Legal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Mongolia: Gender, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Manchu-Mongol Marriage Alliance*

The rule of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) over its “outer territories” in East and Inner Asia (Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Tibet) has received considerable scholarly attention since the 1990s. Historians have suggested that in Mongolia, as well as in Xinjiang and Tibet, the Qing managed to establish and maintain an efficient administration that played a more crucial role than military power, at least since the second half of the eighteenth century. The Qing eventually transformed the jimi, or “loose reign” system, an indirect form of central control over “barbarian” client states along the imperial borders in the traditional Chinese tributary system, to a more direct administrative structure accompanied by military occupation.¹ With regard to legal order in Mongolia under Qing rule, previous scholarship has proposed that, unlike their counterparts in colonies controlled by European powers, Mongolian local banner princes (jasags) held a recognized position in the official hierarchy of Qing judicial-administration in Mongolia. They served as judicial authorities on a local level, but they were incorporated into the Qing imperial judicial-administrative system rather than answering to an alien imperial order.² Scholars are able to trace some major criminal cases in Inner Mongolia in the eighteenth century from the level of the banner, which conducted the initial investigation, up to the court, where the Department of Outer Territories (Lifan yuan) submitted recommendations for imperial consent, and then back down to the banner as the executive organ that had to put the punishment into effect.³ These historical studies of the Qing legal order in Mongolia parallel and support scholarship on Qing military and civil administration on frontiers by portraying an increasingly streamlined imperial judicial-administrative hierarchy in Mongolia that successfully employed local elites as imperial agents that reinforced Qing imperial rule on its frontiers in the eighteenth century.

Other scholars focus on non-judicial-administrative aspects of Qing rule in Mongolia, such as imperial rituals, religions, and particularly the Manchu-Mongol marriage alliance. Historians view the institution of the Manchu-Mongol marriage alliance as a continuation of previous non-Han dynasties’ marriage alliances with non-Han groups, primarily in light of their function of establishing nonthreatening relations with influential elites by bringing sons-in-law into the royal family through marriage to princesses of the blood.⁴ The Qing brought Mongol sons-in-law into the imperial family and granted them efu (imperial son-in-law/ brother-in-law) titles, the specifics of which were determined by the ranks of their wives. These Mongol princes by virtue of being husbands of Manchu princesses in turn offered valuable political and military service to the Qing court. And the privileged Manchu princesses, who usually outranked their Mongol husbands, served as emblems of Qing sovereignty over the Mongols.⁵ Notwithstanding the similarities between the Manchu-Mongol marriage alliance and many other marriage alliances between different national/ethnic groups practiced in other parts of early modern Eurasia, the Manchu-Mongol marriage alliance was characterized by its codified inequality between the Manchus and their Mongol in-laws, largely due to the imbalance of military power and economic resources between the two parties.

These two bodies of scholarship on Qing rule in Mongolia, one on the formal judicial-administrative hierarchy and the other on marriage alliance and court politics, provide points of departure for this article, but they should be considered together under the framework of rulership and law. These two systems were not established separately to serve goals unrelated to one another, one for daily administration and the other for wartime emergency. Rather, they were designed to use essentially the same pool of people (Mongol banner elites) to serve Qing rule over Mongolia by maintaining Mongol loyalty and preventing social disorder. It was necessary to mobilize military support for the Qing from Mongolia only when loyalty and order could not be maintained by nonviolent means.

Earlier studies disregard the crucial point that the Qing judicial-administrative system in Mongolia was designed to be populated and managed by Mongol elites who held hereditary positions in their own banners...