The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (4 page)

Some years before this, the Yeho clan had themselves conquered a neighbouring tribe–a people calling themselves the Nala. It was this combined group, the Yeho-Nala from which Yehonala–the girl destined to rule China for almost fifty years–derived her name. After they had been subdued, and many of their warriors mercilessly slaughtered, it is recorded that the head of the Yeho-Nala, Buyanggu, solemnly promised upon his deathbed that ‘even if only one woman of our tribe managed to survive, she would certainly seek revenge and the overthrow of Nurhachi’s clan’.
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The fierce independence of this tribal group, and their defiance of the House of Nurhachi, goes a long way towards explaining the prophecy that a woman of the Yeho-Nala would bring the Dynasty to ruin. It appears that Nurhachi realised how deep ran the hostility of the defeated clan: he sought to appease them with promises of high position and intermarriage. From that time forward, the concubines and wives of the ruling clan (the Aisin Gioro, the ‘Golden Race’) were to be taken primarily from the Yeho-Nala tribe. But the proud Yeho-Nala could not easily forget the disgrace of their defeat, and the desire for revenge, for an opportunity to sweep away their dishonour, would undoubtedly have been carried down the generations. Given the strong blood-ties that linked all Manchu families,
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such a secret, silent feud does much to account for the otherwise baffling indifference Yehonala displayed to the continuance of Nurhachi’s Dynasty once she herself had attained supreme power.
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The conquest of the Yeho-Nala had other benefits for Nurhachi–it gave him the perfect pretext to attack China. The Ming, fearing Nurhachi’s martial prowess, and seeing in the Yeho tribe a counterweight to the Manchu warlord’s rising power, had ignored Nurhachi’s demand that they maintain strict neutrality and had sent help to his foes. Nurhachi now revealed his true intentions. Before his assembled army he swore a sacred vow to exact revenge upon the Mings for the murder of his forebears and for their aid to the Yeho tribe. War had been declared. The Chinese responded with a determined effort to crush Nurhachi’s growing strength. In1619, four separate Chinese armies, supported by their Korean tributaries, crossed the northern border to crush the parvenu Manchu dynasty. Nurhachi destroyed them all with an army numbering less than fifty thousand men, scattering them to the winds, amassing much booty and taking thirty thousand men captive.

This reverse brought about a brief assertion of martial ardour in the Ming. While they shrank from invading Manchu territory, they did manage to find competent generals who (with the aid of Portuguese cannon obtained via the good offices of the Jesuit ‘missionaries’ retained by the Ming Emperor)
⁶
were able to hold the line against further Manchu encroachment. Some were able to hold on to strategic strongholds beyond the Great Wall, greatly hampering Nurhachi’s freedom of movement. But such was the dissolute and dissipated nature of the Ming court that any benefits could only be temporary. The Emperor and his favourites were sunk in luxury, more interested in the latest songs or theatrical presentation than the grim verities of realpolitik. Funds destined for the army were diverted to more pleasing pastimes for the court. Eunuchs controlled access to the Celestial Prince, and they were able to suppress unwelcome news and at the same time portray rumour as truth. Without payment of large amounts of ‘fragrant grease’, these eunuchs could quickly and easily poison the monarch’s mind against even the most competent of his generals. Most military men simply accepted their lot, but General Sun, a courageous and patriotic commander, was brave enough to write to the Emperor in person:

Your Majesty’s forces have lately been deprived of their necessary training and often of their pay. Instead of leaving the command in the hands of competent military officers, you dispatch ignorant civilians to train the troops. In battle, the supreme command devolves upon some high civil functionary, supported by a large and quite useless staff of literary men. The tactics which your armies are to adopt in the field are discussed at supper by your courtiers, or decided by a party of eunuchs in the intervals between their debauches.
⁷

There is no guarantee that this courageous attempt to warn the Emperor was ever seen by the Celestial Prince. Rather the reverse. General Sun refused to vouchsafe the ‘largesse’ required by the chief eunuch, Wei Ching-hsien, a principled but ultimately disastrous decision. In a matter of days, the good general was demoted, and Kao Ti, who did provide financial support to Wei Ching-hsien, was set in his place. Even to the court literati this strategy (if we can grace these actions with such a term) must have been recognised as disastrous. Sun Tzu’s
Art of War
, one of the military classics by which these men of letters set such store, had stated the case plainly: ‘War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied.’
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Unfortunately, by this stage in the court’s evolution, an appreciation of eggshell porcelain was regarded as a far higher attainment than any martial pursuit.

