The History of China - #296 - Qing 31: The Architect of Capacity

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

As his era of rule over Great Qing drows to a close, the Yongzheng Emperor spares neither expense nor detail to reform the empire he inherited and modernize it for the one who will inherit it from him. But this is no idle fancy - he has a definite purpose. Though no great warrior himself, he is nevertheless fully in-line with the century-long grand objective of his father and son: the absolute destruction of the Zhungar Khanate. Time Period Covered: 1722-1735 CE Major Historical Figures: Great Qing: The Yongzheng Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Yinzhen) [r. 1722-1735] The Qianlong Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Hongli) [r. 1735-1796, d. 1799] Prince Yinxing [1686-1730] General Longkedo [1648-1728] Governor-General Qingfu Governor-General Yinjishan Dzungar Khanate: Galdan Tseren, Khan of the Dzungars [r. 1727-1745] Tsewang Dorji Namjal, Hongtaiji of the Dzungars [1746-1750] Princess Ulan Bayar Lama Darja/Dorji Dawaci [d. 1759] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. And the head of Oliver Cromwell. The same head they kept on a pike for three years? Yep, all here on History Dispatches. New episodes every weekday. Find out more at HistoryDispatches.com or wherever you get your podcast app. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 296, The Architect of Capacity. When we consider as a whole the era that we usually call the Haiqing, the long 18th century zenith of China's final imperial dynasty, it's easy to picture the grandeur of the Forbidden City, the Confucian orthodoxy of the examination halls, or the vast shipments

of silver that pass through the ports of Canton. But to understand how that version of the empire was truly built, we actually need to go back and much, much further west. Out to the steppe, mountains, and desert of Central Asia. Out there, far beyond the Great Wall, the Qing state met with its greatest challenge, one that we've been looking at already in depth, that of the Zhenggar Connate. Kangxi, the great second emperor of the Qing, had already fought bitter campaigns against them, culminating in costly wars throughout the 1690s and early 1700s. But

when his son, Yinzhen, came to the throne in 1722, who we better know now by his regnal name Yongzheng, he inherited a frontier still unsettled, a national treasury still strained under the effort, and an empire very much in flux. Yongzheng in total would rule for just 13 years, but those years, as we've seen already, were transformative. His reign saw not only a dramatic push to clean up the Empire's fiscal house, as we'll see here today, but also a strategic recalibration of the Northwest altogether, amounting to a deliberate effort to quote, transform the barbarians through trade, end quote, as one

Governor General put it, rather than simply crush them through force. So with all that out of the way, let's go ahead and set the scene. Coming to the throne, the Yongzhong Emperor's first and perhaps most pressing concern was, what else, money. The Qing treasury, despite generations of imperial grandeur, was in fairly poor shape. This was because, at least as the Emperor saw it, taxes collected out in the provinces weren't getting to where they ought to arrive, that is, the treasuries of the capital. The issue wasn't arrears due to poor harvests,

or the peasantry simply not being able to pay, but what Yongzheng blatantly pointed out to be naked embezzlement. The cause of deficits, he insisted, quote, was embezzlement. Taxes collected were not being remitted to the central government, end quote. The bureaucracy, from lowly clerks to provincial governors, had developed and long maintained a wide-ranging and deeply embedded system, a network of corruption. Officials, quote, were able to steal from the state because their superiors protected them, end quote, and local budgets were padded by all manner of unofficial fees and surcharges. Bribes were euphemistically labeled, quote, funds shifted for public expenses, end quote,

and the money trail often vanished right along with the official who pocketed it. Understanding this to be the problem, Yongzheng did what he thought he ought. And what is that to win? Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir! I can't hear you! Strike first, Strike hard! No mercy, sir!

