Recently shortlisted for the Canadian Historical Association's Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Slaves of the Emperor, by David Porter, Faculty Lecturer in the Department of History and Classical Studies, examines how the Qing empire was built and held together by an imperial "service elite", the Qing Eight Bannermen, who were at the core of both the military and the bureaucracy of the dynasty.
We spoke to Professor Porter about the research and archival work he did for the book, the meaning of a "service elite" and the Qing dynasty's similarities to other comparable imperial systems of the time.
Q: What research and academic interests led you to write this book?
DP: Slaves of the Emperor grows out of an interest in the complexities of historical identities and the ways in which they don’t quite line up with our expectations or with contemporary ways of thinking about identity in North America. It began as a PhD thesis looking at ethnic Han members of a military system closely associated with Manchu rule over China – the Eight Banners – and trying to figure out what it meant to be both Han and a bannerman. Through this work, I realized that the way most historians had been thinking about identity in the Qing overemphasized the ethnic dimension, which was real but not all-encompassing. So one big argument I end up making in the book is that to understand Qing society, we have to recognize the importance of hereditary legal status, a concept that, unlike ethnicity, isn’t really very important in how most societies work today, but was of crucial importance to the Qing and many other societies of the time.
Q: What is a “service elite”, and why were the Eight Banners so important to the Qing dynasty and its legacy?
DP: I think of a “service elite” as a particular kind of social category tied to the maintenance of dynastic rule in many early modern states. As states like the Qing empire grew in size and power they were faced with a problem: how to maintain the loyalty of their heavily militarized core supporters while also developing a competent bureaucracy capable of administering a large and complex empire. The service elite model was to turn to those core supporters and decide that they would retain hereditary, institutionalized privilege in exchange for loyal service to the ruling family. But because the population of service elites, like the Qing banners, was quite large (the banners had between 2.5 and 5 million members in the early 18th century), it was possible to select officials from among them on the basis of merit, rather than relying on the inheritance of specific positions as in, say, a feudal system. So from a ruling family’s perspective service elites had many of the advantages of modern bureaucracies – governance by competent professionals – without the risk that those bureaucrats or their families would turn against the ruler, because their legal privileges depended on the continuation of dynastic rule. In the Qing case specifically, we see that bannermen never rebelled against the dynasty, avoiding one of the key challenges that many previous Chinese states faced, even as the Qing was able to extend its rule over a territory far larger than that of any previous China-based state with the exception of the Mongols (who ruled for a much shorter period of time).
Q: What similarities and differences did you observe in your research when comparing the Qing banners to the samurai of Edo Japan, the service nobility of imperial Russia and other dynasties? How does a comparative history of these various service elites deepen our understanding of status and hierarchy?
DP: There are quite a few really fascinating similarities across the systems I compare, which also include the Ottoman Janissaries (and other portions of the Ottoman elite). The basic point of comparison was the notion of a service elite with the exchange of institutionalized privilege for loyal service that I described above. But in addition, we see that all of these groups were quite urbanized, that they faced specific expectations for the performance of a kind of martial masculinity, that their development was linked to the bureaucratization of the states they serve, and that they were all rhetorically understood, at least at times, as subordinate members of the households of their rulers. This last point was, except for Japan, linked to a discourse in which service elites were often described as “slaves” of the ruler.
There were of course many differences as well, as each group departed from the banner model in at least one key way. Ottoman Janissaries were not a hereditary group – or at least were not supposed to be. Russian service nobles possessed an exclusive right to own serfs that was the basis of their economic privilege, with salaries playing only a secondary role. And Japanese samurai did not serve a single ruler, but were divided among many local lords, though by far the largest contingent did serve the shogun directly.
But I think in terms of thinking about status and hierarchy, the shared discourse of subordination/slavery (from which I derive the title of the book) is the most important issue. We see from these groups that, unlike in the contemporaneous system of slavery in the Americas, to be unfree and subordinated to a master was not necessarily a marker of inferiority. Rather, because masters and household heads had the responsibility for the material support of their slaves and subordinate household members, to be directly subjected to a ruler was a privileged position, one that created a claim on the resources of the state. Western Europeans of the time often misunderstood this relationship and described Qing, Russian, and Ottoman elites as lacking in dignity due to their servility. But no Qing bannerman thought there was any loss of dignity deriving from being the emperor’s “slave” – quite the opposite.
Q: Chapter 5 of your book focuses on the Qing Banner Women. What role did women have in the hierarchy of the Qing dynasty? In what ways were they comparable to other dynasties from that period?
