Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  The Manchu clan founder was Hong Taiji’s father, Nurhaci. He was born a Jurchen, a people related to the Khitan. Nurhaci is not a household name, but at the start of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a group of leaders of the Asian underworld meets at a remote Himalayan lodging house to haggle, for huge sums, over a blue vial containing “essence of Nurhaci”; when the vial is produced, all hell breaks loose in the inn in the fight for it. Nurhaci, in this reading, is a native warrior-king, an East Asian version of Geronimo or Sitting Bull but with a far greater potency. After all, unlike them, he was not doomed. Nurhaci laid the groundwork for his offspring to conquer an ancient, settled empire, and his descendants ruled it for nearly three centuries.

  The Jurchen homeland was in what is now the northeastern part of China, to the south of the Amur River, where forest, steppe, and cultivable lands merge. Nurhaci lived at the end of a trajectory that had taken the Jurchens to great things and back to oblivion again. It was in the eleventh century that they grew powerful, and in 1115 the Jurchen raided China and seized the dragon throne, as the Qing were later to do. They ruled as the Jin dynasty, the Chinese character for gold. But unlike the later Qing, the Jurchen never controlled more than China’s northern half, and they ruled for not much more than a century. The Mongols were their undoing. Following several years of desperate fighting against Mongol attacks, the dynasty collapsed when the Jin emperor killed himself. His half-million-strong army crumbled as the Jurchens retreated in ragtag groups to their former homeland. There they became obscure again, mere barbarians once more on the marches of China’s northeastern borders.

  Later, and barely observed, the Jurchens disintegrated as a single people, driven apart by occasional Mongol eruptions from farther west, the last spasms of the empire that Genghis Khan had founded but which now, too, was a dying star. Splintered, the Jurchen evolved into three fairly distinct groups. To the west, near Hulun Lake, were the Hulun Jurchens. To the east, toward modern-day Korea, were the Jianzhou Jurchens. And to the north, slipping back into the Amur forests from where these China-conquerors had emerged centuries before, were the Wild Jurchen. As barbarians did, the nearer of these Jurchen groups continued to raid settled Chinese lands. As the Chinese always did in response, the Ming dynasty that was now in power attempted to divide and rule the frontier barbarians. Ming emperors sought to win over raiders, to make gamekeepers of former poachers, and turn barbarians into the empire’s border guards. They awarded lofty titles to Jurchen lords, and gave them noble Chinese wives. They demanded a tribute of local goods brought each year to Peking. The “tributary system” was a term invented only later, by Westerners, to depict an East Asian order in which China lay at the center and all other peoples paid it homage. Such a description underplayed the advantages to the tribute bearers, for whom the arrangements could be immensely rewarding. The gifts Chinese emperors bestowed in return often greatly outweighed the value of the tributes brought to Peking. What is more, when tributary missions traveled to Peking, they were also the occasion for licensed and very profitable trading. And so tribute bearers heading home returned with both wealth and prestige.

  So profitable, indeed, were tribute missions that before long, tribute bearers were bringing retinues of hundreds and occasionally thousands to the Chinese capital. In exasperation, the Ming emperors issued printed patents at the Chinese border in an attempt to control the numbers of missions and their retinues. Over the years, as local leaders died and clans re-formed, these patents became, in themselves, a form of transferable currency. Wealth and power accrued to those Jurchen leaders who managed to accumulate the most patents. All the while trade increased.

  Above all, the Chinese had a perennial and occasionally desperate need for warhorses, bred on the steppes. The Ming founded horse markets in the borderlands, a market for each barbarian group. In time the Chinese came in greater numbers to buy other things. They prized forest ginseng and the northeast’s delicate little freshwater pearls, which remained a staple of the Manchurian economy well into the twentieth century. The Chinese aristocracy had a passion for hunting with gyrfalcons, which the Jurchen caught in the Manchurian forests. And at the court in Peking, no fur was more coveted than the Amur sable, which the border barbarians acquired from the remote Wild Jurchen. In one six-month period, forty-two thousand Amur sables were delivered to the empire. The emperor himself, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Confucius in Shandong province, bestowed on Prince Kong, descendant of the great sage and the shrine’s guardian, a great cloak of the finest Amur sable.