Within months of his accession, he created an independent audit office called the Hui Kaofu and staffed it with some of the people he trusted the most, including his favorite brother Prince Yingxiang and his uncle Long Kedou. Their job was to, quote, put an end to the practice of evading ministry scrutiny through bribery, end quote, not only in the provinces, but at the highest levels of government. Even the Ministry of Revenue itself would not prove to be above suspicion. But here's the real piece of political brilliance. Yongzheng offered a kind of amnesty for past sins, at least temporarily.

He instructed local officials to report all deficits honestly, and promised that they would not be punished for shortfalls discovered under their watch, so long as these shortfalls were repaid within three years. And if they lied or covered up their misdeeds, well then after that, yeah, the punishments would be severe and without mercy. This policy wound up doing something rather extraordinary. Suddenly, governors and magistrates began sending in very detailed, and sometimes shockingly candid accounts of just exactly how their administrations had been balancing their books.

As Zellin writes, quote, The Emperor's moratorium on sanctions for fiscal malfeasance had allowed officials to report on local fiscal affairs with an unprecedented candor that revealed the truth about the shaky foundations upon which the public financing was based in the Qing, end quote. One such important new truth learned? The local governments, most of them, were broke,

were pretty close to it. Even in theory, the Qing system wasn't designed to provide counties or even provinces with enough money to function. The vast majority of state income came from land taxes and salt sales, and only a fraction of that revenue was ever retained locally. As Ellen details, a Governor General might receive 180 tales per year, a lowly magistrate just 80 tales. On paper. But their real expenses were many times that, as they were expected to repair roads, fund

granaries, pay clerks and runners, run courtrooms, and maintain the basic machinery of their local administration. So given the gap between the ideal and the real, how did such a system survive, much less the people who were tasked with its upkeep? The answer is through a creative and, of course, illegal system of unofficial surcharges, wastage allowances, collection fees, weighing charges, and especially something called the haoxian or haolao, meaning the melange fee. This was a nominal charge added to each tax payment, justified at least officially to account for silver loss in melting or grain loss in transport.

These fees had ballooned far beyond their original function, however. In some provinces, they could be 50% or more of the stated tax rate. This is not because the mints were losing 50% of the silver that they coined, obviously. This is because it was fulfilling a function that was not being officially met. Yongzheng did not do the super obvious thing and just try to eliminate the fees. Instead, in what we might term a bit of bureaucratic gongfu, he legalized them, but required that they be recorded publicly and then sent up to the provincial capitals. There, they would be redistributed transparently to magistrates and officials as Yanglianyin, or Nourishing Virtue Silver,

and Gongfei, or Public Expense Funds. It was a way to regularize what had long been off the books but needed, and to eliminate the worst abuses by making the system visible. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant. One memorial summed up the thinking clearly. Quote, If one speaks in imprecise and confused generalities, uttering phrases such as, taxes are important, then what one says amounts

to empty words on paper. What practical use does it have?" As Zellin puts it, "...platitudes about morality and good government were not enough." This administrative revolution was not just about better accounting. It was also about expanding the reach of the state, especially into the frontier. And that, of course, brings us right back to where we become so accustomed – the Northwest. For decades, the Qing had struggled to consolidate rule over the newly acquired and quite unruly territories out west, places like Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and of course

the lands bordering Zhengaria and Tibet. Under the Kangxi Emperor, military garrisons were established, but the real conquest of territory was yet to come, through land, people, and of course, imperial policy. One of the Yongzheng Emperor's key initiatives was the promotion of what's called land reclamation. In 1723, he issued a bold decree. Anyone who opened new land for farming would get a tax holiday, six years for paddy fields, ten years for dry fields. A later edict reiterated this goal, quote, the reclamation of all potential arable lands,

end quote. In regions like Sichuan's Red Basin and along the southern and northwestern frontiers, this policy led to a surge of migration and settlement. After all, it's free real estate. The state even subsidized these pioneers. Migrants heading for remote areas like Chaotong and Yunnan received travel funds,.05 tails of silver per day on the road, and up to 20 mow of land upon arrival. Provincial treasuries bought rice to sustain them until their first harvests. Officials distributed seeds, tools, and cattle. In Yunnan and Guizhou, they even imported plow animals and buckwheat seed, and experimented with soil treatments like lime to quote-unquote warm up the soil.

