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Dorgon (17 November 1612 – 31 December 1650) was a Manchu people prince and regent of the early Qing dynasty. Born in the House of Aisin-Gioro as the 14th son of Nurhaci (the founder of the Later Jin dynasty, which was the predecessor of the Qing), Dorgon started his career in military campaigns against the Mongols, the Koreans, and the Ming dynasty during the reign of Hong Taiji (his eighth brother) who succeeded their father.
After Hong Taiji's death in 1643, he was involved in a power struggle against Hong Taiji's eldest son, Hooge, over the succession to the throne. Both of them eventually came to a compromise by backing out and letting Hong Taiji's ninth son, Fulin, become the emperor; Fulin was installed on the throne as the Shunzhi Emperor. Dorgon served as Prince regent from 1643 to 1650, throughout the Shunzhi Emperor's early reign. In 1645, he was given the honorary title "Emperor's Uncle and Prince-Regent" (皇å”父æ”政王); the title was changed to "Emperor's Father and Prince-Regent" (皇父æ”政王) in 1649.
Under Dorgon's regency, Qing forces occupied Beijing, the capital of the fallen Ming dynasty, and gradually conquered the rest of the Ming in a series of battles against Southern Ming and other opposing forces around China. Dorgon also introduced the policy of forcing all Han Chinese men to shave the front of the heads and wear their hair in queues just like the Manchus. He died in 1650 during a hunting trip and was posthumously honoured as an emperor even though he was never an emperor during his lifetime. A year after Dorgon's death, however, the Shunzhi Emperor accused Dorgon of several crimes, stripped him of his titles, and ordered his remains to be exhumed and flogged in public. Dorgon was posthumously rehabilitated and restored of his honorary titles by the Qianlong Emperor in 1778.
In early 1644, just as Dorgon and his advisors were pondering how to attack the Ming dynasty, peasant rebellions were dangerously approaching Beijing. On 24 April of that year, rebel forces led by Li Zicheng breached the walls of the Ming capital. The last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, hanged himself at Jingshan Park behind the Forbidden City.. Hearing the news, Dorgon's Han Chinese advisors Hong Chengchou and Fan Wencheng (范文程; 1597–1666) urged the prince to seize this opportunity to present themselves as avengers of the fallen Ming Empire and claim the Mandate of Heaven for the Qing Empire.; . The last obstacle between Dorgon and Beijing was Wu Sangui, a former Ming general guarding the Shanhai Pass at the eastern end of the Great Wall.. Wu Sangui was caught between the Manchus and Li Zicheng's forces. He requested Dorgon's help in ousting the rebels and restoring the Ming Empire.. When Dorgon asked Wu Sangui to work for the Qing Empire instead, Wu had little choice but to accept.. Aided by Wu Sangui's elite soldiers, who fought the rebel army for hours before Dorgon finally chose to intervene with his cavalry, the Qing army won a decisive victory against Li Zicheng at the Battle of Shanhai Pass on 27 May.. Li Zicheng and his defeated troops looted Beijing for several days until they left the capital on 4 June with all the wealth they could carry.; .
On 7 June, just two days after entering the city, Dorgon issued special proclamations to officials around the capital, assuring them that if the local population surrendered, the officials would be allowed to stay at their posts. Besides, all the men had to shave the front half of their heads and wear the rest of their hair in queues.; . He had to repeal this command three weeks later after several peasant rebellions erupted around Beijing, threatening Qing control over the capital region., pp. 420–422 (which explains these matters and claims that the order was repealed by edict on 25 June). gives the date as 28 June.