  • • •

  All this trade, it was hoped, would draw the Jurchen ever closer into the Ming embrace. In the end, it rendered them more independent. Jurchen raids continued into settled communities—Korean and Chinese—and carried away slaves. Jurchen fields came to be tended, overwhelmingly, by such bond servants. With agriculture taken care of by others, Jurchen had all the time to keep up their martial valor. Great emphasis was put on the traditional skills of horsemanship and archery. Just as in the days of Genghis Khan, the two skills were honed together in huge organized hunts that took place four times a year and lasted for weeks. Meanwhile, the growth of trade with China set off a spate of town building in Jurchen lands. The Jurchens, at least those on the borders with China, grew settled and prosperous. They were no less martial for that, but they could hardly be called a people, for over the centuries a once-powerful sense of Jurchen identity had dissipated. It was Nurhaci who seized the chance to mold a people again out of the raw material that lay about him—Jurchen, Mongol, even Chinese who had gone native in the borderlands.

  Nurhaci made much of his good Jurchen pedigree, much of it fabricated. His grandfather and father were local kingpins who, while boasting of their ancestors, neglected their offspring. As a boy, Nurhaci grew up half feral, hustling in the ginseng markets of the border towns. In one of these, a Chinese frontier general was impressed by Nurhaci’s natural astuteness. The general adopted him. In the general’s home Nurhaci learned Chinese, and he read hungrily from the books that lay scattered about the house on Chinese history and military tactics. It was to be the undoing of the Ming, the last native Chinese dynasty.

  At some point Nurhaci’s father and grandfather were killed in a struggle with a China-backed warlord. Nurhaci swore revenge, but bided his time and burnished his credentials. He gathered trading patents. He fabricated descent from Mongke Temur, a fifteenth-century Jurchen khan. He founded his own clan, the Aisin Gioro. Aisin is Manchurian for gold, jin () in Chinese. It was a conscious echo of the Jurchens who had ruled northern China half a millennium earlier. Nurhaci demanded loyalty from his own male relatives, and then from neighboring clans. When they refused, he made war. He was nearly always victorious, and soon local Jurchen and Mongol lords were offering him their sisters and daughters; he in turn gave daughters, nieces, and granddaughters to vassals, cementing power. He forged north and pacified the Wild Jurchen in the Amur Valley. Within a decade Nurhaci had made the Jurchen whole again, and to the south he was pushing back the Chinese frontier—his assault on Fushun in China’s northeast had procured valuable cannon designed by Jesuit advisers to the Chinese court.

  Now Nurhaci wanted a lasting power for his descendants, and China was both natural model and eventual target. In Liaodong, southern Manchuria, Nurhaci began to build a state that consciously emulated the Chinese one, complete with dynastic lineage. His capital at Mukden (modern-day Shenyang) began to resemble a miniature Peking, with defensive walls, processional avenues, and tiled-roof palaces. Early on in his rise, perhaps because of those books lying about the Chinese general’s house, Nurhaci understood the importance of a rule administered by literate scribes and competent bureaucrats, and he began to recruit former Ming officials, including from among a pool of disaffected exiles banished to the frontier for one misdeed or other. All this turned out to be a dry run for holding China itself, though it was something Nurhaci neither lived to see nor perhaps seriously consi
dered. In 1626, in a rare military setback against a Ming stronghold at Ningyuan, his forces were routed, and Nurhaci himself was wounded. He retired to Mukden, as one account puts it, “to nurse his body and his pride.” Neither rallied, and the khan was soon dead. He was well into his sixties, and had spent two thirds of his life in battle.

  It was Nurhaci’s son, Hong Taiji, who insisted on a new appellation for Nurhaci’s followers. They were to be Manchus, and Jurchen was henceforth a banned word. Hong Taiji, an overweening man who smashed what collegial rule Nurhaci had fostered, declared himself not a khan but an emperor. He renamed his dynasty the Qing (), implying purity or clarity. The family had still to set up in China. But when it did, it all happened very fast, and the Qing were ready. They had watched closely as civil war and peasant revolts swept across China, attended by a millenarian sense of doom. In 1644 two superbandits at the head of armies from the North China plain, Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, pressed west toward Peking in a race to see who could bring down the Ming and set up a new dynasty. The Ming’s mandate of heaven now looked to be slipping. Li Zicheng got there first, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself from a tree on Prospect Hill, a man-made mound that still rises behind the Forbidden City. By this point, Qing regents (Hong Taiji by now was dead) had moved their armies to the Shanhai pass, where the Great Wall runs into the Yellow Sea just one hundred miles east of Peking. They sent messages to the general of the loyal Ming army outside the capital, offering their services to help retake the capital. The commanding general, Wu Sangui, accepted—both his father and favorite concubine were hostages in Peking. The armies combined and attacked, and Li Zicheng fled. When the Qing entered Peking, they put a five-year-old, Fulin, Hong Taiji’s fifth son, on the imperial throne, with Hong Taiji’s brother as regent.

