China

by John Keay

  It was a surprisingly cosmopolitan society with immigrants from Korea and especially from the Ming province of Liaodong mingling with the various Jurchen and Mongol clans. Sin Chung-il’s Jurchen host, an impressive figure called Nurhaci (Nurgaci, r. 1616–26) who held court in robes trimmed with sable, was already engaged in welding these disparate elements into an organised and effective fighting force. All were encouraged to wear leather tunics and adopt the shaven fore-crown and long queue of the Jurchen (the resemblance to indigenous Americans being not perhaps incidental in that the peoples of the Aleutian islands and Alaska also spoke a Tungusic language). Moreover Nurhaci’s forces rode beneath distinctive flags described by Sin Chung-il as being either yellow, white, red, blue or black. Denoting the troops enrolled under each colour, these ‘Banners’, reduced to four, then expanded to eight, and eventually, identified with specific ethno-social groups, formed the basic military units into which the people of the north-east, whether Jurchen, Mongol or Han, were being steadily absorbed as Nurhaci extended his sway. As Bannermen they would constitute the Manchu striking force in China and the privileged backbone of Manchu society throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  Nurhaci attracted adherents by the judicious distribution of lands, women, slaves and prestigious merchandise, while forcefully overcoming potential rivals in order to obtain these assets. In 1606 a local Mongol confederation acknowledged him as their leader, and in 1616 he had himself enthroned as the Jurchen emperor, reviving for this purpose the dynastic title of Jin. He and his successor are thus sometimes known as the ‘Latter Jin’ – a rather feeble attempt to distinguish them from the ‘Later Jin’ of the Five Dynasties period. Meanwhile Nurhaci advanced his capital steadily westward, taking the town of Fushun in 1618 and the city of Shenyang (renamed Mukden), capital of the Ming province of Liaodong, in 1621. As the Jurchen pushed west, hostilities with the Ming developed spontaneously over matters of migration and trade; but they took on a new dimension when in Shenyang Nurhaci began laying out a palace complex of unmistakably imperial proportions and referring to the Ming as ‘the southern dynasty’, his own Latter Jin being ‘the northern dynasty’. This recalled the thirteenth-century controversy between the Jin and the Song about the duplication of the Mandate and was ill received in Beijing. Yet the Ming ‘did not deny the historical link . . .; on the contrary they desecrated the imperial Jin tombs at Fangshan, near Beijing, “to celebrate it”’.7

  Nurhaci died in 1626. He was succeeded by a son, Hong Taiji (or Abahai/Abatai, r. 1626–43), who so transformed Jurchen prospects as to deserve recognition as co-founder of the dynasty. Campaigning in Mongolia and Korea, as well as north to the Amur in what is now Heilongjiang province and west to the outskirts of Beijing, the Banners under Hong Taiji’s direction became acquainted with other modes of warfare, including artillery and siegecraft. Large cities such as Datong were invested, and in repeatedly passing back and forth through the undermanned Great Wall, the Banners exposed the futility of a static, if monumental, defence. In Mongolia a descendant of Khubilai Khan’s Yuan dynasty was overthrown, allowing Hong Taiji to claim the title of the Mongols’ Great Khan, plus a Mongol bride, a vast Mongol following and much of what is now Inner Mongolia. More Banner recruits came from among the ‘wild Jurchen’ of the far north, from Korea and from Ming China; as the number of Bannermen grew to six figures, their purely Jurchen component shrank from a half to a quarter.

  Hong Taiji also began employing Han bureaucrats, selected by examination, to staff an administrative service. An external affairs bureau was set up, too; initially concerned with Jurchen–Mongol relations, the bureau was soon reorganised and renamed to handle all ‘colonial’ relations, including the close ties lately established between the Mongols and the Tibetan religious establishment, especially its Dalai Lama (of whom more later). In 1636 Hong Taiji put the seal on all these developments by discarding the terms ‘Jurchen’ and ‘Jin’. Both were too freighted with contentious baggage and irredentist sentiment. In the past neither Jurchen nor Jin had achieved the universal dominion to which their descendants were now aspiring; in Chinese eyes, ‘Jurchen’ remained a term of disparagement and ‘Jin’ a dynasty of questionable legitimacy. A newer, more inclusive orientation was needed: the Bannermen, and by extension the regime, were henceforth to be known as ‘Manchu’, and the dynasty as ‘Qing’.

