Early Qing Officials as Chroniclers of the Conquest

Vol. 10, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1989 EARLY QING OFFICIALS AS CHRONICLERS OF THE CONQUEST Lynn A. Struve Early in my work with primary materials on the Ming resistance to the Qing conquest, a principle occurred to me, to wit: Ming officials left memoirs; Qing officials left memorials. Through several more years of my attempts to clarify the basic record of the Ming-Qing struggle, this principle has held true. There are almost no private accounts of the conquest by Qing officials who personally witnessed or were proximate to events; moreover, the many memorials and reports that early Qing officials wrote to superiors and to the court were preserved almost wholly in the imperial archives or other capital offices rather than in private collections. Let me draw some contrasts to vivify this circumstance. A cursory survey shows forty-two surviving accounts by men who held official appointments under some Ming court, from Chongzhen (1628-44) through Yongli (1647-6 1).1 On the other hand, an assiduous search has uncovered only three accounts by Qing officials who were directly involved in conquest affairs before 1660. One of these, the Dongcun jishi, concerning various crucial events in the Nanjing-Suzhou and southern Fujian areas in the 1650s, was written by Song Zhengyu, a former literary-society associate of Chen Zilong and a jinshi of 1647, who died in 1667 on duty as director of education for Fujian. Another is the Zhengxing jilue by a subordinate of Wu Sangui named Ma Yu, who reportedly recorded his experiences during Wu's campaign from Shaanxi to Yunnan in the years 1658-1660. Third is a memoir, the Chujie jilue, by literatus Ding Yaokang, who vividly recounts how he and his family managed to survive the depredations of Manchu and bandit forces, and how he tried in vain to aid dilatory Ming forces in Shandong Province from 1639 to 1647. None of these works is mentioned in Qing catalogs or bibliographies of miscellaneous histories from the end of the Ming. Though Ding's work was published in 1656, Song's did not appear in print until 1944, and Ma Yu's survives 1 The list, too long to be given in full here, includes as Ming officials one jinshi, Cheng Yuan (1643), and one Imperial Academy student, Xu Chongxi, as well as Chen Hongfan, whose Beishi jilue (a justification of his behavior in service to the Southern Ming Hongguang court), appears to have been written before his open defection to the Qing side. 2 Lynn A. Struve only in manuscript.2 As for memorials, aside from those preserved in the Neige archives in Beijing and Taibei, only a scattered few have appeared elsewhere.3 To my knowledge, no memorials that directly reflect events or conditions of the conquest appear in the wenji of early Qing officials. I do know of two cases, however, in which such memorials were published separately by figures, perhaps in defense of their reputations, who had gotten into trouble for insubordination.4 One is a two-part set of draft memorials by Tong Guoqi, who belatedly joined the Chinese Plain Blue Banner in 1645. This collection favorably represents Tong's activities when he served successively as governor of Fujian, of southern Jiangxi, and of Zhejiang during the years 1653-1660. In 1660 Tong was cashiered, confined, and prosecuted for stubbornly refusing to carry out the Shunzhi emperor's order to exile the aged, infirm mother of a grand secretary who was being punished for a series of improprieties.5 The second case is a three-part set of memorials published in 1656. These reflect the vigorous and often contentious career of Qin Shizhen, also of the Plain Blue Banner, in his successive posts as Zhejiang regional inspector, Jiangnan regional inspector, and governor of Zhejiang. Qin repeatedly was involved in controversial adjudications over his own or 2 Xie 1981:314, 619, 971-72. Whether Ma Yu held official position, strictly speaking, is unclear to me. I have not yet been able to see the manuscript of the Zhengxingjilue, which was located for me by Thomas H. Lee. Some of the content ofthat work appears in the Dianyou jiwen by Fang Xiaobiao...