In the early Qianlong reign, the Eight Banners were bedeviled by economic dislocation and martial declension. To solve these problems, the Qing government decided to relocate the bannermen in Beijing to Manchuria and simultaneously to enforce the poli...
In the early Qianlong reign, the Eight Banners were bedeviled by economic dislocation and martial declension. To solve these problems, the Qing government decided to relocate the bannermen in Beijing to Manchuria and simultaneously to enforce the policy of closing Manchuria, i.e. fengjin (封禁). Qing specialists have long believed that these two decisions made by the Qianlong emperor were not related each other: the former has been mainly discussed as one of the many economic policies to improve life of the bannermen in the capital, while the latter mostly examined from the perspective of agriculture and land reclamation in Manchuria. In fact, however, these two policies were taken to achieve a same goal, that is, making Place of Manchu Origins (genben zhi di 根本之地, genben zhong di 根本重地), by which the Qing government expected to resolve both the serious economic crisis of the bannermen and the steady acculturation of Manchus to Han customs. This policy came to transform the meaning of Place of Manchu Origins from a common noun indicating a very important place to a proper noun specifying a fundamentally crucial place for the Manchus. After the Qianlong reign, Manchuria as the fundamentally crucial place for the Manchus became a place for all the bannermen living in both Beijing and Manchuria. It was a place where privileges for bannermen in Manchuria should be protected, population pressure in Beijing (the home for half the entire banner populations in the Qing empire) be resolved, and finally, the Manchu culture and language be preserved.