The History of China - #268 - Qing 13: The War of the Three Feudatories

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Just as the last vestiges of the Ming are being swept away, a new round of wars will erupt to challenge Manchu suzerainty over China. From both within - as in the rebellions led by the three great feudatory lords of the south - and without - as in the challenges coming from Mongolia and Taiwan - the Kangxi Emperor's reign, and the Qing Dynasty itself, will be tested as never before. Time Period Covered: ~1661-1683 CE Great Qing: The Kangxi Emperor (Xuanye) [r. 1654-1722] Prince Lergiyan Gyesu, Prince Kang of the First Rank [1645-1697] Shang Kexi, Prince of Pingnan [1604-1676] Southern Ming: Zhu Youlang, Prince of Gui [1623-1662] Gen. Li Dingguo [1621-1662] Gen. Bo Wenxuan [d. 1662] Kingdom of Tungning: Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) [1624-1662] Zheng Jing [1642-1681] The Three Feudatories: Yunnan & Guizhou: Wu Sangui "Emperor of Wu Zhou" [1612-1678] Wu Shifan [1663-1681] Guangdong: Shang Zhixin "Prince Who Pacifies the South" [1636-1680] Fujian: Geng Jingzong, Prince of Jingnan [d. 1682] Chahar Mongols: Burni [d. 1675] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to the History of China. Episode 268. The War of the Three Futatories.

The Sixteen Maxims 1. Highly esteem filial piety and brotherly submission to give due weight to social relations. 2. Behave generously toward your family to promote harmony and peace. 3. Cultivate peace within the neighborhood to prevent quarrels and lawsuits. 4. Respect farming and the cultivation of mulberry trees to ensure sufficient clothing and food. 5. Be moderate and economical in order to avoid wasting away your livelihood. 6. Give weight to schools and academies in order to honor the scholar. 7. Wipe out strange beliefs to elevate the correct doctrine. 8. Elucidate the laws in order to warn the ignorant and obstinate.

9. Show propriety and tactful courtesy to elevate customs and manners. 10. Work diligently in your chosen callings to quiet your ambitions. 11. Instruct sons and younger brothers to keep them from doing wrong. 12. Hold back false accusations to safeguard the good and honest. 13. Warn against sheltering deserters lest you share their punishment. 14. Promptly and fully pay your taxes lest you need to be pressed to pay them. 15. Join together in hundreds and tithings to end theft and robbery. 16. Free yourself from enmity and anger to show respect to your body and life.

The Sacred Edict of the Kangxi Emperor, published circa 1670 Throughout its vast history, Chinese official historiography has reserved some of its highest accolades for rulers who functioned as a unifier by drawing the country together after a protracted period of civil war. Because the fall of Ming, at least in retrospect, appeared to have been so swift and the concurrent rise of the Qing so assured, it can sometimes be forgotten that it was a distinct and terrifying possibility that there may have been a protracted breakup of China at the time of this particular transition. Much of the credit for preventing that outcome, therefore, must actually go to our emperor today, just as it was last time, the Kangxi Emperor,

who, in the words of Jonathan D. Spence, would therefore be justified in receiving, quote, if not the aura of a Qin Shi Huangdi or a Sui Wendi, at least out of a Han Gaozhu or Song Taizu, end quote. The steps toward reunification in the Kangxi reign included suppressing the last main claimants, breaking the Three Feudatories or Sanfan Revolt, conquering Taiwan, and integrating Han Chinese into networks of official service to the state. This is what we're going to focus on today. Now, before getting too laudatory of the Kangxi Emperor and his period of reign, it must be

said that while chronologically within the Kangxi Reign, the final suppression of the last main claimants must be seen as a triumph of the Oboi Regency, which itself followed policies initially formulated by Dorgon in the Shunzhi period. No man is an island, after all. By 1661, the Qing armies had eliminated all the major Ming claimants except for Zhu Yulong, the Prince of Gui, who was a grandson of the Wanli Emperor. Even Zhu Yu Long, though, had been forced out of Yunnan and all the way to Burma, where the Burmese King Bin Talei kept him under virtual house arrest in Sangang, across the Irrawaddy River from the town of Ava. Two of Chu's generals, Li Dinguo and Bo Wenxuan, kept sizable armies and occupied much of

northeastern Burma, but they could not break through to Sangang to liberate their ruler. In August 1661, King Bintale was killed in a palace coup and his successor imprisoned too. When Wu Sangui approached Eva in 1662 with a large force, the new Burmese king handed over Zhu Yulong and Zhu's son Zhu Zishuan to Wu Sangui. And thus, without further ado, Wu had the two executed by strangulation. General Li Dingguo died a few weeks later after hearing the news of Zhu Yulong's death. Thus it was, with the death of this last claimant to the Ming throne who possessed both title and an army, the last gasp went out of the main Ming loyalist resistance.