It was a truly ambitious agricultural push into ethnically diverse, sparsely populated terrain, part colonization, part development plan. But all of this, the auditing, the melange fees, the reclamation subsidies, cost money. And a lot of it. Which brings us all to a crucial point. The Yongzheng Emperor's fiscal reforms didn't just patch up the existing system. They created the conditions for empire building and expansion. And nowhere was that more evident in Qing policy than towards the Jungar Khanate. So let's now pivot there, the last Great Central Asian rival to Qing power, Jungaria. The Jungar Mongols, as we well know, were no minor frontier nuisance.

Their confederation, based out of the Ili Valley and stretching across what is now northern Xinjiang and parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and western Mongolia, was the most powerful inner Asian empire since the days of the Mughals and the Ottomans. Their leaders, direct descendants, or at least so they claimed of Genghis Khan's lineage through the Oirat Mongols, had ambitions just as grand as any of the Qing's. They were also Buddhists, rivals for the patronage of the Tibetan Church, not unlike the Manchu emperors themselves. For the Qing, then, Jungaria wasn't just a military problem, it was also an ideological and spiritual competitor, a geopolitical threat, and an economic wild card all rolled together. After decades of war under the Kangxi Emperor, including brutal campaigns in the 1690s, there

was an uneasy stalemate. When Kangxi died in 1722, he left the new Yongzheng Emperor with a battered northwest and an enemy that was wounded but not destroyed. Yongzheng's approach, as we've seen in the last several episodes, had been measured. He didn't abandon the goal of subduing the Jungars, but he recognized that brute force had failed to achieve it. During Kangxi's wars, the Qing had spent as much as 50 to 60 million tales, an astronomical amount, and still hadn't broken Jungar power. And in the wake of that conflict, the Northwest economy had been totally wrecked.

Two thirds of the Jungars, according to Qing reports, by this point in the narrative, now owned no animals at all. The steppes themselves had been devastated, border regions were depopulated, and trade virtually nonexistent. So Yongzheng changed tactics. And this new policy? Trade, tribute, and patience. In 1734, the emperor sent a high-level Qing delegation west to negotiate peace, not to surrender, but to reframe the frontier.

The plan was to delimit a border between the Jungars and the Qing's Khalkha-Mongol allies, carving Inner Asia into spheres of influence. The Jungar leader at this time, Gadan Sarin, preferred a boundary at the Kangai Mountains. The Qing, by contrast, pushed for a line along the Altai Mountains and the Irtysh River deeper into Jungar territory. Ultimately, no agreement was reached. But we can't consider the talks to be an abject failure, either. Instead, they set the stage for what came next. A truce

based not on conquest, but on commercial engagement. As the Qing Governor General Qing Fu put it, the idea was to quote, transform, or xianghua, the barbarian peoples by offering them goods from the interior in exchange for peaceful relations." This was hardly a new idea. It echoed so far back as the old Han-Xiangnu Five Bates strategy, that is, when the Han emperors used wine, silk, and trade to pacify rather than annihilate their northern neighbors. But now, in the hands of the Yongzheng emperor and, later, his heir Qianlong, this dusty

old strategy took on a remarkably modern new scene. What emerged was a regulated trade regime, rooted in Qing confidence and Jungar need. Jungaria, after years of war and deprivation, was hungry for trade. And not just for the basics like tea and textiles, but for silver, medical goods and tools. The Qing were willing to offer these, for a price of course. As of 1739, the two sides agreed on a formal truce, and regular trade relations were established. Every four years, the Jungars were allowed to send tribute missions to Beijing, caravans of men, animals, and goods, including horses, camels, hides, dried grapes, salamoniak, which is used in medicine, and even antelope horn. On alternating years, they could trade at border posts like Suzhou

