Production of Simultaneous Rulership

The Qing Empire as constituted in 1636 was composed of a court and its dependent administrative offices resting atop three governments of different origins, all of which would retain significant functionality until the mid-nineteenth century.

The court was in essence a collective representation of the rulership,^[1978] and the rulership itself had a quality I have called “simultaneous.”^[1979] That is to say, the rulership and the codes of legitimacy underlying it (including cosmology, rhetoric, ritual, and historical authority) were together a direct product of the process of conquest. The populations who had putatively facilitated the conquest and acknowledged Qing rule—later historicized as constituencies of the emperorship—were historically narrated and ceremonially invoked through performance of their languages, scripts, religions, and architectures. The process was not merely syncretic or hybridizing; codified cultural identities, which in many cases were extended to legislation regarding cultural performance and the legality of marriage, remained distinct. Over time the rulership itself became increasingly abstract, and in the Qianlong era (1736-1795) of the eighteenth century tended to be rhetoricized as culturally null—transcendent over any particular culture—and morally universal.

The orientations of personae within the rulership toward the cultures and descendant of its facilitators was specific. In 1606 eastern Mongols hoping to escape the interference and domination of Lighdan had volunteered to acknowledge the first Jin ruler as khan, a title he later used to elevate himself in the Jurchen political order and made the underlying prescription for his state in 1616. These and later

Mongol adherents became part of the earliest aristocracy within the khanate, as they married with women of the khan's lineage.

In 1634, as Hung Taiji appropriated the remnants of the Chakhar empire, he literally absorbed Lighdan's role as heir of the Chinggisid khans, in both its political and its religious aspects. From that point forward, the khan of the Jin was not only a khan in the sense that the term had been used among the Jurchens, but also a khaghan^[1980]—a great khan, in the line of Chinggis—and a cakvravartin, a wheel-turning Buddhist monarch in a line descending from Asoka through Khubilai and Lighdan.^[1981] ^{^[1982] In these same years of 1634-1636, the emerging emperorship took on a third major aspect. Hung Taiji publicly pursued his war against the Ming as an aspiring practitioner of traditional Chinese benevolent government, and as the rightful curator of Chinese civilization. By the time the empire was declared in 1636, it not only communicated its meanings in Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese, but presented a different face to each constituency. Through the eighteenth century, the court would continue to refine the performance—both in the emperor's person and in the resonance of simultaneous practices through the state—of this simultaneity. The imperial simultaneity that was so marked as early as 1636 was reinforced by—and in part generated by—the accommodation of distinct governments within the new state.}

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Production of Simultaneous Rulership

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