The Qing Empire (1636-1912) was one of a set of very large, long-lived Eurasian empires ofthe early modern period, and like any ofits contemporaries the empire raises a number of questions regarding the sources of its stability, expansion, and durability.
In the Qing case, a strategy limiting the size and expense of the state worked in tension with a deep reliance upon the coherence and dynamism of the localities, exciting a certain amount of institutionalized wariness in the central government regarding the resources and loyalties of local populations.
The balance between encouraging local initiative and discouraging local discretion was one that the Qing maintained with general success until the mid-nineteenth century, when the outbreak of the movement to establish the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping Tianguo) ignited the world's greatest civil war and unraveled the Qing skein of stability. This chapter explores the coordination of three governments within the state, each by design self-funding and self-regulating, and each evolving to fulfill specific roles in the phases of conquest and of occupation.The Qing state was the descendant of a familial commercial dominion of the later sixteenth century. Though the ruling lineage of the Qing later fostered a mythology that placed their origins deep within the traditional Jurchen territories of Northeast Asia, they had in fact dominated a zone on the boundaries of Liaodong province of the Ming Empire (1368-1644), in southwestern Manchuria.1 Their fortune was derived from trade of horses and other products from the region, and they had protected their status as magnates against a number of challenges from rival lineages or federations. They consolidated their position through advantageous connections with disaffected or corrupt Ming officials, and as of1609 had won from the Ming court in Beijing virtual acknowledgment of not only their commercial primacy in trading towns of the eastern Ming frontier, but also of their territorial dominance in the region outside the Ming pale, in present-day Jilin province of the People's Republic of China. In 1616 this inchoate regime became acknowledged as a khanate by those it dominated—that is, its headman became a khan, and declared a state with the name of Jin (Aisin).2 In the ensuing years there evolved a
1 Crossley 1999; Rawski 2001, 73.
2 Crossley 1999.
Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Qing Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0029. form of collegial government in which the khan's sons (and eventually a nephew) legitimated the khan's decisions and advised him on matters of war.
In 1618 the Jin khanate declared war on Ming China, and by 1621 had seized Shenyang, the Ming provincial capital of Liaodong. When the khan died in 1626 he was succeeded by a second khan, and the war continued. This second khan, Hung Taiji,[1977] not only fought to pry the western territories of Liaodong as far as the Great Wall from Ming, but also fought the formidable Chakhar state of eastern Mongolia, ruled by Lighdan Khaghan. Chakhar collapsed as a result of a variety of misfortunes resulting from the policies of Lighdan, who died in 1634. His symbols of state, his populations and capital, and his son were all taken by Hung Taiji, who used them to craft a new form of rule in Liaodong. In 1636, the Qing Empire, with an emperor (huwangdi, huangdi), was declared, and the state reorganized in a process that extended to 1642.
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