Shortly before his death, however, Zhu Yulong had in fief the loyalist commander, Zheng Chenggong, with the new title Prince of Chao, which was, in addition to the honorific title of Prince of Yanping, conferred on Zheng in 1655. Zheng, or as we better know him, Koxinga, continued to support the Ming cause and resistance to Qing. He and a sizable army landed on Taiwan in April 1661, just after the Kangxi Emperor's accession, and after a long and hard siege, seized Fort Zelandia from the Dutch early in 1662. Though Koxinga died that same summer, his son, Zheng Jing, continued to hold Taiwan after being forced to abandon his base in Fujian. Zheng held out in

Taiwan despite Dutch attempts to link up with the Qing forces in a counterattack, and despite the draconian policies issued by the Oboi Regency on the advice of General Huang Wu of removing the inhabitants from southeastern coastal areas 10 to 20 miles inland in an attempt to deny all supplies and recruits for the Zheng regime, as we discussed last time. At approximately the same time that Zhu Yulong in-fiefed Zheng Chenggong, the Qing government, at the urgings of Hong Chengzhou, the former Ming governor-general of Liaodong, who is now a grand secretary, granted Wu Sangwei both civil and military authority over the province of Yunnan. After the execution of Zhu Yulong, Wu's jurisdiction

was extended to Guizhou. In the next decade, Wu consolidated his power over the administration, tax structure, and appointment processes in both provinces, and also took monopoly control over salt and copper mining, ginseng distribution, and trade with Tibet. He built costly palaces and maintained a powerful army, despite steady Qing attempts to reduce the troops under his command. By 1670, when his influence had spread to include much of Hunan, Sichuan, Gansu, and even Shanxi, he was costing the central government an estimated 20 million taels a year, much of which had to be siphoned off from the revenues of the Jiangnan region. Two other powerful military figures whose families had defected to the Qing also developed

similar powers, although to a lesser scale. They were Shangke Xi in Guangdong and Geng Jingzong in Fujian. They ruled these territories as their own domains, and their strong personal power, backed by wealth and trained troops, meant that the Qing court had virtually no control over the provinces in the south and southwest. By 1672, the young Kangxi emperor and a small group of advisors, working within the broader framework of the Council of Princes and High Officials, determined that the main threat to continued survival of the Qing regime came not from Chinese values, as Oboi had seemed to have feared, but rather from the independent military powers of the Three Feudatories. Since the

Feudatories had numerous friends in Beijing and within the Council of Princes and High Officials, Song Gatou was one of the leaders of the Peace Party seeking to avoid any conflict, for instance. Coherent planning for any campaign was extremely difficult, and security leaks were frequent. An opportunity presented itself in the summer of 1673, when Shang Ke Xi submitted a memorial requesting permission to retire. The emperor passed the matter on to the Council of Princes for discussion. Their recommendation was that the transfer request be accepted, though Grand Secretary Tu Hai, and perhaps some others, disagreed strongly. The Kangxi emperor would later write, quote, Since I had already made up my mind, I therefore ordered his transfer, end quote. In August, a transfer request also arrived from Wu Sangui, which radically altered the picture.