Dorgon greeted the Shunzhi Emperor at the gates of Beijing on 19 October 1644.. On 30 October the six-year-old monarch performed sacrifices to Heaven and Earth at the Altar of Heaven.. The southern cadet branch of Confucius's descendants who held the title Hanlin Academy and the northern branch 65th generation descendant of Confucius to hold the title Duke Yansheng had their titles confirmed by the Shunzhi Emperor on 31 October. A formal ritual of enthronement for the Shunzhi Emperor was held on 8 November, during which the young emperor compared Dorgon's achievements to those of the Duke of Zhou, a revered regent of the Zhou dynasty., pp. 858, 860 ("According to the emperor's speechwriter, who was probably Fan Wencheng, Dorgon even 'surpassed' ( guo) the revered Duke of Zhou because 'The Uncle Prince also led the Grand Army through Shanhai Pass to smash two hundred thousand bandit soldiers, and then proceeded to take Yanjing, pacifying the Central Xia. He invited us to come to the capital and received him as a great guest'."). During the ceremony, Dorgon's official title was raised from "Prince Regent" to "Uncle and Prince Regent" (å”父æ”政王), in which the Manchu term for "Uncle" ( ecike) represented a rank higher than that of imperial prince., pp. 860–861, & p. 861, note 31. Three days later Dorgon's co-regent, Jirgalang, was demoted from "Prince Regent" to "Assistant Uncle Prince Regent" (輔政å”王).. In June 1645, Dorgon eventually decreed that all official documents should refer to him as "Imperial Uncle Prince Regent" (皇å”父æ”政王), leaving him one step short of claiming the throne for himself.
Dorgon gave a Manchu woman as a wife to the Han Chinese official Feng Quan, who had defected from the Ming to the Qing. The Manchu queue hairstyle was willingly adopted by Feng Quan before it was enforced on the Han population and Feng learned the Manchu language.
To promote ethnic harmony, a 1648 decree from the Shunzhi Emperor allowed Han Chinese civilian men to marry Manchu women from the Banners with the permission of the Board of Revenue if they were registered daughters of officials or commoners or the permission of their banner company captain if they were unregistered commoners, it was only later in the Qing dynasty that these policies allowing intermarriage were done away with. Wang 2004, pp. 215–216 & 219–221.Walthall 2008, pp. 140–141. The decree was formulated by Dorgon.
One of Dorgon's first orders in the new Qing capital was to vacate the entire northern part of Beijing and give it to Eight Banners, including Han Chinese Bannermen. The Yellow Banners were given the place of honor north of the palace, followed by the White Banners to the east, the Red Banners to the west, and the Blue Banners to the south.See maps in and , p. 103. This distribution complied with the order established in the Manchu homeland before the conquest and under which "each of the banners was given a fixed geographical location according to the points of the compass.". Despite tax remissions and large-scale building programmes designed to facilitate the transition, in 1648 many Chinese civilians still lived among the newly arrived Banner population and there was still animosity between the two groups.. Agricultural land outside the capital was also delineated ( quan 圈) and given to Qing troops.. Former landowners now became tenants who had to pay rent to their absentee Bannermen landlords. This transition in land use caused "several decades of disruption and hardship."
In 1646, Dorgon also ordered that the imperial civil service examinations for selecting government officials be reinstated. From then on, examinations were held every three years as under the Ming Empire. In the very first imperial examination held under Qing rule in 1646, candidates, most of whom were northern Chinese, were asked how the Manchus and Han Chinese could work together for a common purpose.. The 1649 examination asked "how Manchus and Han Chinese could be unified so that their hearts were the same and they worked together without division."Cited in . Under the Shunzhi Emperor's reign, the average number of graduates of the metropolitan examination per session was the highest of the Qing dynasty ("to win more Chinese support"), continuing until 1660 when lower quotas were established., Table 1.1 (number of graduates per session under each Qing reign); (reason for the high quotas); (lower quotas in 1660).
