Global Crisis
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Dorgon took immediate steps designed to win support for the new regime. He announced that the Manchu troops were about to ‘unstring their bows’ (viz. stand down); he abolished several unpopular taxes; and he reduced the land tax by one-third in all areas that submitted to the Qing. Above all, he visited the body of the late Chongzhen emperor to pay his respects and ordered three days of public mourning, inviting all former Ming officials to do the same. This proved an extremely shrewd move, because any official who now committed suicide could be seen as expressing loyalty to the Shun regime, and Dorgon capitalized on their dilemma by promising to reinstate and remunerate all former Ming bureaucrats prepared to resume their former office, and an instant one-grade promotion to those who also shaved their heads in Manchu fashion and adopted Manchu dress.65 Almost the entire bureaucracy of the capital complied. A prominent official who two months earlier had switched his allegiance to the Shun spoke for many when he declared: ‘I am a minister of the Ming but the Ming have perished and there is nothing to belong to. Whoever has the ability to take revenge upon the enemies of the Ming, those murdering bandits, is therefore my ruler.’ On 29 October 1644 China's new ruler, the 7-year-old Shunzhi emperor for whom Dorgon served as regent, entered Beijing. The following day he performed the customary sacrifice to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe at the Temple of Heaven, south of the Forbidden City, and thereby established his claim to be the sole intermediary between Heaven and Earth. A few days later, an official noted in his diary with relief: ‘My alarmed spirit has begun to settle. Within the last ten days officials high and low’ had begun to work once again in the Imperial City, so that ‘it is just like old times’. He spoke too soon: it would take a generation before all China again enjoyed peace – and, even then, ‘old times’ would never return.66
China Partitioned
Since China had two capitals, the Dashing Prince's capture of Beijing automatically made Nanjing the Ming capital. It possessed many assets. Lying in the lower Yangzi valley, the richest region of the empire, amid copious supplies of food and a bustling trade, it was the cultural centre of China. It was also the second largest city in the world (after Beijing) and boasted powerful defences. Admittedly, the southern capital tended to attract officials with little enthusiasm for war, ill-suited to resist skilful and determined invaders; nevertheless, some weeks before the fall of Beijing, officials in the southern capital made plans for the Ming crown prince to escape and join them and began to mobilize naval and military forces.
Although Chinese history offered a promising precedent – four centuries earlier, the Song dynasty had survived in the south for 150 years after Mongol invaders overran northern China – the situation in 1644 was very different: crop failures in 1633, 1634, 1635, 1638 and 1640, followed by the worst drought in five centuries (1641–4) had depopulated parts of Jiangnan and left the survivors weak, poor and demoralized. In addition, the sudden scarcity of silver after 1640 (see pages 128–9 above) crippled both trade and tax collection. Amid such weakness, news of the Chongzhen emperor's suicide, and the disappearance of the crown prince, immediately created chaos: many people considered an interregnum to be a period without laws and acted accordingly.
