Vocabulary Notes From the Manchu Archives 2: On the "booi"

The following HTML text was created from the original print version. Although care has been taken to transcribe the original correctly, errors may remain. Please refer to the PDF as the text of record for citation. If you encounter a mistranscription, please report it to the editor ([email protected].)

It is hard to think of a set of people in the Eight Banners about whom there is greater confusion and conflicting information than the booi, usually called in English "bondservants." Based on Manchu-language documents from the First Historical Archives in Beijing, this brief article sketches the meaning of bondservant status and the origin of the group in the early years of the dynasty, and sheds some light on the exact meaning of the term booi.

First of all, who were the booi? Booi were a hereditary class of unfree people attached in perpetuity to households in the Manchu Eight Banners, where their duties included various domestic tasks as well as assisting their masters in their official duties and on military campaign. Originally belonging to a stratum of Jurchen society consisting of what might be called "slaves" (in Manchu, aha - see below), when companies (niru) and banners (gūsa) were first formed in the late 1500s, booi were put into their own companies, usually attached to the same banners as their masters. These bondservant companies, called booi niru (Ch bao-yi zuoling 包衣佐領) differed from other companies not just socially, but structurally, too, in that the company head was called a booi da (Ch guanling 管領) instead of the usual nirui janggin (Ch zuoling 左領).

The bondservant companies in what came to be the Lower Five Banners were distributed among different members of the nobility; those attached to the Upper Three Banners under the emperor's control formed part of the imperial household and were a kind of elite within the banners generally. They were subject to the separate authority of the Imperial Household Department (neiwufu 内務府 /dorgi baita be uheri kadalara yamun). The literal meaning of this name, "bureau supervising internal affairs," explains why imperial bondservant companies were spoken of as "inner companies," as opposed to the "outer," or non-bondservant companies of the regular Eight Banners. Because of their status as the emperor's personal property, Imperial Household Department booi were frequently called on to perform special tasks and fill important offices, as Jonathan Spence so memorably showed in his classic study of one of the most famous such bondservants, Ts'ao Yin.[1]

Confusion over the booi begins with the name. There is no proper Chinese name for them, the name bao-yi being nothing more than a phonetic rendering of the Manchu phrase booi, meaning literally, "of the household."[2] As to the absence of a Chinese name, the short explanation is that there was no corresponding status in Chinese society for people who were nominally "slaves" - that is, of unfree status - but who often served in powerful positions and were sometimes intimates of the emperor. Calling them "slaves" in Chinese (nuli, nupu 奴隸 奴僕) no doubt conveyed the wrong impression, so to distinguish them from actual slaves they were called bao-yi 包衣. This linguistic compromise, however, contributed to later misunderstandings, as the common assumption among scholars has been that bao-yi and booi meant the same thing, and that everyone described by the word booi was a bondservant. This view is reflected in much twentieth-century scholarship[3] and has become enshrined in a number of dictionaries and reference works published in recent years, where bao-yi and booi are presented as mutually defining and essentially interchangeable nouns, both with the general meaning "slave."[4] For instance, in a widely-cited collection of essays on Manchu history, Mo Dongyin wrote:

Two basic assumptions are made here: a) that booi is short for booi aha or booi niyalma; and b) that these expressions refer to bondservants. However, when we closely examine Manchu documents, we find that neither of these assumptions is warranted. In fact, not only does booi not mean "bondservant" — by itself in Manchu it is not even a noun.

What does booi mean, then? Strictly speaking, booi in the sense of bondservant is short for booi nirui niyalma (urse), "person (people) of a bondservant company." Booi aha and booi niyalma sometimes refer to bondservants, but not always; they may also refer to actual slaves in a household, or simply to "the people in my house," translated variously in Chinese as huxiaren, nupu, jiaren, jiashu, etc.[6] When booi appears in phrases like booi amban (lit. "official of the household"), "Department Director of the Imperial Household" (内務府總管) and booi ilan gasa, "the three banners of the [imperial] household" (內府三旗) where the reference is clearly to the bondservant establishment, then we can say that its meaning of "the household's" is really shorthand for "the emperor's household." This is borne out by the Chinese equivalent terms. But in other phrases, such as booi aha, "household slave," booi hehe, "housemaid," and booi niyalma, "member of a household," the referents might be bondservants, but they could be people in any household. In Manchu, then, the use of the "word" booi (which is really two words, of course) is no guarantee that we are talking about bao-yi, that is, about bondservants.

