Jin Empire

The Jurchen century

formationDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994)

The Jurchen were forest and river peoples of eastern Manchuria, subjects of the Liao, whose chieftain Aguda revolted in 1114 and destroyed the Liao empire within eleven years. The Song, who had been paying the Liao tribute for a century, allied with the Jurchen to be rid of them, and discovered in 1127 that they had exchanged a neighbour who wanted silver for one that wanted Kaifeng.

The Jin took northern China and held it for a hundred and nine years, driving the Song court south of the Huai river. Like the Liao they created a script of their own, adapted from the Khitan and Chinese ones; unlike the Liao they moved their capital into China, adopted much of the Chinese administrative apparatus wholesale, and worried openly and continuously about their own people being absorbed by it. Emperor Shizong's reign contains a sustained official programme to preserve Jurchen language, dress and archery, which is evidence of how badly it was going.

(eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994) · Sekino Tadashi · Public domain

They were destroyed by the Mongols between 1211 and 1234, in a campaign that occupied Chinggis Khan and his successor for over twenty years — considerably longer than the conquest of Khwarazm, and a reminder that the Islamic world's catastrophe was one front of several.

The golden khan

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (1888)

Rashid al-Din, writing the history of the world in Tabriz a century after Aguda's revolt, knew the Jin dynasty by a title rather than a name, and got its origins tangled with the empire it had actually destroyed.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris · Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (1888) · Sayf al-Vahidi · Public domain

What the Persian chroniclers had

Benakati's Tarikh-i Khata, itself drawn from Rashid, describes a settled, agricultural people next to the Khitan whom the Khitan called Miu-che and everyone else called Churche — the Jurchen, filtered through Mongol pronunciation into Persian spelling. Among them, it says, was a man called Huonyen Agudai, surnamed Daigim, whom the Mongols called Akuda.

He overthrew the dynasty of Kara Khitai in Khatai.

That sentence is wrong in a specific and informative way. Aguda overthrew the Liao — the Khitan empire in China and Manchuria. Kara Khitai, the Western Liao, was the state Yelü Dashi founded in Central Asia after fleeing Aguda's own conquest. The Persian sources, writing generations later and a continent away, had folded the destroyer of the Liao and the destroyer of its western remnant into the same confusion of names, because by the time the story reached Tabriz both empires were called Khitai and both had gone down to somebody.

Huangdi, and the golden khan

Bretschneider untangles one more piece of it. Huonyen is the Persian rendering of Wanyan, the Jurchen imperial clan name, used constantly through the Chinese history of the dynasty. Daigim is Persian for Da Jin — Great Jin, the dynastic name itself, which means Golden.

And the Persian sources give the same title, Daigim, to two different men: the founder Aguda, and — separately — "the Altun Khan who lived at the time of Chinggis, and the one who was destroyed under the reign of Ögedei." Altun is Turkic and Mongol for gold. The Persian chroniclers had translated the dynasty's own name into their own language and then used the translation as though it were a separate title held by whichever Jin emperor happened to be reigning when a Mongol army was fighting him — first the emperor Chinggis fought, then the one Ögedei's armies finished off at Caizhou.

Why the confusion is worth keeping

Because it shows, precisely, how information about a Chinese dynasty actually moved through the Mongol world in the thirteenth century — not as a written Chinese record consulted directly, but as an oral report, translated once from Chinese into Mongol and then again from Mongol into Persian, each translation keeping the sound of a name or the sense of a title and losing the rest.

The Jin never called any of their own emperors Altun Khan; it is a Mongol description of a Chinese title, carried west by envoys and merchants and soldiers who had fought them, and written down by a vizier who had never seen China and had no way to check it against the dynastic history the Jin themselves kept.

It is also, incidentally, a demonstration of the same mechanism working on the Jin's own name for itself. Jin means gold. Altun means gold. Everyone in the chain — Jurchen, Mongol, Persian — agreed on what the dynasty was called; only the history attached to the name came apart in transit.

Eleven years

expansionDrafted from Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (1888)

Between 1114 and 1127 the Jurchen destroyed two empires. The first took eleven years, the second took two, and the second was easier.

