The Ming-Qing Conflict: a European Jesuit’s Perspective

Dax Tate

University of Washington HSTAS 327

China and the West

Professor Matthew Mosca

December 7th, 2017

 In 1618 Jurhaci, leader of the two-year old Qing Dynasty, issued Seven Grievances

against China’s Ming Dynasty, established over two centuries earlier. In 1618 he also began

conquering China’s Northeastern provinces. By 1644 the Manchus had captured Beijing, the

Ming capital. And in 1683, the Qing Dynasty consolidated their rule by defeating the final Ming

loyalists on the island of Taiwan. In just 65 years (or less, the transition is often placed at 1644),

and with the help of an internally disorganized Ming administration, the Manchus had conquered

one of the world’s oldest and most powerful countries and taken it for their own.

This was a dynamic time for China, and many Chinese sources described a period of war,

disease, famine, and bandit uprisings. The Chinese were not the only people interested in this

event, however. European missionaries wrote home to describe China’s struggle. These accounts

gave Europe a rare window into Chinese life, government, diplomacy, and war. One of these

sources came from Martin Martinius, a Jesuit missionary in China, who described the events in

his 1654 work Bellum Tartaricum. Martinius understood the event in European terms, making

Bellum Tartaricum a unique source. It is useful in its emphasis on high-level institutions, but

shows a misunderstanding of Qing atrocities during the conflict and a lack of interest in the

effects of the conflict on the general Ming population. By contrasting Martinius’ writing to

contemporary Chinese accounts, these strengths and deficiencies become clear.

Martinius studied the conflict from a unique perspective. His focus was on the level of

government and diplomacy, the mechanisms of which most Chinese peasant sources were either

unaware of or not interested in. He did this with a lack of pro-Ming bias, which was also rare

among Chinese sources. For instance, he put some of the blame for the conflict on the “prefects

or governors” of the Northeastern provinces, saying they “did abuse the Merchant’s Tartars of
Ninche [the Manchus] when they came into [Liaodong].” 1 A source that describes the relations

of Ming governors to Qing merchants is particularly useful for two reasons. First, it is something

that few Chinese peasants would have known or written about. Second, the Ming officials who

were aware of it would have been unlikely to publicize it, to avoid any blame for the uprising.

Martinius’ view was a unique one in those respects: His role as a Jesuit, likely a very learned and

well-integrated member of the Ming administration, put him close enough to the Ming to know

about this behavior, but his outsider status limited any pro-Ming bias he may have had.

Martinius’ position also allowed him to criticize the Wanli Emperor’s own role in the

issue. He accused the Emperor of mishandling Jurhaci’s Seven Grievances, because “being now

broken with age, in this business seems to have proceeded with less prudence than that which

accompanied the former actions of his life.” 2 Martinius presented a nuanced view of the

Emperor. He knew enough about China, as a well-integrated Jesuit missionary, to know the

Emperor’s experience and wisdom, but tempered that with his relatively unbiased outsider’s

view of Wanli’s failings in handling the Manchu issue.

One weakness of Martinius’ work is his handling of the cruelty inflicted by the invading

Qing on the resident Ming population. Martinius did not seem to understand this, and in his

neutrality sometimes mischaracterized the conflict as justified Manchus resisting unjust Ming.

While the Manchus were not entirely to blame, they were hardly benevolent to their new

subjects. Martinius began to address Qing cruelty, saying “the Tartarian King… vowed to

celebrate his father’s funerals with the lives of two hundred thousand of the inhabitants of China.

For it is the custom of the Tartars…” Here, Martinius nearly addressed Qing violence toward the

Ming. Instead, however, he continued that “since they conquered China, they have left off this

1
Martin Martinius, Bellum Tartaricum (London: John Crook, 1654), 12.
2
Martinius, Bellum Tartaricum, 14.
barbarous custom.” 3 Martinius left a clear ambiguity as to the extent of Qing cruelty here. Did

they kill 200,000 Chinese people as revenge? Did they attempt it at all before they “left off” the

practice? It is possible that Martinius, as a Jesuit, was trying to maintain ignorance about these

abuses so as to rehabilitate the new Qing China’s image to Christendom as quickly as possible.

Regardless of motive, Martinius’ writing betrays a degree of confusion regarding this violence.