Additional evidence comes from the Manchu archives, where we find such expressions as "booi mulu i ton be bodome," ("counting the number of ridgepoles in a house"), "harangga gusai baci benjihe alban i booi turigen i menggun be gaire dangse be kimcime baicaci" ("investigating the records of silver collected in public housing rent from the said banner"), and "booi anggalai ton be narhan cese weilefi alibuhabi" ("Having made a detailed record of the population [lit., "number of household's mouths"], [I] reported [it]").[7] None of these uses of booi refers to bondservants or the Imperial Household Department. Even when booi describes people, it is not always clear if the person referred to is a bondservant or not. From the command, "jai Cangšeo be tob cin wang de. afabufi. booi aisilakū hafan de baitala" ("Also, let Cangseo be given to the Zhuang Prince and employed as booi assistant department director [an office in the Imperial Household Department]) it would appear that Cangšeo is a bondservant; but in the phrase, "bi Lan Jeo de tehede. mini booi niyalma Namjal. ging hecen ci minde etuku benjire" ("when I lived in Lanzhou, a person from my household, Namjal, delivered my clothing from the capital") it is impossible to say from the context whether Namjal is a bao-yi, i.e., a person enrolled in a bondservant company, or simply a household servant or attendant.[8] Similarly, from the following, it is hard to know if a bondservant is being referred to or possibly just a household slave having no affiliation with a bondservant company: "kubuhe lamun i Manju gūsai. Futai nirui ilhi funde bošokū Cartai. emu nirui gocika bayara Surtai sebe. niyalmai booi aha seme habšaha emu baita be. wesimbuhede" ("when Cartai, a sub-lieutenant of Futai company of the Bordered Blue Manchu banner memorialized regarding the matter of a personal household slave (?) who accused the imperial bodyguard Surtai and others").[9]

Therefore, while it is perfectly correct to draw a direct equivalence between the Chinese word bao-yi and the English word bondservant, one cannot assume an equivalence between these words and Manchu booi. Some people described as being "of the household" (boo-i) were bondservants (bao-yi), and some were not. Whatever they were, we can be fairly sure they were never spoken of in Manchu simply as "booi." Chinese grammar may have allowed bao-yi to become nominalized, but boo-i never made this metamorphosis in Manchu. Like any possessive, it always modified a noun. In no document I have seen is the noun not there. Therefore it is probably preferable to avoid the use of booi in writing in English, and to stick to bondservant instead.

Another source of confusion is the social and ethnic origin of the bao-yi. Early Jurchen society was divided generally into three groups: free households (irgen), dependent households (jušen), and unfree households (aha). With the rise of the company/banner organization in the late sixteenth century, these classifications gave way to a different system of ordering statutory identity. There was comparatively little change in the status of elites (irgen), many of whom were able to parlay their initial advantageous position into continued elite status in the Eight Banners. The other two groups, however, experienced greater changes, especially after 1644. The dependent households (jušen), who provided the bulk of the population that constituted the banner armies, saw the ties binding them to their masters gradually weaken as an independent banner administrative apparatus took on more and more responsibility for managing their lives: distributing grain and silver, filling vacant positions, awarding housing, settling disputes. This "bureaucratization" culminated in the 1720s with the complete curtailment of the privileges of the banner elite over them. By this time they had long since ceased to be called jušen, a word which is already defined in Kangxi-era dictionaries as "Manchu slave" in Chinese ("Manzhou de nuli"). Their formal designation was as "regular households" (zhenghu/jingkini boigon), or, more popularly, zhengshen qiren, "regular-body person of the banners."[10] In most cases, when one encounters the Chinese expression qiren, "person of the banners," the reference is to someone of this status. Often, though, the reference is to a bondservant.

Bondservants, too, were qiren, but traced their roots to the remaining group, those of unfree status called aha. Prior to the foundation of the Latter Jin in 1616, the aha consisted of Koreans, Mongols, Chinese, and Jurchen who were held as chattel after being bought, taken captive, or condemned to servitude as a punishment.[11] While it is a common misperception that bondservant ranks were composed mainly of Chinese captives from 1621,[12] in fact, this group was but one important source, and there is no indication either that they constituted a majority of the bondservant population or that the bondservant companies affiliated with the Imperial Household Department were made up exclusively of such people.[13]

Indeed, given their mixed origins, it may seem that in the bondservant companies we have an instance of company organization within the banners that is based entirely on principles of legal, not ethnic, status. Yet if we look more closely, we can see that this is not quite true. Even though grouped together in the same companies, bondservants were still differentiated by their origin and ethnicity. Most obviously, it seems that Chinese who were put into bondservant companies during the Liaodong campaign were all put into one type, the so-called "standard-bearer and drummer company" (Ch qigu zuoling)[14]. In addition, there were two companies of Korean bondservants in the Plain Yellow Banner.[15] All other bondservant companies appear to have been captained by (and thus likely filled by) Manchus who formerly had been Jurchen aha. Thus, although mention of the Eight Banner Manchus typically refers only to those Manchus registered in companies of regular households within the Manchu banners, it is worth remembering that there were many, many more ethnic Manchus within the bondservant companies in those banners, too.