  The Qing, a minority in a huge land, reigned in China for three centuries, but they nearly blew it at the start with Fulin, who ruled as the Shunzhi emperor. The Qing had until recently been in essence a forest people, conquering other, sparsely settled regions. China, by contrast, was a densely settled country, with local elites that were much more firmly established. Bringing them onside was a huge challenge for a conquering dynasty, requiring long and delicate maneuvering. Yet until the time of his death as a young man, the emperor progressively retreated into a palace world of mystical poems, Buddhist scriptures, and outré homosexual liaisons. He may have died of smallpox; the other theory is that he was poisoned by powerful men at the Manchu court. Either way, the written will that these men produced, the Shunzhi emperor speaking from beyond the grave, was pure fabrication. It claimed great regret at straying from the martial road, neglecting imperial duties, and so forth, and called for resolute actions from his successor, to be guided by the same wise counselors who had read out the will.

  • • •

  The heir was Xuanye, the Shunzhi emperor’s seventh child (neither Manchu nor Chinese tradition insisted on primogeniture). The thirteen-year-old Xuanye was from this point on only ever known as the Kangxi emperor. The boy seems to have been chosen because he appeared immune to smallpox, endemic in China but rare among steppe peoples, who had little resistance to the disease. The grasslands of North Asia protected their inhabitants from deadly organisms just as the Pacific Ocean protected Polynesians until Captain Cook arrived. Steppe peoples had long known that the Chinese were smallpox carriers, and when the disease struck an isolated clan or tribe, the effect could be devastating, with as much as seven-tenths of the population wiped out. As late as the 1770s, Peter Simon Pallas, the German naturalist and traveler in Mongol and Buryat lands, noted that smallpox was the only disease that the people feared: “If someone catches it, they abandon him in his tent; they only approach from the windward side to provide food. Children who catch it are sold to the Russians very cheaply.” In China, where isolation was not an option, and where the Manchus were being cut down by smallpox, the Qing conquerors quickly adopted for the royal family and, later, for all Manchu children the Chinese innovation of variolation, a form of inoculation achieved by bringing on a mild form of the disease.

  The Kangxi emperor reigned for six decades, longer than any Chinese ruler before or since; and the intellect, know-how, and sheer stamina he brought to this entire period make his among the most brilliant reigns of any land. He was roughly contemporaneous with two other long-lived monarchs, Louis XIV of France and Peter the Great of Russia. He was, as the historian Mark Mancall put it, “subtle and puissant.” Unlike his father, the Kangxi emperor felt keenly his sense of an imperializing mission. In contrast, too, he was a man of detail and decision.

  The affairs of state utterly absorbed him, and so, too, did culture and higher learning. In Chinese, the emperor was a fair calligrapher and a superb prose stylist. He attended assiduously to the lectures he received from Confucian scholars, and patronized scholars and artists. With family members, he embarked on tours of southern China, where affections for the old Ming dynasty clung on strongest. There, he listened to tales of local history and admired scenic spots immortalized in verse. For a non-Chinese ruler of the empire, there were obvious benefits to all this, for it helped persuade the Chinese of the righteousness of his reign. The Kangxi emperor went about winning hearts and minds in exceptional fashion. Most notable was his skill in wooing back Ming loyalists who had refused all offers of government service by proclaiming themselves “hermits,” dedicated in remote cabins to solitary contemplation. Amid great fanfare, the emperor invited them to come and write the history of the Ming, something a loyalist could hardly turn down. No miracle came of these initiatives, the Manchus’ historian in English, Pamela Kyle Crossley, says, “but the chill between the conquest state and the former Ming elite began to thaw . . . under the court’s steady attempts to flatter, employ, and selectively elevate Chinese literati.”

