Manchu Origins revealed (The barbarians who conquered China)

Well, one thing is certain.
Henry Puyi of the 20th century was nothing
at all like the early rulers of this dynasty that
developed Manchu power outside the Great Wall, conquered the Ming,
and made the Great Qing Empire, the Da Qing Guo,
the greatest in the world for a time, and perhaps
the greatest in Chinese history.
Puyi's ancestors came with fury, cunning,
and rather more in the way of organizational administrative talent
than had their Mongol predecessors.
Though the Manchus were not of the Steppe themselves,
the Manchu conquest of 1644 was the culmination
of the struggle between Steppe and Song that Professor Bol
has discussed, between the marauding, conquering tribes
north of the Wall and the farmers and bureaucrats south of it, at least
from a Chinese perspective.
The Manchus succeeded over the long haul because they
embodied parts of both traditions.
They were a nomadic or quasi-nomadic people descended from the Jurchen.
They also practiced agriculture.
The Manchus had already established a rather effective militarized state
in the frontier zone between the Wall and what, from a Chinese perspective,
would be outer barbarism, a place where Chinese and foreigners traded,
intermarried, and where Chinese organizational skills might be brought
together with nomadic military power.
The Manchus themselves were incredible horsemen and archers.
But they had also begun to incorporate Chinese administrators
and to make alliances with Chinese generals.
They made significant gains of their own on the Manchurian frontier
and adopted the dynastic name of the Qing in 1636.
Let's stop for a moment and ask, what else happened in 1636?
That's right.
Harvard University was founded in 1636, the same year
that the Qing dynasty was proclaimed, although the Qing would not seize power
until 1644.
This is a coincidence, as far as I can tell,
of absolutely no significance whatsoever.
The Manchus were extraordinarily well-organized for a frontier people,
and could be considered barbarians only in the sense that they were in no way
literarily distinguished.
They had their own writing, but had not fully
embraced the written canon of Confucian culture.
Manchu warriors and their families were organized
in what were called banners, eight different colors and design variations,
as a means of subdividing and controlling this armed population.
In the years before the conquest, they created
banners of allied Mongols and Chinese, too.
It's been written that the banner system was
a kind of movable, militarized society led by Manchus,
but with important Chinese participation and support.
And while the Manchus were organizing outside the Wall, the Ming, in effect,
was collapsing all by itself, the result of misgovernance, greed, and stupidity
on the part of the court of truly historic dimensions.
Its demise was speeded by a whole bunch of rebellions and incursions,
of which the Manchus were only one.
And indeed it wasn't really, at first, the Manchus,
but rather a demented bandit namely Li Zicheng,
who first took Beijing, leading to the emperor's suicide.
Now this guy, Li Zicheng, wanted to establish his own dynasty.
There's a story about him.
He was said to have been fine archer, and he wanted to-- in some sense,
testing his fate-- shot an arrow at the character zhong, central,
for Central Kingdom, with the assumption that if he hits it on,
the throne is his to be had.
And to everyone's surprise and unease, he missed it, a very bad omen for what
would be the first and last emperor of what he called the Shun dynasty.
Li did himself no good in his brief rule in the capital.
He asked Ming officials there to swear their allegiance to him.
And then he executed 46 of the highest of them on the grounds
that they were being disloyal to the Ming by siding with him, so how could
he possibly trust them?
His troops pillaged, whipped, raped the people of Beijing in April of 1644.
And one month later the Manchus rode through the Shanhaiguan, the open gate
in the Great Wall, in a dust storm, joined the Ming general Wu Sangui
to defeat Li ZIcheng, the bandit in Beijing.
And they entered Beijing.
Now this is an interesting story about how dynasties rise and fall.
They were aided very much by this Ming general Wu
Sangui, who was physically in between the Manchus
on the outside and Li Zicheng in Beijing,
literally and figuratively with his back up against the Great Wall.
And the key question for him-- this would come around again
in the early 20th century when the question would
be asked of whom Yuan Shikai would side with in the Republican Revolution--
whom would this general side with?