by John Keay
There was a lesson here, and throughout the rest of the century and on into the next, sections of frontier wall were clad in brick or stone and elaborated with crenellated battlements and towers. In the same period, the wall was extended east over the hills north of Beijing and on to the coast in Liaoning. Enormous gateways combining defensive potential with palatial effect were constructed at the main points of ingress. Signal towers, guard posts and subsidiary walls covered the flanks and ranged far afield wherever the terrain required. The work was still going on when in 1619 Ming forces were driven out of most of Manchuria. A new horde, not Mongol but Manchu (as the Jurchen now called themselves), was pressing south, intent on giving the wall its baptism of fire.
In the following year the Wanli emperor (r. 1573–1620), grandson of the rites-obsessed Jiajing emperor, died. The longest reigning of all the Ming emperors, he had been the least effectual. After an early flurry of activity, for thirty years he had ignored the needs of the empire and withdrawn from public life, the better to cultivate extravagance and put on weight. Memorials went unread, posts unfilled, troops unpaid, taxes uncollected. A long war against Japanese invaders in Korea in the 1590s had taken a heavy toll in casualties and strained the exchequer; likewise the assault on Guizhou’s upstart ‘pacification minister’, Yang Yinglong. In the west the Mongols had forged unwelcome links with the Tibetans. Banditry and rebellion were rife all over the empire. Japanese, Portuguese and now Spanish and Dutch mariners were monopolising the trade of the southern ports. If it was ironic that wall-building had been preferred to the Zheng He voyages in the first place, it was still more ironic that the construction of the Great Wall itself had been given priority just as Japanese pirates were terrorising the coast and the Portuguese were ensconcing themselves at Macao. But the Ming empire was wilting more from neglect than insult. As of 1591, the Wanli emperor had ceased even to observe the ancestral rites. His Jiajing grandfather had risked all to honour his natural parents; he, on the other hand, could not even be bothered to attend his mother’s funeral. Such dereliction of ritual duty bespoke a moral bankruptcy more fatal than the empty treasury and invited a censure more certain than maritime embarrassment. In quick succession the Ming empire would succumb to rebellion and then foreign conquest.
14
THE MANCHU CONQUEST
1620–1760
OVERWHELMING MING
THERE WERE FEW CLEANER BREAKS IN imperial China’s long history than that between its last two dynasties. The switch was so abrupt as to leave the historians with little scope for dynastic elastication and so dramatic as to appear almost staged. Some time after midnight on 25 April 1644, accompanied only by an old eunuch, the Ming Chongzhen emperor, grandson of the Wanli emperor, ascended Coal Hill, an eminence within the Forbidden City, surveyed Beijing’s unmanned walls and the fires that raged in the still-dark suburbs beyond, and then, retiring into a nearby pavilion – it was the headquarters of the Imperial Hat and Girdle Department – hanged himself from a cross-beam. On 5 June Manchu forces entered the city, quickly occupied the palace and, declaring the Mandate forfeit, arrogated it to their own pre-declared Qing dynasty. The deer had been loose, as the saying had it, for just six weeks. In the same decade, around six hundred weeks of godly ferment followed the removal of the crowned head of Charles I of England and Scotland. But in China, so short was the interregnum between Ming and Qing that it served only to betray the capital and precipitate the conquest of the empire. Resistance, though sometimes heroic, would prove marginal. For once there would be no enduring north–south split, no long multi-state ‘Period of Disunion’, and no excruciating free-for-all among incoming warlords and competing regional dynasties.
After a six-week bloodbath an indigenous lineage was again being displaced by an alien one. High-cheeked warriors on horseback clattered through the Beijing streets, their Inner Asian origins ferociously advertised by incomprehensible languages, soft-soled boots and the shaven fore-crowns and long greasy queues of Geronimo lookalikes. Besides the Jurchen, who called themselves Manchu, there rode in the ranks of the incomers large contingents of ‘Mongols’, a term now denoting language, lifestyle and attachment to the memory of Chinggis Khan and which comprehended peoples once identified as Turkic and Khitan as well as Mongol. The steppe and the forest were reinvading the sown; it was as if all those who had previously savoured Chinese dominion were back for a banquet of lasting empire.
