Hong Taiji

Hong Taiji was the second ruler of the Later Jin state and the founder of the Qing imperial title adopted by the Manchu regime in 1636. A son of Nurhaci, he reorganised military and administrative institutions, expanded into Korea and Inner Mongolia and increasingly presented his state as a multi-ethnic empire capable of replacing the Ming dynasty in China.

He expanded the Eight Banner state, incorporated Mongol and Chinese institutions and continued the war against the Ming. His death before the conquest of Beijing produced a succession struggle resolved by the accession of his young son Fulin.

In Robert Elegant’s Manchu, Elegant uses Francis’s knowledge of cannon and his Jesuit education to examine the role of foreign specialists in seventeenth-century China, while Hong Taiji and Dorgon anchor the story in the political transformation that carries the Manchus from frontier power to imperial dynasty. In Alice Poon’s The Green Phoenix: A Novel of Empress Xiaozhuang, the Woman Who Re-Made Asia, Born Borjigit Bumbutai, a Khorchin Mongol princess, the future Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang enters Hong Taiji’s Manchu court through a political marriage in 1625.