Military Culture in Eighteenth-Century China
Joanna Waley-Cohen
New York University
The empire ruled from Beijing after 1760 was the most extensive in Chinese history, encompassing not only China itself, but also Mongolia, Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan), and the northeastern homelands of the Manchu ruling house of the Qing, whose rule over China lasted from 1644 to 1912. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Qing imperial project rested on two major interconnected bases. One was the series of wars that led to the unprecedented expansion of the empire, the significance of which was marked by the Qianlong Emperor’s (1736-95) assumption of the sobriquet, “Old Man of the Ten Great Victories” to celebrate the victories of his reign. The other was a deliberate campaign of cultural transformation, in which emperors sought to propel military success, and the martial values that underpinned it, onto the center stage of cultural life, to a hitherto unparalleled extent. In short, the three emperors whose reigns spanned the years 1662-1799 set out to monumentalize both the greatness of the Qing empire and the military might on which it rested by means of constant and ubiquitous cultural reinforcement.
Several linked purposes underlay this cultural campaign. First, Qing rulers wished to avoid repeating the mistakes of their Ming predecessors, whose excessive favoring of the civil arm of government had resulted in widespread disaffection of the military, and had been a leading cause of the Ming demise. Second, they wished to avoid the softening-up of the Manchus that they thought would surely follow the adoption of Chinese ways. They saw in this kind of sinicization the root of the downfall of their imperial ancestors, the Jin, who in the twelfth century had pushed the Song southwards only to be overwhelmed themselves a little later by the Mongols. In fact, the campaign to militarize culture amounted to a bid to reverse altogether the dreaded process of sinicization.
Most of all, promoting greater attention to martiality and military success aimed to forge a more closely aligned set of cultural preferences among the diverse peoples of the empire-- Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Uighurs, as well as Chinese. Qing rulers sought to bring about a new shared consciousness of and esteem for martial ideals, and to create an all-new hybrid Qing culture indissoluble from empire. In other words, militarization of culture was an instrument through which Qing rulers sought to unite and rule their multiethnic and multicultural empire.
Recognition of this focus on martial prowess and military success is extremely significant, because it flatly contradicts the conventional wisdom about the allegedly non-military nature of the supposedly unchanging traditional Chinese state. Observers have cited this hypothetical characteristic for various reasons: sometimes in praise of the presumed peaceable “national character of the Chinese”, and sometimes to disparage Chinese people’s--allegedly—ineffectual, backward, and generally weak nature. In all of this, the important point is that the relative military weakness of the late 19th century has been wrongly read back to cover the entire Qing period as well. In fact the Qing campaign to militarize culture underscores not only Manchu distinctiveness but also the reality of their clear appreciation of military power.
The interaction between military and civil, in Chinese wu and wen, always played a prominent role in Chinese thinking, but Wen generally dominated Wu. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the new martial, or wu, ambience by no means supplanted the vibrant tradition in which “being civilized” (wen) reigned supreme in China, but at least for a time martial values (wu) dislodged wen from its exclusive position at the pinnacle of political prestige, and shared the limelight on a more nearly equal basis. This shift towards greater equality between wu and wen may be seen as part of a broader trend discernible under the Qing, involving a move from a more strictly hierarchical approach to one of broad equivalence, for example among at least early dynastic rulers and their relatives, and among the five linguistic/ethnic blocs of the empire (Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, and Hui or Chinese-Muslim).
With regard to wu and wen, on the one hand Qing rulers, who owed their presence as emperors to military force, wished to adjust the civil-military balance to give greater influence to the latter, rhetorically as well as actually. On the other, however, they did not seek to diminish wen values. The Qing still intended to keep military elements under firm control and, moreover, they fully appreciated the centrality of civilian culture to the long-term pursuit of their imperial goals. They simply wished to blur the distinctions between the two on every level possible by bringing wu into areas formerly seen as the domain of wen. They understood the relationship between the military and civil principles, not as one of mutual exclusion, but in terms of a continuum in which scholarly or literary virtue, wende, and military achievement, wugong, mutually produced and reproduced one another, to the ultimate advantage of imperial power.
With benefit of hindsight, it is possible to divide the active implementation of the Qing imperial project into three escalating phases, although Qing emperors themselves may not have understood what they were doing in so continuous or well demarcated a way. The first phase ran from 1636, the year the Manchus first proclaimed their Qing empire (8 years before the conquest of China), to 1681, the year when they finally suppressed the eight-year Rebellion of the Three Feudatories (sanfan), and their rule over China appeared at last to have become secure. The second phase ran from 1681 to 1760, the year in which Qing armies exterminated their competitors for control of vast areas of Central Asia and incorporated that territory, later known as Xinjiang, into their empire. The third ran from 1760 to 1799, the year in which the Qianlong emperor passed away.