Had Martinius fully understood the extent of Qing cruelty, his account would have been

much more complete. To see what is lacking, it is useful to read Chinese accounts from the same

period. In 1645, the self-described (but otherwise unknown) scholar Wang Xiuchu described the

Yangzhou Massacre: “By dusk the sound of Qing soldiers slaying people had penetrated to the

doorstep, so we climbed onto the roof for temporary refuge… The sounds of lamentation and

pain outside struck terror from the ears to the soul.” 4 This is only a small excerpt from Wang’s

writing, but just this selection captured the essence of what Martinius’ writing lacked. In the case

of Qing cruelty, Martinius’ misunderstanding led to an incomplete source which, though it

revealed institutional failings without a Ming bias, failed to address the atrocities of the Qing on

the other side of the conflict.

Perhaps the cause of this misunderstanding was Martinius’ apparent disinterest in the

lives of the Ming lower classes. To illustrate this, one of the reasons he listed for the conflict was

“when the King of Ninche would have married his daughter to another King of the Tartars, [the

Ming] hindered this marriage by representing some pretended reasons of State.” 5 Although this

was a real issue at the time, this and Martinius’ other causes read much like a description of

European court drama: abusive governors, broken royal marriage agreements, and the abduction

3
Martinius, Bellum Tartaricum, 15.
4
Wang Xiuchu, in Lynn Struve, Voices From the Ming-Qing Cataclysm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 35.
5
Martinius, Bellum Tartaricum, 12.
and execution of a king. All of these were distinctly upper-class in focus, because Martinius was

a Jesuit missionary. The Jesuits were known for their top-down approach at proselytizing,

devoting their attention and energy to the well-educated, the wealthy, and the influential, so it is

no surprise that these are the people he would focus on in the conflict. However, here Martinius

was also working on the implicit Jesuit goal of convincing Europe that China was worth

converting. To do that, he had to show that China’s system was similar to Europe’s, and

therefore ready for Catholicism. This is why he focused on governmental and diplomatic issues,

such as arranged marriages (even if they failed), rather than everyday Chinese. In these ways,

Martinius’ Jesuit role limited his inclusion of regular Chinese civilians in his work.

Because Martinius’ role as a Jesuit precluded emphasis on the general Chinese

population, Bellum Tartaricum does not include many popular Chinese issues. One important

issue in contemporary Chinese sources was hair. Liu Shangyou, writing about the fall of Beijing,

said “before long an order came down… all men in the city must shave their heads [in the Machu

style]. Thereupon many people wrote letters requesting that their old [Ming] customs be

continued…” 6 Many Chinese writers described this cultural clash, in which the Qing demanded

that the Han Chinese adopt their particular hairstyle, in defiance of their own customs. As Liu

explained, this set up a level of grassroots resistance to the Qing occupation that the Qing often

had to back down from, implementing the changes in steps instead of single orders. This is a

fascinating cultural artifact which had no clear parallel in Europe at the time, and as a result was

left out of Martinius’ writing.

When Martin Martinius wrote his Bellum Tartaricum, describing the rapid Manchu

conquest of Ming China, he gave modern historians a source that is undeniably useful in a

6
Liu Shangyou, in Struve, Voices From the Ming-Qing Cataclysm, 19.
variety of ways, but is flawed in many others. Martinius’ position as a Jesuit allowed him a rare

outsider’s perspective from within the Ming administration. This gave him access to all the

information that a noble European audience would be interested in (kings, governors, marriage

alliances, etc.) with still enough distance to recognize Ming shortcomings. However, both of

Martinius’ useful perspectives also became his major shortcomings. First, his lack of a pro-Ming

perspective at times turned into a lack of understanding of Qing cruelties during the conquest.

Likewise, the top-down perspective held by Martinius as a Jesuit led him to ignore the equally

important bottom-up view. Together, his poor understanding of Qing cruelty and his neglect of

common accounts created a hole in his writings that cannot be ignored. Altogether, Martinius’

unique roles came together to create a valuable source, but one that must be read in conjunction

with contemporary Chinese accounts to fully understand the Qing conquest of China.
 Bibliography

Martinius, Martin. Bellum Tartaricum, or the Conquest of the Great and Most Renowned Empire

of China, by the Invasion of the Tartars, Who in These Last Seven Years, Have Wholly

Subdued That Vast Empire. London: John Crook, 1654.

Struve, Lynn, ed. & trans. Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.