weeks they had occupied Beijing."
Beijing, spring 1644
The deck's recap (slide B) carries the story from Chapter 14. The rebel Li Zicheng took Beijing on 25 April 1644, and the Chongzhen emperor hanged himself on Jingshan, the artificial hill just north of the Forbidden City. Tradition places the spot on the hill's eastern slope, below the summit pavilions, and the deck's photograph of the Wanchun Pavilion shows the hill rather than the exact place, as its caption now makes clear. The capital had fallen to Chinese rebels, not to the Manchus. That fact shaped everything that followed, because it let the Qing present themselves as avengers of the Ming emperor.
Shanhaiguan
Wu Sangui (1612–1678), a Liaodong man and the most important Ming commander on the northeast frontier, held the pass at Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. When Beijing fell he was caught between Li Zicheng's army to the west and the Qing to the north (slide L). Ebrey writes that "Dorgon proposed to Wu that they join forces and liberate Beijing" (p. 272). Most accounts put the initiative the other way. Wu wrote to Dorgon asking for help against the rebels. Dorgon, already marching toward the frontier, agreed on terms that amounted to Wu's submission. On 27 May 1644 Li Zicheng attacked Wu at Shanhaiguan. In the middle of the battle the Manchu cavalry, which had come through the pass, struck the rebel flank, and Li's army broke. Li retreated to Beijing, proclaimed himself emperor, looted the city and fled west. On 6 June the Qing entered the capital.5
The reading-guide sentence is therefore true but compressed. The "gate" was not a single act of betrayal so much as a frontier general choosing between two enemies, and the Qing won Beijing in a battle, not a march. Slide L now names the battle and has Wu make the appeal, and its notes give the date. It is worth stressing in lecture, because it explains why Wu became a Qing prince.
The southern campaigns and Yangzhou
Ebrey's next point is that the Manchus "made clear that they intended to conquer the rest of the country" (p. 272; slide M). Ming officials in Nanjing enthroned the Prince of Fu as the Hongguang emperor and hoped, as the Song had done in 1127, to hold the south and buy peace. Dorgon refused any division. Qing armies under Wu Sangui and Manchu princes pursued Li Zicheng, who died in 1645, and Zhang Xianzhong, killed in Sichuan in 1647. Another army under Dorgon's brother Dodo moved on the Yangzi.
The Nanjing court was crippled by factional quarrels, and many of its generals went over to the Qing. Shi Kefa (1601–1645), its minister of war, held Yangzhou (slide N). After a short siege the city fell on 20 May 1645, and Dodo let his troops sack it. Ebrey says the army slaughtered "hundreds of thousands" (p. 273); slide N now speaks of a ten-day sack and a huge, uncounted toll. The figure most often quoted, 800,000 dead, comes from the survivor Wang Xiuchu's Record of Ten Days in Yangzhou, which gives the length of the killing as ten days. Modern historians accept that the massacre was real and enormous but treat the number as unverifiable and probably inflated, since it exceeds any plausible estimate of the city's population even with refugees. Shi Kefa was executed. Nanjing surrendered without a fight in June, and the Hongguang emperor was captured.6
The queue
Slide O is the deck's hinge. Ebrey says that in the summer of 1645 the Manchu command ordered Chinese soldiers to shave their heads, "presumably to make it easier to recognize which side they were on," and that the order "soon" covered all Chinese men (p. 273). The longer history is useful. Dorgon first ordered Chinese to shave when the Qing entered Beijing in 1644, met resistance, and withdrew the order within weeks. After Nanjing fell he reissued it in July 1645 for all men, with a deadline of ten days and a slogan reported in the sources: "Keep your hair and lose your head, or keep your head and lose your hair." The queue became the visible sign of submission, and it remained the law until 1911.7
The order turned surrender into revolt (slide P). Towns in the Yangzi delta that had accepted Qing officials rose when the barbers came. Jiangyin held out for some eighty days; Jiading was sacked three times; Changshu and Kunshan were stormed. Ebrey notes the paradox: the cities were slaughtered not for resisting the conquest but for refusing to shave. For many Chinese men, especially in the educated delta, the hair given them by their parents was a matter of filial duty and of civilization itself. That is why the order mattered more than the change of dynasty.
Resistance to 1683
Ming loyalist courts continued in the south for almost two decades (slide Q). The Longwu emperor was captured in Fujian in 1646. The Prince of Lu held a regency in Zhejiang and later on the islands off the coast. The longest-lived court was that of the Yongli emperor, who retreated through Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan into Burma, from which Wu Sangui brought him back to be killed in Kunming in 1662. On the coast, Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga, 1624–1662), son of a merchant-pirate and a Japanese mother, built a maritime power, failed to take Nanjing in 1659, and in 1661–1662 drove the Dutch East India Company out of Taiwan. He died a few months later, in 1662.