in Gansu and Hami. It was, again on paper, a classic Qing-Tributary relationship. Emissaries knelt before the sun of heaven, pressing their heads to the floor and presenting their gifts in exchange for imperial favor. But everyone involved knew that it was really commerce, not supplication. And make no mistake, the Jungars negotiated, and they negotiated hard. One 1742 caravan, led by a relative of Galdon Seren named Chuniyamuke, brought 42 men, 634 packloads, and over 5,000 sheep. They immediately asked permission to bypass the tribute system and sell their goods directly at Hami or Suzhou, a violation of the rules, but a clear sign of economic intent. The Qing commander on site, Yongchang, took a lenient view.

He followed the emperor's instruction to, quote, Cherish men from afar, and allowed the traders to remain in Suzhou at the Qing's expense. The animals were stabled, the traders were housed, and a smaller group of 15 was sent on to Beijing to fulfill the tribute obligation. Yongchang even supplied them with grain, tea, and tobacco, a show of great imperial benevolence. But not everyone would prove to be so tolerant. Just a month after Yongcheng's hospitality, Governor-General Yin Jishan took a much harder

line. In a scathing report, he called the Zhengars, quote, crafty and greedy barbarians who traded useless products for the best of the central kingdom," and were likely spies scoping out the interior for their own nefarious means. When asked what evidence he might have as to any of this, he pointed to a prior mission that had, under the pretense of presenting boiled tea to lamas in Tibet, brought large amounts of trade goods to Xining, then turned around without entering Tibet at all. Clearly, Yin Jishan wrote, these were inconsistent natures, who couldn't be trusted. Still, even the likes of Yin Jishan eventually gave in.

When the traders returned from Beijing with unsold goods, he authorized merchants to buy up the surplus at reduced prices. He complained bitterly, quote, They have hundreds of tricks. The only way to treat them is with a principled balance between generosity and restraint. End quote. But in spite of his lamentations, the deal went through. This would become an all too familiar pattern. The 1748 caravan brought the same antics. The 1748 caravan brought the same antics. Extra people, labeled as doctors, cooks, accountants, whatever, appeared and followed along. Sure, why not? Prices were inflated.

Quote-unquote sick animals were offloaded at lower prices. Officials haggled, grumbled, and of course eventually gave in. The traders, for their part, if caught or harassed by officials, apologized profusely and promised not to do it again. But for the Qing, the real goal wasn't to make a profit. It was to stabilize the frontier as a whole. And in that sense, these little incidents at the border aside, these little cutting of the corners and turning of blind eyes to rule violations, didn't matter. The policy was working. Perhaps the most revealing part of this commercial detente was the so-called boiled tea,

missions to Tibet. These were ostensibly religious pilgrimages, caravans carrying offerings from Mongols to the Tibetan Lamas. But in practice, everyone knew they were massive trade convoys. One 1741 mission brought some 300 traders, 400 cattle, 7,392 sheep, 1,716 horses, 2,080 camels, and tens of thousands of gin of medical products and hides, with a value of over 105,000 tails of silver altogether. Which again, just to ballpark this, is somewhere in the order I worked out of about 30 million dollars today. So a massive trade deal. From the Qing perspective, this was delicate business. The Jungars, still nursing dreams

of Buddhist legitimacy, wanted themselves to re-establish ties with the Tibetan clerics, as well as the Khoshat Mongols of Kokonur. But the Qing, who were now the patrons of the Dalai Lama themselves, saw this as a threat to their religious authority and hegemony over the faith. So they permitted the missions, but with some pretty strict conditions. The missions had to pass through Qing-controlled territory, with Qing military escorts. They were forbidden to contact the Khoshut Mongols at all. In one case, the Emperor even moved the Khoshut communities away from the caravan route in order to avoid any unsanctioned communication which might lead to some kind of alliance

