The Earliest Government: The Eight Banners

The earliest of these governments was the “Eight Banners” (jakungusa, baqi).^& Late sixteenth-century documents from Korea as well as Ming China suggest that these organizations were already in action.

The Eight Banners as they existed at the time of creation of the khanate in 1616 were not culturally striated. They were composed largely of Jurchens who had either followed the ruling family since the sixteenth century or had been brought into the khanate by surrender or conquest at a later date. Each banner was differentiated by a color, which was in essence its formal designation (Plain Yellow, Bordered Yellow, Plain White, Bordered White, Plain Blue, Bordered Blue, Plain Red, Bordered Red). The number of banners corresponded to the number of “princes” (beile) in the col­legial council (sons and one nephew of the khan). In 1616 each prince owned a banner as part of his estate. After Hung Taiji’s accession to the khanship he system­atically undermined the princes, seizing three banners for himself and weakening the discretion with which the remaining banners were used by their respective princes. By the early 1630s he had effectively eradicated any ability of the princes’ council to counterweigh his own power to any significant degree. A progressive bu­reaucratization also eroded vestiges of aristocratic authority within the banners, in­cluding hereditary access to the captaincies of the hundreds of banner companies. It was this process that banished the old name of “Jurchen” from official vocabulary and in most instances replaced it horizontally with “Manchu” after 1634 (it was offi­cially declared the “national” name in 1635).^[1983]

In 1634 the process began of constructing parallel banner organizations for the Mongols. That is, each of the Eight Banners subsequently was constituted of both a Manchu and a Mongol variant (e.g., Manchu Bordered Yellow, Mongol Bordered Yellow). As a consequence, state control over the designation “Mongol” and the narration of this “Mongol” history increased sharply. Groups and individuals who had been the regime’s earliest adherents from eastern Mongolia (including Khorchin, Kharachin, and a few Tumet Mongols) were for general administra­tive purposes thereafter nominalized as Mongols of the Eight Banners.

The Chinese-speaking population of Jilin, and to some extent of Liaodong, had various origins reaching to north China, northern Korea, and migrating populations of Mongols and Jurchens. The establishment of the Chinese-martial banners nominalized this group as “Chinese” but with a difference—the Chinese-martial (hanjun) bannermen were not civilians, and were intended to be restricted in their contacts with the conquered, civilian population in the same way and to the same de­gree as Manchu and Mongol bannermen. This was always a difficult thing to control, and by the latter part of the seventeenth century, administrative practices relating to the Chinese-martial bannermen became increasingly informal and irregular. By the eighteenth century, for reasons relating primarily to evolution of the ruler­ship, imperial prescriptions tended to racialize the Chinese-martial as being an or­ganic extension of the conquered civilian population of China. As imperial finances deteriorated from the mid-eighteenth century the Chinese-martial were increas­ingly characterized as “Chinese” as a reason for cashiering them from the banner payrolls.^[1986] Until that time, all three of the cultural divisions of the Eight Banners worked as mutually distinguishing mechanisms. Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese- martial were defined by contrast to each other, in increasingly rigid, idealized, and in fact impractical ways.

At the time of the Qing conquest of northern China in 1644-1645, there were Eight Banners with three cultural divisions each, or effectively 24 banners (in fact there were a small number of companies created for Muslims and tribal peoples of the upper Amur territories).

By 1644, for the banners as a whole, nearly half of the enrolled population was Chinese-martial.

Of the remaining half of the banners that were not Chinese-martial, Manchus may have outnumbered Mongols by more than five to one; certainly, it is difficult to find Mongol enrollments in the Eight Banners ever rising above 8 percent.

Once the khanate's campaigns against Ming Liaodong had begun, the function and status of the Eight Banners changed greatly. Chinese-speakers surrendering to the invaders were no longer routinely incorporated into the Eight Banner forces. Instead, the Eight Banners became an occupying stratum imposed upon a larger, unincorporated, conquered population. After the initiation of the conquest of north China, the Eight Banners became a virtually closed system, a sealed set of lineages, and would in the ensuing decades take on the characteristics of a dis­tinct cultural identity in China. The armies actually doing the conquering in China were, in number, largely derived from deserters of the Ming forces, or soldiers surrendering from the rebel army of Li Zicheng that had actually ended the Ming dynasty, and they were enrolled in the new Armies of the Green Standard.^[1991] Eight Banner commanders, dominated by members of the imperial lineage of the Qing, led the campaigns, and Eight Banner soldiers were stationed in conquered prov­inces, as well as in every corner of Beijing, to police the conquered. Their families were settled in walled compounds, with their own lands, grazing areas, living quar­ters, entertainment districts. and graveyards. From being a means of administering the entire population in the early khanal period to being a means of controlling the population of occupiers in China after 1644, the Eight Banners remained an intact and essential, but quite distinct, government within the Qing state. Its documen­tation was in the languages of its components (Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese) with a preeminent place for Manchu.