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Transition from Ming to Qing

Period of Chinese history (1618–1683)

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At the same time, the Ming dynasty was struggling to survive amid increasing fiscal troubles and peasant rebellions. On April 24, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt. Li then proclaimed the Shun dynasty. At the time of the city's fall, the last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, hanged himself on a tree in the imperial garden outside the Forbidden City. As Li Zicheng advanced toward him with his army, the general Wu Sangui, tasked by the Ming with guarding one of the gates of the Great Wall, swore allegiance to the Manchus and allowed them to enter China. Li Zicheng was defeated at the battle of Shanhai Pass by the combined forces of Wu Sangui and the Manchu prince Dorgon. On June 6, the Manchus and Wu entered the capital and proclaimed the young Shunzhi Emperor as the new Emperor of China.

However, the conquest was far from complete, and it took nearly forty more years before all of China was firmly united under Qing rule. The Kangxi Emperor ascended the throne in 1661, and in 1662 his regents initiated the Great Clearance to defeat the resistance of Ming loyalists in South China. He then fought several rebellions, such as the revolt of the Three Feudatories, led by Wu Sangui, which broke out in southern China in 1673. He subsequently launched a series of campaigns that expanded his empire. In 1662, the general Koxinga expelled Dutch colonists and founded the Kingdom of Tungning in Taiwan, a Ming loyalist state, with the aim of reconquering China. However, Tungning was defeated in 1683 at the battle of Penghu by Admiral Shi Lang, who had previously served under Koxinga.

The fall of the Ming dynasty resulted from a combination of factors. Kenneth Swope argues that a key factor was the deterioration of relations between the Ming royalty and the military leaders of the Ming Empire. Other factors include repeated military expeditions in the north, inflationary pressures caused by excessive spending by the imperial treasury, natural disasters, and epidemics. A peasant rebellion in Beijing in 1644 and a series of weak emperors contributed to the chaos. The Ming power survived for years in what is now southern China, though it was ultimately defeated by the Manchus.

Overview

The transition from the Ming to Qing was a decades-long period of conflict between:

  1. the Qing dynasty, established by the Manchu clan Aisin Gioro in contemporary Northeast China;
  2. the Ming dynasty, the incumbent dynasty led by the Zhu clan;
  3. and various other rebel powers in China, such as the short-lived Xi dynasty led by Zhang Xianzhong and the short-lived Shun dynasty led by Li Zicheng.

Leading up to the Qing, in 1618, the Later Jin khan Nurhaci commissioned a document entitled the Seven Grievances, which enumerated grievances against the Ming. Nurhaci, leader of the Jianzhou Jurchens, was originally a Ming vassal who officially considered himself a local representative of imperial Ming power, but he broke his relationship with the Ming with the establishment of the Later Jin dynasty in 1616 after he unified Jurchen tribes. Many of the grievances he presented dealt with conflicts against the Ming-backed Yehe clan of the Jurchens. Nurhaci's demand that the Ming pay tribute to him to redress the Seven Grievances was effectively a declaration of war, as the Ming were not willing to pay money to a former vassal. Shortly afterwards, Nurhaci rebelled against Ming rule in Liaoning.

At the same time, the Ming dynasty was fighting for its survival against fiscal turmoil and peasant rebellions. Han Chinese officials urged Nurhaci's successor Hong Taiji to crown himself emperor, which he did in 1636, declaring the new Qing dynasty. On 24 April 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt and then proclaimed the Shun dynasty. The last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, hanged himself from the Zuihuai tree in the imperial garden outside the Forbidden City. When Li Zicheng moved against him, the Ming general Wu Sangui shifted his allegiance to the Qing. Li Zicheng was defeated at the Battle of Shanhai Pass by the joint forces of Wu Sangui and Manchu prince Dorgon. On 6 June, the mainly Han Chinese forces of Dorgon and Wu entered the capital.