According to an eyewitness living near Shanghai, ‘seeing that there was no emperor, the bondsmen made a body of many thousands, and asked their lords for papers of [manumission] because [with the fall of] the Chinese government they were already free. And taking up arms they first turned on the lords in the countryside, killing, robbing and doing a thousand other insults without anyone taking up arms against them.’ They also warned magistrates in nearby towns that, unless they received ‘the papers of their freedom immediately’, they would ‘kill all without mercy’. According to another contemporary, thousands of bondservants took up arms ‘under rebel leaders. They ripped up pairs of trousers to serve as flags. They sharpened their hoes into swords and took to themselves the title of “Levelling Kings”, declaring that they were levelling the distinction between masters and serfs, titled and mean, rich and poor.’ They also ‘opened the granaries and distributed the contents’.67 The leader of one uprising claimed: ‘Now we are endowed by heaven with a special opportunity, for our masters are all weak and feeble and are not able to take up arms. We can take advantage of their crisis. Even if they want to suppress us, they do not have time.’ His followers agreed: ‘The emperor has changed, so the masters should be made into servants to serve us; master and servant should address each other as brothers.’ In the words of the gazetteer of a county near Shanghai, ‘an uprising like this has not been seen for a thousand years’.68
The collapse of central authority also encouraged other, lesser forms of resistance. Peasants presumably deployed their traditional repertory of ‘foot-dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage’ (page 512 below), and withheld rents and services whenever possible. Even when defiance stopped short of murder, it spread disorder that proved particularly deleterious in areas where successful agriculture depended on hydraulic projects: inland, the destruction or neglect of dikes created marshes and lakes that offered a sanctuary to bandits (many of them, no doubt, peasants deprived of their livelihoods by the floods); in coastal areas, it supplied recruits to pirate enterprises. The towns of the Yangzi and Pearl river estuaries in particular fell prey to attacks by ferocious river pirates.69
Unlike their colleagues in Beijing, many Ming officials in the south responded to the news of the Chongzheng emperor's death by committing suicide. Gazetteers record some southern gentry families in which a dozen or more members either set themselves on fire or, one after another, jumped into a well; while students, inspired by an ardent colleague or teacher, either drowned or hanged themselves. Yet not all Ming loyalists gave up. In Nanjing, ministers discussed which member of the imperial family should become the ‘caretaker’ of the realm until the crown prince reappeared. The prince of Fu, a first cousin of the late emperor, who had supported the hated eunuch Wei's persecution of Donglin, attracted the allegiance of surviving yandang officials, but was unacceptable to the self-proclaimed ‘righteous ministers'; so although he became first ‘caretaker’, and then emperor, bureaucratic factionalism continued to plague the Ming state.
Nevertheless, for a moment it seemed that the new ruler in Nanjing might stabilize the situation. He immediately promoted all officials by one grade, scheduled civil service exams, and granted all provinces between the Yangzi and the Yellow rivers tax relief until they recovered from the crisis of the preceding years. He also divided these provinces into four military zones and charged Shi Kefa, one of the few Ming generals to have campaigned successfully against the roving bandits, with coordinating defensive operations. Shi made Yangzhou, on the Grand Canal just north of the Yangzi, both the linchpin of a new defensive system and a springboard for a future offensive to reunite China under its former dynasty.
In Beijing, Dorgon considered his options. When his Chinese advisers urged him to conquer all China, he at first ridiculed the notion – ‘Unify it?’, he is alleged to have asked: ‘We can do no more than gain an inch and hold on to an inch, gain a foot and hold on to a foot’ – but he soon discovered that his huge new capital could not survive without rice from Jiangnan, controlled by the Southern Ming, and without coal from Shanxi, controlled by Li Zicheng.70 Dorgon decided to deal with the second problem first.
Since Li still commanded some 350,000 soldiers whereas the Manchu Grand Army probably now numbered fewer than 100,000 warriors, only half of them Manchus, the regent made several further concessions to win the support of his new Chinese subjects. He barred eunuchs from handling revenues from imperial estates and from participating in court audiences; he also reduced their numbers to about 3,000. He accepted the services of magistrates and ministers who had served both Ming and Shun (although they were later known by the unflattering label Er chen, ‘ministers who served both dynasties’), and welcomed back many reforming ministers, of
ten associates of the Donglin and other Academies, who had lost their posts under the Tianqi and Chongzhen emperors. These officials began to rationalize the legal system (issuing a standard set of penalties, updating the civil code, promulgating new criminal regulations) and improve revenue collection (‘forgiving’ tax arrears in areas that submitted to the Qing and confiscating the vast estates held by Ming clansmen). To Frederic Wakeman, an outstanding historian of ‘the Great Enterprise’,
