The Forgotten Qing Genocide
When the Chinese Emperor ordered the destruction of a whole people
Considering there is only one state called “Mongolia,” it’s difficult to see how diverse the Mongols really were as an ethnic group. With the exception of a few periods in history, the era of the Mongol Empire being one of them, the Mongols were rarely united and mostly consisted of nomadic tribes, squabbling for dominance of one another.
Historically, there were two rival subgroups of Mongols. The Khalkha were the largest and mostly resided in present-day Mongolia. The Oirats, who were made up of a few major tribes known as the Four Oirat, lived in what is today Northwestern China, small parts of Russia, Mongolia, and Central Asia. The latter region was known as Dzunguria and is today mostly inhabited by ethnic Han Chinese, Kazakhs, and Uyghurs.
The Genocide
In c.1620, the Dzungars, an Oirat tribe finally united the Western Mongols into a single, nomadic state known as the Dzungar Khanate. They fought against the Khalkha Mongols to the east and the newly-established Manchu Chinese Qing Dynasty to the southeast, and at a certain point held the Tarim Basim, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia.
The Dzungars were powerful and the Qing needed the perfect circumstances to defeat them. This came in 1745 when the khan died and a series of succession disputes followed by a devastating civil war severely weakened the Dzungars and gave their enemy a golden opportunity. A series of Dzungar nobles even defected to the Khalkha, who were allied with the Qing. When the Qianlong Emperor sent 50,000 soldiers to Dzungaria, the Oirat Mongols who had been a thorn in China’s side for some 75 years practically did not put up a fight.
The Qing originally did not want to destroy the Oirats but no longer wanted them to be a threat, and opted to divide the Dzungar Khanate among the four Oirat tribes, each with their own Khan. However, Amursana, a disgruntled noble who had previously allied with the Qing to destroy the Dzungar state was merely made Khan of the Khoid Mongols, even though he wanted to be the ruler of all the Oirat tribes. Thus, in 1755, he began a failed revolt against the Qing which was crushed two years later. The Oirat nobleman then fled to Russia where he died in Tobolsk on 21 September 1757.
The Dzungars now faced the Qianlong Emperor’s wrath. Incensed at Amursana’s betrayal, he ordered their destruction.
“Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur. If a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surrender. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. Tell Tsengünjav[A Mongol ally of the Qing] to massacre these crafty Zunghars. Do not believe what they say.”
— The Qianlong Emperor, translated by Peter C. Perdue
The emperor also ordered that the “young and strong” be massacred and that young men who surrendered should be executed because “their ancestors were chieftains.” These orders spared children, women, and the elderly from death but enslaved them as bondservants with their Dzungar identity to be forgotten and erased forever. The devastating effects on the land and population were noted by a Qing official:
“Of several hundred thousand households, 40 percent died of smallpox, 20 percent fled to the Russians and Kazakhs, and 30 percent were killed by the Great Army. [The remaining] women and children were given as [servants] to others. . . For several thousand li [one-third of a mile] there was not a single Zungharian tent.”
— Wei Yuan
The kind of brutality inflicted by the Qing armies and mercenaries on the Dzungar people contrasted deeply with the seemingly humanistic and benevolent tenets of Chinese Confucianism. But Confucianism also emphasized obedience and the heavenly nature of the emperor, so those who opposed heaven’s will were perceived as no more than bandits and savages.
Interestingly, the Qianlong Emperor was actually quite open to the idea of considering outsiders like the Mongols as Chinese and opposed the opinion that Dzungaria should not be incorporated into the country. Indeed, his not-so-distant ancestors had been outsiders themselves. But the genocide of the Dzungars displayed a far uglier aspect of the emperor’s ambitions. Soon, he allowed the resettlement of Manchus, Uyghurs, and Han Chinese to the depopulated territories of Dzungaria and permitted the renaming of cities from their previous Mongol ones. The entire region itself was given a more familiar name: Xinjiang.
“In the final massacre, Qianlong bared his teeth. He had called himself a ruler who showed equal favor to all, aiming to encompass a variety of different peoples under one harmonious realm. But those who resisted the imperial embrace faced extermination. The emperor’s edicts from this period expose the tension within the mid-Qing between the ideal of benevolence and the reality of repression.”
— Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
Though a man willing to be tolerant, he did not hesitate to exterminate the Dzungars, erase their culture, and scatter them to the four corners when they refused him.
Estimates vary, but around 70–80% of the Dzungar population of 500,000–800,000 died due to starvation, disease, or by the orders of the Qianlong Emperor to wipe them out. As a consequence of the genocide and the settlement of the region by Han, Manchu, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs, barely 1% of the population of Xinjiang is Mongol today.
In a twist of historical fate, the Eastern Khalkha Mongols, having conceded their independence to the Qing, managed to survive the several centuries of colonization to establish their own nation we know today as Mongolia. Meanwhile, the Dzungars, who zealously fought annexation had their state, culture, and people annihilated.
References
- https://www.google.com/books/edition/History_of_Civilizations_of_Central_Asia/XPfcfF8LRWQC?hl=en
- https://www.google.com/books/edition/China_Marches_West/J4L-_cjmSqoC?hl=en&gbpv=1
- https://www.google.com/books/edition/Peacemaking_From_Practice_to_Theory_2_vo/XLgWhJXHqYAC?q=Zunghar+genocide&gbpv=1#f=false
- https://www.google.com/books/edition/War_Crimes_Genocide_and_Justice/aynFAgAAQBAJ?q=Zunghar+genocide&gbpv=1#f=false
- https://web.archive.org/web/20080410040826/http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/uploads/approved/adt-QGU20061121.163131/public/02Whole.pdf
