Beijing’s new rulers pose something of an enigma. In terms of numbers, economic resources, military technology and governmental experience, the Jurchen of the early seventeenth century appear so disadvantaged as to make their chances of conquering all China seem quixotic. Yet much the same might have been said of the Khitan and Mongols when first they invaded. Under their own Jin dynasty, the Jurchen had already had one bite at the cherry, evicting the Khitan Liao and then the Northern Song from northern China in the twelfth century before themselves succumbing to Mongol conquest in the thirteenth. Some Jurchen had then served under the Mongols, others had trickled back to their homeland, yet others had never left it. They had remained a restless presence in the far north-east, whether within the Yuan empire or later as tributaries of the Ming.
Sin Chung-il, a Korean emissary who in 1595 had visited the Jurchen living north-west of the Yalu River, found a people heavily influenced by their exposure to both Han and Mongol culture. The educated spoke some Chinese as well as their native Tungusic tongue. They used the Mongol script in preference to the Khitan-based script developed by the Jin, and they combined a regard for Confucian values with respect for the devotional Buddhism of Tibet as lately adopted by the Mongols. Above all they retained an abiding attachment to their own traditions of divination and sacrifice; ancestors and deities were regularly consulted through a male or female ‘shaman’, the term itself being ‘the only commonly used English word that is a loan from [the Jurchen] language’.6
Yet they lived in a manner that was little removed from that of their pre-Jin ancestors. Dispersed, along with their livestock, in fortified village settlements, they were grouped under hereditary leaders called beile. These chiefs lorded it over their dependants, distributed land, slaves, brides and arms among them, and often fought with one another. Defensive walls were of mud and wattle with stone foundations; houses were of timber or brick and might be half buried in the ground, a Jurchen concession to the harsh climate of the north-east. It could indeed be cold. The visit of the Korean Sin Chung-il coincided with midwinter, which might explain his taking notice of the Jurchen propensity for strong liquor, impromptu wrestling and vigorous dances. The fields, fallow at the time, produced wheat and millet, the stables were well stocked with horses, and from the forests and uplands came pelts, pine nuts and ginseng root. The Jurchen of the Yalu and Liao basins harvested, herded, hunted and foraged. They were not even semi-nomadic, though other ‘wild’ Jurchen farther north were, and likewise the Mongols of the region.
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.
Nor is he very informative about the puzzling relationship between artillery and the wall itself. He does mention some colossal cannon that might have been used on the wall; one such piece, cast in bronze and inscribed as ‘made by the Armaments Bureau in [1574]’, has since been unearthed near Huangyaguan, a gateway on the Beijing–Chengde road. Certainly Qi Jiguang’s period of service coincided with what Waldron calls ‘the hey-day of wall-building’; indeed, literary sources, supported by inscriptions, credit Qi Jiguang with building 1,200 watchtowers and undertaking ‘a major reconstruction’ of the whole section from Beijing to Shanhaiguan.16 But this rebuilding of the Great Wall (as it survives today) is nowhere specifically linked to the new ordnance. Nor is it clear whether the wall would have been intended primarily as a platform and highway on which to deploy guns, or as a more solid defence against them – or both. An illustration of the defence of Liaoyang (in Liaodong) in the 1620s shows folangji ranged outside the walls. Assuming the scale is accurate, the wall-top walkway there, as at Yangzhou, was clearly too narrow for them. The rebuilding of the Great Wall and the addition of so many towers may well have been prompted by the proportions of the new guns and their field-of-fire requirements.
Beyond the wall the Jurchen-Manchu had also been quick to latch on to the importance of guns. Ming cannon and folangji had been captured by Nurhaci, who had then stipulated that half of all new Banner recruits from Liaodong be equipped with muskets or trained in cannon use. These Han troops from Liaodong, whether defectors or captives, were further encouraged by Hong Taiji to specialise in the manufacture and management of artillery. Meanwhile the Ming court had acquired, through Ricci’s associates, both Portuguese armourers and some of the large-bore cannon, 6 metres (20 feet) long and weighing 1,800 kilograms (1.76 tons), known as hongyi, which were being cast in Macao. Again the Manchus responded, with Hong Taiji establishing a manufactory forhongyiand other large cannon at Jinzhou (west of the Liao river). In what was becoming an arms race, both Ming and Manchu were producing guns in quantity by the 1630s. The Manchu became adept at siegecraft and learned to coordinate the mobility of cavalry with the firepower of artillery. The Ming obtained the services of the Jesuit Father Adam Schall von Bell, whose foundry in Beijing is said to have produced some five hundred cannon of a lighter, more manageable design during the months immediately preceding the city’s capitulation to Li Zicheng and then Regent Dorgon.
This trend towards lighter guns that were easier to transport, quicker to load and probably more accurate looks to have been crucial to the success of the Manchu Banners in suppressing Ming resistance, especially in waterlogged Jiangnan and Sichuan and throughout the hilly regions of the south and south-west. In such terrain the range and firepower of artillery offset that disadvantage under which cavalry-based armies from the north had traditionally laboured. Hilltop redoubts that no horse could reach could be reduced by field guns, and likewise towns and villages islanded in flooded rice paddies. Major cities being almost invariably sited on rivers, they were no less vulnerable to naval bombardment.
Just as the Ming had obtained the cannon-casting services of Father Schall, so, when Schall died in 1665, the Manchus retained in Beijing another Jesuit, the Belgian Father Ferdinand Verbiest. Verbiest, like Schall, first won fame as an astronomer and instrument-maker and became one of the Kangxi emperor’s closest advisers. Accompanying him on several imperial tours, he was one of the first Europeans to see something of the reconstructed sections of the Great Wall. They exceeded his wildest expectations, and accepting the idea that the wall was a continuous construction thousands of kilometres long and all of it equally well appointed, Verbiest pronounced it ‘prodigious’. ‘The seven wonders of the world put together are not comparable to this work,’ he ventured, so drawing an anachronistic comparison that has been echoed by just about every wall-visiting foreigner ever since.17
Verbiest’s first cannon were produced in the 1670s specifically for hill warfare. They were deployed in the final stage of the Manchu conquest and were soon followed by others. ‘Over 500 out of a total of about 900 artillery pieces made during the Kangxi reign (1661–1722) were cast under [Verbiest’s] direction or on the basis of his designs.’18 Besides field guns effective over a range of 300 metres (330 yards), they included cannon weighing up to 3.5 tonnes (3.43 tons) that fired cannonballs as heavy as 10 kilograms (22 pounds). With such a formidable arsenal, as well as the best cavalry in Asia and almost unlimited infantry, the Qing commanded a military machine capable of suppressing more than internal opposition.