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10 O -ERH -T 'AI AND THE YUNG -CHENG EMPEROR By Kent C. Smith Few officials of the Yung -Cheng period could claim a more illustrious career than that of the Manchu statesman, O-erh-t'ai. As Grand Councillor, Grand Secretary, and as President of the Board of War he sat in the highest councils of state. As a close confidant of the monarch, he enjoyed extraordinary influence throughout the Empire. Throughout the Yung-cheng Emperor's reign, O-erh-t'ai basked in the Imperial favor. Given the envenomed atmosphere of court politics in that period, the durability of his success is remarkable. The roster of Yung-cheng favorites is filled, after all, with names of Imperial proteges who fell from grace abruptly. O-erh-t'ai suffered no prolonged period of disgrace or political eclipse. O-erh-t'ai's rapid rise to prominence began when the Yung-cheng Emperor plucked him out of relative obscurity and named him to high provincial office. From 1726 to 1732, he served as Governor -Gene ral of Yunnan and Kweichow, and from 1728, of Kwangsi as well. It was in this capacity that O-erh-t'ai earned his reputation as a model official. A few months after he appointed O-erh-t'ai Governor-General, the Yung-cheng Emperor singled him out both publicly and privately as an example to be emulated: "O-erh-t'ai, " he wrote to another official stationed in Southwest China, "is the best of all my present ministers, Manchu or Chinese, civil or military, metropolitan or provincial. " To O-erh-t'ai himself, he declared: Your attitudes and actions should not only leave the current generation of Governors -General and Governors ashamed; they can serve as a model for myriad generations of provincial officials. Personal affection as well as official esteem colored the Yung-cheng Emperor's praise for O-erh-t'ai. In 1728, he told his assembled ministers that he thought often of O-erh-t'ai, and he wept when he read his memorials. Destiny, he confided, had brought them together as monarch and minister. Like others among the Yung-cheng Emperor's favorite officials, O-erh-t'ai was a new man. Born to a respectable but penurious Manchu 11 family, he did not hold a chin-shih and was attached to none of the bureaucratic factions which the monarch so despised. He owed his success solely to the favor of the Yung-cheng Emperor rather than to any previous position or reputation. There is no reliable data on how the Yung-cheng Emperor first be came acquainted with O-erh-t'ai. Certainly, however, O-erh-t'ai had already won an extraordinary place in the Emperor's confidence before his appointment to the Yun-Kwei Governor -Generalship. Whatever were the personal factors involved in the relationship between O-erh-t'ai and the Yung-cheng Emperor, O-erh-t'ai attuned himself brilliantly to the monarch's principal administrative preoccupations. And this was his single greatest political asset. The central theme which runs through the Yung-cheng Emperor's administrative policies is his effort to push the machinery of the Imperial state to its utmost potential efficiency. Apart from his vendetta against his personal enemies, he sought to eliminate the demoralization and corruption which pervaded the bureaucracy at the end of the K'ang-hsi period. He augmented the flow of intelligence reaching him when he extended and formalized the Palace Memorial system. This permitted him to ferret out corruption in local and provincial government more readily. His many fiscal reforms -- for example, the supplementary salary system and the stricter accounting procedures for tax-collection -- curtailed bribery and graft. The Yung-cheng Emperor put the officialdom on notice that he would not tolerate the lax administrative practices which had long been accepted procedure. His reforms did serve* on the one hand, to consolidate his personal control over the bureaucracy. But in many parts of the Empire they also lessened official peculation and reduced extortionate levies upon the populace. Few provinces offered more formidable obstacles to such reform than did Yunnan, Kweichow, and Kwangsi where the Yung-cheng Emperor...

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