The Ming’s nearly twenty-seven decades were up, the Qing’s nearly twenty-eight just beginning; a tired and now ineffectual regime looked to have succumbed to a fresh and still-dynamic one. The eclectic society of the later Ming would soon be superseded by a more rigid social and cultural conformity. Likewise, the Ming flirtation with the wider maritime world would appear repudiated in favour of a typically Inner Asian obsession with territorial conquest. Zheng He’s voyages, the 1557 accommodation of the Portuguese at Macao, the interest taken at court in well-primed foreigners like the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, and the economy’s growing dependence on the exchange of silk and ceramic exports for bullion from Japan and the New World – these things could not be reversed. But their aftermath might have been better managed had priority not been given to territorial expansion into the unproductive wastes of Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang. By the late eighteenth century, thanks to the Qing, China would have acquired the subcontinental girth that it rejoices in to this day. On the other hand the price for neglecting its seaboard and underestimating the foreigners who increasingly frequented it would be national humiliation, and not just by trading companies, upstart empires and ‘great powers’ but by domestic revolutionaries, opportunistic neighbours and itinerant ideologues.
Not surprisingly, then, the year 1644 – or less explicitly, the first half of the seventeenth century – is taken to mark an important milestone in China’s historical marathon. Hereabouts period-conscious histories flag the end of one era, or ‘world cycle’, and the beginning of another, though whether ‘late feudal’ is superseded by ‘proto-capitalist’, ‘late imperial’ by ‘post-imperial’ or ‘pre-modern’ by ‘early modern’ is a matter of mouth-watering debate. Many recent works carry their narratives up to the 1600s, after which others take over for the homeward stretch. In the changeover from Ming to Qing, the tradition, hallowed by China’s historiography, of chopping the past into dynasty-size lengths looks for once to have been justified. And yet change is seldom so sharp, transition never so tidy. Arguably a chronology inflexibly based on dynasties and reign periods imposes artificial divisions, or ‘conceptual barriers’, that truncate and obscure more deep-rooted trends in society, culture and government.1 The thematic continuities, within Jurchen-Manchu society as well as Chinese, though they play havoc with a date-dependent narrative, may be more rewarding than the comings and goings of dynasts.
Travelling from Nanjing to Beijing in 1598, the Italian Father Matteo Ricci had opted for the Grand Canal. He was no stranger to the country. He had been in Guangdong for sixteen years, had mastered the language and was now superior of the small Jesuit mission based on Portuguese Macao. He was nevertheless amazed by the volume of shipping on the canal. It was said that 10,000 vessels were engaged in transporting the tax produce of Shandong and the Yangzi provinces to Beijing, and Ricci saw no reason to doubt it. He was equally impressed by the ‘great number of well known cities’ he passed. As for the banks of the canal, they were lined by ‘so many towns, villages and scattered houses that one might say the entire route is inhabited’. Throughout a distance of around 1,700 kilometres (1,060 miles), the commercial activity never ceased.
Later, returning south by land because in winter there was insufficient water and too much ice for the canal to function, Ricci stayed in Suzhou. Like Polo he was reminded of Venice; ‘the city is all bridges’, he wrote in his journal, ‘very old but beautifully built . . . [and] the water fresh and clear, unlike that of Venice’. As a location for a Christian mission, though, Suzhou had a major disadvantage: it was subject to ‘a
tremendous tax’. Reportedly an indemnity dating back to the Ming conquest, it meant that fully half of what was grown in and around the city passed to the imperial treasury. ‘Hence it may happen in China that one province pays twice as much as another in taxes.’2
There was nothing new in all this. The size and ubiquity of towns and cities, the commercialisation of agriculture as farmers concentrated on specialised crops for market rather than food grains for subsistence, the consequent development of local networks of commercial, manufacturing and socio-political activity, and the extremely uneven nature of tax liabilities are all discernible in earlier accounts like those of Ennin, Polo and Ibn Battuta. But in no small part thanks to the survival of more in the way of documentation – tax registers, local gazetteers, genealogies, unofficial histories – provincial conditions during the Ming and Qing periods have attracted greater scholarly scrutiny.