Nurhachi took every advantage of such purblind folly. By 1625 he had consolidated his new capital at the strategic site of Mukden, from which he could threaten not only China but the vassal kingdom of Korea. A year later, at the age of 68, he led his men southwards towards the strategically important Chinese town of Ning Yuan. The Chinese court favourite Kao Ti immediately counselled retreat, but the commander, General Yuan, used his own blood to write out an oath, in which all his men pledged to die in defence of the town. When Nurhachi mounted his assault, he found the fortress defended by resolute warriors, and protected by European cannon, whose blasts ravaged his elite squadrons. For the first time in four decades, Nurhachi was forced to beat the retreat, and to leave a bastion untaken. He fell back with his army upon his capital at Mukden, and whether it was the shame of this defeat, his advanced age, or both, Nurhachi never again took the path of war. On 30th September 1626, this doughty warrior, the victor of scores of battles, died peacefully in his sleep.

Primogeniture was not absolute among the Manchu, and Nurhachi was succeeded by his fourth and most able son, who took the reign-title Tien Tsung (Heaven Obeying). Tien Tsung shared his father’s dream of conquering China, but he was far-sighted enough to understand that it was only the debility and irresoluteness of the Ming that gave the Manchu the freedom of movement they had enjoyed for so long. Tien Tsung’s strategic position was actually extremely weak. China was the acknowledged suzerain of Korea to the east, and in the west of the Mongol tribes (who had previously ruled China between 1206 and 1333 under the fabled Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan). This posed a serious problem for any northern invader; as soon as the Manchu moved south into China, any competent administration in Beijing should have been able to rouse both tributary states to attack the aggressor in an east–west pincer movement that, together with a northward thrust by the Chinese armies would almost inevitably prove disastrous for the Manchu. Should the Ming come to their senses and organise a proper defence, China would be impregnable.

So concerned did Tien Tsung become with the strength and ability of his Chinese foe that his next major incursion was via Mongolia, circumventing a string of refurbished fortresses along the Chinese border. Tien Tsung led a substantial force of raiders to the very gates of the Ming capital. But the commander of the border fortresses, the formidable General Yuan, was more than a match for the Manchu: he led his men south by a series of forced marches, and surprised Tien Tsung at his encampment near the Imperial Hunting Park. Threatened with imminent destruction by a superior force, the Manchu monarch revealed again his
sang froid
, and his knowledge of the Chinese Classics.

A late Ming volume
The Secret Art of War: Thirty Six Strategies
, by an unknown author, expounded a number of ruses, based upon the most revered of all the classics: the I Ching, or Book of Changes. In this system, the number six, the primal Yin number, denotes secret military plans, and the thirty-six strategies of the title (six squared) indicates a whole bag of dirty tricks. Strategy Thirty-Three is termed ‘Turn the Enemy’s Agent’s against Him’:

On detecting an enemy agent...one may feign ignorance, expose the agent to false information, and allow him to return and report to the enemy commander. Taking the false information for facts, the enemy will make the wrong judgement.
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Tien Tsung had no enemy agents in his possession, but he did hold captive two eunuchs from the Forbidden City. He arranged for the pair to ‘accidentally’ overhear a council of war between himself and his generals, in which General Yuan was described as a traitor to the Ming, on the point of defecting to the Manchu cause. The following day, the prisoners were allowed to escape.

