Nurhaci

天命

Reign facts

Reigned: 1616–1626 (10 years)
Lived: 1559–1626
Personal name: Nurhaci 努爾哈赤
Temple name: Taizu 太祖
Era name: Tianming 天命 1616–1626

Qing Dynasty Emperors

On this page

Early Life and the Jurchen Tribes
Uniting the Jurchens
The Eight Banners
Founding the Later Jin
War with the Ming
Ningyuan and the Death of Nurhaci
Liaodong, the Late Ming and Porcelain

Nurhaci (1559–1626) was a chieftain of the Jianzhou Jurchens, of the Aisin Gioro clan, who united the Jurchen tribes and founded the state from which the Qing dynasty grew. In 1616 he proclaimed himself khan of the Later Jin, and he ruled under the era name Tianming, "mandate of heaven", until his death in 1626. His temple name is Taizu.

Over more than thirty years of war he brought the scattered Jurchen tribes under his rule, organised them in the Eight Banners and had a script created for their language. From 1618 he turned on the Ming and conquered most of Liaodong, fighting Ming armies and their Korean allies. He died before the conquest of China, but the state and army he built carried his successors to Beijing in 1644.

Early Life and the Jurchen Tribes

Nurhaci was born in 1559 into the Gioro clan of the Suksuhu River tribe, part of the Jianzhou Jurchens. His family claimed descent from Möngke Temür, a Jianzhou leader of the early fifteenth century whose people had lived in what is now North Korea. According to Chinese sources, Nurhaci spent part of his youth in the household of the Ming general Li Chengliang, where he became fluent in Chinese.

The Jianzhou Jurchens lived east of the Ming frontier, in the Long White Mountains north of the Yalu River. Further north lived the Haixi Jurchens, among them the four Hulun tribes (Hada, Ula, Hoifa and Yehe), and beyond them the Wild Jurchens of the northern forests. The region was nominally subject to the Ming, which encouraged quarrels among the tribes so that none grew too strong.

In 1583 Nurhaci's father, Taksi, and grandfather, Giocangga, were killed during a Ming attack on a rival Jurchen fort, an attack in which the Jurchen leader Nikan Wailan had a hand.

Uniting the Jurchens

Nurhaci began his campaigns the same year, reportedly with only thirteen suits of armour, against Nikan Wailan, whom he held responsible for the deaths. Nikan Wailan, who had Ming backing, was killed in 1586. Nurhaci then brought the other Jianzhou tribes under his control, and in 1593 he defeated a coalition of tribes led by the Yehe.

In 1599 his scholars Erdeni Baksi and Gagai Jarguchi adapted the Mongolian script to write the Jurchen language, creating the script later used for Manchu.

The same year he turned on the Hulun tribes. He attacked the Hada in 1599 and had absorbed them by 1601. In 1606 Mongol chiefs gave him the title Kundulun Khan. He took Hoifa in 1607, when its beile Baindari was killed, and in 1613 he defeated Ula and its beile Bujantai. Only the Yehe, under their beile Gintaisi and backed by the Ming, still held out.

The Eight Banners

As his following grew, Nurhaci organised it in banners: companies of fighting men and their households, grouped under coloured flags. Four banners were formed in 1601, and by 1615 there were eight. They were military, administrative and economic units at once, responsible for conscription, taxation and mobilisation. Their members farmed in peacetime and fought when called, and conquered tribespeople could be enrolled in them, transferring their allegiance readily to the new state.

Nurhaci was supreme commander, and each banner was placed under one of his sons or nephews, which kept power within the family without threatening his own. Conquered land was granted to the banners, and its cultivators became serfs of the banners. The banner system became the core of the Jurchen state and, later, of the Qing army, and it lasted for some three hundred years.

Founding the Later Jin

In 1616 Nurhaci proclaimed himself khan of a state he called Jin, known to historians as the Later Jin to distinguish it from the Jurchen Jin dynasty of the twelfth century. The clan name he adopted, Aisin Gioro, recalls the same dynasty: aisin is the Manchu word for gold, as jin is the Chinese. Five trusted followers, Hurhan, Anfiyanggu, Eidu, Hohori and Fiongdon, were named chief councillors.

In 1618 he issued the Seven Grievances, a list of complaints against the Ming that began with the deaths of his father and grandfather and dwelt on Ming support for the Yehe, and went to war.

War with the Ming

His first target was Fushun, a Ming fortress on the Hun River east of Shenyang. It lay close to his capital at Hetu Ala and was poorly defended, and Nurhaci knew it well from trading there as a Ming tributary. He also knew that the Ming army in Liaodong, nominally 90,000 strong, was badly trained and months behind with its pay. In 1618 his troops scaled the walls, and the commander, Li Yongfang, surrendered on condition that no one was harmed. A Ming relief force was beaten off by Nurhaci's sons Daisan and Hong Taiji. Nurhaci gave Li Yongfang a command and one of his granddaughters in marriage, and Li became the first of many Ming officers to change sides. Such defectors, rewarded with marriages into the Aisin Gioro clan or other Jurchen families, later played a vital part in the Qing conquest.

In 1619 the Ming sent a large army against Hetu Ala, advancing in several columns and joined by Korean troops. Nurhaci concentrated his forces and defeated the columns in turn at the Battle of Sarhu, then conquered the Yehe, completing the unification of the Jurchens. In 1621 he took Shenyang and Liaoyang, the centres of Ming power in Liaodong, and in 1625 he made Shenyang his capital, as it remained until the move to Beijing in 1644.

Ningyuan and the Death of Nurhaci

In 1626 Nurhaci attacked the fortress of Ningyuan and suffered his first serious defeat, at the hands of the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan, whose European-style cannon broke the assault. Nurhaci is reported to have been wounded. He never fully recovered and died later that year, aged 67. His tomb, the Fuling, lies east of Shenyang.

He had named no single successor, intending his sons to rule together. The four senior beile were his sons Daisan, Manggultai and Hong Taiji and his nephew Amin, son of Nurhaci's brother Surhaci. The day after his death they forced his primary consort, Lady Abahai, to take her own life and accompany him in death, and some historians suspect that Nurhaci had chosen her son Dorgon as his heir, with Daisan as regent. Instead his eighth son, Hong Taiji, became khan. He soon strengthened his position by exchanging his own two White Banners for the two elite Yellow Banners that Nurhaci had left to Dorgon and his brother Dodo.

Liaodong, the Late Ming and Porcelain

Nurhaci's wars mattered far beyond the north-east. To pay for its armies in Liaodong the Ming court raised new tax surcharges, and money for everything else ran short. Imperial orders to the porcelain kilns at Jingdezhen fell away in the last years of the Wanli reign and never recovered under the Ming. The potters turned to private buyers at home and abroad, and the fresh, pictorial porcelain they made from about 1620 until the imperial kilns were restored in 1683 is known to collectors as Transitional porcelain.