  ‘Qing’, meaning ‘pure’, was extracted from the same textual pool of prestigious aspirational titles as Yuan (‘original’) and Ming (‘brilliant’). It transcended the regional associations of most other dynastic names and positioned its claimants in line to the succession of legitimate all-China dynasties. ‘Manchu’ is more problematic. Freely used, and by foreigners often confused with Tatar/Tartar and Mongol, the word was soon applied to the dynasty as well as the people and then to the northeastern region from which both originated: hence the word manchuguo/manchu-kuo/ ‘Manchuria’, a term that the Chinese have since found objectionable, partly because the Japanese adopted it as the name for their twentieth-century puppet state in that region and partly because it implies a distinct status for somewhere that the Chinese now consider as just north-east China and no more distinct than, say, south-east China. The origin of the word is not clear. Like Aisin Gioro, the lineage to which the Manchu imperial clan was supposed to belong, it seems to have been extracted from Jurchen genealogy. Equipping an imperial dynasty with an illustrious and Heaven-favoured pedigree was standard procedure for the Ministry of Rites and would be championed by the Qing themselves when they became hostages to the conceits of their own imperial mythology in the eighteenth century.

  Laden with universalist claims – as Han emperor, Mongol Great Khan and, thanks to the Dalai Lama, Buddhist cakravartin and Bodhisattva – Hong Taiji dispensed with a Jurchen tradition whereby rulership was sometimes shared with brothers or sons; such collegial habits obviously had no place in an autocrat’s arsenal. In the event of the ruler being a minor, however, this collaborative tradition could be advantageous. While not precluding factional struggles, it encouraged a cohesion and continuity of purpose that had eluded the eunuch-run administrations and dowager-led cliques of imperial regencies in the past. In fact, just such a test had arisen in 1643; for on the eve of the ‘great enterprise’ – as the Manchu termed their move into China proper – Hong Taiji had died, leaving as successor a five-year-old son known as the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644–61).

  Thus in June 1644 the Manchu leader whose identity so mystified the Beijing populace, and who then confidently moved into the imperial palace, was not in fact an imperial claimant but Prince Dorgon, one of deceased Hong Taiji’s many brothers who was acting as regent. The Shunzhi emperor would not assume the reins of government until 1652, when he was fourteen, and would die eight years later, leaving the succession to yet another minor. There then followed a second regency before this new minor came of age in 1669 as the long-lasting Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722). By then the ‘great enterprise’ had been substantially realised and resistance to Qing rule lingered on only in out-of-the-way places such as Yunnan and Taiwan. In effect the Manchu/Qing conquest of China was largely realised without the benefit of an active emperor and by a coterie of Jurchen-Manchu commanders, mostly sons and grandsons of Nurhaci, assisted – and often hampered – by various ex-Ming generals and ex-rebel warlords.

  But if the Qing advance was therefore occasionally uncoordinated, this was as nothing compared to the chaotic state of those who would resist it, whether Ming loyalists, rebels or any of a host of other special interest groups. As already noted, conditions in the Jiangnan region at the time could hardly have been less conducive to concerted resistance, with intellectual ferment, natural disasters, economic meltdown, industrial unrest, widespread brigandage and piracy, unruly militias and rabid tax-collectors all conspiring to shatter the social fabric. The same was true of the northwest, to where the rebel Li Zicheng had withdrawn, of Sichuan, where another rebel army was causing havoc, of Henan/Anhui/
Jiangsu, where the Grand Canal was out of action, and of the far south, where trade was at a standstill.

  Basically the Manchu Banners and their ex-Ming affiliates, like General Wu Sangui, made good progress in the first year (1644/45). They drove Li Zicheng’s rebel forces out of the north-west, secured Shandong and the Yellow River basin, and pushed south along the line of the Grand Canal to the city of Yangzhou (near the canal’s junction with the Yangzi). There the conciliatory policy of the Manchus – amnesties, reinstatements in office, abolition of the most extortionate taxes, remissions of others – won over some local power-brokers but failed to entice defenders professing loyalty to a makeshift Ming regime that had just been set up in Nanjing.

