Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  The Jiaqing emperor did not have an enviable start to his reign. A broad, heavyset man with a talent for archery, he was left to clean up the problems of corruption and rebellion that had begun to unsettle the empire in his father’s dotage. After the honor of learning in 1795 that Qianlong had chosen him, the fifteenth son, as heir apparent, Jiaqing had been forced to suffer the ignominy of being enthroned in 1796 only to find that all decisions would still be made by his father and his father’s personal advisers like Heshen. Already verging on forty years of age at the time, a conscientious and eager aspirant to the throne, Jiaqing ruled for his first three years in name only, a ceremonial actor openly defied by the ministers of his retired father and treated like a puppet. “When the retired emperor is happy, he is happy,” wrote one observer at court. “When the retired emperor laughs, he laughs.”1 To judge by Jiaqing’s later actions, however, he was clear-eyed enough to see exactly where the worst problems lay. It was just that as long as his father was alive, he was powerless to do anything about them.

  When Qianlong finally died in 1799, one of Jiaqing’s first major acts—only a day after the “supreme retired emperor’s” death—was to order Heshen’s arrest. After a swift and widely publicized trial, the Board of Punishments found the old emperor’s favorite minister guilty of a long list of corruption-related charges and sentenced him to death. In keeping with his rank and the favor of the late emperor, Heshen was allowed to strangle himself with a silk cord—a privilege considered more honorable than, say, beheading. But while his high-profile execution may have been cathartic, serving as a decisive sign that a new emperor was in power, there was little it alone could do to stem the spreading rot of corruption.

  In the trial and its aftermath, Heshen was in effect blamed for all of the sins of the age, as if he alone had managed to drag the entire imperial bureaucracy down into the depths of self-interest and graft during Qianlong’s later years. Documents of the trial, as well as separate assessments of Heshen’s wealth, revealed the truly fantastic scale of his misdeeds. Most pertinent to his execution were the political crimes. Among them: revealing to Jiaqing in advance that Qianlong had chosen him as heir (claiming that it was his own doing, to cultivate the heir apparent’s loyalty); hiding military reports on the White Lotus rebellion from the emperor; removing names from the rosters of officials in line for promotion; and fabricating imperial edicts.2

  But it was the astounding wealth Heshen had accumulated in the course of his two decades in power that really confounded the imagination. First there was his sprawling mansion of 730 rooms, flanked by separate east and west wings with more than 300 rooms each. Then there was his secondary residence, with 620 rooms of its own. There were his landholdings, totaling more than 120,000 acres of productive farmland (nearly two hundred square miles). There were extravagances that hinted at his lavish lifestyle: seventy-two silver place settings for banquets, two hundred pairs of gold chopsticks, five hundred pairs in silver. He had entire storehouses of jewels and jade and ginseng. He owned ten banks, ten pawnshops with millions of taels in capital, and another storehouse just to hold his pearls. One wall of his main residence turned out to be filled with nearly five thousand pounds of pure gold bullion. Forty tons of silver was buried in the basement. He had other stores of silver as well, vast ones including millions of ounces of silver ingots and foreign silver dollars. Estimates of the total value of Heshen’s property reached as high as eight hundred million taels of silver—an impossible sum worth, for comparison, roughly $1.5 billion at the time, or four times the entire gross domestic product of the United States.3 Less sensational (and surely more accurate) figures still put the value of his property at somewhere around eighty million taels—more than the entire treasury surplus that preceded the White Lotus war and enough to make him as wealthy as the emperor himself.

