by John Keay
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 for hongyi and 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.
MUCH IN DEMAND
The Qing dynasty’s famous ‘Three Emperors’ – those of the Kangxi (1661–1722), Yongzhen (1723–35) and Qianlong (1723–95) reign periods – monopolised the throne until the dawn of the nineteenth century. Capable, generally conscientious and occasionally capricious, they gave the empire unprecedented continuity and comparative stability. During the same period, monarchies elsewhere fared indifferently: thirteen Mughal emperors came and went as India succumbed to foreign conquest; seven British sovereigns, three being Georges, fretted over the constraints of constitutional monarchy; and five French kings, all called Louis, eked out their ancien régime until overwhelmed by the revolution. Qing China, like Romanov Russia, bucked the trend. Once established, its ‘Three Emperors’ ruled virtually unchallenged over much the most populous and sophisticated society in the world. Its culture, insofar as foreigners understood it, was almost universally admired and its products proudly displayed. A craze for chinoiserie was sweeping the salons of Europe; ‘Shantung’ (Shandong) was best known as a silk, ‘Nankeen’ (Nanjing) as a cotton; blue-and-white ‘chin-ware’ from Jingdezhen might share a shelf – in Limoges, say, or Limerick – with a caddy of the loose tea from Fujian in which it had originally been packed for shipping.
In Europe an Age of Enlightenment that could have scorned Neo-Confucian navel-gazing celebrated it. The philosopher Leibniz pored over the Book of Changes and ‘had no trouble construing a theist’s sense of divinity in Zhu Xi’s concept of li’.19 Voltaire, likewise, exulted over a society that, innocent of church or clergy, yet cherished moral values. China’s ‘constitution’ he ranked ‘the best in the world’; and he wrote poems in honour of the Qianlong emperor. Dr Johnson merely urged a doubtful Boswell to visit the Great Wall; even if he never came back, future Boswells would be famed as ‘the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China’, declared the doctor.20
Those who did actually visit the country marvelled at the empire’s prosperity and invariably praised its orderly government and its industrious and law-abiding people. Some, with relief, even noted its official reluctance to compete for overseas trade and a share of the world’s natural resources. Only its landlocked neighbours quailed at the prospect of such a productive society being at the disposal of what was still an Inner Asian regime with continental ambitions.
Ironically, no sooner had the Great Wall (as we know it) been built than it appeared redundant. Instead of defining and defending the empire, which was presumed to have been the Ming intention, it now bisected it. Long before 1644, when the Manchu-Jurchen had ridden through Shanhaiguan at Wu Sangui’s invitation, the extramural lands of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia had been integral to the Manchu empire. They remained so after the conquest of China, increasing the Celestial Empire’s stature by about ten degrees of latitude, or 1,000 kilometres (620 miles). The wall, straggling across what was now the Qing midriff, already had the look more of an internal folly than a frontier fortification.
Conversely, though, and no less plausibly, the wall could be seen as poised to come into its own. Even Ming territory had not stopped at the wall; the Ming province of Liaodong, for instance, had stretched for hundreds of kilometres beyond the wall – until, that is, Nurhaci began nibbling away at it. The wall provided a means of communication and supply, and like earlier walls had a purpose other than defence. It may not, then, as widely proposed, furnish overwhelming testimony to the pacific in
tentions of China’s rulers or the reclusive tendencies of China’s culture. It may in fact have been designed for precisely the far-flung operations that the Qing, taking advantage of its armouries and granaries and its nexus of interlinked roads and signal towers, were about to launch into the Asian interior.
