by John Keay
Vastly encouraged by this success and abrim with youthful energy, the Kangxi emperor further strengthened his position among his conquered subjects by reversing some of the blatantly pro-Manchu measures taken by his regent predecessors. Through example and patronage, he also sought to tempt into official employ those scholarly celebrities, mostly from the south, who were still scornful of the Manchus and nostalgic for the Ming. Some were assigned to work on anthologies, dictionaries, gazetteers and other mammoth digests. Their labours foreshadowed the twin pillars of later Qing scholarship – one an enormous encylopedia, ‘surely one of the largest books in the history of the world’, commissioned by the Kangxi emperor, and the other a comprehensive anthology of all the historical, literary and philosophical works ever written in Chinese that was commissioned by the Qianlong emperor; running to 36,000 manuscript volumes, this last was too vast ever to be printed.23 Other luminaries were seduced by an invitation-only exam to select a group of scholars to work on the official history of the Ming dynasty. Though some scholars preferred to compile their own histories of the Ming (and especially of its ill-fated ‘Southern Ming’ successors), and though any scholarship that could be construed as remotely seditious brought draconian punishments, these measures, plus regular recruitment to the civil service, did reassure many in the Han Chinese elite.
ZUNGHARIA, XINJIANG AND TIBET
Meanwhile the Kangxi emperor played to his non-Han constituency of Manchus and Mongols with a personal regimen of archery, hunting and travel, and by addressing far-flung political challenges. The greatest of these was that presented by the rising star of a new confederation of Oyirat (Oirat, Oyirod, etc.) whom the Qing designated as ‘Mongols’. Located in the north-west of what is now Outer Mongolia and in neighbouring northern Xinjiang, but with a catchment area for grazing and cereals that was still wider, a section of this confederation, the Zunghar (Dzungar, Junghar), threatened to destabilise and detach those central and eastern Mongols who had thrown in their lot, or might yet, with the Manchus. The Zunghars had emerged as a force to be reckoned with by combining claims to the pan-Mongol legacy of Chinggis Khan with the divinely sanctioned sovereignty and legitimacy extended to them as devotees and patrons by Tibet’s spiritual leadership. In fact Galdan, the inspirational khan of the Zunghars (r. 1671–97), had himself studied as a novice in one of Tibet’s monasteries. The threat, therefore, though it emanated from the north-west, also affected relations with Tibet and the frontier provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan. The Dalai Lama had been implicated in Zunghar expansion from the start. Tibet’s relations with Wu Sangui had aroused Qing suspicions in the 1670s; and a Tibetan refusal to co operate in the suppression of Wu Sangui’s Yunnan regime had been deplored. But before engaging this formidable combination, the Kangxi emperor thought it well to secure his north-eastern flank; and that meant addressing the little matter of the Russian empire.
Driven by hopes of gold and, more realistically, by the profits to be made from furs, Russian expansion in Siberia had been as rapacious and rewarding as that of Europe’s maritime powers in the Americas and the East. After crossing the Urals in 1579 and disposing of the only organised opposition in Siberia, Muscovite traders with Cossack escorts had pushed east, founding as they went the forts of Tobolsk (1587), Tomsk (1604), Yakutsk (1632), Okhotsk on the Pacific seaboard (1647) and Irkutsk (1651). Mostly the trader-settlers kept north of the steppe. As in North America, the fur trail followed frigid latitudes where the great river systems provided easy paddling, or sledging, interspersed with short portages. But Irkutsk is next to Lake Baykal on the northern edge of Mongolia. Already the Mongols were alert to the Russian newcomers; and so were the Manchus when in the mid-seventeenth century Russian expeditions began appearing in the basin of the Amur River (Heilongjiang) in northern Manchuria. The first clash between Qing and tsarist forces had occurred near the Amur in 1652 at a time when the Qing were disposing of the last of the four ‘Southern Ming’ regimes. Six years later a Russian force was ejected with heavy losses from Albazin, a settlement north of the Amur. The Russians nevertheless returned and remained thereabouts throughout the 1670s while the Kangxi emperor was distracted by the rebellion of Wu Sangui and the other ‘feudatories’.