As the wily Manchu hoped, the eunuchs made straight for the Ming Emperor and poured out their news, denouncing Yuan as a traitor. And the Chinese did indeed ‘make the wrong judgement’: General Yuan was immediately arrested and imprisoned. A court favourite was appointed in his place, an incompetent whose puerile manoeuvrings were no match for the battle-hardened strategems of Tien Tsung. In a combat fought just outside Beijing’s Yung Ting Gate, the Manchu won a great victory, leaving the Forbidden City and its ruler defenceless. But instead of taking the Chinese capital, and the Emperor’s crown that went with it, Tien Tsung ordered a withdrawal to their own territory. His men, his generals, even his own son protested. They were angry and confused–the road to the riches of the Forbidden City, perhaps to Manchu rule over China itself, lay open. Why refuse the God-given chance that their victory had earned them? But Tien Tsung was no mere freebooter intent on plunder; he was playing a long game. One contemporary chronicle records his words: ‘To take the city would be easy enough, but the time is not yet. Their outlying defences are still untaken, we have established no terror in the heart of China proper. If we took Beijing today we would not be strong enough to hold it...No; let us return to our own place and prepare for the hour of destiny, when God shall deliver the whole empire into our hands.
^’10

And so the Ming Dynasty was granted yet another reprieve; another chance to put its house in order and reclaim its days of greatness. But while Tien Tsung recruited expert founders and engineers to cast artillery of European design, the Chinese court fell back once again into an endless cycle of intrigue, debauchery and theatrical performances.

Slowly, Tien Tsung drew tight the net around the Ming. In 1635 all the Mongol tribes were brought within his rule, and in token of submission their leader handed over to Tien Tsung the Mongol Yuan Dynasty’s Great Seal of China. Four years later Korea had fallen, the Korean king formally passing over to the Manchu monarch the Ming documents confirming his kingship. Tien Tsung’s flanks were now secure and the Manchu were able to by-pass the Chinese defensive fortresses along the Manchu–China border and raid the rich lowlands with impunity.

One thing only remained: to establish ‘terror in the heart of China proper’. This was accomplished by a series of raids, and by the slow destruction of China’s remaining border fortresses. In November 1642 Tien Tsung dispatched an enormous force of men, under the command of his elder brother Abtai, into China. The expedition was a resounding success: by the time the army returned to Mukden it had been victorious in thirty-seven separate engagements against the Ming, and had captured and put to death around a thousand members of the Imperial clan, including six Princes of the Blood. The spoil secured was staggering: 350 kilograms of gold, 348,000 kilograms of silver, 4,440 ounces of pearls, 52,234 bolts of silk and satin and innumerable quantities of furs, robes and deer horn. Almost 370,000 prisoners were taken (most destined for slavery among their Manchu captors) and over half a million camel, oxen and other stock.
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Once again it was not simply the superiority of Manchu arms that had carried the day. The cliques and factions, the intrigues and chicanery of the Ming court, especially the machinations of the eunuch cabal, made a coordinated policy impossible and emasculated the Ming defence. In the northern section of the Great Wall alone there were four viceroys, six governors, and eight generals-in-chief, all vying with each other for supremacy, and above them a eunuch commander-in-chief, who saw the purpose of his position solely in terms of personal advantage.

At the same time as the Manchu massed on its northern border, a second crisis of equal severity threatened the Ming Dynasty from within. Li Tzu-cheng, a one-time hunter turned brigand, had gradually drawn to his band numerous Chinese dissatisfied with their life under the Ming. From brigand, he had suddenly found himself at the head of a full-scale rebellion against the incumbent Dynasty. A natural general, his skills had won victory after victory for his troops. For more than five years he had marched across the breadth of China, from Hunan through Shaanxi and Shanxi Provinces, his force increasing in number and strength with every mile, and he had now set his face towards Beijing, threatening the Emperor’s capital and giving out that Heaven had withdrawn its Mandate from the Ming. He would depose the effete Dynasty and place himself upon the Dragon Throne. Incredibly, at the same time as the nation was faced with this huge internal rebellion, the Emperor’s advisers counselled all-out war with the Manchu, effectively committing the Dynasty to a war on two fronts.

By 1643 all seemed set fair for the Manchu; Tien Tsung’s patient waiting game was about to pay off: he had no doubt that his army was a match for both the Ming and the rebel forces. In September of that year he enjoyed a strenuous hunting trip in the northern forests, then returned to his palace for a tiring day of audiences. That night, at 11 p.m., sitting in his chair of state as he readied himself for bed, he suddenly fell forward, and died. A heart attack is the most likely diagnosis. He was fifty-one, and for the ‘Heaven Obeying’ monarch, the dream of conquest was over.