This time, according to the Kangxi Emperor's later reminiscences, only five men in the whole council went along with the young emperor's decision to grant Wu Sangui's request. With only this minority backing, the Kangxi Emperor decided to challenge Wu and ignore the majority's vague warnings of disaster. As the Emperor rather apologetically reflected on his decision eight harsh years later, quote, these others did not explicitly say that transferring Wu Sangui would certainly lead to rebellion, end quote. Interestingly though, the editors of the Veritable Records dropped the word explicitly, or Ming, thus erasing from the formal historical record the admission of ambivalence or even misjudgment

that Kangxi had privately been willing to make about himself. The court's acceptance of Wu Sangui's request, which was designed to test the court's intentions, made Wu determined to revolt. The news of Wu's rebellion reached Beijing in January 1674, and the same day there was an uprising in the city, led by a pretender to the Ming throne, a self-styled Zhu Shanzi, who managed to rally several hundred household slaves from the plain yellow and border yellow banners before troops cut them down as they fought through the streets. This local rising, occurring as it did in the context of the larger rebellion, almost certainly led to random reprisals against Han Chinese in Beijing

by Qing troops. Edicts were issued urging those who had fled the city in a panic to return, and the city gates were thereafter kept closed to prevent any further exodus. While coping with this local crisis, the emperor was swamped with news of defeats from Qing troops, suicides of loyal officials, and the defection of Wu Sangui as well as the majority of the southwestern bureaucracy. The emperor's response was to send a vanguard at top speed to hold Jingzhou, some 200 miles up the Yangtze River from Wuhan, with orders to press down into Hunan from that base. The garrison troops in Xi'an were ordered to move to Sichuan. Sun Yanling was ordered to hold Guangxi, and messengers were sent to recall the transfer orders sent to the two other feudatories, that of Shangkexi and Geng Jingzong. At the end of January 1674, the emperor had established two main staging areas for all troops and supplies

that were to be used in the war. One, at Yanzhou, in Shandong near the Grand Canal, was to handle all logistics for Jiangnan and Jiangxi, and, by implication, for Fujian and Guangdong if the other feudatories should revolt. The other at Taiyuan, the key river and road junction in Shaanxi, was to control the flow to Shaanxi, Sichuan, and the southwest. Prince Lergyan was named commander-in-chief of the pacification armies. The appointment of Lergyan is worth brief consideration, not least because he proved to be an extremely inept general who severely hampered the war effort. We can only guess as the reasons for his selection, but one important reason was undoubtedly that he was his father's son.

Throughout his reign, the Kangxi emperor showed a deep faith that the sons of capable and loyal men would prove as loyal and capable as their fathers had been. Though the results of this policy were often unfortunate, he never seemed to have wavered from it, but continued to appoint sons to the same kinds of jobs in the same areas where their fathers had served. Lergyon was the son of Lekedahun. Le Kedahun, bearing the title of General Who Pacified the South, or Pingnan Dajangjun, had pacified the Ming armies in Zhejiang in 1645, in Hubei in 1646, and in Hunan and Guangxi in 1649. Furthermore, the family were direct descendants of Nurhaci, and Le Giyan was famous for his

physical strength as well as being the head of the imperial clan court. Le Giyang had been called the Pingnan General, and accordingly, Le Giyang was named Ningnan, or the Southern Pacifying General, a synonymous echo of his father's former greatness. In the fighting of early 1674, the Qing forces did astonishingly poorly. The armies of Wusanggui moved swiftly northward. They captured most areas south of the Yangtze and, in the west, pushed up through Sichuan toward Gansu and Shaanxi. Hundreds of senior Qing officials in southern provinces defected to the rebel side, and the situation was rendered even more dangerous by crises elsewhere. In Gansu, General

Wang Fujun, a former Wusangwei subordinate thought to be completely loyal to the Qing, defected after, he claimed, being insulted by Molo, his nominal superior officer, and took much of Gansu and Shanxi into the rebel camp. In Guangxi, General Sun Yanling, a member of the Council of Princes and High Officials, and ennobled as the consort of an imperial princess, killed his fellow Qing officers and threw his lot in with Wu Sangui. Geng Jingzhong followed suit with his huge Fujian feudatory region. These two defections lost the Qing virtually all South China, except for Guangdong, where Shang Kexi remained loyal to the Qing,

even though his son was known to be dangerous and unpredictable. Swallowing his pride, the Kangxi Emperor offered Wu Sangui and Wu's entire family an amnesty in the summer of 1674, just before fighting began at Yuezhou. For his part, Wu rejected the offer. In the spring of 1675, the Mongol leader Bernie revolted in Manchuria and led an army on Mukden, where his father had earlier been imprisoned on the orders of the Kangxi Emperor. A major war on the northern front, possibly linked to Mongol risings further west, became an added threat to a Qing court that was running assembled for the Mukden campaigns under General Oja and Tuhai, Tuhai also being president of the Ministry of Revenue at the time, was a motley one, to say the least, made up primarily of untrained bannermen and even some of their household slaves,

