聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

白谷集

8 min read

Text ID
KR4e0236
Date
1636–1643
Dynasty
明

Báigǔ jí 白谷集

Collected Works of (Master) Báigǔ by 孫傳庭 (撰)

About the work

The Báigǔ jí 白谷集 in five juǎn is the surviving body of writings of the late-Míng general and Supreme Commander Sūn Chuántíng 孫傳庭 (1593–1643; hào Báigǔ 白谷), who was killed at Wèinán after the rebel Chuǎngjūn of Lǐ Zìchéng 李自成 broke Tóngguān 潼關 in Chóngzhēn 16 / 1643. It is the Sìkù-assembled redaction: juǎn 1–3 contain his memorials (zòushū 奏疏) as Grand Coordinator and later Supreme Commander against the Chuǎng rebellion (Chóngzhēn 10 / 1637 — Chóngzhēn 12 / 1639), juǎn 4 the miscellaneous prose (zázhù) including the Qīng tún lù 清屯錄 (a record of his Shǎnxī military-colony rehabilitation) as an appendix, and juǎn 5 a selection of his poetry. The 1642–1643 memorials of his second commission (the Rǔzhōu campaign and the road to Tóngguān) were lost in the catastrophe of 1643 along with his household.

Tiyao

Your servants etc. respectfully memorialise. The Báigǔ jí in five juǎn was composed by Sūn Chuántíng 孫傳庭 of the Míng dynasty. Chuántíng, zì Bóyǎ 伯雅, a man of the Dàizhōu Zhènwǔ Garrison 代州振武衛 — his given name is sometimes corruptly written 傅庭, which is an error. He became jìnshì in Wànlì gēngshēn (this is a slip for jǐwèi, i.e. 1619; Wànlì 48 / 1620 had no metropolitan exam), and rose to Bīngbù shàngshū dūshī (Minister of War and Supreme Commander); in the campaign against Lǐ Zìchéng his army was defeated at Tóngguān and he died at his post. In Qiánlóng 41 (= 1776) he was posthumously canonised Zhōngjìng 忠靖.

According to the histories: in Chóngzhēn 11 (1638) Lǐ Zìchéng returned from Shǔ to Shǎnxī; Chuántíng intercepted them at Chéngchéng 澄城, dividing his forces along five roads to attack — and so received the surrender of fierce captains Hùn Tiānxīng 混天星, Guò Tiānxīng 過天星 and others, on whom the court relied as its shield. In Chóngzhēn 16 (1643) he marched out of Tóngguān, received the submission of the false general Sì Tiānwáng 四天王 Lǐ Yǎngchún 李養純, captured the rebels’ pseudo-Brave-Bold General Xiè Jūnyǒu 謝君友, and Zìchéng was so alarmed that he plotted to surrender — the rebellion was on the very brink of total annihilation. Then for seven days the heavy rains fell, rations ran out, the army was thrown into disorder, defeat ensued, and Chuántíng died in the ranks. Now, if one collates the zòushū such as the Chéngchéng bàojié (Victory-report from Chéngchéng) preserved in this collection, every detail tallies. As for the Míngshǐ běnjì entry that in Chóngzhēn 12, first month, wùchén day, Liú Yǔliàng 劉宇亮 and Sūn Chuántíng assembled 180,000 troops at Jìnzhōu 晉州 but dared not advance — examining the Guānjūn kǔzhàn shū in the collection one finds that the relief of Zhēndìng, the rescue of Jǐnán, and the Chūkǒu engagement, in which his forces and town-garrisons fought side by side with all their strength, all postdate that wùchén day; and in the Gōng tīng chǔfēn jiān lì xuèchén shū he lists in detail that on the 27th of the first month he wished to despatch troops ahead to Dōngān 東安 but the Dūchá would not permit it, that on the 29th he reluctantly despatched Cáo Biànjiāo 曹變蛟, Yáng Guózhù 楊國柱 and others to the front, then on the morrow proposed to ride out with the Dūchá — or alone — and the Dūchá again barred him forcibly. The Dūchá is Liú Yǔliàng. So the responsibility for the troops’ standing massed but not advancing rests wholly with Yǔliàng; Chuántíng was held back by him, and the běnjì note linking both names is the source of confusion. This is also worth consulting.

The collection itself is: juǎn 1–3 memorials, juǎn 4 miscellaneous prose, juǎn 5 poetry. The memorials run from the twentieth day of the seventh month of Chóngzhēn 10 (= 1637) through the twelfth day of the sixth month of Chóngzhēn 12 (= 1639). Those of his second commission of Chóngzhēn 15 (= 1642) — when he was raised up again to relieve Kāifēng — and through Chóngzhēn 16 (= 1643) are wholly missing: presumably when Chuántíng died and the whole family perished, the manuscripts of his last two years went up in the war-fires.