The Liao

Aguda's revolt began with a few thousand men against a state that had held the northern frontier for two centuries, and it went faster than anyone including Aguda seems to have expected.

The reason is that the Liao was a composite. It governed a steppe population and a settled Chinese one through two separate administrations, held a conquered Bohai kingdom in the east, and drew tribute from Jurchen, Tanguts and Koreans on its edges. Every one of those was a joint, and once the centre was seen to be losing, they came apart in order: Bohai first, then the tribal contingents, then the Chinese prefectures, each defecting or standing aside rather than dying for a dynasty that was going to lose.

The Liao emperor spent the last years of it in flight. The capital fell in 1120, the Southern Capital in 1122, and Tianzuo was captured in 1125.

The alliance that killed the Song

The Song had wanted the sixteen prefectures back for a hundred and eighty years, and in about 1120 it made an arrangement with the Jurchen to take them: the Jin would attack the Liao from the north, the Song from the south, and the prefectures would go to the Song.

The Song armies performed badly enough that the Jurchen had to take the Southern Capital themselves, and then handed over a few of the prefectures, stripped, in return for the tribute payments the Song had been making to the Liao.

That is the whole of it, and everything after follows. A dynasty that had spent a century buying peace from a northern neighbour it could not beat had just demonstrated, to a new and far more capable northern neighbour, that its armies could not fight.

1127

The Jin invaded in 1125, the year they finished the Liao, reached Kaifeng, were bought off with an enormous indemnity, and came back the following year when the payments stopped. The second time they took the city and carried its court into captivity in the north.

What they had acquired

The whole north China plain: the old imperial heartland, both Song capitals, and a population of perhaps forty million people, held by a ruling group of at most a few million.

A surviving Song prince set up a court in the south, and after fifteen years of fighting the two states settled a border along the Huai river in 1142, with the Southern Song as a tributary paying annual silver and silk.

The Jurchen had gone from a forest tribute-people to the ruler of northern China in one generation. What that did to them took longer to show, and it happened faster than the conquest had.

Jingkang, and the treaty after it

peakDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994)

In 1127 the Jin took Kaifeng and carried off two Song emperors, the imperial family, the court, and the palace collections into captivity in the north. It is called the Jingkang incident, and it is the most consequential single event in Chinese history between the An Lushan rebellion and the Mongol conquest.

National Palace Museum, Taipei · (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994) · Unknown · Public domain

A surviving prince re-established the dynasty south of the Yangtze. The hundred and fifty years that follow are conditioned by a court that wanted the north back and a faction at that court that did not, and by the execution of the general who most wanted it — which Chinese popular memory has never let go of.

1141

The treaty of Shaoxing fixed the border at the Huai river, made the Song emperor formally the subject of the Jin emperor, and set annual payments in silver and silk.

The Liao had extracted the same arrangement from the Song a century earlier with the parties changed: the treaty of Chanyuan in 1005, under which the Song paid the Liao and both courts agreed to call it something other than tribute.

The Jin had watched that arrangement from the outside as a tributary of the Liao. Within twenty-seven years of destroying them they were on the collecting end of the institution they had inherited, on worse terms for the payer, having improved it.

It is worth being clear about what the payments were and were not. They were large, and they were not what either state ran on. The Jin was funded by the land tax and the poll tax of forty million people in north China; the Liao by the agricultural taxes of its own Chinese and Bohai provinces. The tribute was the part both courts wrote about, because it was the part that had to be explained — the payer had to explain why it was paying and the receiver had to explain why it was not called tribute.

I love all peoples

peakDrafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)

Wanyan Yong took the throne in 1161 the way most of his predecessors had - in the chaos left by another man's crimes - and spent the next twenty-eight years proving that was not the only way to hold it.

National Palace Museum, Taipei · Boulger, The History of China (1898) · Chen Shiguan (album) · Public domain

An inherited throne, not an undisputed one

His predecessor, the tyrant Hailingwang, was murdered by his own guards mid-campaign against the Southern Song, and Wanyan Yong, proclaimed emperor in the disorder that followed, still had to fight for the succession he had been handed. A Khitan general named Yelu, entrusted with keeping his own people in order, used his position and his standing among the Khitan tribes to proclaim himself emperor of a restored Liao instead. It took a considerable army to run him down; his capture and execution were what finally let the new Jin emperor govern without looking over his shoulder at his own frontier troops.

