Qīndìng Bāqí Tōngzhì 欽定八旗通志
Imperially Commissioned Comprehensive Treatise on the Eight Banners by 高宗弘曆 (敕撰)
About the work
The grand imperially-commissioned monograph on the institutions, geography, military organisation, biographies, and literature of the Qīng Eight Banners (bāqí 八旗 — eight Manchu, eight Mongol, and eight Chinese-martial banners). The Sìkù-included recension is the Qīndìng Bāqí tōngzhì (often Bāqí tōngzhì; sometimes called Bāqí tōngzhì xùjí in modern bibliography to distinguish it from the 1739 chūjí), comprising 342 juǎn in the Wényuāngé manuscript, covering the period from the Manchu founding to the late Qiánlóng reign. It is the principal Qīng-state account of the bannermen and is the second of the two great institutional histories of the Banner system — the first being the Bāqí tōngzhì chūjí 八旗通志初集 in 250 juǎn (Yōngzhèng 5–Qiánlóng 4, 1727–1739), compiled under È Ěrtài 鄂爾泰. The present, expanded recension was begun by imperial command in Qiánlóng 44 (1779), continued through the 1780s and 1790s, and printed in Jiāqìng 1 (1796), with the bulk of the new material covering 1735–1795.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in the WYG source file. The Kyoto Zinbun digital Sìkù tíyào preserves a tíyào under the heading Bāqí tōngzhì chūjí 八旗通志初集 (250 juǎn), which describes the predecessor recension; for the 342-juǎn expanded Qīndìng Bāqí tōngzhì preserved here, the tíyào in standard form was either not transmitted into the present WYG or never written in the imperial-commission style (its compilation overlapped with and continued past the SKQS proper). The chūjí tíyào, which gives the structural model the present work follows, summarises:
By imperial command of Shìzōng (Yōngzhèng 5, 1727); completed and presented under Qiánlóng 4 (1739) with imperial preface. Eight Banner divisions in 17 juǎn; Tǔtián zhì (lands and fields) 5 juǎn; Yíngjiàn zhì (encampments and constructions) 3 juǎn; Bīngzhí zhì (military offices) 8 juǎn; Zhíguān zhì (civil offices) 12 juǎn; Xuéxiào zhì (schools) 4 juǎn; Diǎnlǐ zhì (rites) 15 juǎn; Yìwén zhì (writings) 10 juǎn; Fēngjué shìbiǎo (enfeoffment generation-tables) 8 juǎn; Shìzhí biǎo (hereditary office tables) 24 juǎn; Bāqí dàchén niánbiǎo (year-tables of Eight-Banner senior officers) 8 juǎn; Zōngrénfǔ niánbiǎo (Imperial Clan Court year-table) 1 juǎn; Nèigé dàchén niánbiǎo (Grand Secretariat year-table) 2 juǎn; Bùyuàn dàchén niánbiǎo (Six-Boards-and-Courts year-table) 2 juǎn; Zhíshěng dàchén niánbiǎo (provincial high officials’ year-table) 5 juǎn; Xuǎnjǔ biǎo (selection table) 4 juǎn; Zōngshì wánggōng lièzhuàn (princes and dukes of the imperial clan, biographies) 12 juǎn; Míngchén lièzhuàn (eminent ministers) 60 juǎn; Xūnchén zhuàn (meritorious officers) 19 juǎn; Zhōngliè zhuàn (loyal-and-martyred) 12 juǎn; Xúnlì zhuàn (good officials) 4 juǎn; Rúlín zhuàn (Confucian scholars) 2 juǎn; Xiàoyì zhuàn (filial-and-righteous) 1 juǎn; Liènǚ zhuàn (exemplary women) 12 juǎn. The tíyào observes that “in the numbers of Heaven-and-Earth and the natural order, all are founded in nine and used in eight; hence the round disposition of the Nine Palaces and the square apportionment of the Nine Provinces all rely upon the four cardinal and four corner positions to surround a centre. The sage takes Heaven-and-Earth as his model in establishing institutions; therefore the jǐng field has the public field at its centre and the eight households around it; the army takes the centre as the master and the formation is in eight.” It traces the principle from the Fēng Hòu classic, the figure of Zhūgě Liàng, and the record of Dú Gū Jí, through to the founding of the four banners by Tàizǔ (Nurhači) and their division into eight. After Shìzǔ Zhānghuángdì (Shùnzhì) entered the capital, the banners were placed by the principle of mutual conquest of the Five Phases: blue-banner = water = south, yellow = earth = north, white = metal = east, red = fire = west, encircling the imperial Zǐyuán purple-walled compound; this ordering was preserved unchanged for over a century. The work has the military system as its warp and all related laws, statutes, offices, and persons as its weft — a fully detailed monument suitable for the consultation of imperial-document files and frontier-defence plans.