China-ware being packed in crates for export, as depicted by a Chinese artist in gouache on paper. Loose tea was crammed between the pots to prevent breakages. By the nineteenth century tea far exceeded the value of all other Chinese exports, including the porcelain it once protected.
An oil painting of the Cantonese school shows the waterfront of Shamian Island (Guangzhou) in the eighteenth century. Otherwise known as Canton, Guangzhou was the multi-national hub of the tea trade and subsequently of the traffic in opium.
While under intense pressure from the foreign powers in the late nineteenth century, the Chinese empire was further destabilised by two massive rebellions. In 1851–65 Taiping armies swept north as far as Tianjin, where a Taiping encampment is shown in a contemporary scroll painting. And in 1900 Beijing itself succumbed to what foreigners called the Boxer Rebellion. Qing ambivalence towards the Boxers failed to save their leaders from the public executions demanded by the foreign powers by way of reprisal.
Cixi (1835–1908), empress dowager of the Qing Xianfeng emperor and regent for both of his successors, presided over the fate of the dynasty for forty-five years. A controversial figure who antagonised the foreign powers and stifled the 1898 ‘Hundred Days’ reforms, she yet supported the self-strengthening movement and outlawed the practice of foot-binding. (Portrait of 1905 by Hubert Vos.)
Pu-yi (1906–67), also known as Henry, was ‘the Last Emperor’, though he scarcely reigned. Reared in the Forbidden City, he was obliged to abdicate following the 1911 revolution. Restored for a few weeks in 1917 (and given a British tutor), he was forced to flee into Japanese custody in 1924 and made titular emperor of Japanese Manchuria in 1934. After the Second World War he underwent re-education and ended his days working for the Beijing parks department.
In 1930 the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (right) and the young Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang (left) formed a joint front against the Japanese and the communists. Six years later Zhang took Chiang Kai-shek hostage in a bid to end the Nationalist vendetta against the communists and unite all China against the Japanese.
Shanghai’s waterfront of hotels, banks and shipping companies was more cosmopolitan than anywhere else in China. In 1937 Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government chose to open a new front against the Japanese. No enemy vessels were sunk but the erratic Chinese bombing killed 2,000 Chinese civilians in a single day.
From Shanghai, Japanese troops pushed west up the Yangzi. Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, fell in December 1937. Suspecting Chinese troops of having donned civlian clothes, the Japanese then conducted a horrific massacre that included using prisoners for bayonet practice.
After the fall of Nanjing, it was Chongqing, above the Yangzi gorges in Sichuan, that became the Nationalists’ last redoubt. Though heavily bombed (as here), the city held out and with Allied support remained the Nationalist capital throughout the Second World War.
A youthful Mao Zedong (1893–1976) addressing troops at Yan’an in Shaanxi, to where the communist forces had withdrawn in the Long March of 1934–35.
‘Rivers and Mountains are Charming’ is the title of this 1980s poster celebrating the four-man leadership of the 1949 communist revolution – Xu De, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. All had died in 1976 except Liu, who, though a victim of the Cultural Revolution, had been posthumously rehabilitated. Not so the conspicuously absent Lin Biao.
Security became an obsession following the Sino-Soviet rupture of c.1960. By 1970, when this poster appeared, strategic industries were being relocated inland for fear of a US assault. Entitled in English ‘Survey the Enemy’, the poster urges vigilance and surveillance (rather than surveys) even in the lotus beds.
A 1980s poster promotes the one-child-per-family policy, while the Yangzi’s Three Gorges Dam (with its staircases of shipping locks) provides the world’s largest output of hydro-electricity. Both projects have their critics; but the stabilisation of China’s population and the provision of green energy may be accounted sensational sucesses for any regime.