reinforced, as such things go, with the guards of northern Mansolia. In spite of all this, though, they managed to rout Bernie, and he was later killed by the Khorchian Mongols. During the Oboi Regency, the young Kangxi Emperor was almost certainly helped to power by his grandmother, as we talked about previously. This lady, the widow of Hong Taiji, was herself a Khorchian Mongol of the Borjigate clan. Now as Grand Empress Tawajar, Tai Huang Tai Ho. She also played a major part in breaking Bernie. The politics of this brief war are intriguing and serve as a useful reminder, in the middle of the

larger civil war in the south, that the Kangxi Emperor himself had important Mongol ties. Early in 1675, Xin Zhu, a guard officer with the entourage of Bernie's stepmother, learned that Bernie was planning a coup. Though this guard officer could not absent himself without arousing suspicion, he was able to send his own younger brother to Beijing in order to warn the Kangxi Emperor. The Emperor was now at the same sort of quandary that he'd been with the three feudatories. If he took direct action, he might precipitate the very crisis he was trying to avoid. So, he had his grandmother send one of her trusted bodyguards, named Serang, to invite various Mongol princes and leaders to Beijing. Suspecting a trap, Bernie arrested Serang and tried to rally the Tumut

Mongols to his cause, but the Tumuts informed the Kangxi Emperor. At about the same time, Xinju arrived in Beijing with his full report. In addition to sending off the army under Oja and Tuhai, the Kangxi Emperor offered Bernie full amnesty and a princedom if he would return to his allegiance. This dual policy of marshalling force and offering amnesty at the same time was a common tactic of the Kangxi Emperor, but on this occasion, he carried it in a new direction, by preparing for a much more serious crisis. A director named Mala from the Court of Colonial Affairs, the Manchu and Mongol staff department which handled the policies in the northern and western regions, was appointed as coordinator of troops who were to be drawn from a wide range of tribes, such as the Korchin,

the Arukorchin, Onegit, Barin, Karachin, Tumet, and Jarud. Thus, we see that the concept of a federation of Mongol troops was used by the Qing court, just as such a federation could be used against it. It's within this specific context that we should evaluate the brief item in the Variable Records, in which it is stated that at just this time the Kangxi Emperor ordered his diarist to cease accompanying him when he visited the Empress Dowager and Grand Empress Dowager. They were just routine visits in accordance with filial piety, said the Emperor, and there was no need for anyone else to come along.

But if we're right in asserting the key political role that the Kangxi Emperor's grandmother played, then we can infer that he would wish to have certain conversations with her in absolute privacy. Despite his victory over Bernie, the war in the South continued to go badly for the Kangxi Emperor, and it's at this juncture, around the spring and early summer of 1675, that the balance of documents in the Veritable Records and the thrust of the Emperor's edicts began to shift in an important way. Sarcasm and even anger with Manchu generals became increasingly common, as does warm praise for certain Hanjun banner generals. Part of this was to boost Chinese morale and to prevent any more mutinies like that of Wang Fushun.

But it also seems clear that the Kangxi emperor had grown disillusioned with the performance of his Manchu commanders. In July, the emperor ordered the execution of a Manchu general for desertion in the face of the enemy. At the same time, he began to lavish praise on Han Chinese generals like Wang Jianbo, Sun Shuke, Zhang Yong, and Chen Fu. This evidence, plus the fact that at the war's end the Kangxi emperor had large numbers of senior Manchu generals investigated and degraded for incompetence, strongly suggests that the Manchu banner forces were in disarray as early as this time, a full century before the Qianlong

reign, which is generally given as the date that the decline began to be obvious. Undoubtedly, the nadir for Qing forces came in early 1676. The third feudatory, Shang Zixin, who had long been fence-sitting, now rebelled in Guangdong, and one of the emperor's most vaunted generals, Chen Fu, was killed in a mutiny in Ningxia. The campaigns were bogged down in Zhejiang, Shanxi, and Hunan. The Qing dynasty would not be in such serious military trouble again until the Taiping rebels' triumphs in 1853. And even then, the Qing court kept control over more areas than they had in 1676. The Kangxi emperor would later tell his children that this was the only period of his entire reign that he could not prevent his despair from showing on his face. Morale had grown so low

