The transition from Ming to Qing, also known as the Manchu conquest of China or Ming–Qing transition, was a decades-long period of conflict between the Qing dynasty, established by the Manchu Aisin Gioro clan in Manchuria, and the Ming dynasty in China proper and later in South China. Various other regional or temporary powers were also involved in this conflict, such as the short-lived Shun dynasty. In 1618, Nurhaci, the leader of the Aisin Gioro clan, commissioned a document titled the Seven Grievances, in which he listed complaints against the Ming before launching a rebellion. Many of the grievances concerned conflicts with the Yehe, a major Manchu clan, and the Ming's favoritism toward the Yehe at the expense of other Manchu clans. Nurhaci's demand that the Ming pay tribute to address the Seven Grievances was effectively a declaration of war, as the Ming were unwilling to pay money to a former vassal. Shortly thereafter, Nurhaci began to rebel against the Ming in Liaoning, a region in southern Manchuria.
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:
- the Qing dynasty, established by the Manchu clan Aisin Gioro in contemporary Northeast China;
- the Ming dynasty, the incumbent dynasty led by the Zhu clan;
- 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.
Initial Jurchen conquests
Conquest of Liaodong and other Jurchen tribes (1601–1626)
The Jianzhou Jurchen chief, Nurhaci, is retrospectively identified as the founder of the Qing dynasty. In 1589 the Ming dynasty appointed Nurhaci as paramount chieftain of the Yalu Region, believing that his tribe was too weak to gain hegemony over the larger Yehe and Hada. When the other tribes attacked him to check his power in 1591, he succeeded in defeating them and seized many of their warhorses.
During much of his early life Nurhaci considered himself a guardian of the Ming border and a local representative of imperial Ming power. Upon the advice of an Erdeni, most likely a Chinese transfrontiersman, he proclaimed the Later Jin dynasty in 1616, named after the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty that had ruled over northern China several centuries earlier, and declared himself Khan. His efforts to unify Jurchen tribes gave the Jurchen the strength to assert themselves backed by an army consisting of majority Han Chinese defectors as well as Ming produced firearms. In 1618, Nurhaci openly renounced the Ming overlordship and proclaimed his Seven Grievances against the Ming and departed his capital of Hetu Ala with 20,000 men. The army attacked and captured Fushun, located on the Hun River about 10 kilometers east of Shenyang.
The Hulun tribes, a powerful confederacy of Jurchen tribes, started recognizing the authority of Nurhaci by the beginning of the 17th century. In some cases, such as with Bujantai of the Ula, chieftains would attempt to reassert their independence and war would break out, but the Jianzhou Jurchens would defeat and assimilate all the tribes eventually (Hada 1601, Hoifa 1607, Ula 1613, Yehe 1619). The powerful Yehe Jurchens under Gintaisi united with the forces of the Ming dynasty to combat the rise of Nurhaci but Gintaisi was defeated and died in 1619. The fur-trapping Warka peoples near the Pacific coast were subjugated as tributary tribes from 1599 to 1641.
By summer 1621, the Ming's Liaodong fortress cities, Fushun, Shenyang, and Liaoyang, were all handed over to the Later Jin by traitors and defectors. Fushun's commander surrendered after a single attack when promised that his troops and their families would not be enslaved or forced to change any of their customs (including hairstyle), but rather given high office. Shenyang fell with the aid of Mongol Ming soldiers in the city; Liaoyang fell after traitors let down ropes for the Jurchens to climb the wall in the night. The Ming general Li Yongfang who surrendered the city of Fushun in what is now Liaoning province in China's northeast did so after Nurhaci gave him an Aisin Gioro princess in marriage and a noble title. The princess was one of Nurhaci's granddaughters. In April 1625, Nurhaci designated Shenyang the new capital city, which would hold that status until the Qing conquest of Beijing in 1644. In 1625, the Jurchens captured the port city of Lüshun, thus controlling the whole Liaodong peninsula.
When the Jurchens were reorganized by Nurhaci into the Eight Banners, many Manchu clans were artificially created from groups of unrelated people who would found a new Manchu clan (mukun) using a term of geographic origin such as a toponym for their hala (clan name). The irregularities over Jurchen and Manchu clan origin led to the Qing trying to document and systemize the creation of histories for Manchu clans, including manufacturing an entire legend around the origin of the Aisin Gioro clan by taking mythology from the northeast.
Nurhaci read the Chinese novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, learning all he knew about Chinese military and political strategies from them.
In February 1626, the Jurchens besieged Ningyuan but suffered a defeat in which Nurhaci was mortally wounded.
First Joseon campaign
The Later Jin had lost at the Battle of Ningyuan the previous year and their khan Nurhaci died from his wounds afterwards. Peace negotiations with the Ming after the battle delayed an aggressive Ming response to the Jurchen loss, and the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan was busy fortifying the border garrisons and training new musketeers. The new khan Hong Taiji was eager for a quick victory to consolidate his position as khan. By invading Joseon he also hoped to extract much-needed resources for his army and subjects, who had suffered in the war against the Ming.
In 1627, Hong Taiji dispatched princes Amin, Jirgalang, Ajige, and Yoto to Joseon with 30,000 troops, under the guidance of Gang Hong-rip and Li Yongfang. The Jurchens met sharp resistance at the border towns but Joseon border garrisons were quickly defeated. The Jurchen army advanced into Uiju where Ming general Mao Wenlong was stationed, and Mao quickly fled with his men into the Bohai Sea. Next, the Jurchens attacked Anju. When it became clear that defeat was inevitable, the Anju garrisons committed suicide by blowing up their gunpowder storehouse. Pyongyang fell without a fight and the Jin army crossed the Taedong River.