potentially down the road. When Galdon Saren tried to bypass the garrison towns, claiming that his men weren't immunized against smallpox, which was common in such population centers, the Qianlong Emperor famously refused him. Still, the trade went forward because trade always does go forward. And for over a decade, it kept the peace. Now, so far we've seen how the Qing under the Yongzheng Emperor adopted its new frontier strategy, not through conquest, but through commerce. By the late 1730s and early 1740s,

this strategy had created a relatively stable, if always uneasy and a bit ambiguous, peace with the Jungars. Trade flowed. Tribute missions arrived regularly, and from the Qing perspective, the relationship appeared to be working. But we shouldn't mistake this détente for any sort of genuine trust. Even in its most generous phases, the Qing policy was never purely economic, it was deeply strategic. Trade wasn't just about exchanging sheep for silk, it was a tool for soft power, a

means of managing their own geopolitical risk profile, if you will. And from the Qing court's point of view, these risks were growing with time, not shrinking. The Jungar missions were routinely pushing the envelopes of what was allowed. Every time just a little bit, but every time a little bit more than the last. They brought more and more men and animals than permitted. They stayed longer than their 80-day time allotment. They haggled for silver when the Qing preferred to barter. And they used every loophole to turn religious missions into commercial expeditions.

The official frustration was clear. Border officials complained of being overwhelmed, of inadequate pastureland, and of pressure to quote, be flexible in accordance with circumstances, or 建衡中情, even when the traders clearly violated the rules. In 1742, for instance, the Qing treasury lost nearly 10,000 tails when provincial officials bought 17,000 jin of dried grapes, a commodity for which there was no market. They ended up selling them at one-third the purchase price. Obviously, this was not a sustainable economic model.

And yet, the Qianlong Emperor, who of course took the throne in 1736 after his father Yongzheng's sudden death, initially continued his predecessor's policy. The trade missions continued to be allowed. He tolerated the haggling. He even reimbursed the Jungar caravans when animals died en route. Why? Because the political benefits still seemed to outweigh the fiscal losses. In 1750, Jungar caravans brought goods worth 186,000 tails, the largest volume ever, amounting to my own calculations here to about $55 million worth of trade goods today. In return, they received cloth, tea, and silver totaling 167,300 tails. About $50 million, or about $5 million less. Governor General Yin Jishan protested the drain on Qing resources, but the emperor

responded, quote, the loss of silver is a slight consequence compared to the political benefits derived from the trade, end quote. This tells us something crucial about Qing statecraft at mid-century. The emperors were willing to lose money in order to gain stability. This wasn't laissez-faire liberalism. This was imperial mercantilism grounded in state security. If trade could pacify the frontier, then it was worth the expense. End of debate. But by the early 1750s, that equation had begun to change. The turning point came in 1745 with the death of Galdan Saren, the last effective leader of the Djungar state. Galdan Saren had held things together, albeit barely, through a mix of diplomacy and

repression, but his death unleashed a bitter succession crisis that tore the Khanate apart from within. He'd had three sons and a daughter. The second son, Sewong Dorji Namjal, seized power in 1746 and took the title of Hong Taiji. By all accounts, he was a deeply unstable man, quote, a violent, perverse, paranoid man, end quote, in Purdue's words, interested mainly in drinking and killing dogs. He feared betrayal from within his own family, and when his sister, Ulan-Bayar, tried to restrain him, he had her locked up. His fears, as it would turn out, were not entirely unfounded. His elder brother, Lama Darja, also called Lama Dorji, plotted with Ulaanbaar's husband

to have him killed while out on a hunting trip. Sewang Dorji Namjal discovered the plot and attempted to strike first, but was defeated. His eyes were put out, and he thereafter disappeared from the political stage. What followed was nothing less than a vicious civil war. Lama Darja took control but lacked a claim to legitimacy. New rivals emerged. By 1753, a young contender named Dawasi was making his own bid for power. The Qing, through all this, watched from across the border and realized that they had spied an opportunity. In fact, the Qing had already begun limiting Jungar trade access. When Dao Wasi asked to send a mission in 1753, the Qing court denied it, suspecting that

he was using trade as a cover for espionage. This was not mere paranoia. Earlier missions had included covert reconnaissance, and Jungar leaders had a long history of mixing diplomacy with intelligence gathering. So the Qing decided to cut off all trade altogether. They locked down the border, and they began now preparing for what they had so long postponed, the total military destruction of the Jungar state altogether. Understand, this was not some rash decision nor emergency measure.

