ABSTRACT
In 1644, the Ming dynasty gave way to the Qing, established by the Manchus through their initial seizure of the capital city, Beijing, and extended over the entirety of the empire in the following years. 1 In the course of this struggle the Qing state sought ways to win the loyalty and trust of the Han Chinese elite, without whom the task of governing the empire would have been virtually unmanageable. As the early years of the Qing passed by, the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644-61) was particularly anxious to find ways to inspire loyalty among his Han officials. The position of Han Chinese within the civil and military administrative systems was a focus of much attention, as Chen-main Wang has noted in his study of the Han general Hong Chengchou, who went over to the Manchus in the years before their passage within the Great Wall. 2 One strategy in this effort was to identify exemplary figures ofloyalism from previous dynasties, and hold them up as epitomes for emulation in the present day. Yang Jisheng became one such model.
