The Conquest Elite of the Ch'ing Empire

CHAPTER 6 THE CONQUEST ELITE OF THE CH’ING EMPIRE Pamela Kyle Crossley The conquest elite of the earlier Ch’ing underwent marked changes as expansion transformed the geographical contours, cultural content, and political dynamics of the empire. Prior to the Ch’ing invasion of north China a Ch’ing elite already existed, but its qualities and its proportional components were deeply altered between 1644 and the end of the century. From the time of the conquest of north China to the completion of Ch’ing control of south China, the conquest forces were contained in or under the control of the Eight Banners, the Ch’ing sociomilitary organization.1 Within the Eight Banners, “Manchu” (itself a complex matter of definition)2 combatants composed only a modest percentage of the conquest force, in absolute numbers somewhere between 110,000 and 140,000. It also included a large number – perhaps as 1 Many histories of the Manchus are functionally histories of the Eight Banners (and the reverse is also true). The foundation modern study is Meng Sen, “Pa-ch’i chih-tu k’ao-shih,” Kuo-li Chung-yang yen- chiu yüan, Li-shih yü-yen yen-chiu suo chi-k’an, 6, No. 3 (1936), pp. 343–412, and there has been impor- tant research on individual banner or garrison histories by Ch’en Wen-shih, Okada Hidehiro, Liu Chia-chü, and others. For more general studies see Sudo¯ Yoshiyuki, “Shincho¯ ni okeru Manshu¯chu¯bo¯ no toku shusei ni kanseru ichi ko¯satsu,” To¯hoku gakuho¯, 11, No. 1 (March 1940), pp. 176–203; Wu Wei-ping, “The development and decline of the Eight Banners” (diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1969); Kaye Soon Im, “The rise and decline of the Eight-Banner garrisons in the Ch’ing Period (1644–1911)” (diss., University of Illinois, 1981); Wang Chung-han, ed., Man-tsu shih yen-chiu chi (Peking, 1988); T’eng Shao-chen, Ch’ing-tai pa-ch’i tzu-ti (Peking, 1989); Pamela K. Crossley, Orphan warriors: Three Manchu generations and the end of the Qing World (Princeton, 1990); The Manchus (Oxford, 1997); A translucent mirror: History and identity in Qing imperial ideology (Berkeley, 1999); and Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu way: The Eight Banners and ethnic identity in late imperial China (Stanford, 2001). 2 The origin of the name “Manchu” cannot be proven on the basis of documentation known at this time, but the complexities I refer to here have to do with who is indicated by the term “Manchu.” The once conventional assumption that “Manchus” without exception were the people formerly called “Jurchens,” and that the name was changed to throw off unflattering connotations in the Ming records, is not per- suasive in itself, and does not accord with the facts. Many people whose ancestors had been known as Jurchen were called Manchu after 1635, but there is no absolute transference of the “Jurchen” denomination to Manchus. The reasons for the change of name are far more likely to have been related to the creation of the Ch’ing empire in 1636 than to avoiding an old name that, if widely known, could not be dispensed with in such a manner and, if not widely known, cannot explain this event. See also Crossley, Orphan warriors, pp. 16–17; Evelyn S. Rawski, The last emperors: A social history of Qing imperial institutions (Berkeley, 1998), p. 36; and Crossley, A translucent mirror, pp. 193–4. Adding to the com- plexity, the terms “Manchu” (manju, man-chou, man-chu, man-chou-jen) and “bannerman” (gu¯sai niyalma, ch’i-jen) have an uneven relationship to each other, sometimes being used interchangeably and sometimes used distinctively. See Crossley, Orphan warriors, pp. 16–20; Crossley, “Manchu Education,” p. 369, n. 1; Crossley, The Manchus, pp. 7–8; and Rawski, The last emperors, p. 62. 310 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 conquest elite of the ch’ing empire 311 many as 340,000 at the time of the conquest of Peking in 1644 – of sino- phone, agriculturally or commercially employed residents of Liao-tung and Chi-lin who were referred to, with greater or lesser precision, as Han-chün bannermen.3 Others in the conquest elite were members of the populations of eastern Mongolia, northern Liao-tung, and western Chi-lin who became the foundation of the Mongol Eight Banners4 and certain former Ming officials who joined the Ch’ing. As the venues, methods, and pace of Ch’ing conquest shifted again in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the effects were soon seen in the function and fortunes of the Ch’ing conquest elite. The nineteenth century saw the massive displacement of a major portion of the remnant conquest elite, with comparatively few aristocratic survivors. The components of the conquest elite consolidated slowly, and in stages. Earliest of these stages was the formation of a governing