But first the Qing had to douse the fires of Ming resistance in southern China. In 1651 the last of the four ‘Southern Ming’ regimes had been flushed from its retreat close to the Vietnamese border in Guangxi. Its Ming pretender, a grandson of the Wanli emperor, fled west to Kunming in Yunnan, where support was promised from a doubly rebellious army (having first rebelled against the Ming, it now challenged the Qing). To eliminate this pocket of defiance, three Qing expeditions converged on Yunnan in 1658, whereupon the Ming pretender and his allies fought a fierce rearguard action as they withdrew over the Shan hills from the Mekong to the Salween and the Irrawaddy in Burmese territory. In this they traced a trail that neatly anticipated that taken, nearly three centuries later, by General Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang or KMT (in Pinyin, General Jiang Jieshi’s Guomindang or GMD) as they fled before the communists’ People’s Liberation Army. Half the KMT would hole up in Burma and neighbouring Laos, there to discover a new vocation in narcotics; the other half would descend on the island of Taiwan for an, as yet, indefinite sojourn. In doing so, they too followed a Ming trail; for in 1661 those loyalists who baulked at a Burmese exile had also taken ship across the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan at the time was as much Dutch as anyone’s. Having deprived the Portuguese of their Indonesian spice empire, plus the great port citadel of Malacca, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (the Dutch ‘United East Indian Company’) was by the 1640s the best represented of the European powers in Eastern waters. But the Compagnie had failed to persuade the Ming of its need for a permanent trading base on the China coast, and it had failed, in 1622, to winkle the Portuguese out of theirs at Macao. Instead Dutch traders had had to make do with an offshore facility, first in the Pescadores Islands between Fujian and Taiwan, and as of 1624 on the south-west coast of Taiwan itself. Taiwan, or Formosa, as the Portuguese had called it, was not at the time a province of China. Sparsely populated by a non-Han and implacably hostile people, and with a climate of equally evil repute, the island had tendered tribute to the Ming but had attracted no more settlement than the neighbouring Ryukyu Islands. This, however, was changing. The enterprising Zheng family of Xiamen (Amoy) in Fujian – part privateers, part Mandarin traders, latterly Ming officials and increasingly coastal overlords – had used the island as an occasional naval base and had encouraged the Dutch settlement there.
The Dutch company had a near-monopoly of the carrying trade of south-east Asia and Japan (from which, for different reasons, both Chinese and Japanese shippers were currently barred). It was a valuable trading partner. But if the Zheng family owed part of its fortune to the Dutch, it owed its status to the Ming. Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), a second-generation scion of the family and better known to many as ‘Coxinga’ (Koxinga), had been born of a Japanese mother at Hirado, near Nagasaki, where the Zheng family had maintained an establishment; but he was educated in Nanjing and was there adopted by the first of the ‘Southern Ming’ pretenders and showered with titles and favours. Meanwhile his father, having held high office under the Ming, had been won over by the Qing. The Zheng clan was worth cultivating; by the 1640s it could call on ships by the thousand and followers by the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.
When Nanjing fell to the Qing in 1645, Zheng Chenggong returned to Fujian. Taking command of the family navy, he dedicated it to the Ming cause and for a decade lorded it over all the coastal settlements and islands of Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang. At sea he proved more than a match for anything the Qing could launch against him; from Hong Kong to Shanghai (in modern terms) the inshore waters constituted a Zheng thalassocracy. Heady with success, in 1659 he sailed into the Yangzi as part of a bold plan to recapture Nanjing for the Ming. It meant confronting the Qing Banners and their cannon on dry land. Zheng Chenggong welcomed the prospect. He allowed the Qing all the time they needed to assemble a formidable army; one great battle was to settle the fate of southern China once and for all. And so it did. Heavily defeated, Zheng Chenggong slipped back downriver, and with his navy still largely intact, sailed home to Fujian.
In 1660 the Qing emperor – it was the short-lived Shunzhi emperor whose coming of age had interrupted the succession of regents – sent a naval force after him. It fared no better than others; Zheng was still invincible at sea. But a new Qing directive designed to cut off Zheng’s source of supplies made a greater impact. The entire coastline was declared a no-go zone; all fields and fishing ports, villages and settlements within 50 kilometres (30 miles) of the shore were to be evacuated, the entire population resettled, and all coastal shipping outlawed. The prohibition would lapse within a couple of decades, and whether it really applied to the whole coast ‘from Canton [Guangzhou] in the south to the northern coastal region near Beijing’ seems doubtful. But as the typically inward-looking ploy of an alien and continental regime, it would be blamed for blunting China’s maritime potential as well as causing extensive social disruption. Certainly it affected Fujian; there the coastal strip reportedly reverted to wilderness; all habitations were abandoned; ‘even the swallows’ nests were empty’.21
It was this measure, plus an overland approach by Qing forces, which in 1661 triggered the first great wave of mainland migration to Taiwan. It also determined Zheng Chenggong himself to relocate there. Only the Dutch in their fort on Taiwan stood in the way. Still angling for a Macao-like concession on the mainland, the Dutch company had now allied itself with the Qing; it was therefore obliged to contest the approach of Zheng’s armada. There followed an epic battle in the Taiwan Strait which spread to the island itself, then a long siege of Fort Zeelandia, the Dutch citadel. Zheng’s forces ultimately triumphed and the Dutch sailed away. To Zheng Chenggong’s considerable reputation as the most daring of sea-dogs and the most loyal of Ming supporters was added the accolade, later upgraded to semi-divine status, of being the first patriot to inflict defeat on a European intruder and expel its representatives from what he proudly claimed as Chinese territory.