A peace he had to defend from his own side

Wanyan Yong's own instinct, once the throne was secure, ran toward peace with the Song rather than renewed war - a preference his own generals did not share. A faction of Jin commanders, unwilling to accept the inactivity peace required, deliberately massed frontier garrisons and spread rumors of a coming invasion to goad the Song into striking first, calculating that once fighting began their own emperor would have no choice but to back them. It worked, in the narrow sense: a fresh war broke out the same year peace had seemed settled. It did not work in the sense the hawks wanted - Jin forces were driven from the field, and the war ended in a peace on terms more favorable to the Song than any earlier settlement had been. Wanyan Yong got the outcome he had wanted in the first place, just by a route he had not chosen.

Boulger, The History of China (1898) · Donald Trung · CC BY-SA 4.0

Two tests of the same principle

Two episodes from later in the reign show what that preference for peace actually meant in practice, rather than as a slogan. In 1170 a Xia minister tried to force his own king into a private arrangement dividing the kingdom

• and needed Jin's consent as overlord to make it stick. Wanyan Yong saw through the scheme immediately, refused to ratify an agreement he judged had been extracted rather than freely made, and wrote to the Xia king directly making the case plainly enough that the king had his own scheming minister arrested and executed.

A Korean rebel offered a cleaner temptation: having seized his own kingdom's western provinces by force, he proposed becoming Jin's vassal in exchange for recognition. Wanyan Yong turned him down in terms his own court recorded as remarkably direct: "You and your master deceive yourselves if you believe me capable of approving an act of treason, whatever the personal advantage it might procure me. I love all peoples of whatever nation they may be, and I wish to see them at peace with one another. How have you imagined me capable of so mean an act as that you propose to me?" Both refusals cost him an easy opportunity for gain. Both were consistent with the same standard applied in his own reign's first year, against his own generals.

What the reign left behind

His later years turned toward a sustained programme of Jurchen cultural preservation - the language taught and examined, the Chinese classics translated into it, Jurchen dress and archery mandated for an aristocracy already drifting toward Chinese habits it could not be legislated out of. He died in 1189, and Jin's own historians ranked him second only to Akouta, the dynasty's founder, among the great figures of their whole ruling house - the first Jin emperor, in their own judgment, to understand that war was only ever justified as a means to a worthy end, rather than an end an emperor was entitled to pursue for its own sake.

Boulger, The History of China (1898) · Sekino Tadashi · Public domain

A parting gleam

peakDrafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)

Zhangzong inherited the throne from his grandfather Shizong in 1189 and, for most of his own nineteen-year reign, inherited his policy along with it - the record's own verdict is that he preserved the salient features of Shizong's government without needing to reinvent them.

British Museum, London · Boulger, The History of China (1898) · Emperor Zhangzong of Jin · Public domain

Peace tested once more, and won

That inheritance was tested from the Song side rather than the Jin's own. Song's Emperor Ningzong, hearing repeated reports of Jin decline - a discontented, underpaid army, a population with no particular loyalty to an alien dynasty the moment it looked weak, Genghis Khan's own Mongols already striking at Jin's reputation on the northern steppe - let those reports convince him the moment had come to recover territory lost to the Jin generations earlier. In 1206 he let himself be talked into a war his own advisers had oversold.

The campaign went the opposite way from what Ningzong had been promised. Jin forces won it decisively, and the peace that followed in 1208 simply confirmed the existing treaties rather than conceding anything - Ningzong's own advocate for the war was executed for the miscalculation once the fighting was over. It was, the record notes, the last real triumph the Jin dynasty would ever win over its old southern rival: "a parting gleam of glory" around a dynastic name whose own signs of decline the war itself had been fought to test.