  With Heshen’s very public trial and execution, Jiaqing had an opening to mount a wide-scale campaign against official corruption, which a good number of his advisers wanted to see. Many identified corruption as the greatest danger facing the dynasty, more fundamental even than rebellion, insofar as they blamed corrupt officials for having provoked the White Lotus uprisings in the first place. After making a grand display of punishing Heshen, however, Jiaqing let the campaign peter out. By doing so, he risked allowing the graft-driven government culture to continue unimpeded, but he sensed even greater dangers if he should cast a wider net. He knew how easily an anticorruption campaign could lose control and become a general purge, for almost nobody was innocent. Officials would readily testify against their personal enemies, turning them in for any number of crimes, but there was no way to know where the process would end (or whether, once it was done, it would leave enough honest men of talent behind to run any kind of a government). The Qing administration would get bogged down further, old scores would be settled, and the fractiousness of the officials would only worsen.4

  That did not, however, mean that nothing changed with Heshen’s execution. One subtle but important shift in Jiaqing’s early reign was that Han Chinese scholars—that is, ethnic Chinese Confucians, who had been fully subordinate to the Manchus since the founding of the dynasty—became bolder and more outspoken in addressing the empire’s problems. They started to critique the government’s policies and suggest solutions, even when their advice was not wanted. The Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty had long been suspicious of private Chinese scholarly associations—poetry societies, Confucian academies, and the like—where Han scholars could meet to discuss political problems. Even when they were motivated only by patriotism, they could become antagonistic if their advice was not followed. Such associations had been banned outright in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but under Jiaqing’s reign at the opening of the nineteenth century the climate began to thaw.5

  It was the Heshen case that first provoked the shift. Unhappy with the Jiaqing emperor’s refusal to mount a purge of Heshen’s followers, in 1799 a nervous and insomniac Confucian scholar named Hong Liangji broke with precedent and wrote a bold letter to the Jiaqing emperor demanding reform. The emperor, he wrote, should dig deeper into the problem of corrupt officials. He should restore moral government and redeem the respect that officials had once enjoyed from the public but no longer did. The emperor should choose his advisers more carefully, for he was “frequently misled by buffoons and intimate associates.” Hong Liangji admitted in the course of the harshly critical letter that he did not have sufficient rank to address the emperor directly (a mentor submitted it for him to a prince, who passed it on to the sovereign). But nevertheless he refused to remain quiet: “The country,” he wrote, “cannot be left without someone who dares speak out in the face of opposition.”6 He then went on—for pages upon pages, for thousands of characters—to identify a litany of problems that faced the dynasty, and to spell out how the Jiaqing emperor as a ruler had failed to deal with them.

  Even an emperor who was not, like Jiaqing, anxious about his authority at the start of his proper reign would have bristled at such a cutting and uninvited critique. And so, as his ancestors would have done as well, Jiaqing had Hong Liangji arrested. The Board of Punishments almost immediately sentenced Hong to death for “extreme indecorum.”7 But then Jiaqing had an unexpected change of heart. Instead of allowing the execution to proceed, he instead commuted Hong Liangji’s death sentence and merely banished him to Chinese Turkestan in the far west. By letting him live—even if in exile—he sent a signal that such criticism would be, if not strictly tolerated, at least not punished by death. To other scholars more judicious in holding their tongues, Hong Liangji became a vision of romantic virtue, the archetype of an upright official unafraid to speak the truth to his ruler. As he traveled out to Turkestan for his exile, crowds turned out to cheer for him at every stop along the way. It was, they sensed, the dawn of a new era.8

  To his great credit, Jiaqing realized that he needed advice and guidance, even needed to hear criticism. The disturbances in the empire
were simply too complex and unsettling for him to rule as a confident authoritarian like his father. So in the spring of 1800, half a year after sending Hong Liangji into exile, he pardoned the scholar and allowed him to come back to the capital. Not only that, but Jiaqing also publicly apologized for having punished him in the first place. He had been wrong, the emperor announced, to condemn an honest official who was merely trying to correct his ruler’s faults. Jiaqing let it be known that he had not destroyed the original letter in which Hong Liangji criticized him—in fact, he said, he kept it by his bedside so that he would always be reminded of its contents. There had been a terrible drought that year in Beijing, which, like other natural disasters in China, was taken to be a potential sign of Heaven’s displeasure with the emperor. According to the imperial records, on the day that Jiaqing officially pardoned Hong Liangji, the rain finally began to fall again.9

