Píngdìng zhǔn’gā’ěr fānglüè 平定準噶爾方略
Campaign History of the Pacification of the Dzungar by 傅恒 (奉敕撰)
About the work
The Píngdìng zhǔn’gā’ěr fānglüè in 173 juǎn is the imperially commissioned campaign history of the Qiánlóng emperor’s annihilation of the Dzungar (Junggar) Khanate and the consequent conquest of Eastern Turkestan, conducted in stages between 1755 and 1759 — the operations that produced Xīnjiāng as a Qīng dominion. The work is organised in three parts: a Qián biān 前編 (Former Edition) on the Sòng to early-Qing background of the Oirat Mongols and on Kāngxī’s and Yōngzhèng’s earlier campaigns; the Zhèng biān 正編 (Main Edition) on the 1755–58 conquest from the deposition of Dawachi 達瓦齊 through the Amursana 阿睦爾撒納 revolt and its suppression; and the Xù biān 續編 (Continuation) on the 1758–59 Hui Muslim campaign against the Afaqi Khoja brothers Burhan al-Din 布拉尼敦 (Bùlānídūn) and Khoja Jihan 霍集占 in the Tarim Basin. Chief compiler-of-record was the senior Manchu official Fù Héng 傅恆 (c. 1722–1770), the emperor’s brother-in-law, then in the highest Bǎohé diàn 保和殿 grand-secretarial post; the imperial preface (Yùzhì xù) is dated Qiánlóng 35 gēngyín 仲春 (early spring 1770), one or two months before Fù Héng’s death from malaria contracted on the disastrous Burma campaign. Together with Wēn Dá’s Shuòmò fānglüè (KR2c0010) and the Píngdìng liǎng Jīnchuān fānglüè (KR2c0013), this is one of the three foundational expressions of Qiánlóng’s Inner Asian Shíquán wǔgōng 十全武功 (“Ten Complete Military Victories”) cycle.
Tiyao
(The witness file opens directly with the Yùzhì xù; no separate tíyào is filed.)
The Qiánlóng Yùzhì xù — the work’s principal preface — strikes a deliberately temperate tone unusual in his late-reign martial writings. The emperor declines to make the work the occasion of self-celebration: the fānglüè itself in three editions, he writes, has already exhausted what is to be said of the campaign, the imperial-college stele, the cliff-engraved inscription, the xī shī 西師 victory poem, and the Kāihuò lùn 開惑論 having moreover already addressed the campaign’s strategic essentials. Yet, between the two great victories (the conquest of the Dzungar and of the Hui Muslim tribes) only five years passed; another decade saw the book completed; and so as with the Shuòmò and Jīnchuān precedents, a preface should be written. He places under the topic four cautions: that achievement should not be empty, that name should not be false, that fortune should not be assumed permanent, and that ambition should not lead to excess. To wage war beyond the Gobi and across the Tianshan, he writes, is in itself an undertaking against which the histories abound with disaster; that the campaign nonetheless succeeded was, however, a matter of laborious preparation and of the sacrifice of many soldiers, whose memory the present work is meant to preserve. He notes that, in the year of the fānglüè’s completion, the troops returning from the Burma campaign had brought news of unexpected enemy submission: a coincidence that he reads not as further fortune but as an admonition. The closing memorial of presentation (Gōng jìn 恭進) — preserved at the work’s head, formally on behalf of the entire commission — frames the conquest as the consummation of a HànTáng project: the founding of dūhù 都護 governments in the Tarim having repeatedly failed in earlier dynasties, the Qīng has at last succeeded in extending sustained imperial administration across the entire Tianshan circuit.
Abstract
Wilkinson (§66.6.1, ch. 51, and passim in chs. 16–19) places this work at the centre of the late-Qiánlóng campaign-history corpus and as the principal Chinese-language documentary record for the destruction of the Dzungars and the conquest of Xīnjiāng. The work was begun under the Fānglüè guǎn 方略館 (the permanent Campaign History Office established adjacent to the Junjīchù in 1749) immediately after the close of the operations, and went through three editions before its 1770 imperial preface. The Sìkù edition is the master version. Fù Héng’s nominal lead obscures a large staff including Liú Tǒngxūn 劉統勛, Yú Mǐnzhōng 于敏中 (later author of KR2c0014), Lǐ Bāo 來保 (compiler of KR2c0011), and several dozen drafters from the Hànlín, the Bīngbù, and the Mongolian Affairs Court (Lǐfān yuàn 理藩院). The work draws on Manchu and Chinese memorials, Junjīchù archives, dispatches translated from Mongolian, and the personal records of Qiánlóng. Modern scholarship (Perdue 2005, Millward 1998, Newby 2005) has used the work as the principal Chinese narrative source for the operations, while flagging — as for all fānglüè — its characteristic editorial inflations and silences. In the Sìkù its 173 juǎn make it the largest single work in the jìshì běnmò division.
Translations and research
- Perdue, Peter C. 2005. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge MA: Belknap. The standard English-language synthesis of the conquest, drawing extensively on the Píngdìng zhǔn’gā’ěr fānglüè together with the surviving Manchu and Mongolian archival record.
- Millward, James A. 1998. Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Uses the Xù biān extensively for the Tarim Basin operations.)
- Newby, L. J. 2005. The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand c. 1760–1860. Leiden: Brill.
- Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, biographies of Fù Héng, Zhāo Huì 兆惠, Bandi 班第, and Yú Mǐnzhōng.
- Yáo Jìróng 姚繼榮. 2002. Qīngdài fānglüè biānzuǎn yánjiū 清代方略編纂研究. Tianjin guji.
- Wilkinson, Chinese History, §66.6.1.
Other points of interest
The work’s Qián biān — its retrospective treatment of pre-1755 Qing-Oirat relations — has been used as the principal Chinese-source companion to Wēn Dá’s Shuòmò fānglüè (KR2c0010) for the Galdan campaigns: it preserves Qiánlóng-era reframings of the Kāngxī-era materials that are not present in the earlier fānglüè. Fù Héng’s death from Burma-campaign malaria in summer 1770 — only weeks after the imperial preface was issued — gave the project an inadvertent commemorative tone.