What the victory actually proved

The 1208 peace was real, and so was the decline it had been fought over. Zhangzong's own generation held the frontier competently enough to beat back a war Song had started expecting an easy win. What neither he nor his own court fully reckoned with was the power gathering on Jin's other border, in the Mongolian steppe, where the confederation the Song had correctly identified as a threat to Jin was still, in 1208, treated as a secondary concern next to the older, more familiar rivalry with the south.

Boulger, The History of China (1898) · Thomas Child · Public domain

The last quiet year

Zhangzong died the same year the Mongol threat was still being measured against the wrong neighbour, and it was his own less capable successors who would have to answer for that miscalculation directly. His reign closes out what later observers would come to treat as the dynasty's own settled middle age - two capable rulers in succession, Shizong and Zhangzong, governing a conquest state that had made its peace with the Chinese population it ruled and mostly kept the peace with its Chinese rival to the south. The war Genghis Khan brought to the Jin frontier within a few years of Zhangzong's own death would show, in short order, how little of that settled competence had prepared the dynasty for what was actually coming.

Preserving what conquest dissolves

aside?What aside meansDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994)

Emperor Shizong's reign in the second half of the twelfth century contains a sustained official campaign to preserve Jurchen identity: the language taught and examined, translations of the Chinese classics into Jurchen commissioned, dress regulated, hunting and archery mandated for the elite, Jurchen names required.

(eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994) · Stephen Wootton Bushell · Public domain

Programmes like that are evidence of the opposite of what they intend. By the 1180s the Jurchen aristocracy in northern China was speaking Chinese, marrying Chinese, living in cities and reading for examinations, and the emperor could see it happening and could not stop it.

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto · (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994) · Daderot · CC0

The problem is structural, and every conquest dynasty on this frontier met it and answered differently. The Liao kept the two populations under two administrations and a mobile court. The Yuan legislated a racial hierarchy and suspended the examinations. The Chagatai khanate split in half over it. The Jin tried cultural preservation by decree and got a century.

What none of them could escape is that governing a large settled population requires the methods that population already has, and using those methods for two or three generations produces administrators who are at home in them. The conquest elite either stays on the steppe and stays small, or comes inside and stops being distinct. The Jin came inside.

The Mongols destroyed them between 1211 and 1234, which took over twenty years — longer than the conquest of Khwarazm, and a useful corrective to the habit of treating the Mongol invasions as an event in Islamic history. Khwarazm was a season's work. This was a war.

The settlers

contractionDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994)

The Jin held north China with a settlement scheme, and the scheme was called the meng'an-mouke.

Jurchen households were organised in units of a hundred and of a thousand and moved south in enormous numbers after the conquest — hundreds of thousands of people — and settled on confiscated land across north China. They held it in exchange for military service, kept their own law and their own officers, and lived among a Chinese population that outnumbered them perhaps forty to one.

(eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994) · Unknown · Public domain

What happened to them

What happens to every land-for-service arrangement anywhere. Within three generations the settlers were landlords who rented out their allotments and did not soldier; the state issued edicts about it; the edicts did not work; and when the Mongols came the Jin fought them with hired troops.

That decay is so regular it is almost a law — Roman limitanei, Byzantine pronoia, Ottoman timars, Ming garrison colonies, all of them the same three generations. What makes this one specific is the population transfer. The Ming weisuo garrisons were Chinese soldiers on Chinese land. The Jin moved a people.

The other half of that is the harder problem: a dynasty deliberately trying to preserve a Jurchen identity — the language, the script, the hunting, the names — in a population that was assimilating anyway, and legislating about it with increasing urgency for a century.

The two things are one policy seen from two ends. Settling the Jurchen among the Chinese was meant to hold north China with a garrison that fed itself; what it actually did was dissolve the garrison into the country it was garrisoning.

And then 1214

With Mongol armies in the north the court left Zhongdu — the city that is now Beijing — for Kaifeng, the capital it had taken from the Song eighty-seven years earlier.

The move gave up the Jurchen homeland and the settled Jurchen population of the north in order to hold the Yellow River plain. It held neither. Twenty years later the last emperor died at Caizhou with a Mongol and a Song army outside the walls together.

