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2 Manager or Craftsman Skillful Bannermen of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) Kai Jun Chen Abstract The chapter investigates how the ‘palace machine’ of the Qing dynasty reproduced (or systematically trained) particularly skilled bannermen as ethnically-marked official experts. By mapping out these bannermen’s education, training process, and official appointments, I explain how the court system perpetuated the administrative privilege of bannermen families and how specific skills of different generations matched the particular demands of empire building projects of the Qing dynasty in different stages. I focus on a representative family, the Wanggiyan/ Wanyan clan, generations of which served the court within the insti- tutional framework of the Imperial Household Department. Placing this extended family in the context of peer bannermen equipped with specialized skills allows me to shed light on the larger issue of the relationship between hereditary status and specialized skills in the Qing palace machine. Keywords: expert, specialized skill, family, Wanyan clan This chapter investigates the mutual formation of the ‘palace machine’ of the Qing dynasty and the ethnically-marked official experts, that is, the bannerman specialists involved in military campaigns, finance, and large-scale construction, all aspects of statecraft that required special- ist knowledge outside the purview of Confucian classics. In addition to capturing the regulated mechanism of several innovative court bureaus established by the Manchu rulers, as outlined in the Introduction, the concept of a machine, ji 機, illustrates the pivotal role of skilled labourers Siebert, Martina, Kai Jun Chen, and Dorothy Ko (eds), Making the Palace Machine Work: Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463720359_ch02 74 KAI JUN CHEN in practical statecraft.1 Together with the lower-ranked workers examined in Chapter One, the princes and bannerman experts working in the Impe- rial Household Department comprised the human operators who drove the ‘palace machine’. In the very process of operation, the mechanism reproduced qualified workers. The official Regulations and Precedents (zeli 則例) and the constantly-updated Precedent Cases of Statutes of the Great Qing (Da Qing huidian shili 大清會典事例) documented the bureaucratic structure and its transformation in principle. However, that schematic framework, by its very nature of explaining how things should be done, left out the detailed process of actual production and the workers’ specialist skills, which is the focus of this chapter. By scrutinizing a few representative bannermen specialists’ education and training processes, career patterns, and cultural output, this chapter examines how the palace machine perpetuated a group of officials’ administrative privi- lege, and how the skills of different generations of a bannerman lineage met the particular challenges of the empire-building project in different phases. Scholars have clarified the evolving Manchu bureaucratic system in which bannerman bondservants elevated their status from house slaves over time.2 After the establishment of the Eight Banner system, the term ‘bondservants’ came to refer to servants registered in banner companies (Chinese: zuoling 佐 領; Manchu: niru). The bannerman bondservants were trusted accountants, managers, or master technicians who occupied the top tier of the pyramid of workers.3 Through a carefully-channelled memorial system, they responded 1 The word ji even appears in the name of the Grand Council (Junjichu 軍機處), one of the three innovative bureaus created by the Qing ruling house. See Beatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Chʻing China, 1723-1820 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). The other two were the Imperial Household Department and the Ministry for Ruling Outer Provinces (Lifanyuan 理藩院). See Dittmar Schorkowitz and Chia Ning, eds., Managing Frontiers in Qing China: The Lifanyuan and Libu Revisited (Leiden: Brill, 2017). For an explanation of the concept of ji 機 in traditional military thought in China, see Earnest Caldwell, ‘Opportune moments in early Chinese military thought: the concept of ji 機 in the Warring States period manuscript Cao Mie’s Battle Array’, in Chinese and Indian Warfare – From the Classical Age to 1870, eds. Kaushik Roy and Peter Lorge (London: Routledge, 2014), 17-31. 2 Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 166-71. Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 81-84. Liu Xiaomeng 劉小萌, Manzu cong buluo dao guojia 滿族從部落到國家 (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2007). See also Qi Meiqin 祁美琴 and Cui Can 崔燦, ‘Baoyi shenfen zaibian 包衣身份再辨’, Qingshi yanjiu 清史研究, no.1 (2013): 117-28. 