Dorgon

Biography

Nurhaci's fourteenth son, Dorgon was the man who actually conquered China. When Hong Taiji died in 1643, Dorgon was passed over for the throne in favor of Hong Taiji's five-year-old son (the future Shunzhi Emperor), but he became Prince Regent and exercised absolute power. When Wu Sangui opened Shanhai Pass in 1644, Dorgon seized the moment with decisive speed, marching into Beijing and declaring the Qing the legitimate successors to the Ming. Dorgon proved a brilliant political operator as well as a general. He initially won Chinese cooperation by presenting the Manchus as avengers of the Ming dynasty against Li Zicheng's rebels. He retained the Ming civil service, honored the Chongzhen Emperor with a proper burial, and kept the bureaucratic machinery running. But his most controversial act — the Queue Order of 1645, forcing all Chinese men to adopt the Manchu hairstyle — provoked massive resistance and some of the worst massacres of the conquest. He died in 1650 from injuries sustained in a hunting accident, aged only thirty-eight. Posthumously condemned by the Shunzhi Emperor but later rehabilitated, Dorgon remains the most important single architect of the Qing conquest.

Key Battles