that posters openly criticizing the emperor were displayed near Beijing. Then, with startling suddenness, the course of the war turned. The government forces were shown, after all, to have greater resources. The dissident generals and the feudatories began to wary of the protracted conflict and to fight amongst themselves. Though Wu Songhui had minted his own currency and developed a moderately systematic tax collection scheme, the rebels as a whole never developed a coherent administration that would recruit promising new leaders and apportion revenue efficiently. For such reasons, and perhaps also because Wu Sangui was demanding and arrogant, the rebel forces began to fragment. Wang Fuzhen returned to the Qing

allegiance in July 1677, shaving his head and regrowing his queue in sign of submission. The Kangxi Emperor promptly renamed him a general in the Qing regrowing his Q in sign of submission. The Kangxi Emperor promptly renamed him a general in the Qing army and used his troops in western China. In November, the feudatory Geng Jingzhong surrendered to General Giesu in Fujian, and his troops were sent to Jiangxi so that an attack from the east could be launched into Hunan. The feudatory Shang Zhexin surrendered in January 1677, and later that year, Wu Sangui had Sun Yanling murdered in Guilin because it was believed that he too was about to surrender. Thus, the only major threats remaining to the Qing forces were Wu Sangui himself in the southwest,

and Zheng Jing, son of the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong, aka Koxinga, who still threatened the southeast coast from his base in Taiwan. In April 1677, a now-confident Kangxi Emperor announced that since the war was going so well, he would have time once again to take up his work in poetry and calligraphy in earnest. The last four years of the war saw a steady series of Qing victories, first against Wu Sangui, and then, after Wu's death from apparently natural causes in 1678, against Wu's grandson, Wu Shifan, who finally committed suicide in Yunnan in December of 1681. This effectively ended the war, since Zheng Jing had been defeated near Amoy in 1680 and forced to withdraw to Taiwan, dying there in 1681. In early 1682, the Council of Princes and High Officials and the Ministry of War

recommended that large numbers of rebel generals be executed and the families enslaved. Though there was no general bloodbath, it cannot be said that the Kangxi Emperor was immensely lenient. He approved death sentences on many, and death by a thousand cuts or slow slicing for Geng Jingzong and several others. Unknown hundreds were also beheaded or hacked to death in front of the victorious troops. Some of those killed were men who had surrendered in good faith, believing that they would In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures. Their tale comes to life in the History of Egypt podcast.

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and websites. Come, visit ancient Egypt, as he had repeatedly promised. An edict, which the Emperor sent to General Gyesu in 1680, proves that the Emperor had no intention of keeping his word in all cases. I think that whenever you are going to do something, you must think through both the background and the consequences. If it will be to the benefit of the state, then you can take action. Belightly embarking on a dangerous course will inevitably lead to trouble. At the present time, the remaining rebel groups who are stretching out their necks and their desire to return to the right path cannot just be numbered by hundreds or thousands. If we now kill Geng Jingzong, then not only will those who have already surrendered expect to receive the same punishment at a later date, but those who have not yet surrendered will note this

example and grow cold at heart, with unknown consequences. If you are really able to do what I have ordered and get him to come to Beijing, then everything will be settled peacefully. End quote. Two years later, having traveled to Beijing in good faith, Geng was then executed by slow slicing and his head displayed in public. As a peaceful settlement, such a policy was both ruthless and successful. The Kangxi Emperor had learned a great deal in the course of this war. He acknowledged that the war, engaged in its protracted bitterness, brought immense hardship to the civilian population of South China and expressed his regret in numerous edicts. The one inescapable triumph, however,

was that the empire was now reunited and the Qing leaders secure on the throne once again. Yet even to the end of the Qing dynasty, neither the Kangxi Emperor nor any other Qing Emperor ever traveled farther south than Hangzhou, and none ever visited the southwest or Sichuan. After the suppression of the three feudatories, the tenacity of the Zheng family rebel regime off the coast of Fujian continued to be troublesome. They maintained a hold over several offshore islands as well as their fortified base on Taiwan. Their presence there, and the strength of their fleet in conjunction with the coastal population prohibitions, hampered trade along the whole Fujian coast, as well as parts of Zhejiang and Guangdong. Despite the factional struggles within the family and Zheng Jing's own unpredictability,