Ten thousand li

contractionDrafted from Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (1888)

In the autumn of 1220 a vice-president of the Jin Board of Rites named Wuguxun Zhongduan set out from a court that had already lost its capital, to find an emperor who was in the middle of destroying an empire two thousand miles further west than anyone in Kaifeng had reason to expect him to be.

The mission

Chinggis Khan had broken with the Jin in 1211 and taken Zhongdu in 1215. His general Muqali was still fighting through north China, but the khan himself had turned west against Khwarazm. The Jin court, in its distress, sent Wuguxun to sue for peace — travelling, nominally, to "the northern court," though by the time he reached it the northern court was in Central Asia.

He set out in the twelfth month of 1220, crossed the northern edge of the Tangut kingdom, and kept going. Bretschneider's translation preserves his own account, given afterward to a colleague who wrote it down at his request: I have been sent a distance of ten thousand li west of the border of heaven, and not wishing all the curious things I saw in my travels to remain unrecorded, I therefore request you to write down my narrative.

What he saw on the way

He rode along a mountain range where the rivers split — east of it running east, west of it running west, the ground falling away beyond. He passed more than a hundred cities, and none of them had a Chinese name.

He reached the Uyghur country and a city he calls Ili, and gives, unprompted, the history of the Qara Khitai as it was told to him there: how a prince of the fallen Liao house named Yelü Dashi had fled west with a following, wandered from pasture to pasture, crossed a mountain range his party could barely get their carts over, and founded an empire in the land of the Muslims that lasted some ninety years before falling into decline and finally being destroyed by them in turn — the very event, as it happened, that Chinggis Khan was in the process of finishing off further south.

He describes the Muslim world he was crossing with the eye of a Chinese official who has never seen anything like it: the grass drying up in early summer as if it were Chinese winter; snow on the mountains in the hottest months; men whose beards are dyed orange with henna and go black over it, so that only the nose and eyes show through the hair; women who cover their faces and do nothing but sing and dance, while the men do the sewing and embroidery; houses roofed in clay instead of tile; windows and vessels of white glass; watermelons of sixty pounds' weight; bridges built of great bricks; camels with one hump instead of two; oxen with a hump on the neck; sheep with enormous tails; a four-legged snake; a spider whose bite makes a man cry out and die.

None of it is quite right and all of it is exactly what a startled envoy from Kaifeng would notice.

The audience

He found Chinggis Khan somewhere in the mountains of what is now Afghanistan, in the middle of a war, and delivered the letter he had carried across a continent — an offer to become the khan's younger brother, his vassal, on condition of keeping the title of emperor.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris · Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (1888) · Sayf al-Vahidi · Public domain

The Yuan Shi records what the khan said to him, and Bretschneider translates it in full because Wuguxun's own account, oddly, says nothing about it:

I formerly asked of your sovereign to cede the land north of the Yellow River, and to reign over the country south of it with the title of wang. On these conditions I would have suspended the war. But now Muqali has already conquered all these countries, and you are compelled to sue for peace.

Wuguxun asked for pity. The reply is the whole relationship in three sentences:

It is only in consideration of the great distance you have come that I can be indulgent. The land north of the Yellow River is in my possession, but there are still some cities in Kuan-xi which have not surrendered. Tell your sovereign to surrender these cities, and then he may reign south of the Yellow River, with the title of wang.

Not emperor. King. The offer that had been on the table when the war began was gone; what remained was smaller, because Muqali's campaign had made it smaller while the envoy was still travelling to ask for the old terms.

Wuguxun turned round and rode home.

Zhang Qian's road, run in reverse

The colleague who wrote his account down could not help the comparison, and the Han envoy he reaches for is the same one whose own road west opened this whole stretch of history, thirteen centuries earlier.

Anciently, in the time of the Han dynasty, Zhang Qian and Su Wu were entrusted with missions to far countries. They returned after several years, having endured much suffering and risked their lives. Like these men you penetrated to unknown countries, travelled amongst enemies more than ten thousand li, crossed deserts, and accomplished all this for the sake of saving the people.