  The first order of business for the newly empowered sovereign in 1799 was to finish the war against the White Lotus. The day after Qianlong’s death, Jiaqing issued an edict naming the suppression of antigovernment religious sects as the dynasty’s most urgent priority. Although Qianlong’s previous victories over internal rebellions had always been achieved within months, wrote Jiaqing, the White Lotus alone had dragged on for years and cost tens of millions of taels. Jiaqing said that his most important duty was to carry forward the work of his father, whose final days had been haunted by the desire for victory. “I have now received the weight of the empire,” Jiaqing wrote, “and every day that passes with the war still unfinished is a day that I must bear the guilt of being an unfilial son.”10 He railed against the corruption of the military officers in the campaign, accusing them of dragging out the war merely in order to increase their own profits. He laid blame for the insurrection at the feet of the dynasty’s own civil servants, for their extortions from the peasants below them. “The peasants enjoy few fruits from their labor,” wrote Jiaqing in sympathy, “so how can they possibly supply such insatiable demands? It is the local officials who provoked these rebellions.”

  Jiaqing began by removing corrupt and incompetent military officials from command, trying to restore some kind of accountability and integrity to the war effort. The grim reality, though, was that given the circumstances of the time he had an exceptionally thin pool of talent to draw from.11 Most of the great Manchu generals of his father’s generation had passed on or were too old to lead a campaign. Those in the younger generation were comparatively soft from having grown up in such a prosperous age. Among them were a great number tainted by association with Heshen and his network of patronage, who couldn’t be fully trusted. But at least a small number of the old guard remained, the great warriors who had won so many hard-fought campaigns for Qianlong.

  The best of them was a broad-shouldered, chiseled Manchu field commander named Eldemboo. He was fifty-one years old in 1799 when Jiaqing picked him to lead the White Lotus suppression—on the older side to lead a campaign, but he was incorruptible, experienced, and ruthless. He represented the foundations of the Qing dynasty’s military strength—a forceful, hard-bitten man of arms, a concentration of physical power in contrast to the cerebral bureaucrats who governed the empire. He, like those Manchu warriors who had gone before him, was the dark fist of brute strength that lay behind the gentle and refined demeanor of the emperor and his civil officials. Yet so far apart did he live from that cultured world that he could not even read or write in Chinese, only the Manchu language.

  Eldemboo’s career read like a summary of Qianlong’s great expansion of the empire: conscripted in 1768 at the age of twenty to fight the Burmese in southern Yunnan province, he had served in the crushing of an ethnic Tibetan rebellion in Sichuan in the 1770s and a Muslim uprising in Gansu province in 1784. He helped put down a rebellion on Taiwan in 1787, and served in the far west in the early 1790s in major wars against the Gurkhas in Tibet and Nepal. In 1797, promoted to lieutenant general, he led the suppression of the Miao ethnic uprising in Hunan province that preceded the outbreak of the White Lotus. Eldemboo was clean of connections to Heshen, and Jiaqing promoted him to assistant commander of the war against the White Lotus rebels as part of an upper-level recalibration in early 1799. In September of that same year, Jiaqing put him in charge of the entire campaign.12

  The fundamental problem for the government’s campaign was mobility. The rebels needed little more than hand weapons, and they could get everything else they required from villages as they traveled. When on the move, they didn’t need elaborate camps, and they were accustomed to the landscape of mountains and heavy forests. They could come and go like birds. The government troops, on the other hand, were far larger in number, and plundered from villagers at their own peril, so they had to carry all of their food with them—along with their matchlock muskets, powder, shot, bows, arrows, and all of their other necessities, which meant heavy loads for the regular soldiers, as well as a long train of porters. That wouldn’t be such a hardship if they were experienced, but most of the government soldiers had been transferred from other parts of the empire and were unaccustomed to the mountainous terrain. Their progress through the unforgiving territory where the rebels made their bases was slow and exhausting.13

