CHAPTER 5

Conquest, Continuity, and the Loyal Turncoat

In Shunzhi 6 (1649), Feng Quan celebrated his mother’s eightyseventh birthday. On behalf of a large group of officials, the turncoat Hu Shi’an (jinshi 1628) authored a congratulatory essay for this highly publicized occasion. Feng’s colleagues all wanted to acknowledge his impressive zhongxiao achievements, a success story for the Qing policy of “governing with filial piety.”¹

The essay describes Feng willingly leaving his powerful position for some time to visit his aged mother and praises the sagacious ruler, the Shunzhi emperor—but in actuality, Regent Dorgon—for recognizing this official’s zhongxiao commitment. Hu invokes two historical figures to highlight Feng’s zhongxiao accomplishment. Both figures served as prime minister in the Song dynasty: Zhang Qixian (942–1014), increasingly dissatisfied with the emperor’s policies, resigned, using the excuse of needing to care for his mother; Fu Bi (1004–1083) stepped down from his position of prime minister when his mother passed away.

Strictly speaking, these historical references were not proper for the occasion, as they differed from Feng Quan’s circumstances in fundamental ways. However, they still served a meaningful purpose: Hu suggests that because Feng’s mother had lived longer than the mothers of these two accomplished Song officials, Heaven had rewarded Feng, who had the good fortune to thrive in a better time. The same message was repeated at another major celebration of Feng Quan’s mother by his colleagues, in Shunzhi 11 (1654).² Then, upon her death the next year, in an epitaph composed by the turncoat Jin Zhijun (jinshi 1619), Feng was again portrayed as a man of “noble aspirations to zhongxiao” (zhongxiao dazhi).³

Image-making efforts such as these remained an important way for turncoats to strengthen friendships and affirm political positions. By incorporating public and personal lives into one narrative, these efforts also, if unwittingly, burnished the Qing court’s own image. In the early Qing, the turncoats’ narrative of moral continuity—from the Ming to the Qing, and between loyalty and other Confucian masculine virtues—was intertwined with the Manchu claim to moral superiority. The Qing “ethno-dynastic rule” would reveal itself in the entangled Confucian family tales of the Manchu monarchs and their Han subjects.⁴ While the Manchu claim to moral superiority constituted a significant part of the Qing consolidation of power, narratives of moral continuity were indispensable in rebuilding the turncoats’ social lives and literati society across the empire. Through a variety of media such as visual art, literature, family genealogy, and public spectacles, the figure of the loyal turncoat, an emblem of Confucian ethical ideals pursued across the dynastic divide, conveniently became a site of sociopolitical negotiation between factionalists, between the Manchus and the Han, and between turncoats and Ming loyalists.

PORTRAITS OF THE LOYAL TURNCOAT

As Manchu rulers and Han officials sought ways of navigating the increasingly complex factional strife and unpredictable conditions outside the court in order to survive, adapt, and forestall political trouble, Han officials created the vivid figure of the “loyal turncoat.” This figure embodied undisrupted commitment to loyalty, filial piety, friendship, and gender propriety from the Ming to the Qing.

Loyal Turncoats as True Friends

The turncoats’ survival depended on their ability to mobilize social and cultural resources with which to improvise protective tactics amid uncertainty. They achieved this goal by helping one another articulate their experiences during the dynastic change and reiterate their collective and personal commitment to Confucian ideals. Take some of the turncoats associated with the Fushe as examples. Within this community, there emerged a strengthened sense of mutual sympathy and dedication. When Beijing fell, Chen Mingxia was captured by the rebels but eventually escaped to the south, where he found himself condemned as a disloyal official and wanted by the Southern Ming regime. So he fled again, and after months of living as a fugitive in various provinces, he returned to Beijing in late 1644.⁵ Chen’s Fushe friends there wholeheartedly embraced him as an old friend, expecting to strengthen their bonds in those trying times. A line from Cao Rong’s (1613–1685) poem best captures the sentiment: “Homeless now, how can we afford to lose friends?”⁶

Another celebrity figure among Fushe scholars, Li Wen, composed two moving poems upon Chen’s arrival. In the poems, he expressed his confidence that the turmoil would only draw out the most sincere feelings among the friends. Lamenting that so many extraordinarily talented friends had perished during the war, he voiced the expectation that Chen’s arrival would rekindle hope and good spirits in their community in Beijing. By invoking a few famous historical references, Li unmistakably implied that Chen’s loyalty and talents warranted imperial recognition in the new dynasty.⁷

At Chen’s request, Xiong Wenju, another Fushe friend, composed a preface for his new poetry collection. That collection, which was to be printed soon thereafter, consisted of poems Chen had written during 1644, as he, like many of his Fushe friends, tried to survive the rebellions and the Manchu invasion. In his preface, Xiong emotionally described how he encountered this poetry collection: when he reunited with Chen, choking on tears, they told each other their own heartbreaking experiences upon and immediately after the fall of Beijing. It was at this moment that Chen showed Xiong the poems written during that period and requested a preface.⁸

Xiong employs in this preface the traditional language of zhongxiao, but he challenges some literati’s selective invocation of zhongxiao for purposes of political persecution. He recalls Chen’s accomplishments in the last year of the Ming dynasty, arguing that Chen did not commit suicide when Beijing fell but fled to the south only because he was loyal to the Ming. Now his return from the south testified to his loyalty to the new dynasty, which had taken over the Mandate of Heaven and pledged to serve the people better than the corrupt Southern Ming regime had.⁹ Importantly, Xiong urges the reader to contemplate the meaning of true zhongxiao and rebukes the unfair treatment of officials trapped in Beijing at the hands of “literati in the south who snarl at Chen and slander his colleagues who have had similar experience”: “They look on unconcerned and comment with such ease, ‘This man should be executed’ and ‘that man should be arrested.’ When the parents suffer, the sons who happen to be living with them are expected to kill themselves. Those who live far away do not assume any responsibility. They have already taken advantage of the situation. Now they criticize the brothers who have gone through hardships with their parents.”¹⁰