  The Kangxi emperor’s boundless curiosity was exceptional for a ruler. He delighted in the natural world (“Since childhood I have loved to watch the new shoots grow, and to transplant flowers and seedlings from other provinces and foreign lands”). And he always questioned orthodoxy, bringing Jesuits into his court and learning eagerly from them, everything from abstract mathematics to the practicalities of surveying for a canal. As for the dead weight of the Chinese classics and for the set divinations that, among other things, made up military orthodoxy, he had no patience. It was action that mattered:

  The so-called Seven Military Classics are full of nonsense about water and fire, lucky omens and advice on the weather, all at random and contradicting each other. . . . All one needs is an inflexible will and careful planning.

  From the start in his campaign against the Russians, the Kangxi emperor seems to have chosen to flex Chinese power by showing what he kept in reserve. First, he moved their subject peoples, the Daurs and the Solons, away from the Amur front line, sending them into the interior along the Nunjiang. He had, some years earlier, done something similar along China’s eastern seaboard during the campaign against the pirate Zheng Chenggong, a half-Japanese Ming loyalist more commonly known in the West as Coxinga. The Manchus moved the entire littoral population inland, a trauma for the coastal communities. In Manchuria, this resettlement was an admission that the Manchus were unable to defend their subject peoples along the Amur. But it also undermined the Russians’ ability to plunder—and removed the temptation among the Solons and the Daurs to swap their allegiance.

  The emperor built a new base, a city indeed, from where the military campaign would be waged, and named it Wu-La: By the River. Several thousand families were drafted from farther south to fill this land. Local peoples—Daurs, Solons, Koreans—were conscripted and organized into fighting banners along Manchu lines. Indeed, “New Manchus” is what the people of this new army were called, and the chief qualification was that you had to be over five feet tall. A navy was established, with shipwrights, boatmen, and shipboard militias. Thirty-two villages were established to grow food, gather fuel, and lay down stores. When t
he Kangxi emperor came up to see the progress for himself in 1682, all this was not enough. The Russians, he said, were “savage, greedy, stubborn, and ignorant.” They had remained at Albazino, farming and hunting furs and natives, because in previous attempts to dislodge them, Manchus had not followed through, abandoning their campaigns, usually for want of food. Now, the emperor said, a reconnaissance was needed to gauge the Russians’ strength in order to overwhelm it.

  And so two of the emperor’s generals, Langtan and Duke Pengcun, came into the Amur Valley at the head of 180 soldiers. It was supposed to have all the air of a deer-hunting expedition, though quite how they pulled off the ruse is unclear. Their instructions were to find the best route to Albazino. On their return, the generals briefed the emperor. Some three thousand troops and twenty cannons, they said, would be enough to overwhelm the wooden walls of the Albazinians. But so icy was the land in winter and so boggy during the summer rains, the generals advised, that the Chinese force should go to Albazino by water, descending the Ussuri until it met the Amur near present-day Khabarovsk and then heading up the main stream. More than one hundred vessels would be needed, forty of them junks of considerable size.

  At this point the disadvantages began to tell of a distant emperor, however brilliant, managing the finest details of a military campaign. He bombarded the generals with advice about the sizes of the boats that needed to be built, and how the granaries were to be constructed. He thought that half a month’s rations were ample for the men leaving Wu-La for the Amur campaign, while his generals petitioned for a year’s worth. Above all, he wanted two wooden cities to be constructed as Amur bases for the attack on Albazino, one at Aigun and the other at Kumarsk. One of the emperor’s commanders in the field, Bahai, felt strongly that not only would these two bases be too far from Albazino to be practical, but they would also divide the Manchu forces, rendering them vulnerable to attack. Instead, Bahai recommended a lightning attack on Albazino before the Russians had a chance to bring up reinforcements and fresh supplies. Kangxi rejected the recommendation on the basis that the terrain was unfamiliar. Yet the emperor was not always more cautious than his field commanders. He urged them to go capture the harvest the Russians had grown around Albazino. When the generals demurred—the harvest might already have been taken in, the rainy season was about to start, the men and horses would be too exhausted—a whole year was lost.