Shunzhi Emperor

Fulin (福臨), who reigned as the Shunzhi Emperor from 1643 to 1661, was the first emperor of the Qing dynasty to rule China from Beijing. He came to the throne as a small child, spent his first years under a regent, and in a decade of personal rule began to shape the Qing state on Chinese lines.

His era name, Shunzhi, was used from 1644 to 1661, and the reign mark on imperial porcelain reads Da Qing Shunzhi nian zhi (大清順治年製). His temple name is Shizu.

Rise to the Throne

Fulin was born in 1638, a son of Hong Taiji. When his father died in 1643 without naming an heir, the succession was disputed between Hong Taiji's eldest son, Hooge, and Hong Taiji's half-brother Dorgon.

A council of Manchu princes settled on the five-year-old Fulin as a compromise and appointed two co-regents: Dorgon, the fourteenth son of Nurhaci, and Jirgalang, a nephew of Nurhaci. Both were senior members of the imperial clan.

In 1644 Qing armies entered Beijing after the fall of the Ming, and later that year the young emperor was brought to the city and enthroned in the Forbidden City.

The Reign of the Shunzhi Emperor

Although his reign was short, it set several precedents that defined the Qing dynasty.

The Regency of Dorgon

For the first seven years of the reign, power lay with Dorgon. Under his direction Qing armies conquered most of the former Ming territory and drove Ming loyalists deep into the southwest. The conquest was often brutal, and several cities that resisted were subjected to massacres.

Dorgon also imposed the queue order of 1645, which required Han Chinese men to shave the front of the head and wear the rest of the hair in a braid in the Manchu fashion. It was bitterly resented, but it became a lasting sign of submission to Qing rule.

Personal Rule

Dorgon died at the end of 1650, and early the next year Shunzhi, then twelve, took personal control of the government. He stripped the dead regent of his honours, brought the Upper Three of the Eight Banners under his direct command, and strengthened central power.

He drew Han Chinese officials into government, kept much of the late Ming system of administration and court ritual, and supported the Confucian curriculum and the civil service examinations as a way of winning over the scholar class.

Ming resistance revived in the 1650s. Qing forces turned back Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) at Nanjing in 1659 and drove the Yongli Emperor, the Prince of Gui, into Burma. The last Southern Ming court on the mainland was not extinguished until 1662, the year after Shunzhi's death.

In the winter of 1652 to 1653 the emperor received the Fifth Dalai Lama in Beijing, and in 1653 he conferred on him an honorific title, with a gold seal and a gold certificate of appointment.

He also placed great trust in the German Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell, who directed the imperial office of astronomy and advised the young emperor on astronomy, the calendar and matters of government.

Death and Succession

The Shunzhi Emperor died of smallpox in 1661, aged 22. The disease was endemic in China and greatly feared by the Manchus.

He was succeeded by his third son, Xuanye, who had already survived smallpox. Xuanye reigned for 61 years as the Kangxi Emperor.

Far fewer documents survive from the Shunzhi reign than from later Qing reigns, and it remains one of the less well known periods of the dynasty.

Porcelain of the Shunzhi Reign

Imperial production at Jingdezhen was limited in these unsettled years, and porcelain with a genuine Shunzhi reign mark is scarce. The period belongs to what collectors call the Transitional style, which bridges late Ming and early Qing: blue and white painted with figures in landscapes and narrative scenes, much of it made for private buyers rather than the court.

Our guide to Transitional porcelain explains how these wares are recognised and dated.