Ebrey writes that Koxinga "was able to hold out in Taiwan until 1683" (p. 273). Koxinga himself never held out on Taiwan for long. His son Zheng Jing ruled the island until 1681, and his grandson Zheng Keshuang surrendered in 1683, after the Qing admiral Shi Lang destroyed the Zheng fleet at the Penghu islands. The correct statement, now on slide Q, is that Koxinga's family held Taiwan until 1683.8
Loyalism of another kind
Slide R defines loyalism as staying faithful to a fallen dynasty by refusing to serve its successor. Song loyalists had done this under the Mongols. In the 1640s the forms ranged from fighting (Shi Kefa, the delta cities, Koxinga) to suicide, to entering Buddhist monasteries, to simply staying home. Ebrey's three examples are men who survived, refused office and wrote (pp. 272–273).
Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) (slide S) was the son of a Donglin official who had died in prison under the eunuch Wei Zhongxian in 1626. Ebrey says he "served the Ming resistance court at Nanjing" (p. 273). That is not quite right. In Nanjing in 1644–1645 he was a target of the court, not its servant: Ruan Dacheng, an enemy of the Donglin, had him and other Restoration Society men arrested, and he got away when the city fell. He then raised a militia in his native Yuyao, in Zhejiang, for the regency of the Prince of Lu, and followed that regime to the offshore islands. After about 1649 he went home and turned to scholarship. His Waiting for the Dawn (Mingyi daifang lu, 1663) argues that the ruler should serve the people, not the other way around; that laws made for the dynasty's benefit are "unlawful laws"; that ministers serve the realm rather than the ruler; and that schools should be places where public questions are freely debated. The deck's notes now place his service in Zhejiang, with the textbook's version in an instructor note.9
Gu Yanwu (1613–1682) (slide T) defended Kunshan in 1645. When the Qing took nearby Changshu, his mother, Madame Wang, fasted for about two weeks and died, leaving him an instruction never to serve the new dynasty. She was in fact his adoptive mother. Betrothed to Gu's uncle, she had refused to marry anyone else when he died before the wedding, and had lived in the Gu household as a "faithful maiden" and raised the adopted boy. Slide T now says "adoptive mother" and links to Lecture 4 slide Z, on girls who remained "widows" of fiancés they had never met. Gu spent the rest of his life traveling in the north, studying geography, defense, taxation, mining and phonology. His Record of Daily Learning (Rizhi lu) attacked abstract philosophizing and argued for practical, evidence-based learning. He is one of the founders of the evidential scholarship of Lecture 4.10
Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) (slide U) had passed the provincial examination under the Ming and was prevented by rebels from reaching Beijing for the metropolitan examination of 1642. He raised troops in Hunan, served briefly at the Yongli court, and then lived in seclusion for forty years. His writings, which were not published until the nineteenth century, combine a materialist philosophy with a fierce cultural nationalism. Ebrey's quotation, on slide U, compares the ruler to ants that guard their nest and keep out outsiders; the deck quotes part of the sentence and marks the omission with an ellipsis. Zeng Guofan printed Wang's collected works in the 1860s, and late Qing revolutionaries read him as a prophet of Han nationalism.11
Pierian Spring: The Conquerors' Grandsons (Review Questions 14 and 4)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Banner System," pp. 277–278. Reading-guide sentences (p. 277): "Outside the cities, lands were expropriated to provide support for the garrisons, some 2 million acres altogether, with the densest area in the region around Beijing" (Q14); and "Yet bannermen were not allowed to pursue occupations other than soldier or official" (Q4).
Garrisons, land and stipends
After 1644 the banners became a permanent occupying army. About half the banner force was stationed in and around Beijing; the rest was spread among garrisons in strategic cities, usually in a walled compound of their own (slide Y). In Beijing the Qing cleared the Chinese population from the northern, Inner City in 1648 and gave it to the banners, while Chinese lived in the southern, Outer City (slide Z). Around the capital the state expropriated land for banner estates, about 2 million acres in Ebrey's figure (slide CC). The enclosures caused great hardship and were halted only in 1669, when the young Kangxi emperor ended them.
Bannermen did not farm in China proper. They lived on stipends paid partly in silver and partly in grain, from birth to death (slide DD). Slide BB's concept of a hereditary occupational caste is the right one. The state gave the conquerors security and privilege and in return forbade them other occupations.