It wasn't that the Qing suddenly lost patience with the Mongols. It was that the internal collapse of Djungaria made conquest not only possible, but convenient. As Perdue notes, quote, fatal individualism was indeed fatal, end quote. The Jungar elite, fragmented, divided, and desperate, began reaching out to Beijing for support. By the time Qing forces marched to the Ili Valley in 1755, the once proud Khanate was already broken beyond repair. It's worth pausing here to look out at the bigger picture. For nearly two decades, the Qing had pursued peace through trade.

They'd invested in the idea that Jungaria could be integrated, pacified, even transformed, through commerce and ritual diplomacy. Transforming the barbarians wasn't just some slogan. It was a guiding principle of the Qing frontier policy. But the Qing were not naive. Trade was a tool towards an end, not an end in itself. When that tool no longer served its purpose, that is to say, when Jungar Disunity offered the chance to erase the threat once and for all, the court pivoted without hesitation.

Chen Long, despite his early enthusiasm for peaceful engagement, had always kept the military option on the table. As of 1755, that option became reality. But that is for a future episode. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions. A tyrant and a reformer, a liberator and an oppressor, a revolutionary and a reactionary. His biography reads like a novel, and his influence is almost beyond measure.

I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in history, and explore the world that shaped him in all its glory and tragedy. It's a story of great battles and campaigns, political intrigue, and massive social and economic change, but it's also a story about people populated with remarkable characters. I hope you'll join me as I examine this fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. Instead, now, let's return briefly to the Yongzheng Emperor himself. He died in 1735 at the age of 57, reportedly collapsing at his writing desk.

His reign had lasted just 13 years, relatively short by imperial standards. Nevertheless, his impact was immense. What Yongzheng achieved, more than any single conquest or edict, was a transformation of the Qing state from within. He regularized a corrupt and informal financial system. He launched frontier settlement programs that would change the demographic makeup of China forever. He legalized the melange fee, creating a stream of revenue that funded not just daily governance, but fueled imperial expansion in the decades that would follow. And perhaps most importantly, he modeled a new kind of imperial attention.

Detailed. Data-driven. Relentlessly. Hands-on. From Zellian, quote, "...this was an emperor with an eye on the details of administration, and a strong distaste for his father's leniency towards substandard performance. End quote. The Qianlong Emperor would be the one to inherit this well-running machine,

and make no mistake, he would use it. The conquest of Jungaria, which we'll explore in depth going forward, wasn't simply a military triumph. It was a product of the bureaucratic and fiscal reforms that Yongzheng himself had first set in motion. Without the melange fees, there would have been no grain for settlers, no pay for officials, no silver for the border garrisons. Without the secret palace memorials, there would have been no way to coordinate policy across provinces. Without Yongzheng's crackdown on corruption, the empire might have rotted away from the inside before it could ever expand outward.

