The Qianlong Retrospect on the Chinese-martial (hanjun) Banners

63 Vol. 10, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1989 THE QIANLONG RETROSPECT ON THE CHINESE-MARTIAL (hanjun) BANNERS Pamela Kyle Crossley* Few Chinese dynasties, and no "alien" dynasties in China, were secured without a means of transforming the conquered into conquerors. For the Qing (1636-1912) this process began among the Jurchens of the Northeast during Nurgaci's wars of unification in the late sixteenth century. The dynamics of subjugation and incorporation refined among the Jurchens were applied to the varied populations of Liaodong, and finally, after 1644, within China Proper (guannei). But when the empire was stabilized in the middle eighteenth century, the transformation of the conquered into conquerors became of secondary importance to the establishment and enforcement of an immutable code of loyalty (zhong).1 In its political manifestations, loyalty was a self-evident requirement for the Qing as for all other dynasties. The Qianlong (1736-1795) emperor, however, sought to elevate an abstract construct capable of superceding dissonances of This article began as a paper presented to the AAS annual meeting in 1988; I owe first thanks to the panel participants, Lynn Struve and Wang Chen-main, and to the panel discussants , Frederic Wakeman and Jerry Dennerline. The draft has benefited from an extended discussion of ideas with Ann-ping Chin, Arthur Waldron and Thomas Bartlett; the searching and generous critical guidance of the anonymous referee; Lillian M. Li and Charlotte Fürth; and by the comments of Evelyn S. Rawski, and Gertraude Roth Li. For editorial assistance I am indebted to Barbara Calli and Jonathan Tyler. I claim all stubbornly persisting errors of fact or judgment, and all infelicities of language. Research for this paper was begun at the Qingshi yanjiu suo, Renmin daxue, Beijing, and I am particularly indebted to Li Hongbin for bibliographical guidance. The original draft was completed while I was a fellow at the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, to whom I am grateful for institutional support; for the long period over which this essay was intermittently researched, written and revised I enjoyed the financial support of the Committee for Advanced Study/Committee for Scholarly Exchange with the People's Republic of China/National Academy of Sciences, the Wang Fellowships in Chinese Studies and Dartmouth College faculty research funds; I remain indebted to the staff of Baker Library, Dartmouth College and to the collections and staff of the HarvardYenching Library. 1 Preliminary work on the diachrony of posthumous titles (shi) for the Qing has been provided in early work by Abe Takeo, "Shincho to ka i shisho," where, most specific to the present discussion, it is shown that the epithet zhong, "loyal," became the most frequent shi only during the Qianlong period, displacing wen, "cultured," which had been most common in earlier eras. See also Fisher, "Lu Liu-liang":180-185. 64Pamela Kyle Crossley cultural, racial or personal affinities, to all of which the Qing were vulnerable . The court could not escape the fact that because of its regionalist origins and because of the history to which it now traced its legitimacy, it actually had at least two systems of loyalty at hand, which it attempted to ascribe to sectors of the population on the basis of an increasingly racialist criterion. The character of loyalty was only one of the contradictions with which the eighteenth-century court had to deal, and the tendency of the court was not to resolve contradictions, but to accommodate them. Perhaps no political class in Qing China was as precisely poised between the contradictions of the ideology of loyalty of the Qianlong period as were the "Chinese-martial," or hanjun bannermen.2 By the later Qianlong period, the court was seeking manifestation of its universalism in a progressively rigid taxonomy of culturally-distinct races within the empire. Idealization of cultural types was emergent,3 and in the case of Manchu and Mongol bannermen particularly, prescribed cultural attributes on the basis of genealogical affiliations entered more and more frequently into court instructions.4 By degrees the state moved from its seventeenth2 On the principle that one should attempt translation of even the untranslatable, "Chinesemartial " is offered here for hanjun. The use of hanjun in the Qing records is anomalistic...