  This Nanjing administration, the first of four short-lived regimes under ‘Southern Ming’ pretenders, was as cash-strapped and faction-ridden as its Beijing predecessor; but in Shi Kefa, who commanded at Yangzhou, it boasted a military leader of unimpeachable character and the loftiest principles. Such attributes should have guaranteed success as well as immortality, yet they availed the Ming defence not at all. Undermined by Nanjing’s dithering and more desertions, Yangzhou soon fell to the Manchus. Shi Kefa died in the carnage, the most elegant of port cities was comprehensively sacked, and the entire populace massacred or enslaved. Three weeks later, without a fight, Nanjing itself surrendered, and the first of the four ‘Southern Ming’ regimes promptly collapsed. From a Manchu point of view, Yangzhou’s salutary fate had served its purpose of deterring opposition. On the other hand, the ten-day slaughter, ‘one of the most infamous massacres in Chinese history’, and especially the fate of Yangzhou’s womenfolk, all of which was chronicled in explicit detail, would top every subsequent indictment of Manchu excesses; and in the heroic figure of Shi Kefa, the Ming resistance – not to mention a patriotic posterity trans-fixed by the fate of China’s last indigenous dynasty – would recognise its first great martyr.8

  The fall of Yangzhou, and then Nanjing, in June 1645 seemed to bode well for a speedy conclusion to the Manchu conquest. Unfortunately, just days later, Regent Dorgon and his associates issued a directive so gratuitously provocative that it would prolong hostilities for decades. Included in a package of otherwise welcome pronouncements, this directive ordered all males to demonstrate their allegiance to the Qing dynasty by adopting the Manchu dress and hairstyle. They had ten days to comply, after which any head with an unshaven pate (costume could too easily be improvised and the queue would obviously take time to grow) would be forfeited.

  An identical directive had been issued after the capture of Beijing, then swiftly retracted in the face of bitter protest; the Manchus can have been in no doubt as to the probable reaction. But like other non-Han peoples, they set great store by physical conformity. A sign of submission and a useful means of distinguishing friend from foe in chaotic times, the shaven pate and the uncut queue were also seen as a concesssion: ex-subjects of the Ming were being invited to identify with the new regime and join it as participants in the ‘great enterprise’. Much stress had already been laid on this collaborative aspect of Manchu rule. The Banners by now included far more Han Chinese, both long-serving farmer-soldiers from Liaodong and more recent recruits from south of the Great Wall, than native Jurchen and Mongols. Schools were being re-established, examinations rescheduled, and the whole paraphernalia of Han bureaucracy reinstated. The Kangxi emperor would make accommodation with his Han subjects the keystone of his long reign. ‘We are of one family,’ declared the ‘clothes and hair’ directive. ‘The emperor is like the father, the people like his sons. Father and sons being of the same body, how can they be different?’9

  But to a proud people whose sense of cultural distinction vis-à-vis their neighbours was indebted to just such differences, and who were anyway allergic to all forms of disfigurement that might prejudice posthumous acceptance by their ancestors, the haircutting order was anathema. Compliance was a matter of the most abject shame, and for a Confucianist shame remained the ineluctable sanction. Many preferred suicide; others chose a life of exile in the hills or seclusion in a monastery (Buddhist monks, shaven-headed anyway, were excused the queue); still others were driven to gestures of defiance that were demonstrably futile. The directive did not inspire greater unity of purpose, only a wider spectrum of resistance. Those social elements that now entered the fray have been usefully listed by one scholar as:

  . . . incumbent or retired Ming civil and military officials, members of the district yamen [administrative offices] or constabulary staffs, Ming imperial clansmen, local landowners and merchants, leaders of political and literary societies, regular Ming military units, local sea and land militia, freelance military experts, armed guards from private estates, peasant self-defense corps, martial monks, underground gangs, secret societies, tenant and ‘slave’ insurrectionary forces, and pirate and bandit groups.10

  The fighting flared again and dragged on. More cities shared the fate of Yangzhou, more makeshift Ming regimes that of Nanjing. Pacified areas broke out into revolt a second time, unpacified areas aspired to forms of local autonomy. Both sides were repeatedly betrayed by supposed allies. Many Ming loyalists, appalled by the chaos or revolted by their supporters, construed endorsement of the Qing as the ultimate act of sacrifice. Instances of spectacular defiance would be cherished and celebrated; but they were vitiated by a brutality that was by no means the monopoly of the Manchu Banners.

