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 princi-ple 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 (1647-61). 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 Chujiejilue, 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.