Misapprehensions on both sides dogged these early Manchu-Russian contacts. The Russians may not have appreciated that Jurchen tribesmen encountered on the Amur were the ‘wild’ brethren of Beijing’s Manchu emperors; and the Manchus seem not at first to have realised that their adversaries in the far north-east were subjects of an empire from which several merchant-diplomats had reached China via more conventional trade routes. A Russian mission of 1618 to the Ming court had in fact pipped the Portuguese and the Dutch to become the first ever from a European power to reach Beijing and return safely. Unfortunately it took no Chinese interpreter back with it; a letter from the Wanli emperor inviting further ‘tribute’ missions thus languished unread for nearly sixty years. Other Russian missions of a more commercial character in the 1650s and ’60s had established that China offered an excellent market for furs. The potential of trading furs for silks, silver and especially food grains (in which Siberia was chronically deficient) excited the Russians.
The Manchu Qing, while exercised over Russian encroachment on their north-eastern border, were increasingly concerned about Russian support, supplies and sanctuary being extended to Galdan’s Zunghar Mongols. Once the Qing grasped that trade was the Russian priority, the basis for an agreement began to emerge. Another scuffle over the remote outpost of Albazin in the mid-1680s brought matters to a head, and in 1689 drew delegations from both sides to Nerchinsk on the Shilka tributary of the Amur. The Qing delegation included two Jesuits, Verbiest’s successors in Beijing, and the Russian delegation a classically educated Pole. Latin thus served as the common language for the negotiations and for the definitive version of the Nerchinsk Treaty. Its use may, though, have had as much to do with protocol as comprehension. Manchu, Mongol, Chinese and Russian versions of the treaty, each agreeable to those who could read them, were also produced; but the priority given to Latin, a neutral and, to most of the delegates, incomprehensible language, meant that the Russian insistence on equality of status and the Qing refusal to concede it could be buried in devices like the ablative absolute. If, as sometimes contended, the Treaty of Nerchinsk should be regarded as the first of imperial China’s ‘unequal treaties’, that was not how the signatories read it, nor were the Chinese disadvantaged by it.
For China the treaty was nevertheless an important first. Since it implicitly acknowledged the existence of another sovereign state – so contradicting the traditional concept of the universal Mandate that underlay all those peace-through-kinship and trade-as-tribute agreements – the act of signature certainly constituted ‘the most significant Qing concession’.24 Other provisions concerning trade missions, boundary demarcation, the surrender of one another’s fugitives and an implied neutrality in respect of one another’s internal affairs benefited both parties. The Russians relinquished claims to the Amur in return for commercial access to the Qing empire; the Qing got a secure frontier and a neutral neighbour. Further adjustments, especially to the size and frequency of Russian trade missions and the alignment of the Russo-Mongolian border, necessitated subsequent protocols and then a new treaty, signed at Kiakhta in 1727/28. Additionally a Russian Orthodox church was to be built in Beijing and a language school established there for Russians to learn Chinese. It says much for the pragmatic approach of both sides that potentially explosive issues, such as obeisance to the emperor and diplomatic gifts being construed as tributary offerings, were never allowed to torpedo negotiations. This was in marked contrast to the acrimony and hostility these things generated among the powers seeking maritime trade with China. When in the 1950s fraternal relations between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China were at their closest, references to the harmonious accords of this earlier era of Sino-Russian intercourse were not misplaced.
; With the northern border secured, the Kangxi emperor could pursue his vendetta against Galdan and the Zunghar Mongols. It brought out both the best and the worst in him. Thanks mainly to the survival of his letters, many of them written in the course of operations against the Zunghars, more is known about the character of the Kangxi emperor than any previous ruler of China. He is revealed as a sympathetic figure who would surely have enjoyed a favourable press without the later official eulogies to his all-conquering exploits. Spirited, decisive, insatiably inquisitive and devoted to his growing family, he was also genuinely concerned for the welfare of his troops. He took a lively interest in practically everything that came to his attention. He was especially passionate about hunting, some letters reading more like entries in a game-book. Indeed, Galdan is identified as his personal prey, his prize quarry; he would track him, it seemed, to the ends of the earth. Hunting him and his successors became an obsession, pursued regardless of cost, sometimes of reason, and to the detriment of regional stability. Like Han Wudi or Tang Taizong, the Kangxi emperor knew not when to stop; and since he was mostly successful, he set standards of intervention in Inner Asia that his Qing successors would feel obliged to follow.