  A more intriguing feature of the fighting was the widespread use of firearms. The war, in fact, was the first on Chinese soil in which guns look to have played a decisive part. Cannon bombardments feature in nearly all contemporary accounts of the fighting, and muskets receive frequent mention, though the crossbow remained commoner. A survivor of Yangzhou – one of the very few – recalled that the defence of the city had been prejudiced by the discovery that the top of the city walls was too narrow for ordnance. ‘To provide more room for mounting the cannons’, therefore, the admirable Shi Kefa had ordered the construction of supplementary platforms supported in part by the wall, in part by the roofs of the houses abutting the wall from behind. Unfortunately the carpentry was still incomplete when the Bannermen stormed the defences. Advancing under cover of heavy fire, plus the screening afforded by roofed and wheeled siege engines (like aircraft boarding steps), the Bannermen came pouring over the parapets. The defenders had no choice but to flee by way of the nearly-ready gun platforms, which collapsed under their weight. ‘People fell like leaves, eight or nine of every ten being killed.’ Others reached the rooftops, only to crash through them too, ‘startling the inhabitants out of their wits; [and] soon every room in those homes, from the outer reception halls to the inner apartments, was totally filled with soldiers and people who’d been on the wall’.11

  Though Yangzhou’s walls were clearly not designed for it, artillery was no novelty. Joseph Needham dates the first Chinese ordnance to around 1250, and there is a cannon of sorts in Beijing’s National History Museum with a date equivalent to 1332. Yet according to the Standard History of the Ming, the first serviceable guns were acquired in 1410 in the course of the Ming Yongle emperor’s long and otherwise unrewarding vendetta against the Vietnamese; probably they were transported back to Nanjing aboard one of Zheng He’s great ships. In China, as in the contemporary Middle East and Europe, developments in the casting and boring of barrels and in formulation of the explosive charge took time. China’s use of gunpowder from at least the ninth century had provided the wider world with the key component; but the Ottomans and Europeans had since been more successful in harnessing saltpetre’s explosive potential for ballistic purposes. As Matteo Ricci noted, in 1600 the Chinese still favoured gunpowder, ‘not so much for their arquebuses, of which they have few, nor for bombards and artillery which are also in short supply, but for their firework displays . . . that none of us ever saw without amazement’.12

  Arquebuses (long-barrelled matchlocks supported on a swivelling tripod), bombards (basic muzzle-loading cannon) and
culverins (which could be either) had comprised the arsenal of the first Portuguese vessels to reach east Asia in 1517–20. The ‘breech-loading culverins presented at the Ming court in 1522’ were a gift from the Portuguese; and Portuguese arquebuses were acquired in the 1540s by the Japanese, who copied and greatly improved them.13 The China coast acquired them from Japanese pirates, and they were being manufactured in Zhejiang by the 1560s. To defeat the pirates, some of whom had reached Nanjing in 1555/56, Yu Dayou, one of the Wanli emperor’s commanders, had urged equipping all ships with cannon, declaring: ‘In sea battle, there is no trick: the side that has more ships defeats the side that has fewer, the side that has more guns defeats the side that has less.’14 In respect of firearms – as in other scientific fields such as astronomy, cartography, mathematics and medicine – Chinese interest in foreign technology stemmed from long familiarity with the basic principles, not ignorance of them; and if adoption was sometimes slow and ineffectual, the blame lay in official ambivalence rather than with military men like Yu Dayou.

  From pirate patrol in Zhejiang, a protégé of Yu Dayou’s called Qi Jiguang had been transferred to the Great Wall north of Beijing. There, from 1568 to 1582, he had pioneered field artillery using the guns known as folangji (i.e. farangji, ‘Frankish’ or ‘foreign’). ‘More large calibre rifles than cannon’, they were mounted on mule carts, usually two to a cart. The carts had side-screens with apertures; and minus their mules, they could be arranged end to end to form a continuous stockade. Like the chariots of the ‘Warring States’ period, each gun-cart was accompanied by infantry – ten men to work the guns and another ten, four of them equipped with muskets, to ‘form an assault team round the wagon’.15 Clearly Qi Jiguang had given these arrangements much thought, though to what extent they were actually tested he does not say.