Growth, debt and the Chinese bannermen
The system worked as long as the conquest needed soldiers. Once it was over, banner families multiplied faster than the number of paid positions (slide EE, which now says "many" Chinese bannermen were removed). Stipends were shared among more people, prices rose, and bannermen fell into debt. Officers mortgaged and sold banner land to Chinese buyers despite laws against it, and the court repeatedly spent large sums to redeem it (slide FF). Ebrey adds that by the Qianlong period the problem was serious enough that the emperor "had most of the Chinese bannermen removed from the banner system" (p. 277). The qualification matters. From the 1740s Qianlong did expel large numbers of Chinese bannermen, above all from the provincial garrisons, and turned them into ordinary commoners so that their stipends could go to Manchus. Many Chinese bannermen, especially in Beijing and in the old Liaodong families, remained. The policy also marked a change in what the banners meant: they were being redefined as an ethnic Manchu institution rather than a multiethnic conquest elite.12
Privilege and acculturation
Slides HH and II give the privileges. Quotas let Manchus win more than 5 percent of jinshi degrees though they were never more than about 1 percent of the population, and many posts were reserved for them. In court bannermen came under special jurisdiction and could not be beaten or imprisoned like commoners. Yet by the eighteenth century most bannermen in Beijing spoke the city's Chinese rather than Manchu, and their archery and horsemanship declined (slide KK). Qianlong tried to send city Manchus back to farm in Manchuria (slide JJ), and many slipped away to return to the city. He also lectured his people constantly on the "old way" of language, archery and frugality. Elliott argues that these campaigns show how anxious the court was that Manchus not simply become Chinese, and that being a bannerman, more than speaking Manchu, defined who was a Manchu.
Why the banners stayed loyal
Slide LL ends the story with the paradox Ebrey points to: despite poverty and grievance, the bannermen never turned on the dynasty. Their privileges, their stipends and their identity all depended on it. When the British attacked Zhapu and Zhenjiang in 1842, the banner garrisons fought to the end, and in 1911 several garrisons were massacred by revolutionaries. That loyalty is part of the answer to Q4: the banners declined as a fighting force long before they declined as a pillar of the state.
Corrections and Cautions
Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes
The deck's speaker notes are written for students. The instructor-level detail behind them, where a slide departs from Ebrey and the scholarship it relies on, is collected here, slide by slide.
Notes
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On the Jurchen world before 1616 and on Sin Ch'ung-il's report, see Gertraude Roth Li, "State Building before 1644," in Willard J. Peterson, ed., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 9, part 1, The Ch'ing Empire to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). ↩
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Kenneth M. Swope, A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), discusses Nurhaci's offers of 1592 and 1597 and why they were refused. ↩
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The fundamental modern study is Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). ↩
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On the decree of 1635 and the political meaning of the new name, see Crossley, The Manchus, and Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩
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Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), gives the fullest account of Wu's negotiations and the battle at Shanhaiguan. The popular legend that Wu turned to the Manchus to recover his concubine Chen Yuanyuan comes from Wu Weiye's poem "Song of Yuanyuan" and is best treated as literature. ↩
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Wang Xiuchu's account is translated in Lynn A. Struve, ed. and trans., Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On how Yangzhou rebuilt itself and remembered the massacre, see Tobie Meyer-Fong, Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). ↩
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Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), explains the politics of the queue and why it still mattered to Qianlong a century later. On the orders of 1644 and 1645, see Wakeman, The Great Enterprise. ↩
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Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), tells the conquest of Dutch Taiwan in 1661–1662. On the Southern Ming courts, see Lynn A. Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644–1662 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). ↩
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Huang Zongxi, Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince, trans. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), with a long introduction on Huang's life and thought. ↩
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Willard J. Peterson, "The Life of Ku Yen-wu (1613–1682)," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 114–156, and 29 (1969): 201–247. On faithful maidens and Gu's mother, see Weijing Lu, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). ↩
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On Wang's thought, see Alison Harley Black, Man and Nature in the Philosophical Thought of Wang Fu-chih (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989). ↩
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Elliott, The Manchu Way, on banner finances, the expulsions of Chinese bannermen and the "Manchu way"; Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, on the changing place of the Chinese-martial banners in Qing ideology. ↩
Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation
Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (1985). The great narrative of the conquest, enormous but readable in sections; the best place to look up any event of 1618–1683.
Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus (1997). A short, lively history of the Manchus from the Jurchens to the twentieth century, ideal for students.
Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (2001). The standard work on the banners, their finances and what it meant to be Manchu; the basis for the Pierian Spring.
Lynn A. Struve, ed., Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws (1993). Translated eyewitness accounts of the conquest, including Yangzhou; excellent for primary-source teaching.
Lynn A. Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644–1662 (1984). The loyalist courts and why they failed.
Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony (2011). Koxinga's conquest of Dutch Taiwan, told as military history with a global frame.
Huang Zongxi, Waiting for the Dawn, trans. Wm. Theodore de Bary (1993). The most important loyalist political treatise, short enough to assign in excerpt.
Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers (1990). Includes the clearest short account of why the queue mattered to both sides.