Nayancheng and Regulations for Zhili

chapter 7 Nayancheng and Regulations for Zhili

The final chapter of the sea-transport plan was written by Yinghe and Nayancheng, the Governor-General of Zhili, and, to a lesser extent, by Granary Vice President Bai Chun. These officials devised procedures for handling sea- transported grain in Zhili in 1826 that merged seamlessly with this province’s long-established patterns of grain management. Zhili, the capital province, re- ceived huge amounts of tax grain each year from all of the eight canal-zone provinces as well as wheat and beans from Fengtian (Manchuria), and, now, in 1826, by sea from Jiangnan, and it had a complex bureaucratic organization for transferring and storing it that reached from the Zhili-Shandong border to the capital granaries at Tongzhou and Beijing. This organization included Zhili field officials as well as specialized grain-transport and granary officials stationed along the Northern Canal from the Shandong border to the Stone Dam at Tongzhou, as well as its extension along the Hai River to the sea. The bureaucratic, sub-bureaucratic, and extra-bureaucratic personnel that served this administrative behemoth were legion, and they had 150 years of codified tradition, precedents, and laws to guide their management. Because of the strategic significance of tax grain and the special role that Banner elites played in its management, changes to its administrative practices were complicated and heavily fraught.1

1 Governor-General Nayancheng

Adapting this huge grain-transport and storage system to sea transport was principally the task of Nayancheng (1764–1833), the Governor-General of Zhili and Concurrent Director of the Northern Canal. Compared to the relatively young Qishan, he had many years of experience as a high-ranking official and battle-scarred military commander. He had been appointed Zhili Governor- General in 1822 after returning from Shaanxi-Gansu where he had settled the unrest between Tibetans and Mongols in Kokonor. He was a skilled admin- istrator, known for his ability to mediate and resolve conflicts both on the battlefield and in bureaucratic settings.

1 Leonard 1996, pp. 36–49.

figure 8 Nayancheng (1764–1833)

Nayancheng was born in 1764 and was a Manchu of the Zhangjia clan and Plain White Banner. He was a grandson of the famous official and general, Agui (1717–1797), who had served earlier as a grand secretary and held the rank of duke. He passed the official exams at a young age (xiucai 1779; juren 1788; jinshi 1789), was assigned to the Hanlin as a bachelor, then compiler (1789–1790), and was then appointed to the Imperial Study in 1792. From 1794 to 1798, he served as a sub-chancellor in the Grand Secretariat, then on the Grand Council, and was later to head a number of central boards: Works (1799), Civil Appoints (1820), and Punishments (1821). Similar to Qishan, he was entrusted to carry out special investigations of military and civil officials in the provinces.2 However, his most noteworthy assignments were in Shaanxi-Gansu, Liangguang, and Turkestan where he served variously as governor-general, imperial commissioner, and military commander during the White Lotus Rebellion along the Shaanxi-Sichuan border (1799–1800, 1810); during the rebel Tiandihui and piracy suppression campaigns in Liangguang (1802, 1804–1806); during the Tianlijiao uprising in Zhili, Shandong, and Henan (1813–1814); and during the conflicts with Tibetans and Mongols in Kokonor and with Kokandians in Turkestan (1807–1809, 1822–1823, 1827–1828).3

2 ECCP, pp. 584–587. 3 Ibid. CHC 10, pt. 1, pp. 136–144, 360–373; Borei 2002, pp. 274–301; Murray 1987, pp. 99–118, 123–125, 137.