And so, while the Qianlong Emperor gets deservedly his share of the glory, the horse paintings, the campaign at Ili, the ten great victories. We must remember that it was his father, the humble, cosplaying Yongzheng emperor, who laid the foundations of what was to come. As the 1720s progressed, it became increasingly clear that the Yongzheng emperor's fiscal reforms were not just financial patchwork, they were foundational to Qing statecraft. What he did was transform a loosely administered empire into a more cohesive fiscal-military state, and he did it by attacking the root cause of Ching administrative dysfunction. That is, the disconnect between

official responsibilities and actual financial support. I mean, if we're going to be honest here, then let's. The early Qing tax structure was a mess. As we've noted, the provincial governors were expected to maintain their infrastructure, provide famine relief, fund schools, and oversee massive jurisdictions, all with an annual salary of just a few hundred tales. A pittance, not even enough to really afford to feed oneself. County magistrates, the parents and officials of the people, were allotted even less. The result, of course, had been the sprawling system of

unofficial charges, the service fees, transport fees, accounting fees, etc. of course capped off by the melange fee. These surcharges could add up to be as high as 60% of the official land tax, and they funded everything from office supplies to salaries to just outright bribery, as we've already talked about. As we've noted, Yeongjong decided not to abolish these charges, but to legalize and standardize them. His rationale was simple, but revolutionary. Since the officials already levied these fees, and the state clearly needed them, it was better to

formalize the process, monitor its use, and redistribute it equally. In so doing, he stripped away the fiction of a clean, moralized Confucian bureaucracy, and replaced it with something far more effective, and arguably more honest. From Zellian, quote, What the Yongzheng emperor did was to separate the personal incomes of officials from the operational costs of local government, and to formalize both through the creation of two types of grants, the yanglianjin and the gongfei. If we break these down, the yanglianyin, or the nourishing virtue silver, was designed to support the personal living expenses of

officials, ensuring that they could maintain their office and dignity without having to resort to corruption. Meanwhile, the gongfei, or the public expense fund, was allocated for official duties, couriers, runners, repairs, grain storage, disaster relief, and even the subsidizing of the local militia, if it was called up. It was not a perfect system. No one pretends that it was. Local discretion still created opportunities for favoritism and hidden dealings. But it represented a shift in state policy. The Qing was becoming an empire that could quantify its needs, fund its operations, and audit its own institutions. We're gonna do this now based on numbers and data,

not just on feels and morals. And it was that shift from moralism to managerialism that gave Great Qing the capacity to rule the frontier at large. This system, however, did not run on institutions alone. It also ran on loyalty and, of course, fear. The system, however, did not run on institutions alone. It also ran on loyalty and, of course, fear. Personally, the Yongzheng Emperor was rather famously intense.

He often worked late into the night, editing documents himself alone. He issued corrections in red ink, personally chastised officials who fudged their numbers, and demanded regular updates from provincial governors on everything from the local harvests to official decorum and dress. To keep control, he created a parallel system of communication, that is the Secret Palace Memorial, or Zouzhe. These allowed trusted officials, and only trusted officials, to report directly to the emperor, thus bypassing the bureaucracy entirely. This created a dual system of governance, formal and informal, public, private. It let Yongzheng reward loyalty and punish disobedience instantaneously. And he

was not shy about punishment. One of the more vivid examples is the case of Langkidou, who we have discussed before. Langkidou was of course Yongzheng's uncle and key early supporter. Yet despite his closeness to the throne, he was arrested in 1725 on charges of corruption, arrogance, and violating protocol. His fall echoed that of Nian Gung Yao, another early ally whose overconfidence in the emperor's favor led to his downfall. This tells us that Yongzheng's state was not just a set of policies. It was a culture, a lifestyle, built on surveillance, selective mercy, and administrative vigilance. He ruled like a man who had seized the throne under suspicious

circumstances, which we must not forget, he had, and who understood in his marrow that the continued maintenance of the order that he ruled over depended very much on his personal attention to every seemingly minor detail. And all of this, the budgeting, the audits, the secret memorials, the personal involvement, it all fed into the larger goal of Capital E Empire itself. Great Qing under Yongzheng wasn't just trying to hold the frontier, they were trying to transform it. That meant converting wasteland into arable farmland, Mongols into herdsmen who paid taxes,

bandits into militia regiments. In the southwest, land reclamation surged. In Yunnan, officials subsidized soil warming techniques to make mountain plots arable. In Guizhou, settlers were encouraged to take over quote-unquote, abandoned land, a term that unfortunately usually meant territory that had been claimed by indigenous peoples. In the northwest, the Junggar trade regime, which we talked about earlier, was part of that same wider vision. Trade wasn't just tolerated, it was structured to encourage economic dependence on the imperial core itself. From Purdue, quote,

