Prelude
It was a cold winter in the first lunar month of the eighteenth year of Shun Zhi’s reign. With the recent end of the Spring Festival, flocks of beggars now began to solicit alms along the street as if they had cropped up from underground. They were clustered under the eaves of the stores and dilapidated temples to the west of Hademen Gate of Beijing. Poorly-built thatched huts and sheds were constructed in scattered groups along the city wall by these beggarly families, giving one the impression that they were there to stay forever. As Beijing had been ravaged by several wars since the defeat of Li Zicheng (“The Roaming King”) the city population had been almost decreased by half. Both inside and outside Dongzhimen Gate, the city would have been overcrowded if it had not been reduced to rubble, leaving sufficient room to accommodate these beggars. Most spoke with a Northeastern Chinese accent (the accent of those from the eastern region of the Shanhaiguan Pass), but quite a number of them seemed to come from Zhili, Shandong, and Henan Provinces. Dressed in ragged coats with straw ropes tied around their waists, they begged for food with bowls in their hands.
“Elderly uncle and aunt, please have mercy on us and spare us some of your leftovers. We are refugees from Rehe. We have both parents and little ones to support, and truly have no other way to feed them now!”
“Oh my God! What kind of offence have you brought upon yourself? What kind of disaster in the dead of winter has driven you to such a faraway place as this?”
A strong young man in the prime of his life who shouldered his wok-mending tools turned his face and stopped to sneer at this inquiry: “You live at the foot of the Son of Heaven. How could you be aware of what is happening in the countryside? Those damn Bordered Yellow Bannermen roped off my land! If I did not beg for food, what would I eat?” With this remark, he threw his pigtail around his neck and walked off in indignation.
At this point, you may be asking yourself: Just what is “roping off the land”? And what could be so terrible about that!?
Before the Manchu forces broke into Shanhaiguan Pass, the Eight Banner Troops used to prepare their own supply of horses and weaponry for each expedition or battle. Since every Banner Troop had to support and feed their own army, they each occupied a large area of land. The Banner Troop chiefs, princes, dukes and imperial clansmen who expended considerable gold and silver to maintain their luxurious lifestyle set up manors of various sizes in different locations outside the Pass. After they stormed through the Pass, they had access to countless plots of wasteland left by the former Ming Dynasty’s royal relatives, civilian and military officials who either died or fled when the Roaming King took over Beijing. Dorgon thereby issued a decree that “kings, third-ranked princes (“Beile”), fourth-ranked princes (“Beizi”) as well as court officials who moved eastward shall be entitled to claim as much land as they want.” Naturally, the unscrupulous servicemen would try to lay their hands on the most fertile land. A rope was tied to two horses on each end and a banner was planted on the ground. Then the soldiers started to whip the horses like mad to make them gallop in large circles, the circumscribed, “roped-off” land inside these circles became the property of the respective Banner Troop. This was called “roping off the land”. “This belongs to the Bordered Yellow Banner Troop.” “That belongs to the Plain White Banner Troop.” All the commoners inside the circles were evicted by those highhanded troops. Some of them got a small stretch of useless sandy or salty land in return, but those who fared even worse were looted. Once their land got roped off, they had to leave every piece of furniture in the house. If their wives or daughters did not look pretty, they were granted the “mercy” of leaving with the household owner. If not, they were coerced to stay. As a result, seventy-seven prefectures and counties covering an area of two thousand li in capital environs, Zhili, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi were laid waste, swarmed with relocation victims and strewn with people starved to death. The sound of crying never seemed to cease. The number of those who risked their lives in desperation to become bandits was simply too numerous to count.