From newly captured Xi'an, in early April 1645, the Qing forces mounted a campaign against the rich commercial and agricultural region of Jiangnan south of the lower Yangtze River, where in June 1644 the Zhu Yousong had established a regime loyal to the Ming. Factional bickering and numerous defections prevented the Southern Ming from mounting an efficient resistance.For examples of the factional struggles that weakened the Hongguang court, see . Some defections are explained in . Several Qing armies swept south, taking the key city of Xuzhou north of the Huai River in early May 1645 and soon converging on Yangzhou, the main city on the Southern Ming's northern line of defence. (taking of Xuzhou; ; converging on Yangzhou). Bravely defended by Shi Kefa, who refused to surrender, Yangzhou fell to Qing artillery on 20 May after a one-week siege.. Dorgon's brother, Dodo, then ordered the slaughter of Yangzhou's entire population.. As intended, this massacre terrorised other Jiangnan cities into surrendering to the Qing Empire. (purpose of the massacre was to terrorise Jiangnan); , passim (late-Qing uses of the Yangzhou massacre). Indeed, Nanjing surrendered without a fight on 16 June after its last defenders made Dodo promise he would not harm the population.. The Qing forces soon captured the Ming emperor (who died in Beijing the following year) and seized Jiangnan's main cities, including Suzhou and Hangzhou; by early July 1645, the frontier between the Qing Empire and the Southern Ming regime had been pushed south to the Qiantang River. (capture of Suzhou and Hangzhou by early July 1645; new frontier); (capture of the emperor around 17 June, and later death in Beijing).
On 21 July 1645, after Jiangnan had been superficially pacified, Dorgon issued a most inopportune edict ordering all Han Chinese men to shave the front half of their heads and wear the rest of their hair in queues identical to those of the Manchus.; ; (which calls this edict "the most untimely promulgation of Dorgon's career.)" The punishment for non-compliance was death.. This policy of symbolic submission helped the Manchus distinguish friend from foe. ("From the Manchus' perspective, the command to cut one's hair or lose one's head not only brought rulers and subjects together into a single physical resemblance; it also provided them with a perfect loyalty test"). For Han officials and literati, however, the new hairstyle was shameful and demeaning (because it breached a common Confucianism directive to preserve one's body intact), whereas for common folk cutting their hair was the same as losing their virility., pp. 648–649 (officials and literati) and 650 (common men). Because it united Chinese of all social backgrounds into resistance against Qing rule, the hair cutting command greatly hindered the Qing conquest. ("broke the momentum of the Qing conquest"); ("the hair-cutting order, more than any other act, engendered the Kiangnan Jiangnan resistance of 1645"); ("the rulers' effort to make Manchus and Han one unified 'body' initially had the effect of unifying upper- and lower-class natives in central and south China against the interlopers"). The defiant population of Jiading District and Songjiang was massacred by former Ming general Li Chengdong (æŽæˆæ±; d. 1649), respectively on 24 August and 22 September.. Jiangyin also held out against about 10,000 Qing troops for 83 days. When the city walls were finally breached on 9 October 1645, the Qing army led by the previous Ming defector Liu Liangzuo (劉良ä½; d. 1667) massacred the entire population, killing between 74,000 and 100,000 people.. These massacres ended armed resistance against the Qing Empire in the Lower Yangtze.. A few committed loyalists became hermits, hoping that for lack of military success, their withdrawal from the world would at least symbolise their continued defiance against Qing rule.
After the fall of Nanjing, two more members of the Ming imperial household created new Southern Ming regimes: one centred in coastal Fujian around the “Longwu Emperor†Zhu Yujian, – a ninth-generation descendant of the Hongwu Emperor, the Ming dynasty's founder – and one in Zhejiang around "Regent" Zhu Yihai, Prince of Lu., pp. 665 (on the Prince of Tang) and 666 (on the Prince of Lu). But the two loyalist groups failed to cooperate, making their chances of success even lower than they already were., pp. 667–669 (for their failure to cooperate), 669–674 (for the deep financial and tactical problems that beset both regimes). In July 1646, a new southern campaign led by Bolo sent Prince Lu's Zhejiang court into disarray and proceeded to attack the Longwu regime in Fujian.. Zhu Yujian was caught and summarily executed in Tingzhou (western Fujian) on 6 October.. His adoptive son Koxinga fled to the island of Taiwan with his fleet. Finally in November, the remaining centers of Ming resistance in Jiangxi province fell to the Qing.