From 1690 to 1760 the ‘Three Emperors’ conducted against the Zunghar Mongols a devastatingly long, if intermittent, war of attrition. It was a conflict of many phases and highly complex relationships involving not only numerous Mongol confederations but most of Inner Asia’s other peoples. The size of Qing territory would be doubled as a result, and something approximating the configuration of China today would emerge. Invading western Mongolia and northern Xinjiang, then Tibet, Qinghai, eastern Kazakhstan and southern Xinjiang – all of them more than once – was a logistical triumph in itself. It meant coordinating and supplying, over several thousand kilometres of the harshest terrain imaginable, a host of irregular allies as well as large armies composed of the polyglot Banners. Some armies marched directly from Hebei and Shanxi through Inner Mongolia, others were launched across the Gobi from the opposite end of the Great Wall in Ningxia and Gansu and from beyond it in Hami. Forts had to be built, garrisons established where no imperial troops had been since the days of the Tang and the Empress Wu, and interminable caravans of supplies and feedstuffs organised.
The object was ever to ensnare the Zunghars, bring them to battle, and so capture their elusive leaders and transport them, dead or alive, to Beijing. They would be ceremonially executed by slicing, followed by the pulverisation of their bones – a punishment designed less to fit the crime than to serve the purpose of imperial ritual by eradicating all trace of the criminal’s existence. ‘Exterminate’ was the constant Qing refrain, at first in respect of the Zunghar leaders, then of the entire people when in the 1750s the Qianlong emperor sought what one authority does not hesitate to call ‘the final solution’.
‘Gunpowder is the key to exterminating Galdan,’ declared the Kangxi emperor in the course of the great campaign of 1696/97 that he himself accompanied. He encumbered his troops with a corps of cannon-bearing camels – useful against recalcitrant cities but of largely psychological value against nomadic pastoralists. The steppe was set ablaze to deprive the Zunghars of grazing, livestock by the million were sequestered; imported diseases, especially smallpox to which the Inner Asian peoples had little resistance, proved the most lethal allies; overkill became official Qing policy. When in late 1759 the Qianlong emperor finally declared victory, Zungharia (western Mongolia, the northern Urumqi area of Xinjiang and the neighbouring district of Kazakhstan) was almost deserted. Of the 600,000 Zunghars, it was reported that 40 per cent had died of smallpox, 30 per cent had been killed by the Qing armies and 20 per cent had fled across the Russian, Kazakh and Kyrghyz frontiers. ‘Zungharia was left as a blank social space, to be filled by a state-sponsored settlement movement of millions of Han Chinese peasants, Manchu Bannermen, Turkestani oasis settlers, Hui [Chinese Muslims] and others.’25
Tibet and southern Xinjiang (comprising the oasis-cities south of the Tian Shan) were undoubtedly destabilised by the conflict. Whether they were dragged into it, or whether they actively sought advantage from it, is a matter of opinion. In respect of Xinjiang the Qianlong emperor became acutely conscious of the costs involved and of the criticism that such far-flung adventures attracted. On the other hand, he was ever hopeful of an easily defensible frontier and mindful of the exploits not only of the Han and Tang dynasties but of Chinggis Khan and his successors. For a Manchu, as for a Mongol, distance was no deterrent.