The fall of the Ming dynasty was largely caused by a combination of factors. Scholars have argued that the fall of the Ming dynasty may have been partially caused by the droughts and famines caused by the Little Ice Age. Historian Kenneth Swope argues that one key factor was deteriorating relations between Ming royalty and the Ming Empire's military leadership. Other factors include repeated military expeditions to the north, inflationary pressures caused by spending too much from the imperial treasury, natural disasters and epidemics of disease. Contributing further to the chaos was a peasant rebellion throughout the country in 1644 and a series of weak emperors. Ming power would hold out in what is now southern China for years, though eventually would be overtaken by the Qing forces. Other authors have linked the fall of the Ming with the General Crisis affecting the Spanish Empire under Philip IV, the English Civil War and other polities.

It took almost 40 more years after the fall of the Ming before all of China was securely united under Qing rule. By the mid-1600s, there were eleven emergent regimes which purported to be the authentic Ming. The Qing dated the founding of the dynasty to June 1644 but transitional warfare continued until 1683.

In 1661, the Kangxi Emperor ascended the throne, and in 1662 his regents launched the Great Clearance to defeat the resistance of Ming loyalists in South China. He then fought off several rebellions, such as the Revolt of the Three Feudatories led by Wu Sangui in southern China, starting in 1673, and then countered by launching a series of campaigns that expanded his empire. In 1662, Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) drove out and defeated the Dutch and founded the Kingdom of Tungning in Taiwan, a Ming loyalist state with the goal of reunifying China. However, Tungning was defeated in 1683 at the Battle of Penghu by Han Chinese admiral Shi Lang, a former admiral under Koxinga.

The Qing conquest depended heavily on the defection of the Ming dynasty's Liaodong military establishment and other defectors, with the Manchu Banner forces constituting a relatively small fraction of Qing military strength relative to the Green Standard Army. However, historian Michael Fredholm von Essen argues that the Manchu military's organization into combined-arms forces integrating cavalry, infantry, and artillery was the decisive factor in the Qing's ability to defeat numerically superior Ming armies, and that the Banner armies constituted the Qing's main battle force.

Jurchens and the late Ming dynasty

The Manchus are sometimes described as a nomadic people, when in fact they were not nomads, but a sedentary agricultural people who lived in fixed villages, farmed crops, and practiced hunting and mounted archery. Their main military formation was infantry wielding bows and arrows, swords, and pikes, while cavalry was kept in the rear.

Manchus were living in cities with walls surrounded by villages and adopting Han Chinese-style agriculture well before the Qing conquest of the Ming, and there was an established tradition of Han Chinese-Manchu mixing before 1644. The Han Chinese soldiers on the Liaodong frontier often mixed with non-Han tribesmen and were largely acculturated to their ways. The Jurchen Manchus accepted and assimilated Han soldiers who went over to them, and Han Chinese soldiers from Liaodong often adopted and used Manchu names. Indeed Nurhaci's secretary Dahai may have been one such individual.

In the late Ming dynasty, Ming army units had become dominated by officers who would spend long periods of 10 or 12 years in command instead of the usual practice of constant rotation, and the Central Military Command had lost much of its control over regional armies. Zongdu Junwu, or Supreme Commanders, were appointed throughout the empire to oversee the fiscal and military affairs in the area of their jurisdiction. In the frontier areas these became increasingly autonomous, and especially in Liaodong, where military service and command became hereditary and vassalage-like personal bonds of loyalty grew between officers, their subordinates, and troops. This military caste gravitated toward the Jurchen tribal chieftains rather than the bureaucrats of the capital.

The She-An Rebellion among the Yi people broke out in Sichuan in 1621 against the Ming, requiring suppression, which was completed in 1629. In the early 1640s, mass rebellions led by many rebel leaders broke out in northwestern China's province of Shaanxi and spread throughout China in the 1640s. Major battles included the sacking of Fengyang by Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong and a battle in Kaifeng which led to the deliberately engineered 1642 Yellow River flood by the Ming governor in an attempt to stop Li Zicheng.

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