The gelugpa monastery of Labrang Tashikyil in Amdo (Gansu) was one of many that, nearly half a century after the Dalai Lama’s 1959 flight to India, was still staging protests against Beijing’s interference in Tibetan affairs and against Han settlement in Tibet itself.
The main conclusion of this scrutiny is predictable, if disconcerting: generalising about the empire is shown to be a dangerous exercise. Not only taxation but crops, productivity, patterns of landownership, standards of law and order, and levels of social well-being varied enormously from province to province, prefecture to prefecture, and county to county. Yet communications being excellent, social as well as commercial linkages between the cities, towns and countryside were highly developed. Government officials were forever returning to their rural roots to attend ancestral festivals, observe the long mourning periods for a deceased parent, nurse the wounds of censure and demotion, or simply retire for good. Nor were they starved of appreciative company once they got there. Since the supply of graduates now greatly exceeded official demand, and since living with kin in a village was cheaper than keeping up appearances in a city, local society had acquired a whole new tier of cultivated office-seekers and opinionated mentors. Genealogical researches by such underemployed scholars contributed to the formation of local clan associations that might own land, offer social and educational support to their members, actively engage in local affairs, and disconcert official bureaucrats. The urban exiles, mixing more freely with landowning, military and mercantile families now that they too included degree-holders, augmented a gentrified local elite that, in an age of bureaucratic ‘sclerosis’, could exercise considerable influence.
This influence was far from consistent, however, and local society anything but coherent. Differences convulsing the late Ming court would be exposed by the Qing conquest as common throughout the empire. Mostly they were couched in the high moral terms of a controversy that pitched latter-day disciples of the hands-on, ‘thought as action’ Wang Yangming and his ‘innate sense’ of what was right (which all too easily became what was convenient or permissive) against those who, true to Zhu Xi’s emphasis on ‘the investigation of all things’, insisted on the cultivation of moral integrity as the prerequisite for office entitlement and for the empire’s salvation. The latter, at first overwhelmingly disappointed junior officials, were vociferous, even suicidal, in challenging the Grand Secretariat and bombarding the emperor with remonstrances; as the Donglin faction (named after an academy in Wuxi near Suzhou) they suffered persecution in the 1620s; as the Fu She (‘Restoration Society’) they fared slightly better in the 1630s; but as a component in Ming resistance to the Qing conquest in the 1640s they failed dismally. Many other shades of opinion were represented; some brave spirits would wonder whether abstract speculation of any sort was appropriate at a time of growing crisis. But all schools of thought were tainted by deep personal and professional animosities, were exercised by the age-old rivalry between the palace and the bureaucracy, and were susceptible to competing opinions about the post-Wanli succession.
As for the b
ureaucracy itself, its plight had little to do with the calibre of its personnel. Loyal and devoted public servants were no rarer in the early seventeenth century than formerly; indeed, the Qing conquest revealed some quite exceptional officials. But because of the rivalries and suspicion engulfing the government in Beijing, central direction was lacking. Instead the provinces were bombarded with ever more demands for revenue. Partly these impositions and levies were needed to defray the expense of war against the Japanese in Korea in the 1590s, against Jurchen advances in Manchuria after 1615, and increasingly against rebellious subjects in China itself, who were often driven to take up arms by the severity of the very same impositions. But new taxes were also needed because the existing ones, and the liabilities on which they were assessed, had come to bear little relationship to actual landownership, population totals or theoretical liability. The later Ming had bartered such extensive exemptions to the imperial clan, the Buddhist clergy, the military, office-holders, degree-holders and anyone else with influence that the tax burden now fell overwhelmingly on small landholders and sharecroppers who were least able to support it.
This placed local officials in an unenviable position. Should they side with those powerful interests accustomed to exemption or evasion, or with downtrodden cultivators not unreasonably inclined to violence? Worse still, as of the late 1590s the local administration had become increasingly sidelined; poor returns from the new taxes had led the emperor to entrust the collection of the most detested levies – or more accurately, their extortion – to that alternative bureaucracy of palace officials that constituted the ‘eunuchracy’.