Southern Xinjiang’s conquest came last and was a direct result of the Qing victory in Zungharia. In fact it was conducted by the same Qing general fresh from his Zungharian triumphs. The Zunghar Mongols had depended on Xinjiang’s oasis-cities, by now with a substantial Muslim Uighur population, for supplies and taxes, and had exercised a loose supervision over them. The Qing elimination of the Zunghars left a power vacuum that members of a formerly prominent and still greatly revered Muslim family sought to fill. These were the Khojas of the Naqshbandi sect of Sufis, whose authority in the region spread even to Kashmir and Afghanistan and had occasionally been endorsed by the Zunghars. Exploiting this connection, the Qing demanded submission and tribute. The Khojas, counting on their remoteness, declined, recruited a sizeable army, and fortified Kuqa (Kucha), the Silk Road city that commanded access to the region. In 1758 they were there defeated by a Qing force, and in 1759 were driven back to Kashgar, Yarkand and finally across the Pamirs to Badakshan in northern Afghanistan. Despite latter-day opinion, as yet ‘there was no unified “Uighur” nationality either fighting against the Qing state or yearning to be incorporated within it’.26 The region was indeed incorporated within the empire, but not as a regular province. ‘Xinjiang’s overall administration [under the Qing] was in essence nothing more than a huge garrison under the command of the military governor.’ Officials there ‘neither respected nor learned much about the languages and customs of the people whom they ruled’. They learned even less about the nominally jimi (‘loose rein’) lands beyond, including Tashkent, Bukhara, Afghanistan and Hunza in what is now northern Pakistan, over all of which the Qing inherited a vague suzerainty.27
Tibet’s involvement in the Qing–Zunghar conflict was very different. It preceded that of Xinjiang and was much more influential, though the outcome was less conclusive. Like Taiwan, and despite vague claims by the Yuan dynasty, Tibet had never been administratively part of any Chinese empire. But the Mongols had become intimately involved in Tibet’s religious politics, mostly as champions of the Yellow-hatted order of monks (Gelugpa), whose spiritual leader was the Dalai Lama of Lhasa. Khubilai Khan had patronised visiting lamas for their learning and occult powers, and by the late sixteenth century Mongol khans, like the Manchu leaders, were accustomed to seek confirmation and legitimacy from the Tibetan religious establishment. Tibetan Buddhist monasteries founded in Mongolia, such as that at Urga (Ulan Bator), became nuclei of Mongol settlement and later cities. In a mutually rewarding arrangement, Mongol leaders provided Tibet’s competing religious leaders with temporal clout in the form of recognition, donations and troops, while the lamas provided the competing Mongol leaders with titles, divinely sanctioned authority and monastic power bases. It was Altan Khan, a Mongol leader claiming descent from Chinggis Khan, who in 1578, in return for recognition as ‘Protector of the Faith’, had first acknowledged the leader of the Yellow-hatted order as ‘Dalai’ (‘Oceanic’, ‘Universal’) lama. (He was later known as the Third Dalai Lama when his father and grandfather were retrospectively recognised as the Second and First; the Fourth was in fact one of Altan Khan’s descendants, and so a Mongol.) Mongol contacts with Tibet, for educational and commercial as well as religio-political purposes, were frequent. But this rich seam of legitimacy was also worked by the Qing, who in 1652 had feted the ‘Great Fifth’ Dalai Lama (r. 1617–82) in Beijing and confirmed his title. Whether as ally, opponent or umpire, Lhasa’s Dalai Lama could not but play a pivotal part in the Qing–Zun
ghar struggle.
Matters were vastly complicated by two further factors: the first was the rival claims of other senior lamas, both Mongol and Tibetan, whether Yellow-hatted (like the Panchen Lamas of Tashilunpo) or not (like those of other orders); and the second was the dilemmas arising from a firm belief in the principle, and much latitude in the practice, of reincarnate succession. As a manifestation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteswara, the Dalai Lama did not die; but when relinquishing one incarnation, he left it to others to determine the next, so creating great potential for controversy and uninvited interference.
To avoid this, the Great Fifth’s ‘non-death’ in 1682 was kept secret from the Kangxi emperor for sixteen years. The emperor blamed Galdan and his Zunghars for contributing to the deception and endorsed intervention by a loyal (to the Qing) Mongol confederation from Qinghai. These Qinghai Mongols, keen to unseat the Zunghar-backed administration in Tibet and its Sixth Dalai Lama, reached Lhasa, but were in turn evicted by their Zunghar brethren. Imperial troops were then sent to the rescue, and in 1720, for the first time, entered Lhasa. The Zunghars evacuated the city ahead of their arrival, the Qing Banners occupied it, and a Seventh Dalai Lama was installed. A precedent for Qing protection in central Tibet had finally been established; civil power was now entrusted to a council of ministers who would be advised by two Beijing-appointed ambans (‘commissioners’ from the Qing Colonial Office, they ‘were basically political informants’) and a few troops were left to support them.28 This did not accord with the expectations of the emperor’s Qinghai Mongol allies, who rose in revolt. On orders from the Yongzhen emperor (the Kangxi emperor having finally died) the revolt was suppressed. Then Qinghai (north-eastern Tibet) and Kham (eastern Tibet) were effectively detached from the rest of Tibet (Xizang) to become ‘inner’ parts of the empire under more direct rule. They have never since been officially regarded as part of Tibet.
