Kangxi Emperor - Personality and Achievements

Personality and Achievements

Kangxi was the great consolidator of the Qing Dynasty. The transition from the Ming Dynasty to the Qing was a cataclysm whose central event was the fall of the capital Beijing to the invading Manchus in 1644, and the installation of the five-year-old Shunzhi Emperor on their throne. By 1661, when Shunzhi died and was succeeded by Kangxi, the Qing conquest was almost complete and the leading Manchus were already adopting Chinese ways including Confucian ideology. Kangxi completed the conquest, suppressed all significant military threats and revived the ancient central government system with important modifications.

Kangxi was an inveterate workaholic, rising early and retiring late, reading and responding to numerous memorials every day, conferring with his councillors and giving audiences – and this was in normal times; in wartime, he might be reading memorials from the warfront until after midnight or even, as with the Dzungar conflict, away on campaign in person.

Kangxi devised a system of communication that circumvented the scholar-bureaucrats, who had a tendency to usurp the power of the emperor. This Palace Memorial System involved the transfer of secret messages between him and trusted officials in the provinces, where the messages were contained in locked boxes that only he and the official had access to. This started as a system for receiving uncensored extreme-weather reports, which the emperor regarded as divine comments on his rule. However, it soon evolved into a general-purpose secret "news channel". Out of this emerged a Grand Council, which dealt with extraordinary, especially military, events. The council was chaired by the emperor and manned by his more elevated Han Chinese household staff. From this council, the mandarin civil servants were excluded – they were left only with routine administration.

Kangxi managed to seduce the Confucian intelligentsia into co-operating with the Qing government, despite their deep reservations about Manchu rule, by encouraging them to sit the traditional civil service examinations, become mandarins and subsequently to compose lavishly conceived works of literature such the History of Ming, the Kangxi Dictionary, a phrase-dictionary, a vast encyclopedia and an even vaster compilation of Chinese literature. On a personal level, Kangxi was a cultivated man, steeped in Confucian learning.

In the one military campaign in which he actively participated, against the Dzungar Mongols, Kangxi showed himself an effective military commander. According to Finer, Kangxi's own written reflections allow one to experience "how intimate and caring was his communion with the rank-and-file, how discriminating and yet masterful his relationship with his generals".

As a result of the scaling down of hostilities as peace returned to China after the Manchu conquest, and also as a result of the ensuing rapid increase of population, land cultivation and therefore tax revenues based on agriculture, Kangxi was able first to make tax remissions, then in 1712 to freeze the land tax and corvée altogether, without embarrassing the state treasury.