Shunzhi Emperor
The Shunzhi Emperor was five when his people took Beijing and twenty-two when he died of smallpox, and the conquest of China happened around him. He was chosen as a compromise between rival Manchu princes who could not agree on an adult candidate, and his uncle governed as regent. In 1644 a peasant army took the Ming capital and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on a hill behind the palace; the Ming general holding the pass at the eastern end of the Great Wall, facing a choice between the rebels and the Manchus, opened the gate to the Manchus. They took Beijing, declared that they had come to avenge the Ming rather than to replace it, and did not leave for two hundred and sixty-seven years. The conquest of the south took another forty years and was not gentle. The order that every Han man shave his forehead and wear the Manchu queue on pain of death turned a dynastic change into a question of identity, and cities that refused were massacred - the ten days at Yangzhou are still counted in the hundreds of thousands. Against that, the new regime kept the Ming administrative structure almost intact, retained its officials, continued the examinations, and paired a Manchu with a Chinese at the head of each ministry, which is why it worked. Shunzhi took personal control at thirteen when the regent died, and promptly had him posthumously disgraced. He was curious about the world outside the palace in a way his successors were not, kept a Jesuit astronomer as a confidant and adopted father figure, studied Chan Buddhism seriously, and was said to have wanted to abdicate and become a monk after the death of a favourite consort. He died in 1661 at twenty-two, leaving a third son chosen partly because the boy had already survived smallpox.
- Lived: 1638 CE – 1661 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
