Shunzhi Emperor

The Shunzhi Emperor was the second Emperor of the Qing dynasty, and the first Qing emperor to rule over China proper. A committee of Manchu princes chose him to succeed his father, Hong Taiji, in September 1643, when he was five years old. He died at the age of 22 of smallpox, a highly contagious disease that was endemic in China, but against which the Manchus had no immunity. He was succeeded by his third son Xuanye, who reigned for sixty years under the era name ‘Kangxi’

About Shunzhi Emperor in brief

The Shunzhi Emperor was the second Emperor of the Qing dynasty, and the first Qing emperor to rule over China proper, reigned from 1644 to 1661. A committee of Manchu princes chose him to succeed his father, Hong Taiji, in September 1643, when he was five years old. Under his leadership, the Qing Empire conquered most of the territory of the fallen Ming dynasty. He died at the age of 22 of smallpox, a highly contagious disease that was endemic in China, but against which the Manchus had no immunity. He was succeeded by his third son Xuanye, who reigned for sixty years under the era name ‘Kangxi’, but few documents have survived from the ShunZhi era. The emperor’s personal name was Fulin and the posthumous name by which he was worshipped at the Imperial Ancestral Temple was Shizu. The Qing dynasty was founded by Nurhaci, the leader of the Jianzhou Jurchens, who unified most Jurchen tribes under his rule in the 1580s to the 1610s. In 1612 he formally announced the foundation of the ‘Later Jin’ dynasty, effectively declaring his independence from the Ming. He also integrated Chinese troops into the Eight Banners, and in 1629 he led an incursion to the outskirts of Beijing, during which he captured Chinese craftsmen who knew how to cast Portuguese cannon. After capturing the last remaining Ming cities in Liaodong, in 1636 he changed the name of his polity from ‘Qing Jin’ to ‘Manchus’ and in 1936 he renamed the Jurchens the ‘Jin’ in honor of the Jin dynasty, which had ruled northern China from 1115 to 1234.

The name ‘Jing’ is still used to refer to the Jurchen tribe that helped the Qing to conquer China in the 1680s and 1690s. It is also the name given to a group of Jurchen clans known as ‘Jianzhou’ or ‘Jianshui’ that were once part of the Yuan dynasty, but were later absorbed into the Later Jin dynasty. In the 1650s, he faced a resurgence of Ming loyalist resistance, but by 1661 his armies had defeated the Ming Empire’s last enemies, seafarer Koxinga and the Prince of Gui of the Southern Ming dynasty, both of whom would succumb the following year. He tried, with mixed success, to fight corruption and to reduce the political influence of the Manchu nobility. His son and successor continued his father’s state-building efforts: he concentrated power into his own hands, modeled his government on the later Jin government, and integrated his Chinese ones on his Mongol allies and surrendered his Mongol’s institutions on his own. He later died a few months later, probably wounded during the battle of Ningyuan, where Ming commander Yuan Chonghuan defeated him with the help of recently acquired Portuguese cannon, in February 1626.

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