In the mid-1600s, Manchu bannermen spearheaded the military
force that conquered China and founded the Qing Empire, which
endured until 1912. By the end of the Taiping War in 1864, however,
the descendants of these conquering people were coming to terms
with a loss of legal definition, an ever-steeper decline in living
standards, and a sense of abandonment by the Qing court. Focusing
on three generations of a Manchu family (from 1750 to the 1930s),
Orphan Warriors is the first attempt to understand the social and
cultural life of the bannermen within the context of the decay of
the Qing regime. The book reveals that the Manchus were not
"sinicized," but that they were growing in consciousness of their
separate ethnicity in response to changes in their own position and
in Chinese attitudes toward them. Pamela Kyle Crossley's treatment
of the Suwan Guwalgiya family of Hangzhou is hinged upon Jinliang
(1878-1962), who was viewed at various times as a progressive
reformer, a promising scholar, a bureaucratic hack, a traitor, and
a relic. The author sees reflected in the ambiguities of his
persona much of the plight of other Manchus as they were
transformed from a conquering caste to an ethnic minority.
Throughout Crossley explores the relationships between cultural
decline and cultural survival, polity and identity, ethnicity and
the disintegration of empires, all of which frame much of our
understanding of the origins of the modern world.
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