Conclusion

The marriage patterns of the Ch'ing imperial house had a direct effect on the structure of power within Ch'ing society. Marriage exchange with banner allies was a vital element in the supraethnic policies of the early Manchu rulers during the conquest period. Later emperors confronted a different

issue: how to prevent. the Manchus from being completely assimilated into the Han Chinese population that they ruled. Although banner troops were stationed in separate garrisoned quarters in major cities in China, there were clear signs in the mid-eighteenth century of the loss of Manchu language skills among bannermen and indications that Manchu dress and other customs were being supplanted by Chinese norms. It is no accident that this was precisely the period that Manchu tradition and social structure were "fixed" by being written down; the concern with preservation of Manchu ethnicity voiced by the Ch'ien-lung emperor and his successors undoubtedly helped to perpetuate the prohibition against intermarriage with Han Chinese.

As Jennifer Holmgren points out in her chapter in this volume, the relation between marriage and politics is highly complex and variable. The Ch'ing system of political endogamy reinforced the historical master-servant tie of the Aisin Gioro with bannermen. The Ch'ing prohibition on marriage with Han Chinese outside the banner system removed Chinese officials from using this avenue to heighten their power: in contrast to the Chinese traditional historiography, which placed Chinese at the heart of the Ch'ing political system, our study suggests that they were only peripheral players in marriage politics.

The Ch'ing pattern of intermarriage with bannermen can be contrasted with the Northern Sung imperial house studied by Chaffee in this volume. Northern Sung emperors forged marriage alliances with the civil elite—or, more precisely, the civil elite residing in or near the Northern Sung capital—as a means of winning over potential rivals. The Ch'ing, like the Ming rulers (Soullière 1988), deliberately avoided marriages with the civil elite in an effort to prevent imperial consorts and their relatives from obtaining access to political power. At the same time, as we noted earlier, the Northern Sung, Ming, and Ch'ing rulers all used marriage as a means of reinforcing their bonds with the military elite.

The Ch'ing succession system also altered the structure of power within the harem. By rejecting the Ming principle of eldest-son succession, the Ch'ing made the sons of all consorts eligible to become emperor. As we have seen, the Ch'ing (like the Ming) took consorts from both the very top and the very bottom of the banner hierarchy: daughters of noble households mingled and competed for the emperor's favor with maids from bondservant families. Recruitment policies allowed distant sororal and maternal relations to enter the harem, where each served as a check on the others. The deliberate social fluidity among consorts and the possibility of having an "upstart" triumph over her social betters served as an institutionalized check on the political ambitions of any particular group among the banner elite.

The Ch'ing tried to make usurpation more difficult by widening the circle of potential competitors for imperial favor. We have been at some pains to demonstrate that on critical questions like succession, the sons of lower-

ranking concubines could and frequently did win out over rivals with mothers of higher rank. The fluidity of succession subverted the hierarchical order of the harem and served to check the emergence of powerful imperial affines. When we survey the history of the dynasty, the problem of powerful affines is conspicuously absent.

In this chapter we have argued that the criteria used to determine the absence of polygyny among Chinese commoner families reveal that Ch'ing imperial marriage practices differ so markedly as to constitute a separate marriage model—one that is neither monogamy nor polygyny. Why then did the Ch'ing so emphasize hierarchy and gradations of rank in the ritual installation and living allowances of concubines?

Maurice Bloch has noted that rituals are not necessarily faithful reflections of social reality; rather, "the roles that people act in rituals do not reflect or define social status. . . . These roles are part of a drama that creates an image . . . that needs to be created because in many ways it contradicts what everybody knows" (1986:45). Chinese commoner families emphasize the primacy of the first wife precisely because in many cases it is not the first wife but a younger concubine who wins the master's affections and threatens to disrupt family harmony by her power to obtain an unfair share of the family's resources. The institutionalized emphasis on the primacy of the first wife aims to keep family tensions under control so that the patriline can be perpetuated. The vulnerability of the Ch'ing empress, who was frequently chosen without regard for the emperor's personal wishes, is compounded by her rivals' powerful relatives and elite social backgrounds. Nor, as the case of Tz'u-hsi demonstrates, did the empress installed during her husband's lifetime have more power because of her ritual superiority than the mother promoted to empress dowager by her son. The ritual acknowledgment of the empress as the head of the harem preserved the illusion of order in a situation that was in reality extremely fluid and dependent on the whims of the ruler.

If empresses were frequently only nominal heads of imperial harems, there could be no doubt that in the Ch'ing, as in virtually every dynasty, the emperor's mother, the empress dowager, did exercise real authority and power. Her legitimacy was firmly grounded in Confucian teachings: the highly publicized exercises in filial piety of the K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-lung emperors may have been politically manipulative (S. Wu 1979; Kahn 1971), but the affection these rulers bore their grandmothers and mothers was no less real for all that.

Empresses dowager were frequently joined in the inner court councils by imperial princes, the agnates of the collateral branches of the ruling house. The Ch'ing succession system permitted younger sons to participate in government and to vie for the ultimate prize, the throne. The Ch'ing thus differs from native Chinese regimes, which barred nonheirs from politics and power. Throughout the dynasty, we find both imperial agnates and emperors' sons

being appointed to carry out substantive tasks. These assignments continued even after the emperors had successfully overcome the collegial traditions of rule that had characterized most of the seventeenth century. The K'ang-hsi emperor tested his eldest son by making him regent while he himself led troops against the Western Mongols; he sent another son to command the Ch'ing banners in another campaign (S. Wu 1979). Imperial princes took civil service positions in the ministries; they also served as administrators in the banners and the Imperial Clan Court.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the political activities of imperial agnates were never a threat to the throne because of the strong leadership provided by the emperors. During the late nineteenth century, however, with a succession of infant-emperors, imperial agnates played leading roles in national politics. Prince Kung, son of the Tao-kuang emperor, was designated to handle negotiations with the foreign powers in 1860 when his half brother the Hsien-feng emperor fled Peking; of the four adjutants-general who were in charge in the capital in the last months of the Hsien-feng reign, three were imperial agnates and one was an imperial affine (Hummel 1944 2:666, 668, 924).

In the period from 1862 to 1897 China's government was dominated by the empress dowager Tz'u-hsi, who ruled not so much with the help of her natal kin as with the support of her husband's half brothers. The struggle for power that followed the Hsien-feng emperor's death was between two factions dominated by imperial agnates: the empress dowagers Tz'u-an and Tz'u-hsi (the biological mother of the T'ung-chih emperor) won this contest with the help of their brother-in-law, Prince Kung (Wright 1966:16-17). This alliance of imperial princes and the empresses dowager continued in the subsequent Kuang-hsu reign (Kwong 1984; Hummel 1943:384-86), when Prince Ch'un, father of the emperor and Tz'u-hsi's brother-in-law, enjoyed great influence at court. The marriage and succession practices of the Ch'ing had succeeded in preventing substantive political challenges to the throne from affines, but could not guard against challenges from agnates. The Manchu traditions of collegial rule by imperial agnates reemerged during the last decades of Ch'ing governance.