Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i

21 The Tong in Two Worlds : Cultural Identities in Liaodong and Nurgan during the 13th-17th centuries Pamela Crossley Yale University Tong banchao fâ ¡? ¡fDj was a pun current at the Qing court of. the late seventeenth century. It meant "the Tong who fill up half the Court,"1- a fair description of the numerous people of this name serving in very high military and bureaucratic office. It also meant "the Tong who are half the Court," a reference to the fact that Empress Xiaokang y¡¡ /Jf^ , the mother of the Kangxi emperor Xuanye (r. 1661-1722) , was born a Tong. The people indicated by the phrase Tong banchao were members of a family that claimed Fushunij* ''?. , a Liaodong garrison town, as their ancestral home. In the early seventeenth century some members of the family, most notably Tong Bunian 1* \ ^j, had been distinguished for I would like to thank: Jonathan Spence (my advisor), Joseph Fletcher, Betsy Bartlett and the editors of this journal, all of whom weeded nonsense, obfuscation and grammatical errors from earlier drafts; John E. Wills, Jr., whose overheard remarks inspired me to look into this; Li Hsueh-chih, who very generously shared his time and his research with me during my visits to the Academia Sinica (Nankang, Taiwan) in the spring of 1981; Wang Zhonghan, who made some very valuable criticisms of my interpretation,- Seth Ward, for word-processing innovations,- Kang Le, Huang Chin-hsing, and R. Po-chia Hsia for various favors; Yale University, the Yale Concilium for International and Area Studies, the Arthur F. Wright Memorial Fellowship and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for support during the period in which this was being conceived, researched and written. Portions of the material presented here overlap with and the remainder are tangential to my dissertation, a study of the Guwalgiya clan in historical and cultural perspective. 22 their service to the faltering Ming dynasty. But others, such as Tong YangzhenIT jfc J-L and Tong Yangxing ¦{*¦ \ ·\% , had in the same period become relatively early followers of the Latter Jin Khan, Nurgaci.2 Between 1618 and 1645 most of the Tong of Fushun came to be registered in the hanjun >j|_ S , or "Chinese-martial,"3 banners. By special order, the Kangxi emperor transferred selected lineages of the family to the Manchu banners in 1688; they were thereafter considered to be Manchu in every respect. The removal of the Tong from the hanjun to the Manchu banners was based upon the claim of Tong Guogang 1J?- 03 *|£| , one of the Kangxi emperor's uncles, that the Tong of Fushun were actually Manchu in origin, and should never have been registered as hanjun at all. Specifically, he stated that they were originally of the Tonggiya clan, a small clan hailing from Jilin, some of whose members had indeed, by the late seventeenth century, begun to use their clan name as the xing •ty£, or surname, "Tong."4 The claim of the Tong of Fushun to have originated in Tonggiya was false. They were totally unrelated to the Tonggiya clansmen. But their application for enrollment in the Manchu Banners rested upon a foundation of facts whose consideration is useful to our understanding of late Ming and early Qing social history. At base the problem of the origin of the Tong of Fushun is a study in the meanings of the term hanjun in the seventeenth century. It touches incidentally upon the politics of race and recrimination in the late Ming years, upon the rise of the Qing imperial clan, the Aisin Gioro, and upon the Jurchen settlement of both Liaodong and the Northeastern tribal territories of "Nurgan." The resolution of the problem that was reached by the Kangxi Scale 1:3 330 000 H •a;»·. U·- / /Hu-U ni« So" *«/im V^ & S. SkWjI" CA«»»«*«» -· - -UÀ·»' .¦p.?^ Tmik*l V > Av tJkH C*. I«:»t* ^ hm7*3 > -_-^The Northeast 24 emperor was itself revelatory of the significance of clan association, both real and fictitious, in the early Qing period. The Tong of Fushun Born at Shenyang around 1680, Tong Bunian ??· (- » gained the jinshi degree in 1616 and proceeded directly to service as zhixian or "magistrate" in Zhili (now...