Because they often occupied positions of prominence and influence in Qing government, and because of their unusual legal status, bondservants as a group have long been of great interest to Qing historians. However, persistent misunderstandings concerning their name and their origins have stood in the way of a complete and accurate assessment of the bondservants. By pointing out discrepancies between the Chinese term for the bondservants, bao-yi, and its putative Manchu equivalent, booi, this article has urged greater caution in ascertaining and ascribing bondservant status. I have also tried to set the record straight by emphasizing that bondservants were not all Chinese captives, but that many were Manchus as well. At the same time, however, I point out that despite their common legal status, institutional separation still maintained segregation between Chinese, Korean, and Manchu bondservants in the Eight Banners.

1. Jonathan Spence, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).

2. Manchu boo means "house" or "household," and i is a genitive particle.

3. Even in the work of the most eminent Qing historians of the twentieth century such errors can be found. Zheng Tianting, for instance, equated "bao-yi" with general status as a household slave, and Meng Sen asserted that the Manchu word boo-i later became the name of an official position. See Zheng, Tanweiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 84-85, and Meng, "Baqi zhidu kaoshi," 57, in Qingdai shi (Taipei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1960).

4. See Hu Zengyi, ed., Xin Man-Han da cidian (Urumqi: Xinjiang People's Publishing House, 1994); Shang Hongkui et al., eds., Qingshi Manyu cidian (Shanghai: Shanghai gujichubanshe, 1990), 34; Sun Wenliang, et al., eds., Manzu da cidian (Shenyang: Liaoning Daxue chubanshe, 1990), 171. In all these cases, booi is a separate entry following boo. It is interesting to note that in dictionaries written in Manchu (i.e., not in romanized form), such as Liu Housheng et al., eds., Jianming Man-Han cidian (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1988) and An Shuangcheng, et al., eds., Man-Han da cidian (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 1993), this error is not made.

5. Mo Dongyin, Manzushi luncong (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1958), 136.

6. See the examples in a brief discussion of this problem by Ishibashi Takao, "Booi in the Ch'ing Dynasty," Bulletin of the Institute of China Border Area Studies 18 (October 1987), 197-208. The distinction is also nicely made in Li Yanguang and Guan Jie, Manzu tongshi (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 1991), 398-406.

7. Yongzheng Manwen zhupi zouzhe (Palace memorials of the Yongzheng reign, First Historical Archives, Beijing; hereafter YZMaZPZZ) 239, Booxan, YZ12.10.5; Qianlong Manwen zhupi zouzhe 304, Tukxan QL24.5.13.

8. YZMaZPZZ 4, Bootai, YZ1.9.23, for the first citation; YZMaZPZZ 97, Nian Gengyao, YZ3.3.24, for the second.

9. YZMaZPZZ 262, Dalhasu, YZ13.4.6

10. Note the similarity between zhengshen and the term for regular Yuan military households, called zhengjunhu. Hsiao Ch'i-ch'ing, The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty (Cambridge: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1978), 19.

11. An accurate, if brief, account is in Spence, Ts'ao Yin, 7-9. For more detail, see Mo Dongyin, "Baqi zhidu," in Manzushi luncong (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1958), 136-148, Zheng Tianting, "Qingdai baoyi zhidu yu huanguan," in Tanwei ji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 88-109.

12. "Thus apart from the Han-martial Eight Banners, captives also furnished [people] for the bao-yi (the brave and healthy of the Han who had been captured in the early Tiancong period up to that time. . . )," Xiao Yishan [Hsiao I-shan], Qingdai tongshi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986 (orig. pub. 1962-1963), vol. 1, 239; "Most of the bondservants who later served the Manchus were members of Chinese families captured at Fushun and Shenyang," Frederic Wakeman, The Great Enterprise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 70, n. 126, citing Preston Torbert, The Imperial Household Department (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). "This institution [i.e., the Imperial Household Department] was staffed by men from bondservant companies that had been formed of Han Chinese captured by the Manchus in the Liao River basin of Manchuria before 1644." Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 7. More accurately, Charles Hucker writes of the Imperial Household Department that it was "staffed almost entirely by Imperial Bondservants, overwhelmingly Manchus." A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 4291.

13. The starting point for research on the bondservant companies are the pertinent sections describing banner composition (Ch qifenzhi) of the Baqi tongzhi (chuji) (hereafter BQTZ), juan 1-17. Thus in the description of the bondservant companies attached to the Bordered Yellow Banner, we find five Manchu companies (Manzhou zuoling/Manju niru), ten half-companies (guanling/hontoho) and six "standard-bearer and drummer" companies (Ch qigu zuoling). BQTZ 3, 41-45. The latter two were found only in the bondservant organization. See the following note.

14. As noted by Spence, "The phrase ch'i-ku in fact seems to have been coterminous with the Chinese nationality of the officeholders, for a check through the names of the ch'i-ku captains shows that nearly every one has an ordinary Chinese name, whereas nearly all the pao-i tso-ling have Manchu names." Ts'ao Yin, 35 and n. 158.

15. BQTZ 4, 66. There was originally only one such company, but it was split into two in 1695.