In late 1646, two more Southern Ming monarchs emerged in the southern province of Guangzhou, reigning under the era names of Zhu Yuyue and Yongli.. Short of official robes, the Zhu Yuyue court had to purchase from local theatre troupes. The two Ming regimes fought each other until 20 January 1647, when a small Qing force led by Li Chengdong captured Guangzhou, killed the Zhu Yuyue, and sent the Yongli court fleeing to Nanning in Guangxi.. In May 1648, however, Li mutinied against the Qing Empire, and the concurrent rebellion of another former Ming general in Jiangxi helped the Yongli Emperor to retake most of south China.. Li's loyalist resurgence failed. New Qing armies managed to reconquer the central provinces of Huguang (present-day Hubei and Hunan), Jiangxi, and Guangdong in 1649 and 1650.. The Yongli Emperor had to flee again. Finally on 24 November 1650, Qing forces led by Shang Kexi captured Guangzhou and massacred the city's population, killing as many as 70,000 people.. Although Dutch traveler Johan Nieuhof who witnessed the event happened claimed only 8000 people were slaughtered《广东通志》ã€ã€Šå¹¿å·žå¸‚志》《"庚寅之劫"——1650å¹´å¹¿å·žå¤§å± æ€ã€‹ï¼Œå¤§æ´‹ç¶²ï¼Œ2010å¹´7月13日。
Meanwhile, in October 1646, Qing armies led by Hooge reached Sichuan, where their mission was to destroy the regime of bandit chief Zhang Xianzhong.. Zhang was killed in a battle against Qing forces near Xichong County in central Sichuan on 1 February 1647., pp. 17–18. Also late in 1646 but further north, forces assembled by a Muslim leader known in Chinese sources as Milayin (米喇å°) revolted against Qing rule in Ganzhou District (Gansu). He was soon joined by another Muslim named Ding Guodong (ä¸åœ‹æ£Ÿ).. Proclaiming that they wanted to restore the Ming, they occupied a number of towns in Gansu, including the provincial capital Lanzhou. These rebels' willingness to collaborate with non-Muslim Chinese suggests that they were not only driven by religion. Both Milayin and Ding Guodong were captured and killed by Meng Qiaofang (åŸå–¬èŠ³; 1595–1654) in 1648, and by 1650 the Muslim rebels had been crushed in campaigns that inflicted heavy casualties. (Meng Qiaofang, death of rebel leaders); .·
However, the suspicion that Dorgon was actually murdered by his political enemies while being away from the heavy protection afforded him inside the Forbidden City never went away. Dorgon had 25 years of experience of horse-riding and managed to survive, on horseback, numerous battles with the Koreans, Mongols, Han Chinese rebels, as well as regular Han Chinese armies. The official Qing history claim that he injured his leg while riding on his horse and that the injuries were so severe that he could not survive the trip back to the Forbidden City, despite the presence of imperial doctors, was dubious at best. In the dry winter of northern China, the ground was not wet. Or else, it would have easily caused horses to trip. Another cause for suspicion is that Dorgon's corpse was exhumed, flogged, and incinerated in the purge ordered by Emperor Shunzhi, a likely method camouflaged as the ultimate punishment for his alleged plot to take over the throne, in order to remove all evidence that Dorgon was murdered.
His death also took place when Emperor Shunzhi was about 13, an appropriate age for removing the regency over his head. That is, if Dorgon had died any earlier, Shunzhi would still need a regent to supervise the empire on his behalf.