During the first phase of the Qing imperial project, the creation of a substantive, expansive Qing empire was still more wishful than probable, and the strong emphasis placed on military achievement was as much the natural consequence of the raw fact of conquest as it was part of a self-conscious project linking culture, empire, and martial prowess. Yet early leaders set in motion a series of weighty and ambitious public works projects intended both to aggrandise their own personal stature and that of the nascent empire. In doing so they set the course of cultural transformation for the longer term.
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For example, we may cite the infusion of architecture with martial values and references to empire that took place/// at the very outset of the Qing empire /// at the secondary imperial capital of Mukden, present-day Shenyang. In the eastern portion of the palace an octagonal structure, the Hall of Great Administration (Dazhengdian) stood at one end of a long courtyard, its shape perhaps reminiscent of styles favored by earlier imperial formations in the Northeast. This hall dominated ten pavilions, five on either side of the courtyard, of which eight were assigned to the eight banners of the Qing military-administrative structure and one each to the banner commanders of the left and right wings. Some scholars have seen further military references in the design of this courtyard: perhaps the just-off-parallel arrangement of the rows of pavilions intentionally resembled the Chinese character ba, meaning eight, (as in 8 Banners), and so on.
Also at Mukden a major Tibetan-Buddhist temple complex begun in 1636 was dedicated to the cult of the deity Mahakala, whose martial power and protective ferocity were linked to the tradition of Genghis Khan and his grandson Khubilai Khan, the latter the first Mongol ruler of China in the late 13th century. This marked the Manchus’ bold and ultimately successful bid to assume the mantle of Mongol imperial successes, which among other things had involved an intimate relationship between politics and the Tibetan-Buddhist religion. Thus the Mahakala temples heralded Manchu plans to dominate both Mongolia and Tibet.
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During this period martial valour became the symbol of a new, hereditary conquest elite, the banners, that the Qing superimposed on Chinese society, to parallel the traditional Han-Chinese merit-based elite, who were defined by their superior education and literary accomplishments. The banner system was a pre-conquest military-administrative formation and was one of the Qing’s major institutional innovations. The basic banner structure called for eight separate color-coded organizations each for Manchus, Mongols, and “Han-martial” – the latter being originally Chinese who had joined the Manchu cause before the fall of the Ming.
Members of the
twenty-four banners lived, whether in Beijing or in the provinces, in insular
walled garrison compounds. Known as the “Manchu cities”, these compounds were
set aside for the exclusive use of banner garrison officers and soldiers, their
families and households. In certain locations the garrisons’ high visibility as
a sign of Manchu occupation was marked with especial clarity, for example in
Nanjing, the former Ming capital, where initially banner garrisons were located
right in the precincts of the former imperial palace itself, to make a
particular point about Qing power. By contrast, on the northwest frontier dual
Manchu and Chinese cities became a characteristic marker of Qing expansion. . As the garrison cities became progressively incorporated
into the landscape of daily life over time, they became, literally, “part of the
landscape,” effectively militarizing the everyday physical environment.
During the second phase of the Qing imperial project, wars of imperial expansion in effect became a defining characteristic of Qing rule. With the suppression of all serious internal opposition to Qing rule by the early 1680s, the Manchus turned their attention to the Northwest. In that region, for the next 80 years, the Qing pursued a series of campaigns, first against Russia and then in Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), while annexing both Mongolia and Tibet through a combination of strategic alliances and armed interventions. The 1760 addition of Xinjiang to the empire marked the culmination of the expansionist phase of the Qing empire, and was commemorated by the production of a series of maps of newly-conquered regions that were created in part with assistance from European Jesuit missionaries resident at the Qing court.
During this period, military expansion was underpinned on the cultural front by changes in political life, social structure, ritual activity and public spectacle. In politics, the Qing effected a radical shift to a much more military cast, in particular with the founding and promotion to principal organ of state of the Grand Council, which was originally founded for specifically military purposes. Grand Councilors often held concurrent positions elsewhere in the government, and ran military operations or commanded armies during their tenure. Military success became at least as effective a qualification for the Council as the traditional civil service examinations. By the mid-eighteenth century, contemporaries acknowledged that some connection to military success, whether through soldiering, strategising, logistics, historiography, or otherwise, was if not prerequisite to then certainly instrumental in the achievement of a successful political career.
During this phase also, the emphasis on martiality also began to be felt within Chinese society more generally, because during this period its appeal broadened beyond the conquest elite. The dilution of civilian paths to power as the result of the Qing introduction into the social hierarchy of the hereditary banners, combined with the crisis of identity brought on by the Ming collapse, predisposed members of the traditional merit-based Chinese elite to seek new means of justifying their elevated social position. The new focus on military culture, by creating the framework for the evolution of a new social order, offered a rather inviting option in this context. An indirect but not unintended consequence of this change was the formation of a new basis for national connectedness, in which it was possible to derive a sense of affinity from pride in military conquest and the values that accompanied it. The fact that the new culture thus had the potential to serve the interests of at least some of its target audience as well as its creators made it all the more insidiously appealing.