DP: Our understanding of what banner membership meant has usually been focused on men. They were the ones who performed the military and administrative service that was so core to the role of the banners. And they were the ones expected to master skills like mounted archery and ability to use the Manchu language that were key to official conceptions of banner identity. But banner women also played a really key role in the maintenance of Qing rule. All banner girls were potentially subject to involuntary selection to enter the imperial court as either wives or consorts of male members of the imperial family or, in some cases, as palace maids. The vast majority of imperial consorts (and thus also of mothers of emperors) were women of the banner system, as the only other group that could intermarry with the ruling dynasty were Mongol princely families. So, this means that the literal reproduction of the dynasty depended on banner women. Just as important was the role women played in defining the boundaries of banner membership and the ethnic hierarchies internal to the banner system. Banner women could not legally marry men from outside the banners, helping maintain a firm boundary between the banners and the rest of the population. Moreover, one key marker of the social superiority of the Manchu and Mongol banner over the Han banners was the fact that though intermarriage was fully permitted, it usually went only in one direction. Han banner women frequently married Manchu and Mongol banner men, while Manchu and Mongol banner women only very rarely married Han banner men. In a society in which women normally married up, this was a clear marker of an ethnic hierarchy that existed in practice, not just in theory. Finally, the Qing court was also quite concerned with banner women’s adherence to certain standard of dress and appearance, enforced by the inspections to which banner girls had to submit when they were considered for selection into the palace. Emperors denounced cases of banner women binding their feet, which they were forbidden to do, or wearing clothing with wide sleeves, which deviated from the sumptuary standards laid down by the court.
Interestingly, I would say banner women played a substantially more important role than their counterparts in the other states I looked at. The closest similarity comes in the early period of the Russian empire, when daughters of the elite were required to participate in bride shows to select a wife for the tsar or his heir. But this was a much more limited system than the selection of palace women in the Qing, in part because Russian rulers were monogamous, in part because this system was used to find consorts for a much wider array of men in the Qing case than in the Russian one, and in part because under Peter the Great, the Romanovs abandoned bride shows in order to participate in the European dynastic marriage system.
Q: What role or involvement did the Qing banners play in the eventual fall of the Qing dynasty? How did the loss of political and economic privilege affect them?
DP: During the mid-19th century, the banners lost their role as the core military force of the Qing empire. The dynasty’s traditional armies proved unable to contain either European (especially British) imperial forces or, even more problematically, a series of major rebellions, most notably the Taiping civil war. In response to these difficulties, the Qing would develop a variety of new military units, none of which were so closely linked to the dynasty’s rulers as were the banners. It was troops in some of the new armies developed in the early 20th century that launched the revolution that overthrew Qing rule.
Another way to approach this question is to recognize the ways in which the privileges possessed by the banners became a source of resentment for Chinese nationalists in the early 20th century, who came to see the banners as an external occupying army, tied to Manchu conquerors, and thus analogous to the imperialist European forces they were then confronting. Because of this, during the 1911 revolution, banner garrisons in a handful of cities became victims of massacres. As a result, many bannermen in the immediate post-Qing period tried to hide their identity.
But there’s another side to this story, which is that the banners were not actually formally eliminated when the last Qing emperor abdicated in 1912. Several of the northern generals/warlords who dominated China in the 1910s and 1920s continued to make use of banner armies, perhaps hoping to replicate the relationship the Qing emperors had with this group, and the government continued to appoint banner commanders. Only with the victory of the Kuomintang in the late 1920s would the system be formally eliminated. But even before that point, the privileges of banner status had mostly disappeared, as banner people ceased to be legally differentiated from the rest of the population and lost their access to the economic support that had been provided by the Qing state.
Q: You taught the Manchu language as a graduate student- what inspired your interest in learning the Manchu language? How did your knowledge of the Manchu language help with the research you conducted for “Slaves of the Emperor”?
DP: I love working in Manchu alongside Chinese for a few reasons. First, it’s a visually very beautiful language, written in a connected vertical script quite unlike nearly all other languages. Second, it provides access to a huge amount of material that very few people are capable of reading, meaning that it presents a lot of opportunities to make new findings that aren’t accessible to scholars working only in Chinese. Related to this, as a non-native speaker of Chinese, knowing Manchu helps me feel like less of an imposter in the field – my Chinese will never be as good as that of many of my colleagues (the vast majority, when you consider that most Chinese history is written by scholars in China), but I can still make use of materials that very few of them can. This is the sense in which Manchu was crucial to the research for Slaves of the Emperor. I think about half the primary sources I used were written exclusively in Manchu. Finally, I think there’s something important about preserving knowledge of a language that has had a catastrophic decline in the number of speakers – one rewarding aspect of teaching Manchu has been having students with Manchu ancestry who see learning the language as an opportunity to connect to their own ancestry.
Q: Your next project will be a study of translation and translators and their role in the Qing state. Can you tell us more about this upcoming project?
DP: One really fascinating feature of the Qing empire was how important translation was to the functions of the state. The routine bureaucracy of the empire, like the Canadian state today, functioned bilingually in Manchu and Chinese with huge volumes of official documents made bilingual through the work of translators. The broader empire dealt with many more languages, especially Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chaghatay. Of course, empires by their nature have to deal with many languages, but the Qing was perhaps unique in the extent to which translation was the work of the imperial elite (it was a nearly exclusive function of men of the banner system) and the degree to which translators could move up through the bureaucracy to hold the very highest ranks in the imperial government. So the goal of this project is to think about the Qing as an “empire of translation” and how that affected everything from the structure of the Qing state to the lives and careers of official translators to the vitality and use of the Manchu language.
David Porter holds a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University and is currently Faculty Lecturer at McGill, jointly appointed in the Department of History and Classical Studies and the Department of East Asian Studies. From August 1, he will be Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies. He is a historian of the Qing empire and early Republican China, whose research focuses on questions of empire, identity, and state-making in a global early modern comparative context. In addition, he has been active in helping scholars and students across the world study the Manchu language via online teaching and the dissemination of Manchu language-learning resources.