Abstract
The present 342-juǎn Qīndìng Bāqí tōngzhì is the canonical Qīng state monograph on the Eight Banners, organised on the same eight-fold structural model as È Ěrtài’s chūjí but extending coverage forward to Qiánlóng 60 (1795) and incorporating the immense biographical and statistical accumulation of the high-Qiánlóng period. It contains the imperial tiānzhāng 天章 (poetry and prose by Shèngzǔ, Shìzōng, and Gāozōng) at the head; six juǎn of imperial chìyù 勅諭 (imperial edicts) running from Tiānmìng 3 (1618) to Qiánlóng 60 (1795); seventeen qífēn zhì 旗分志 detailing every zuǒlǐng 佐領 (company) of the Manchu, Mongol, and Hànjūn banners; and continues through tǔtián, yíngjiàn, bīngzhí, zhíguān, xuéxiào, diǎnlǐ, and yìwén treatises; fēngjué, shìzhí, dàchén nián-, and xuǎnjǔ tables; and very extensive biographical lièzhuàn sections for princes, eminent officials, meritorious soldiers, loyal-martyred, good officials, scholars, the filial, and exemplary women. The work is the largest single repository of mid-Qīng biographical material on the Manchu and bannermen elite — Wilkinson notes it contains over four thousand biographies of imperial relatives and senior Manchu officials.
The work’s compilation history is somewhat tangled. It was commissioned by Qiánlóng in or shortly before 1779 as a continuation and revision of È Ěrtài’s chūjí; intermediate stages of the work circulated within the bureaucracy through the 1780s; the catalog meta gives the date Qiánlóng 51 (1786), which probably refers to a partial or interim recension. Final printing, with the latest material reaching the year 1795, took place in Jiāqìng 1 (1796). The Wényuāngé manuscript reflects an intermediate stage adjusted to the high-Qiánlóng documentary horizon. The notBefore / notAfter range here (1779–1796) follows the conservative span. The compilers were a large committee whose names are not always reflected in the catalog persons-list — only the imperial commissioner Hónglì appears.
A modern critical and punctuated edition is Lǐ Xún 李洵 et al. (eds.), Qīndìng Bāqí tōngzhì, 12 vols., Jílín wénshǐ chūbǎnshè, 2002, with name indexes in the final volume.
Translations and research
No complete translation into a Western language located. The work has, however, been mined extensively by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Manchu-studies scholarship. The standard scholarly handbook on the Banners — Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford UP, 2001), with an appendix on Banner ranks — uses both the chū-jí and Qīndìng recensions throughout. The principal Japanese reference is Kanda Nobuo 神田信夫 et al., comp., Hakki tsūshi retsuden sakuin 八旗通志列傳索引 (Index to the biographies in the 1739 recension), Tōyō bunko, 1965. For the Manchu-Chinese name and clan dimension see Giovanni Stary, A Dictionary of Manchu Names: A Name Index to the Manchu Version of the “Complete Genealogy of the Manchu Clans and Families of the Eight Banners,” 1744 (Harrassowitz, 2000); Mark C. Elliott et al., “A Demographic Estimate of the Population of the Qing Eight Banners,” Études Chinoises 35.2 (2016), pp. 9–39, draws on its qí-fēn-zhì tables. The institutional and political background is treated in Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus (Blackwell, 1997) and A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (UC Press, 1999).
Other points of interest
The compilation overlaps with the SKQS project itself: the Wényuāngé recension here records imperial chìyù down to Qiánlóng 60, by which date the Wényuāngé Sìkù was already supposedly complete and Qiánlóng had abdicated as Tàishàng huáng. This is one of the clearest cases of post-1782 imperial supplementation of the SKQS manuscript, and the discrepancy between the catalog meta date (Qiánlóng 51, 1786) and the textual horizon (1795) is direct evidence of late editorial intervention.