What is most surprising is how little was actually required in the end to bring the bureaucratic administration up to a reasonable level of efficiency. Adjustments, not replacements; overhaul, not wholesale substitution, were the characteristics of this reform effort. Moreover, the reforms … were mainly the work of men who had seen service under the Ming, and were now given the opportunities denied them earlier to carry out the kinds of adjustment that would make the system with which they were already familiar work best.71
The Qing also courted some important constituencies which the Ming had alienated – above all, by extolling martial virtues and rewarding military merit, they won over many generals and troops whom the Ming had treated with contempt. Moreover, the ability of the new dynasty to tackle the bandit menace that had made life miserable for so many Chinese won both admiration and support from property owners. Shandong offers a testament to the success of Dorgon's policy of reconciliation. After the great Manchu raid of 1642–3, provincial officials estimated that seven households out of ten depended on some form of criminal activity for their survival. A few weeks after entering Beijing, Dorgon ‘forgave’ all Shandong's tax arrears, and the following year he significantly reduced its quota and sent some of his elite troops to restore order. Just five years after being traumatized by Qing marauders, Shandong provided the new dynasty with the largest provincial quota of ‘twice-serving ministers'; and its largest landowners, the dukes of Kong (direct descendants of Confucius), became the dynasty's staunch allies.72
By contrast, two of Dorgon's other initiatives proved highly divisive and unpopular. First, the regent decided to create ‘Tatar towns’ in a number of strategic cities. In Beijing, Dorgon decreed that only Manchus could live in the Inner City, around the palace, and he forcibly relocated perhaps 300,000 Chinese residents to the Outer City beyond. The Qing took similar steps throughout their territory, eventually creating 34 ‘Tatar towns’ – basically citadels – reserved for Manchu soldiers and their families, while all others had to live outside.73 This measure naturally infuriated those compelled to abandon their ancestral homes.
A second innovation proved even more divisive and unpopular because it affected all males, whether living in town or countryside. Long before 1644, the Qing decreed that their supporters must make themselves look like Manchus; but realizing that it would take time to acquire new clothes (or adapt old ones), Dorgon at this stage insisted only that all males must shave the front of their heads and wear the rest in a queue at the back. He failed to anticipate how much resentment even this would cause. Han Chinese culture had for millennia viewed correct attire and appearance as an essential distinction between civilization and barbarism; and bundling his hair into a topknot (shufu) formed part of the etiquette that marked the passage of a Han male to adulthood. Dorgon's tonsure decree thus challenged a fundamental aspect of traditional Chinese culture – and not once but repeatedly, since to keep the front part of the head bald required regular shaving (Plate 8).74
Revolts against head-shaving broke out almost immediately in some areas near the capital and, after three weeks, Dorgon prudently backed down. ‘Formerly,’ he explained,
Because there was no way of distinguishing people who had surrendered, I ordered them to cut their hair in order to separate the yielding from the rebellious. Now I hear that this is directly contrary to the people's wishes, which contradicts my own [desire] to settle the people's minds with civil persuasion. Let each of the ministers and commoners from now on arrange their hair in the old [style], completely according to their convenience.75
This compromise convinced most ‘ministers and commoners’ in northern China to accept the Qing, while Wu Sangui and a part of the Manchu Grand Army set off in pursuit of Li, who had retreated to Xi'an, his ‘western capital’. He could not hold it: instead, in February 1645, the Dashing Prince took to the hills with a handful of followers, where some months later he met a violent end. Wu, having won control of all his strategic objectives in the northwest (including the vital Shanxi coalfields), now invaded Sichuan to destroy Zhang Xianzhong's ‘Great Western State’.
In Beijing, Dorgon bought time by plying the Southern Ming with reassuring messages that hinted at a negotiated partition of China. ‘As for those who have not forgotten the Ming [dynasty] and have supported and enthroned a worthy prince, putting forward their fullest effort with unified hearts to protect the lower Yangzi [against the bandits]’, he wrote soothingly to them, ‘that is as things should be. We will not stop you. But you should contact us for peaceful, amicable discussions and not rebuff our dynasty.‘76 The Nanjing regime countered with an embassy that thanked the Qing for expelling the bandits from the capital and promised that if they withdrew beyond the Great Wall, they could keep all land beyond it and receive a handsome annual tribute. This was totally unrealistic: the Manchus had come too far, and needed the resources of the Central Plain too much, simply to go home. Nevertheless Dorgon entertained the embassy from Nanjing with false hopes until, in March 1645, he felt it safe to recall some of his Banner troops from the west. His brother, Prince Dodo, now led a devastating attack on the Southern Ming.