Zheng Chenggong died the following year. Still in his thirties, he seems to have suffered from a psychological disorder that was exacerbated by disappointment. Withdrawing to Taiwan had been retrograde enough, but it was the news from distant Yunnan which is supposed to have finally shattered his peace of mind. For from there came word that Wu Sangui, the general who fourteen years earlier had routed Li Zicheng at Shanhaiguan and welcomed in the Manchus, had led a Qing expedition into Burma, reached the capital of Ava (near Mandalay), secured the person of the last Ming pretender, and on orders from Beijing had had him strangled. Zheng Chenggong was so convulsed with grief that he could barely dig out a cherished memorial addressed to one of his forebears by the Hongwu emperor. Clasping this keepsake from the first of the Ming, he collapsed, ‘and with that the last defender of Brightness [i.e. “Ming”] stopped breathing’.22
It was not quite the end of the Zheng saga. Zheng Chenggong’s son succeeded to the Taiwanese patrimony and, more merchant prince than Ming loyalist, let alone Chinese patriot, would befriend early traders of England’s East India Company. When in 1683 his navy was finally sunk by a Qing armada, the latter was commanded by one of his father’s old comrades-in-arms. The defeat of the Zheng meant that Taiwan could at last be incorporated into the empire. With its Han population augmented by further waves of migration following a revolt in 1721, it remained a prefecture attached to Fujian province for a couple of centuries. By the time it was wrested from the Qing in 1898 by the Japanese, temples to Zheng Chenggong abounded there; in fact even the Qing had eventually recognised Zheng as ‘a Paragon of Loyalty’. The Japanese had no problem with this. Zheng, after all, had been born near Nagasaki of a Japanese mother; they too revered his memory. Naturally, the KMT Na
tionalists would hail him as their Taiwan pioneer; naturally the communists would celebrate his achievement in making Taiwan an inalienable part of China; and naturally both would applaud his triumph over the encroaching Westerners. In death as in life, the rebellious Zheng Chenggong, alias Coxinga, would be much in demand.
The same cannot be said of General Wu Sangui. Though his devotion to the Qing deserved generous recognition, he was ultimately disgraced. The hero of the hour after his Burmese elimination of the last Ming pretender, General Wu had initially been rewarded with almost unlimited authority in Yunnan and Guizhou plus considerable influence in adjacent provinces. Just as Zheng Chenggong had controlled the south-east fringes of the empire on behalf of the Ming, Wu Sangui controlled the southwest fringes for the Qing. He monopolised tax receipts and appointments, maintained a formidable army, opened trade relations with Tibet, developed Yunnan’s considerable mineral wealth (especially its copper deposits) and lived in regal style. He, and two other so-called ‘feudatories’ in Guangdong and Fujian, were effectively draining the empire while they carved out hereditary fiefs for themselves. Yet any attempt to topple them could be expected to re-ignite resistance to the Qing throughout the south.
The Kangxi emperor inherited this dilemma when in 1669 he took over the reins of power. Four years later, overriding the advice of several ministers, he graciously accepted pleas from Wu Sangui and one of the other feudatories that they be allowed to retire from active service. Though an apparently genial response, this was in fact dynamite; for far from actually wishing to retire, the plaintiffs expected the young emperor to refuse their requests and reconfirm their powers, preferably with the option of transferring them to their heirs. Instead they were being dismissed, even disgraced. All three southern ‘feudatories’ accordingly rose in revolt. By 1674 their armies were converging on the Yangzi; cities were being stormed, pigtails cut; had the feudatories managed to coordinate their movements they might even have severed the south from the north as in the days of the Song. But since all three feudatories had originally defected to the Qing, their calls to now evict the Qing were greeted with suspicion even by Ming loyalists. Wu Sangui declared his own dynasty – it was to be another Zhou – and sustained his defiance until his death in 1678. His rebellious colleagues had by then given up. Only Yunnan held out under the command of his grandson. When in 1683, trapped in Kunming by Qing forces, the grandson took his own life, the revolt was over.