The Qing sought to transform the Jungars into tributary traders, dependent on the goods of the interior, and satisfied to remain peaceful so long as caravans were allowed to travel." That did not mean unlimited generosity. Silver was tightly controlled, officials haggled. Missions were limited in size. But the larger strategy remains clear. Use commerce to create asymmetry. Tie the Jungars to the Qing economy and discourage rebellion by making the benefits of peace outweigh the risks of war. It worked. At least for a while. But the Yongzheng emperor would not live to see the end of his game. He died in 1735, just as the truce was solidifying and the empire's

finances stabilizing. He left behind an empire more centralized, more solvent, and more capable than had been under his father. Yes, his father, even the great Kang Xi. And gave it to a successor who would wield that capacity with frankly terrifying force. The Yongzheng Emperor's death in 1735 came without much of the drama that surrounded his own rise to power. His son, Hongli, ascended to the throne smoothly, taking the reign title of Qianlong. Young Hongli was from the outset everything that Yongzheng

wasn't. Charming, charismatic, artistic, and athletic. All that said, he came to inherit a system that his father Yongzheng had built with blood, bureaucracy, and his own relentless never-ending oversight. Qianlong was no reformer. He did not innovate like his father. But he used what Yongzheng had left him, and make no mistake, he used it well. When Qingfu, Yin Jishan, and other officials in the Northwest began clashing over how to manage Jungar caravans, Qianlong had the administrative tools to adjudicate. When caravans violated rules, he could track their cargo, assess the costs, and weigh the benefits of whether

or not to allow them to proceed. When trade deficits emerged, he could tap discretionary funds. When new settlements needed garrisons, he had revenue streams already established. In short, Yongzheng not only built the toolbox, he filled it with the tools. Qianlong simply picked it up and started hammering. It's tempting to see Yongzheng as the dower bureaucrat and Qianlong the glamorous conqueror, but the truth is that the first made the second possible at all. Without the fiscal reform, there would have, could have, been no conquest to follow. Without the regularized haoxianyin, there could be no subsidies for settlers, no pay

for garrison troops, no grain reserves for the frontier. Without yanglianjian, there could be no stable cadre of county-level magistrates to implement imperial policy on the ground. Without secret memorials, there could be no early warning system for local disorder, and no way for the emperor to track abuses without depending on self-reporting. And without the Zhenggar trade policy, calibrated by the Yongzheng emperor to maximize leverage while avoiding outright war, the Qing would have had no foothold in the Northwest upon which to build. So if Qianlong is the emperor who expanded the Qing to its greatest territorial extent, and he is,

he conquered Jungaria, absorbed Xinjiang, and declared himself the old man of the ten perfect victories, you must at least keep in mind that it was Yongzheng who made it logistically, financially, and institutionally possible. We all sit atop the shoulders of giants. As Zelen writes, quote, he converted informal practices into a formal system. He demanded honesty, but rewarded honesty. He restructured finance, but left its language intact. He acted swiftly, punished selectively, and ensured loyalty through data, not just ritual. He was an architect of capacity, and that capacity would power the bloodiest frontier conquest the Qing Empire would ever undertake. And that is where we're going to leave it off.

Next time, we will dive into that capacity being unleashed against the Jungars across the Ili Valley through trade turned into the beginnings of conquest. The extermination of the Jungars was not a spontaneous event. It was a terminal logic of a system that had spent decades refining, selecting, and sharpening its toolset, those of audit, migration, taxation, and suppression. But even Empire has its limits. All that and much more yet to come. Until then, thanks for listening.