The Final Form of the Banners 1651-1900

Part 4 - Military Units in Name Only

(Pictured: members of the Bordered Yellow Banner demonstrating their skills, late 1644)

See Part 1 - Nurhachi Creates a New Kingdom (1583-1600)

Part 2 - The Four Banners (1600-1615)

Part 3 - The Eight Banners (1615-1650)

With Dorgon’s death at the end of 1650, the Shunzhi Huangdi officially ended the regency and began to rule in his own name. Actually, the government was largely under the control of Oboi and his allies within the Qing court. Oboi was not a member of the Aisin Gioro clan and he had no realistic chance of taking the position as Huangdi of the Qing. However, Oboi understood that having entire Banners under the command of a single man represented a huge threat to his power. So he and his allies made a dramatic change to the Banner system: from this point on, only the Huangdi would be personally in control any of the banners. The Huangdi would officially control three of the eight banners: Bordered Yellow, Plain Yellow, and Plain White.

As for the rest, the five other Banners were effectively broken apart into individual Jalens or Nirus and control over these smaller units were given to the 50 or more men at the top levels of the Qing government. After 1650, every Manchu Beile was given command over one or more Niru and the highest ranked Beile were in command of a Jalen or two. As the various Qing princes, uncles of the Huangdi, and generals rose or fell in favor, they would be given command over more or fewer Jalens or Niru. Note: by 1650 the names of these units had changed, the Sage uses the original names for the sake of clarity.

Rapidly from 1650 onwards, the Manchu banners became less important as military units. For example: most of the fighting against the rebellion by the Three Feudatories was done by the Green Flag Army, which was essentially the Ming army under a new name. For more on the revolt by the Three Feudatories, see this essay by the Sonoma Sage. The Banners, when they were used, generally fought against the Mongols in the north and much of the actual fighting in Mongolia was done by Mongol tribes who were allies of the Qing. The net result: the Qing government used Chinese soldiers to defend the borders of China and to fight in the south. In the north and the west, the Qing used Mongol tribes to fight against other Mongol tribes and the Central Asian states.

This left the Manchu Bannermen to do… well not very much. The members of the Bordered Yellow Banner who lived in Beijing and guarded the palace were able to use their proximity to the Huangdi to become commanders of the Qing army when it was sent out on campaign. They also tended to monopolize the available positions in government. About 5,000 Bannermen were part of the Qing government, nominally supervising their Chinese counterparts at every level. In theory any man from the eight banners could take the Easy test for Bannermen but in practice, the men who passed were nearly always members of the Bordered Yellow Banner. Note: the Sonoma Sage strongly suspects that the Easy test for Bannermen was rigged but perhaps they just had better tutors. The other ~40,000 Manchu Bannerman were scattered across China in ~15 garrison cities. Officially their job was to supress revolts and keep the Chinese government officials in line, but in practice, they did very little.

By 1800, most Manchu Bannerman living outside Beijing were bankrupt - indebted to Chinese money-lenders and with their military training atrophied due to a lack of interest. In 1850, when the Taiping rebellion started, the Manchu Bannerman were almost entirely useless in combat against the Taiping. The Manchu Bannermen defending Nanjing actually surrendered to the Taiping army! For their cowardice, they, their wives, and their children were all slaughtered by order of the Taiping leader. Only Sengge Rinchen (a Mongol prince and not actually a Bannerman) leading his Jalen of Mongol Bannermen demonstrated real military skill during that long and bloody civil war. See Stephen Platt’s great book Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012) for details.

When the Qing army put its best men on the battlefield in 1860, in a desperate attempt to destroy the Anglo-French expeditionary force at the gates of Beijing, their entire army was destroyed by the Anglo-French troops. Although outnumbered 6 to 1, the British and French lost just 5 men dead while the death toll in the 60,000 strong Manchu army of elite Bannerman is estimated at more than 10,000. See the Battle of Palikao. The Qing court fled Beijing the next day, leaving the capital - and their dignity - to the Anglo-French army.

The British and French choose not to end the Qing Dynasty at this juncture in history. The two European powers felt they didn’t have the manpower to rule China. When Zeng Guofan conquered the Taiping capital of Nanjing in 1864, some of his staff quietly suggested that he march his army north and take control over China, since the Manchu had clearly lost all military power. But Zeng remained loyal to the Qing and so the Qing continued to rule China till 1911.

After the fall of the Qing, nearly all the Manchu Bannermen changed their names and adopted Chinese family names. Only since the year 2000 have a few Manchu Bannermen reclaimed their original family names.

Conclusion

The Banner System started by Nurhachi and skillfully used by his sons Hongtaiji and Dorgon proved to be nearly unbeatable in East Asia from 1600 to 1650. The first three Manchu rulers were able to merge different Jurchin tribes together, then they integrated ten or twenty Mongol tribes into their system, and lastly they successfully added a hundred thousand Chinese soldiers into their Banners.

This was a remarkable achievement. As the Sage has mentioned, the Banner fought battle after battle, over the 50 year period, while suffering only a handful of defeats.

Once Ming China was almost entirely conquered, the Banners were broken up, and their military effectiveness declined steadily over the next 100 years.

By 1850 the Banners had become a joke, nothing more than paper tigers. The Qing government only maintained power thanks to Chinese generals, leading Chinese troops against Chinese rebels.

There are only a few European parallels to the Manchu Banner system. The most obvious one is the army of Macedon, created by Phillip II around 360 BCE, and then passed on to his son, Alexander the Great. Alexander bolstered his father’s Macedonian army to nearly triple its original size by adding tens of thousands of Greek soldiers, Thracian cavalrymen, and Cretan slingers. Alexander then used his multinational army to conquer the Persian Empire, as well as western India. When Alexander died, his army splintered and his generals fought each other for control over his vast empire. The Macedonian/Greek phalanx-based armies continued to be very effective military forces for the next 150 years, until the Roman legions beat them in Rome’s Hellenistic wars (205 to 180 BCE).

An open question is whether the Manchu Banners were really good, or if their enemies were weak, or if it all depended on the generalship of Nurhachi, Hongtaiji, and his brothers - the great Banner leaders. That question demands far more research than the Sonoma Sage is willing to undertake at this time. Certainly both Ming China and Joseon Korea demonstrated militarily incompetence in the face of the Manchu attacks. It should also be noted that the Ming spent most of the years 1638 to 1644 unsucessfully fighting against the army of Li Zicheng, and it was Li Zicheng’s army which first took Beijing in the spring of 1644.

The Sage certainly thinks Nurhachi and Hongtaiji were generals of the highest quality. However, the Manchu banners defeated the Mongols consistently, in every battle no matter who was in command. Unless we grant that the Banners were really good, these victories over the Mongol tribes seem hard to explain. After all, the Mongols fought all the time and their entire society was centered around warfare. Consequently, the Sage believes the Banner System was very good, though the Sage wishes future military historian will make an effort to understand the Manchu Banner System in greater detail.

Final Words

This set of essays on the Manchu Banners has been the hardest essays the Sage has written so far. Sources used include:

• The Cambridge History of China - The Ming Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty.

• Fred Mote: Imperial China 800 to 1800.

• Kenneth Swope: The Military Collapse of the Ming Dynasty

• Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period edited by A. Hummel.

The Sage has not (yet) acquired a copy of Fred Wakeman’s book The Great Enterprise. Hopefully the Sage will get a copy in the not too distant future.