3 For a brief comment on powerful bondservants, see Rawski, The Last Emperors, 171; for a detailed case study of an illustrious bondservants’ clan, see Jonathan Spence, Ts’ao Yin and the K’ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). MANAGER OR CRAFTSMAN 75 directly to – or even negotiated in person with – emperors about details of empire-building projects, bypassing the regular bureaucracy. The character of the bannerman bondservants’ remits reveals a conflation of state institutions and household organizations. As the pre-dynastic royal clans built the Qing dynasty and the Aisin lineage managed to reduce peer aristocrats’ power, bondservants witnessed an expansion of hierarchy among themselves. Only bondservants from the upper three banners which directly responded to the ruling house would function as the rulers’ confidantes in the Imperial Household Department. This chapter focuses on bannerman bondservants from the companies in the upper three banners, who formed the core personnel of the Imperial Household Department. Meanwhile, some bannerman specialists from prestigious clans did not register in bondservants’ companies and worked outside the Imperial Household Department.4 Others, such as the pre-dynastic keepers, hunters, herders, gatherers, soldiers, farmers, and petty traders accompanying the Aisin warriors to the court in Beijing, became assistants in the project of ruling the empire by translating documents and the classics, collecting taxes, running manufactories, and intervening in various ministries in the civil government. One vivid illustration of such trans- forming responsibility was found in a memorial from the 16th year of Kangxi reign (1677),5 concerning changing the names of subdivisions in the Imperial Household Department from tribal groupings to more bureaucratic offices. To date, scholars have mapped out the intricate organization of bondservants in various offices which were in charge of practical statecraft, but have left one question unanswered: how did bondservants acquire their specialist skills at court and keep the palace machine working? The mechanism of assessment and promotion sheds some light on bondservants’ career patterns, as I will discuss below.6 Official genealogies provide information on the extended lineage of bannermen, including bondservant companies, and list their 4 The Imperial Household Department is best described as the emperor’s private treasure vault, business company, and manufacturing facilities rolled into one. See Qi Meiqin, Qingdai Neiwufu 清代內務府 (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1998); Preston M. Torbert, The Ch’ing Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its Organization and Principal Functions, 1662-1796 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Chang Te-Chang, ‘The Economic Role of the Imperial Household in the Ch’ing Dynasty’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (1972): 243-273. 5 ‘Ga-lu deng wei zunzhi huiyi Zongguan Neiwufu xia yashu gengming jiyin de tiben 噶魯等 為遵旨會議總管內務府下衙署更名給印的題本’, in Qingdai neige daku sanyi manwen dang’an xuanbian 清代內閣大庫散佚滿文檔案選編, edited by Liaoning shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo 辽宁社会科学院历史硏究所 et al. (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 1991), 1-3. 6 For an extensive discussion of the career patterns of Manchu and Han Chinese at the Qing court, see Raymond Chu and William Saywell, Career Patterns in the Ch’ing Dynasty: The Office of Governor-General (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1984). 76 KAI JUN CHEN official positions. Even more detailed information on bondservants’ skills and their agency in the palace machine is available in individual bondservants’ collected writings, which are seldom examined by historians. Family Resemblance One of the key characteristics of bondservants as the personnel of the palace machine was the family resemblance of their career pattern. A father and a son might not start from the same position at court and might not progress through the same series of posts. Yet the members of six or more generations of a lineage tended to recurrently hold court and regional posts reserved for bannermen, or even civil posts frequented by bannermen. Moreover, the phenomenon of recurrent occupation across generations in a lineage also took place in peer lineages of bondservants, probably because bannerman bondservants were constantly trained and appointed to a set of bureaus which were central in the palace machine. Wang Zhonghan and Liu Xiaomeng have identified more than twenty lineages of bondservants who regularly occupied
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