Third,
this period was marked by an intense imperial focus on hunting and martial
pursuits. In particular the annual autumn hunts held in the northeast
were, explicitly, intended as the martial (wu) counterpart to the civil (wen)
agricultural rituals (qin’geng) central to the Chinese ritual calendar.
Their specific association with military preparedness helped impress its
centrality in the Qing polity upon a diverse audience. As well as accomplishing
military and imperial purposes, hunting and military training provided ample
subject matter for the imperially-sponsored artistic production whose main
purpose was to focus attention on the high degree of military sophistication in
Qing culture and the imperial power that rested upon it.
The years 1749-60
marked a period of transition from the 2nd to the 3rd
phase of the Qing imperial project.
By the 1750s the cultural side of the Qing imperial project was taking great strides under the direction of emperor Qianlong, who both accorded exceptional importance to the wars of his reign, and devoted enormous attention to the militarisation of culture. Qianlong’s passionate attention to both the minutiae of military affairs and the larger picture of empire meant that during his reign, war and devotion to military power surpassed their practical role as the main means of imperial expansion to emerge as very metaphors for the Qing at its height.
Among Qianlong’s many initiatives to advance the project to militarise culture, one of the most prominent involved large-scale public works. Most notably he greatly expanded the summer palace complex at Chengde originally constructed by his grandfather and made it an integral part of the Qing “great enterprise”. Built between 1703 and 1760, and located meaningfully just where China, Mongolia and Manchuria come together, the Chengde palace complex recreated in miniature many of the most famous structures, landscapes and scenic spots of the empire, but with subtle modifications intended to express the absolute nature of Qing power. Landmarks at Chengde included replicas of the Potala palace in Lhasa, Tibet; the Mongolian steppelands; and the Jinshan temple in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province. This constructed landscape not only expressed Qing sovereignty but also drew onto itself some of the often sacred connotations of the models it mimicked. Thus at Chengde a metaphorical landscape was used to support in modern ways Qing cultural domination over conquered territories, much as some Europeans were doing at about the same time.
The Ten Great
Victories to which QL laid claim were three wars of conquest in Xinjiang; 2
wars against Jinchuan minorities in Sichuan province (1747-1749; 1771-1776);
wars in Burma (1766-70), Annam (Vietnam—1788-89), and Taiwan (1787-88); and two
against the Gurkhas in Nepal (1790-92). A sequence of multi-layered
commemorations marked these wars’ conclusion, with the installation in Beijing
and the provinces of monuments engraved in up to 4 of the languages of state
with imperially authored poems and essays.
Ritual troop inspections and celebrations of victory, attended by multitudes of military and civil officials as well as by visiting dignitaries, became commonplace. Court painters recorded these events in careful detail, producing a whole genre of documentary painting (in the absence of photography), that also featured several groups of portraits of meritorious officials involved in the different campaigns and a series of sets of war illustrations. Thousands of copper engravings of the war illustrations graced public buildings all around the country and were presented to individuals privileged to receive imperial largesse. Catalogs of the imperial paintings reproduced the full text of the paintings’ inscriptions, which were often all about war and victory, as did such other texts as histories of Beijing and its monuments. Purportedly imperial versification on the wars, in the emperor’s own calligraphy, adorned much of this artwork. Together with such trophies as the weapons and personal belongings of defeated rebels, these paintings were displayed in specially restored buildings in central Beijing.
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In other words, military success and martial valor had come to infiltrate cultural production and display—written, pictorial, monumental, ritual and material—in an enormous variety of ways. By 1800 the whole tenor of cultural output had simply changed.
In conclusion: the militarization of culture that began no later than 1636 with the construction of the Mukden palaces and temples continued to take effect with an intensity that reached its peak during the mid-eighteenth century. By the end of Qianlong’s reign, the empire and the military power on which it rested permeated cultural life in China as never before. [Indeed, the situation could fruitfully be compared to the extraordinarily wide-ranging impact of the British empire, circa 1850, on every aspect of British economic, political, social, material and cultural life as recently described by Linda Colley]. In such ways the high-Qing of the 17th and 18th centuries distinguished itself not only from its soon-to-be-beleaguered successors, but from all its imperial predecessors as well. Future research will, I believe, prove my hypothesis, namely that the new militarized culture high-Qing emperors promoted laid essential groundwork for the emerging militarized modern state of the 20th century and beyond.
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