Zhang Qian went west in the second century BC to find allies against the Xiongnu, and opened the road that carried silk to Parthia. Wuguxun went west fourteen hundred years later, on the same roads in outline, to beg the people who now controlled them for terms. One envoy had gone out to build a frontier. The other went because the frontier no longer existed.

He got his terms — such as they were — and delivered them, and the Jin court had another thirteen years.

Caizhou

endDrafted from Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (1888)

The Jin was destroyed by the Mongols in twenty-three years, and it was destroyed in exactly the way it had destroyed the Liao — including the part where the Chinese dynasty in the south allied with the northern newcomer against the northern incumbent, and got the same result.

The wars

Chinggis Khan attacked in 1211. The Jin field armies were beaten in the passes; the Mongols got through the Great Wall line, and in 1214 the court bought peace with a princess, gold, silk and horses, and then immediately moved the capital from Zhongdu — the future Beijing — south to Kaifeng.

Moving the capital was read, correctly, as an admission that the north could not be held. Zhongdu fell in 1215. Jurchen and Khitan units defected. The territory north of the Yellow River was progressively lost over the next fifteen years, and the state that had ruled forty million people was reduced to the country between the Yellow River and the Huai.

What the Jin did with its last decade

It attacked the Song.

That is the decision that finishes the argument about whether the dynasty had become a Chinese one. Facing annihilation from the steppe, the Jin court spent the 1220s campaigning south against the Southern Song, on the reasoning that territory lost in the north had to be replaced from somewhere.

It failed, it exhausted the army, and it guaranteed that when the Mongols asked the Song for a joint attack, the answer would be yes.

The last emperor

The Mongols took Kaifeng in 1233 after a siege in which, the accounts say, plague killed a very large part of the population. The emperor Aizong had already left for Caizhou, a small city further south, with what was left of the court and the army.

Caizhou was invested by a Mongol army and a Song army together in the winter of 1233. It held for three months. In February 1234, with the walls being taken, Aizong abdicated in favour of a general — reportedly on the grounds that he was too heavy to ride and escape, and that the man he was handing it to was a better soldier and might get away — and hanged himself.

The general was killed in the fighting the same day. He had held the throne for a few hours and is counted in the dynastic lists.

What the Song got for it

The Song had supplied grain and troops for the siege and was promised territory in return.

In 1234, with the Jin gone, a Song army marched north to occupy Kaifeng and Luoyang and found them empty, ruined and unable to feed an army. The Mongols counter-attacked, drove them out, and treated the advance as a breach of agreement.

The Mongol war on the Southern Song began the following year and took another forty-five.

That is the second time in a hundred and twenty years that a Chinese dynasty in the south allied with a rising northern power against a declining one, got a fraction of what it was promised, and found itself facing something far worse than what it had helped destroy. The Song did it twice, to the same result, in living memory of the first.

The name, taken again

afterlifeDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994)

A dynasty that had been dead for three hundred and eighty-two years acquired a successor who took its name on purpose.

In 1616 a Jurchen leader named Nurhaci declared a state in the forests of the north-east — the same country the Jurchen empire had come out of, in the same language group, among the descendants of the same people — and called it the Later Jin. The claim was explicit: descent from this dynasty, and its name.

Palace Museum, Beijing · (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994) · Unknown · Public domain

His son renamed it Qing in 1636, dropped the Jurchen ethnonym in favour of Manchu, and in 1644 walked through Shanhai pass at the invitation of a Ming general and took China. It lasted until 1912.

(eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (1994) · Jean-Michel Moullec · CC BY 2.0

The pattern

Put the Liao, the Jin and the Mongols in order and they are one argument.

A conquest dynasty holds north China by governing two populations under two systems. It is destroyed by a frontier people it had been extracting from and managing. That people then holds north China by governing two populations under two systems. Three iterations — Liao to Jin to Mongol — and then a fourth, in 1616, by a man deliberately invoking the second one.

Nurhaci was not making a historical allusion. He was making an argument about entitlement to a specific piece of ground, addressed to the people who lived on it, in the name of the last people from his forests who had held it — and it worked well enough that his grandson was ruling from Beijing twenty-eight years later.