Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World / Edition 1

by Pamela Kyle Crossley

Overview

In the mid-1600s, Manchu bannermen spearheaded the military force that conquered China and founded the Qing Empire, which endured until 1912. By the end of the Taiping War in 1864, however, the descendants of these conquering people were coming to terms with a loss of legal definition, an ever-steeper decline in living standards, and a sense of abandonment by the Qing court. Focusing on three generations of a Manchu family (from 1750 to the 1930s), Orphan Warriors is the first attempt to understand the social and cultural life of the bannermen within the context of the decay of the Qing regime. The book reveals that the Manchus were not "sinicized," but that they were growing in consciousness of their separate ethnicity in response to changes in their own position and in Chinese attitudes toward them. Pamela Kyle Crossley's treatment of the Suwan Guwalgiya family of Hangzhou is hinged upon Jinliang (1878-1962), who was viewed at various times as a progressive reformer, a promising scholar, a bureaucratic hack, a traitor, and a relic. The author sees reflected in the ambiguities of his persona much of the plight of other Manchus as they were transformed from a conquering caste to an ethnic minority. Throughout Crossley explores the relationships between cultural decline and cultural survival, polity and identity, ethnicity and the disintegration of empires, all of which frame much of our understanding of the origins of the modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691008776
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/27/1991
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Conventions	xiii
	Introduction	3
	Part 1
Chapter I	Peace and Crisis	13
Chapter II	The Suwan Guwalgiya	31
Chapter III	The Hangzhou Garrisons	47
Part 2
Chapter IV	Guancheng	77
	Sir Nanchuan	77
	The Honor of Zhapu	100
Chapter V	Fengrui	119
	The Volunteer	119
	The Enclave of Gods and Ghosts	138
Chapter VI	Jinliang	162
	Body and Soul	162
	Favorable Treatment	187
	Conclusion	215
	Source Abbreviations	229
	Notes	231
	Select Bibliography	277
	Index	293