Jirgalang was an ally of Hooge in the 1643 bitter fight against Dorgon, who allied with his biological brothers for succession to the throne. Jirgalang had been expelled by Dorgon from the joint regency in 1646. This time, Jirgalang succeeded in convincing Emperor Shunzhi that even Dorgon's descendants could become a threat to the throne. As a result, Shunzhi posthumously stripped Dorgon of his titles and even had Dorgon's corpse exhumed and flogged in public. In the February 1651 imperial edict trying to justify the ultimate punishment to a dead person as well as a key member of the imperial clan, Shunzhi ordered that not only Dorgon's name be removed from the scrolls of the imperial ancestral temple. His biological mother, Empress Xiaoliewu, got the same treatment. It was a political act to remove the legitimacy for succession to the throne by any future heir descended from Empress Xiaoliewu.
Execution of all of Dorgon's heirs was also ordered but intentionally not recorded in official Qing history. Dorgon had two biological brothers: Ajige, the 12th son of Nurhaci and Dodo, the 15th. With Dodo dying of smallpox a few months prior to the death of Dorgon in December 1650 and the death of Ajige after he was arrested by Jirgalang's forces and put in jail, the 1651 purge was meant to permanently eliminate the potential that a future prince descending from Empress Xiaolewu would repeat the two Dorgon competitions for succession to the throne happening in 1626, upon the death of Nurhaci, and 1643, upon the death of Hongtaiji.
However, Dorgon was posthumously rehabilitated during the Qianlong Emperor's reign. In 1778, the Qianlong Emperor granted Dorgon a posthumous name zhong (å¿ ; "loyal"), so Dorgon's full posthumous title became "Prince Ruizhong of the First Rank" (和碩ç¿å¿ 親王). The word "loyal" was intentionally picked. It starkly testified that the charges made by Jirgalang in 1651 were all trumped up. The Qianlong Emperor, either intentionally or inadvertently, contradicted the records of the imperial ancestral temple left behind by Shunzhi when he ordered that the words "Dorgon's heirs having been exterminated" (åŽå—£åºŸç») be included into official Qing history to indicate why Dorbo, a fifth generation descendant of Dodo, was designated to inherit the iron-cap princely title of Dorgon. The expression "Dorgon's heirs having been exterminated" does not carry the same meaning as "Dorgon never had a son." Regardless, after a lapse of 128 years, the Qianlong Emperor could no longer find the heirs of Dorgon. The Qianlong Emperor also ordered that the rehabilitation of Dorgon be accompanied by a destruction of all the records related to the elimination of the heirs of Dorgon. This was an inglorious chapter not only of Qing history but also the history of the imperial clan of Aisin-Gioro.
In the midst of the 1651 purge, a son of Dorgon managed to escape from execution. He fled Beijing with the active assistance of a key member of the White Banner under the command of Dorgon when he was alive. This heir of Dorgon ran all the way to modern-day Zhongshan, Guangdong province, the southern tip of China fronting the South China Sea, where there was no more way to maximize the distance between his hiding place and the Forbidden City. He changed his family name from Aisin-Gioro to Yuan (è¢, or Yuen in the Cantonese), which substantially resembles the character "Gon" (袞) in "Dorgon" (多尔袞). After successfully escaping execution, the camouflage to re-emerge as a Han Chinese person was considered perfect, as he would share the family name of Yuan Chonghuan (è¢å´‡ç…¥), the Han Chinese general who fatally wounded Nurhaci in the 1626 Battle of Ningyuan, making it highly unlikely that pursuing forces from the Forbidden City would suspect that he and/or his descendants were members of the Dorgon clan. He named the large piece of land where he finally settled Haizhou (æµ·æ´²), a combination of Haixi (海西), the tribal native place of Empress Xiaoliewu, his grandmother; and Jianzhou (建洲), the tribal native place of Nurhaci, his grandfather. The village where his descendants have sprung up since 1651 was named "Revelation of the Dragon" (顯é¾, indicating his hope that one day someone in his line would be able to reclaim the throne, which never happened through the remaining years of the Qing dynasty.
Dorgon is usually considered a good, devoted politician but he is also blamed for "Six Bad Policies" (å…大弊政).阎崇年，《清å二å¸ç–‘案》 These were policies designed to bolster the rule of the Qing conquerors, but which caused considerable disturbance and bloodshed in China, and included:
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