there was little chance of moving against him while the Three Feudatories War continued. But as soon as that was over, the Kangxi Emperor sought a possible leader for an amphibious operation against Taiwan and, following the advice of Li Guangdi, chose Shi Lang. Shi had served as an admiral of the Zheng family's fleets during the early 1640s. When he defected to the Qing, Zheng Chenggong had killed Shi's father, brother, and son. Thus, Shi's personal history was intricately and tragically combined with his knowledge of the coast and of naval warfare. An additional advantage was the intimate work he had established with merchants and officials in the major trading ports. Xilong insisted on having an independent

command, not one shared with a veteran governor-general of Fujian named Yao Qisheng, who might have used the campaign to strengthen his own commercial contacts. Xilong was also dependent of Wu Xingzhuo, the powerful bond servant serving as governor-general of Guangxi and Guangdong, who'd gained his office, according to contemporary rumors, by offering to the court 10,000 taels more for the post than Yao was willing to pay. Wu had profited hugely from confiscating the fortunes of the southern merchants who had thrown in their lot with the now-defeated feudatory Shang Zhexin, and was building up his own commercial and administrative power base. Backed by the Kangxi Emperor, Shi assembled a fleet of 300 vessels and defeated the Zheng

family's leading naval commander, Liu Guoshuan, in a major engagement near the Pescadores. A few weeks later, in October 1683, the last members of the Zheng family in Taiwan surrendered. Following the campaign, Taiwan was divided into three counties and established as a prefecture of Fujian province. Slowly, over the next 50 years, despite a nominal ban on immigration and settlement, the island became an attractive area for Chinese trade and agricultural development. The western shore plains of the island were steadily transformed to rice and sugar production, though the Kangxi Emperor and his officials showed considerable resolve in helping to maintain the economic livelihood and contracted rights of the aboriginal inhabitants. This reunification, or at least re-establishment of central control,

was accompanied by specific cultural policies designed to integrate the members of the Chinese literate elite into the Qing state. The vigorous policies of the Oboi Regency, directed against major delinquent taxpayers and against the alleged cultural accommodations of the Oboi Regency, directed against major delinquent taxpayers and against the alleged cultural accommodations of the Xunzhi regime, were now deliberately reversed by the Kangxi Emperor. The Emperor himself gained skill with Chinese language by different means. During the Oboi Regency, he learned surreptitiously from his personal eunuchs such as Zhang Xingcheng. During the Three Feudatories War, he studied with a small nucleus of trusted Chinese-speaking Manchu tutors like the erudite Lasari and Fudari.

He read extensively with accomplished Chinese senior tutors and diarists in the Hanlin Academy such as Xiong Zili and Sun Saifeng, and studied formally with several erudite scholars who became his personal favorites like Gao Sh Shichi and Zhang Ying. Thanks to such training, despite the interruptions caused by the war, by the late 1670s he was making interpretive comments on Chinese classical texts with some conviction to his own educated subjects. Though it remains an important aspect of his reign that it was a largely bilingual one, and with many of the emperor's most important confidants, spoke and wrote fluently in Manchu. The emperor had to exercise both tact and caution with respect to cultural unity and integration. The refusal to serve the Qing on the grounds that such refusal

was mandated by the idea of continuing loyalty to the Ming dynasty was still present in the 1670s and 80s, even though some of those taking loyalist stances had been children at the time the Ming fell in 1644. The Bo Shui Heng Zhu examination of 1679, open to scholars recommended for having outstanding ability and summoned by imperial order, was a calculated act of cultural public relations on the part of the Kangxi Emperor. The special examination was designed to integrate those of wavering or unproven loyalty into Kangxi Emperor. The special examination was designed to integrate those of wavering or unproven loyalty into the regime itself. The key inducement offered was an opportunity for successful candidates to work on the compilation of the official history of the