group under Nurhaci between 1582 and 1626. Next came the era of imperial formation under Hung Taiji between 1627 and 1643, in which segments of the elite were institutionalized, brought under the regulation of the central government, and ranked in general relation to their role in the expansionist policies of the new empire. This was followed by the dramatic and best-known passage in the early empire, the conquest of China and eastern Mongolia during the latter half of the seventeenth century. That conquest partly overlapped with a second-order expansion into western Mongolia, Turkestan, Tibet, and attempted conquests in parts of Southeast Asia, which came to a gradual halt during the latter half of the eighteenth century. During these phases, the various segments of the conquest elite not only continuously altered their positions relative to each other, but also experienced some degree of change in composition, denomination, and political function. 3 This term needs to be distinguished from the English term “Chinese” and at the same time, it recalls the superficially “Chinese” connotations the term carries in Manchu and in Chinese. Elsewhere I have offered the literal translation “Chinese-martial”; see Crossley, “The Tong in two worlds,” “The Qianlong retrospect on the Chinese-martial (Han-chün) banners,” Orphan warriors, The Manchus, and especially A translucent mirror, pp. 44–6, and 97–8, where both the translation of the term and the importance of having it are argued. But see also Mark C. Elliott’s use of the terminology “Han-martial” in his “Bannerman and townsman: Ethnic tension in nineteenth-century Jiangnan,” Late Imperial China, 11, No. 1 (June 1990), pp. 36–74, his “Ethnicity in the Qing Eight Banners,” in Empire at the margins, ed. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (forthcoming), and his Manchu Way. In this volume, the term Han-chün will be used in the romanized form and refers to a functional group. 4 As will become clear, the history of the Eight Banner Mongols is very different from that of other “Mongols” and Mongolian speakers in the Ch’ing empire. For background on Mongols of all sorts during the Ch’ing, see Charles R. Bawden, The modern history of Mongolia (New York, 1968); Joseph F. Fletcher, “Ch’ing Inner Asia, c. 1800,” Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank, Vol. 10 of The Cambridge history of China, ed. Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 35–106; Chao Yün-t’ien, Ch’ing-tai Meng-ku cheng-chih chih-tu (Peking, 1989); Chia Ning, “The Li-fan Yüan in the Early Ch’ing Dynasty” (diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1991); Pamela K. Crossley, “Making Mongols,” Empire at the margins, ed. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (forthcoming). Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 312 pamela kyle crossley By the end of the eighteenth century, then, the conquest elite stood as a functional group with a more central population (the imperial lineage, Manchu and Mongol titled families, eminent lineages of the Han-chün, command ranks of the Eight Banners and the garrisons throughout the empire, certain high-ranking Chinese civil officials) and a more marginal one (common families of the Eight Banners, virtually all members of the Hunting and Fishing Banners, and those Chinese civil officials instrumental in the incorporation of new territories but who had not firmly secured the confi- dence of the emperors). Whether more central or more marginal, components of the conquest elite were subject to mechanisms of attrition that helped keep their numbers in check and in some instances forced a more accelerated diminution than attrition itself would have effected. In the earlier period of expansion in China, for instance, Manchu and Han-chün bannermen who were natives of Liao-tung or Chi-lin could request to return there, which in prac- tice meant discharge as lifelong soldiers. The court encouraged bannermen to pursue forms of civil education that would enable them to become self- supporting outside the banners.5 Members of the Aisin Gioro (Ai-hsin Chüeh-lo) imperial lineage, or collateral Gioro affines, were subject to dis- missal from the rolls if found guilty of crimes, or if their degree of relationship to the direct imperial line became too distant. By these and other methods, the Ch’ing court of the seventeenth century attempted first of all to avoid being crushed by the burden of financial support of this elite, and in the eighteenth century to accelerate the transition from a conquest posture to one of governance and defense. Neither of these goals was attained, and in the event the conquest elite fell victim to the more desultory forces of impoverishment, political displacement, and social marginality.

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