1 - State Building before 1644

Summary

On June 6, 1644, Ch'ing troops entered Peking and claimed the throne for their six-year-old emperor. The military success in 1644 and the subsesquent expansion of the Ch'ing empire were rooted in two centuries of Jurchen multilateral relationships with Koreans, Mongols, and Chinese in the Northeast. By the early seventeenth century, Nurhaci (Nu-erh-ha-ch'ih; 1559–1626), the founder of the dynasty, shifted the goal from seeking wealth and local power to pursuing a vision of an empire, and toward this end he created a sociomilitary organization that was capable of unifying the Jurchens. He laid the foundation for a political system that allowed Chinese and Mongol participation in his endeavor. Following Nurhaci's death, his son, Hung Taiji (Huang T'ai-chi; 1592–1643) built on the accomplishments of his father and consolidated the conceptual and institutional foundation for a Ch'ing empire by drawing heavily on Ming traditions. The glory of taking the throne in Peking fell to Hung Taiji's six-year-old son.

THE JURCHENS DURING THE MING

The place and its people

The Liao valley is the heartland of a region known to Westerners as Manchuria, a place where forest, steppe, and agricultural lands overlap. In the sixteenth century, this region extended southward from the Amur River (Heilungkiang) and included a Ming administrative area in the lower Liao valley and the Liao-tung peninsula. In the east, it reached the Tatar Strait, the Sea of Japan, and the Korean border. In the west, it connected to what in the twentieth century was Jehol, extending northwest from the Great Wall to the Mongolian pasturelands on the slopes of the Greater Khingan Mountains (Ta Hsing-an ling).