Respectfully collated in the third month of Qiánlóng 44 (= 1779). Chief compilation officers: your servants Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Chief collation officer: your servant Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Báigǔ jí is the principal documentary source for the last great Míng counter-rebellion campaigns against the Chuǎngjūn. Sūn Chuántíng raised the Qín jūn 秦軍 at Yúlín in Chóngzhēn 9 / 1636 as newly appointed Grand Coordinator of Shǎnxī, and within months ambushed and captured the Chuǎngwáng Gāo Yíngxiáng 高迎祥 at Hēishuǐyù 黑水峪. In Chóngzhēn 11 / 1638 he and Hóng Chéngchóu 洪承疇 inflicted the catastrophic defeat on Lǐ Zìchéng at the southern plain of Tóngguān that reduced the rebel core to seventeen men hiding in the Shāngluò mountains. The Manchu invasion of the same year drew Sūn and Hóng away to the capital and saved Lǐ. Imprisoned in 1639 after Yáng Sìchāng’s 楊嗣昌 impeachment, Sūn was released in 1642 and made Supreme Commander; he was forced by Chóngzhēn into a premature autumn campaign against Lǐ in 1643, fought the Shìyuán zhī bài 柿園之敗 at Rǔzhōu 汝州 where he lost over 70 officers and several thousand men to seven days of rain and supply collapse, retreated, and died at Wèinán 渭南 on the third day of the tenth month after Tóngguān fell. The standard verdict of Míngshǐ j. 262, Chuántíng sǐ, ér Míng wáng yǐ 傳庭死而明亡矣, frames the work’s historical weight.

The catalog meta entry gives lifedates 1593–1634; this is a clerical slip for 1643, the year of his death at Tóngguān, and is corrected here against CBDB (34753), Wikipedia and the standard biographies. The WYG tiyao itself prints Wànlì gēngshēn for his jìnshì — also a slip; the correct gānzhī is jǐwèi (1619), with no metropolitan examination held in 1620. Both slips have been flagged in the translation rather than silently corrected.

The textual organisation reflects the salvage character of the Qián-lóng-era Sìkù effort: the 1637–1639 memorials survived as personal copies preserved by associates and family before his imprisonment, but the 1642–1643 documents that would have covered the Rǔzhōu defeat, the desperate appeals against the imperial command to march, and the road to Tóngguān were lost when his Xīān household was destroyed by Lǐ Zìchéng in the eleventh month of 1643. The surviving memorials are nonetheless the principal documentary base for the high tide of Míng counter-insurgency policy in Shǎnxī, including the qīngtún 清屯 (military-farm verification) programme by which Sūn financed his force.

Translations and research

No substantial Western-language secondary literature located. Sūn Chuán-tíng figures prominently in modern Chinese-language studies of the fall of the Míng and the Chuǎng-zéi wars: Gù Chéng 顧誠, Míng-mò nóng-mín zhànzhēng shǐ 明末農民戰爭史 (Zhōngguó shèhuì kēxué, 1984); Fán Shù-zhì 樊樹志, Wǎn Míng shǐ 晚明史 (Fùdàn dàxué, 2003); the modern collected edition Sūn Chuán-tíng shū-dú gǎo 孫傳庭疏牘稿 (Shān-xī gǔjí, 1999, ed. Yuán Tóng-lǐ 袁同禮 et al.). For Tóng-guān 1643 see Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way (Stanford 2001), background chapters; and Roger Des Forges, Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming (Stanford 2003), which treats the Hé-nán theatre in detail and references Sūn extensively. In English-language popular historical writing he is occasionally treated as the ‘last hope’ of the Míng.

Other points of interest

The Qīng tún lù 清屯錄 appended to juǎn 4 is one of the few first-hand documents on Míng túntián military-farm administration produced by the field commander who carried it out, and remains useful for the late-Míng fiscal history of the Wèi 渭 valley. Sūn’s contemporary villa at the Yìngbìyuán 映碧園 in the western suburbs of Dàizhōu — over 120 mǔ with pavilions named Xīxī 西溪, Hétíng 鶴亭, Hánxūgé 涵虛閣, Xuándìlóu 軒題樓, Wàngyúnlóu 望雲樓 and Míngyuǎnlóu 明遠樓 — was the subject of several poems in juǎn 5 (e.g. Chūxià Yìngbìyuán xiēxià 初夏映碧園歇夏).

Graph View

Backlinks