‘Keep your head, lose your hair; keep your hair, lose your head’
Appalling weather continued to afflict Jiangnan: the winter of 1644–5 saw the weakest monsoon in more than a millennium, prolonging the drought. As the Grand Army advanced southwards from Beijing most cities opened their gates and offered tribute to the conquerors. By May 1645 only Yangzhou held out north of the Yangzi river, and its makeshift defences proved no match for the heavy artillery brought by the Qing. When the city fell, Dodo allowed his troops to sack it for a week, and only unseasonable rain prevented the fires lit by the looters from consuming the entire city. Nevertheless, the destruction of life and property was so great that poets began to refer to Yangzhou as Wucheng: ‘the weed-covered city’.77
Dodo's strategic use of terror bore immediate fruit: Nanjing and most other cities of Jiangnan surrendered to avoid the fate of Yangzhou. Nevertheless a few Ming loyalists elsewhere in the south organized resistance, forcing the Manchus once again to seek some way to distinguish friend from foe – albeit more sensitively than before. Instead of insisting that all Chinese males must shave their heads, a new tonsure decree of June 1645 announced that ‘In all of the places occupied by the Grand Army we will shave the military and not shave the civilians; we will shave the soldiers and not shave the people'; but a group of Chinese scholars in the capital unwisely protested against even this compromise, claiming that their traditional ‘System of Rites and Music’ required Han Chinese to preserve intact all they had inherited from their parents, so that shaving forelocks was a kind of tonsorial castration.78 This proved too much for Dorgon, who angrily retorted:
Does our dynasty not have a System of Rites and Music? If officials say that people should not respect our Rites and Music, but rather follow those of the Ming, what can be their true intentions? There may be some sense in the idea that one's hair and skin are from one's parents and, thus, ought not to be harmed, but I will not stand for this incessant ‘Rites and Music’ rubbish. I have hitherto loved and pitied the [Han] officials, allowing them to follow their own preference [in matters of dress and tonsure]. Now, however, because of this divisive talk, I can but issue a decree to all officials and commoners, ordering that they all shave their foreheads.
Dorgon further insisted that the tonsure decree must be implemented within ten days of its receipt in each locality: disobedience would be ‘equivalent to a rebel's defyi
ng the Mandate [of Heaven]’, and any official who sought ‘to retain the Ming institutions and not follow those of this dynasty’ would face immediate execution.79
This angry overreaction, a marked departure from Dorgon's previous moderation, perhaps reflected a new confidence born of his appointment as sole regent and the successes of Qing armies on all fronts; but, whatever its cause, it proved a catastrophic error. As a Jesuit eyewitness tartly observed, the Chinese elite now ‘grieved and fought more valiantly for their hair and habit than they had done for their kingdom and emperor’.80 An incident near Nanjing illustrated this point. After the surrender of the southern capital, the new Qing authorities urgently sought information on the resources of the region, dispatching commissioners to secure the tax and population registers of each county. Since the Qing lacked their own reliable cadres, many of these commissioners were former Ming officials: Fang Heng, a young jinshi official sent to the town of Jiangyin, was one of them. He arrived still wearing Ming insignia on his robes and was on the point of securing the registers when four Manchu soldiers turned up with the tonsure decree and orders for its immediate implementation. Fang therefore prepared a simple Chinese version of Dorgon's proclamation – ’Keep your head, lose your hair; keep your hair, lose your head‘ – which provoked armed peasants to converge on Jiangyin, where they killed all four Manchu soldiers and Fang – but not before he had sent a secret appeal for reinforcements. Qing troops arrived with 24 siege guns, which breached the town walls and enabled a successful assault. Dorgon had ordered his troops to ‘fill the city with corpses before you sheathe your swords’, and his troops duly obliged. Tens of thousands of Ming loyalists at Jiangyin ‘kept their hair and lost their heads’.81