Ming. Though 36 out of the 188 invited, including such famous names as Tu Yue and Fu Shan, managed to evade the honor or use the opportunity to meet in private with like-minded scholars who resented or even hated the Manchus. And some eminent scholars like Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi were able to ensure that they were not asked to participate. All of the 50 who were successful at the examination became officials for the new dynasty. The Bolshui Hangzhou examination was directed at those in the Yangtze Delta region, which was the center of scholarly endeavors and where much of the initial resistance to the Qing conquest had been concentrated. Almost half of the 50 successful candidates,

23 exactly, were from Jiangsu, and an additional 13 were from Zhejiang. The Bolshui-Hengzhu examinations, it should be said, did not solve all of the problems either with the loyalists or with the analytical difficulties of Ming historiography. Neither Wang Fuzhi nor Gu Yanwu would have anything to do formally with the project. Neither would Huang Zongshi, though he consented to having his own works copied and made available to the compilers and to letting his youngest son work on the project. Also, two of Huang's most brilliant pupils, Wang Shuzheng and Wang Yan, worked on the Ming project for many years.

Wang Xutong, in particular, found an outlet for his scholarly skills in the Beijing home of the Ming history director, Xu Yuanwan. Despite the talents of these and other compilers, and despite the Kangxi Emperor's flow of edicts concerning the urgency of the search for accurate data, including such devices as intensive interviews with former officials and eunuchs who had lived through the Ming Dynasty's fading years. The project was hindered by incompetence, by numerous resignations among the staff, by delays and factional squabbles involving powerful administrators such as Xu Yunwan and his brothers, and by the deceitful editorial practices of senior court officials like Wang Hongxu.

On a darker level, problems endured for decades. The discovery and swift execution in 1708 of the last Ming direct imperial descendant, Zhu Zihuan, who, though living peacefully as a scholar and teacher, was invoked by some rebels in Zhejiang as the third crown prince Zhu, or Zhu Santaizi, highlighted the state's jumpiness over the issue of the vanquished Ming imperial house. In 1713, execution of the talented and well-connected scholar Dai Ming Shi on charges of misusing oral history data and treasonously employing Ming reign titles after the Qing dynasty was already established showed that historiography

remained politically sensitive. In general, after the special Bolshoi examination of 1679, the examination system functioned successfully as an integrative mechanism, and the emperor worked hard to make it so. In the years immediately following the suppression of the three feudatories, there were repeated efforts to modify the arbitrary north and south Jin-Shu quotas, which continued to discriminate against qualified candidates in the Northwestern and Southwestern provinces. In 1685, an attempt was made to have three main zones. In 1691, the Kangxi Emperor tried a more complex system that would place candidates into six separate zones. Those from Jiangnan and Zhejiang would be in the so-called South-Left Division, Jiangxi, Huguang, Fujian,

Guangdong in the South-Right, Zhili and Shandong in the North-Left, Henan, Shanxi and Shanxi in the North-Right, Sichuan and Yunnan in the Center-Left, and Guangxi and Guizhou in the Center-Right. When even this breakdown proved fruitless in getting successful candidates from every province, the emperor decided in 1712 to abolish the broader groupings and to go for a precise quota system based on province or affiliation with Manchu, Mongol, or Hanjun banners. The exact numbers would vary in proportion to qualified juryn available. Some years before, in 1705, the emperor had already begun an informal system of applying the principle of geographical quotas to admission into the prestigious Hanlin Academy,

which had up until this time seemed the pinnacle of scholarly attainment. Now, men from poor or border areas such as Gansu, Yunnan, Shanxi, or Guizhou could join a scattering of bannermen among those from Jiangsu or Zhejiang. As if to reinforce these provisions even further, the emperor took the unusual step in 1716 of ordering the Grand Secretariat to consider the proposition that all officials from border provinces who were retiring from office should return to their ancestral homes, taking their culture and money with them, and not to settle in some more culturally advantaged place. So successful had the balanced pattern of Hanlin admissions become that when it was abandoned, apparently by oversight, during the first years of the Yongzheng reign, there was a prompt protest

from scholars. The idea of geographical as well as an ethnic and civil-military unification had become an accepted part of maintaining the status quo. And that is where we're going to leave off today. Next time, we will be getting into the middle years of the Kangxi reign. Hope you'll join us then. But until then, as always, thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves.

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