  As a result, the government commanders in the early part of the war had preferred to set up regular outposts, stationing bodies of soldiers in fixed positions, a lazy strategy that proved nearly useless against the highly mobile bands of rebels who moved through the countryside around them. Even competent officers were loath to take their men in pursuit of the enemy into dangerous territory like the old-growth forests of the Hubei-Sichuan border region (where, it was said, among unseen valleys of ancient trees dating back to the time of “wilderness and chaos,” there were spiders as large as cartwheels that fed on tigers).14 In the winter of 1800 one of Jiaqing’s handpicked generals, a young, bookish Manchu named Nayancheng, explained his reluctance to take his army into these woods. “The rebels’ tracks run here and there but they don’t come out of the ancient forest,” he reported to Jiaqing. “The dense trees block everything and you can’t see more than a hundred feet in any direction. To make it worse, the weather is bitterly cold and the snow drifts reach several feet in places, so we can’t even build fires and burn the woods to flush the rebels out.”15

  Jiaqing was intensely frustrated by the excuses and foot-dragging of his commanders. “Nayancheng’s military force is hardly inadequate,” he responded angrily in this case. “How can you have more than ten thousand crack government troops at your disposal, along with several tens of thousands of militia forces, yet get so bogged down trying to pursue just a couple of thousand rebels into the forest and wipe them out?”16 By the summer, Jiaqing would strip Nayancheng of his military duties and recall him to Beijing, transferring his forces to the command of the veteran Eldemboo—who, unlike the younger and softer generals, was unafraid of harsh terrain and weather, and perfectly willing to endure the same outdoor hardships as his men.17

  The dynasty’s war against the White Lotus was in its essence a counterinsurgent war, and it needed a new strategy to suit the reality that the rebels were deeply blended into—and drew their continued strength from—the local peasant populations. With Qianlong’s passing and the execution of Heshen, Jiaqing was open to a new approach, and the strategy by which Eldemboo would ultimately win the war for him was called jianbi qingye, meaning literally “fortify the walls and clear the countryside.”18 A progenitor of the “strategic hamlet” system used with less effect in the early years of American involvement in the Vietnam War, it relied on two primary efforts. First, to separate off the “good” peasants who were as yet unaffected by the rebels’ ideology and move them into concentrated places of safety—a succession of heavily fortified encampments every ten or twenty miles, known as baozhai (“walls and ramparts”)—where some of them would be armed and trained as a militia to defend the camp. Second, to “clear the countryside” by moving all of the grain harvests and fo
od stores into those same fortified encampments where the people would take refuge, thus denying the rebels any source of food or other supplies.19 The hope was that the rebels, unable to scavenge food from the emptied countryside, would be forced to come out of hiding to engage the far superior armies of the government.20

  Under Eldemboo’s command, the jianbi qingye strategy was implemented widely throughout the war zone. Hundreds of fortified camps were built across the afflicted provinces, with heavy walls and moats to surround them.21 As for the local militias that defended the baozhai, they would not be taken on campaign like the ones that had caused so much trouble in the earlier years of the war. Their only role would be to protect their own families and those of their neighbors, which kept them relatively honest and removed the worst excesses of their forebears: the looting and abusing of local populations, their tendency to collaborate with the rebels. With the “good” population concentrated in their baozhai, defended by their own militia units, Eldemboo’s Manchu and Chinese troops were then free to campaign at will through the afflicted provinces—which, in their cleared state, became an open field for combat. Despite occasional setbacks (which, unlike his predecessors, he reported honestly to the throne), Eldem-boo began racking up a string of victories over the weakened and fragmenting rebel forces.

  By the beginning of 1803, Eldemboo’s campaign had moved into its final phase, the brutal mopping up of the remnants of the broken rebellion and the beginning steps to demilitarize and disarm the local militias. But Jiaqing warned his generals not to relax their vigilance too soon. “Though the main disease is cured,” he wrote, “there are boils and sores that remain.” Jiaqing demanded the complete annihilation of the White Lotus survivors: “If even a single rebel is left alive,” he wrote, “it would be enough for them to keep spreading and growing.”22 They heeded his instructions, ruthlessly, and by the late summer of 1803 Jiaqing’s commanders were finally able to report to him that after eight years of effort the extermination of the White Lotus sects in the main three provinces of the rebellion was for all intents and purposes complete.23