Literary projects of this kind generated a positive image of the loyal turncoat as one who practices Confucian ethics in spite of dislocation and dynastic change. Sharing the personal sufferings inflicted by selfproclaimed loyalists strengthened their bond as true friends. Equally as important, turncoat friends fulfilled the role of witness and helped one another explain and authenticate their continuous commitment to Confucian ethics. As shown earlier, Chen Mingxia “became” a disloyal official by accident. However, he was too cautious to provide all the details of his escape attempts. In the meantime, many contemporaries, even though were aware that the established image of Chen might be inaccurate, still felt hesitant about disregarding the official lists of disloyal officials circulated by the Southern Ming government on which Chen appeared.¹¹ Given such circumstances, publishing the turncoats’ writing and comments about their wartime experiences was ever more important.

Turncoats also constructed meaningful images of the loyal turncoat through visual art, as shown by two Fushe friends, Gong Dingzi and Cao Rong. Sometime after the Manchus drove the rebel army out of Beijing, Gong and Cao were appointed to the same positions they had held before the change of regime.¹² Gong was still trying to avoid accepting his appointment when Cao began to serve the Qing. One day, Cao brought Gong a scroll and had him ask Gu Mei to paint on it. The inscription, by Gong himself, is dated the summer of 1644, before Gong officially entered the Qing government.¹³ The pictorial content of the painting has not survived, but from the inscription that alludes to orchid, a long-standing metaphor for the loyal subject, it seems to have been an orchid painting, for which Gu was well known.¹⁴

The message conveyed in Gu’s painting and Gong’s accompanying inscription reveals how carefully turncoats contemplated the proper way of displaying their commitment to Confucian ideals. Every minute detail is meaningful. In particular, the inscription’s reference to the historical figure Yu Xin (513–581) allows the turncoats to defy being easily categorized as “disloyal.”¹⁵ They were turncoats who nonetheless held fast to loyalty.

This gift had a single focus: to convey deep sorrow. Its reference to Yu Xin and the sorrow motif produce a nuanced image of the loyal turncoat. Yu Xin does not, first and foremost, represent disloyalty here.¹⁶ In fact, the power of this historical-literary reference is its allusion to the helplessness and sorrow in Yu Xin’s famous poem, “The Lament for the South” (Ai Jiangnan fu), in which he proclaims his “reluctant disloyalty.” Gong and Cao used this allusion quite often in the early years of the Qing because it suited their delicate situation very well. By that time, “The Lament for the South” had become a classic expression of sorrow over the loss of one’s homeland. Through such references to Yu Xin, turncoats could plausibly present themselves as helpless victims of war—melancholic men, pained by the loss of their country and their martyred emperor. Because the historical figure Yu Xin made his political decision involuntarily, the imagery expressing his great sorrow helped the turncoats explain their circumstances and engage the question of loyalty in a nuanced but meaningful way.

Southerner turncoats in the early Qing often alluded to Yu Xin in their poetry.¹⁷ The reference in the inscription on Gu Mei’s painting is the earliest example of this. Interestingly, nearly all the turncoats who frequently used this imagery at the time belonged to Gong Dingzi’s and Cao Rong’s social circles. It is also significant that when the turncoats circulated this imagery in their poetry, some Ming loyalist friends responded positively to this device.¹⁸ Therefore, just how Gong and Cao employed Yu Xin in art and literature to negotiate loyalty deserves careful consideration.

First, the image of the war victim defuses the stereotypical turncoat figure—traitor to Confucian ethics—by revealing the injustice of this misrepresentation applied to individuals caught in such unfortunate circumstances. At the time the painting and its inscription were made, neither Gong Dingzi nor Cao Rong had found an opportunity to return south to face charges leveled against turncoats in the anti-Qing stronghold areas. But news traveled between the conquered and unconquered regions, bringing with it reports of how the Southern Ming government and the public were persecuting survivor officials and their families.¹⁹ Gong’s inscription pleads for understanding of their complicated political choices through an imagined conversation between the turncoat and the loyalist. In their dialogue, he allows the lament of officials like himself to be challenged and even mocked by two figures from literature famous for political withdrawal, Chrysanthemum of the East Bamboo Fence (Dongli Ju) and Thornferns of the Western Mountains (Xishan Wei).²⁰ Here they clearly stand in for the Ming loyalists. “We lament before the grass and flowers, sobbing, sighing, and confessing. Our hearts are sorrowful; no poems are without pain. The Chrysanthemum of the East Bamboo Fence and the Thornferns of the Western Mountains must be laughing at us, and at [the orchids accompanying] these two frustrated fellows.”²¹ Gong’s voice, representing the vulnerable turncoat, characterizes their situation as being helpless “prisoners of war” (shen zuo fuqiu).²² Gu Mei’s orchid painting, then, becomes a meaningful platform for Cao’s and Gong’s self-expression and self-representation as men who remain loyal at heart. They are turncoats with loyalty.

In interesting ways, the presence of Gu Mei in this gift as a “witness” testifies to the turncoats’ unwavering commitment to Confucian ideals. Gong’s inscription comments that Gu’s painting is artistically marvelous but cannot be considered a truly good piece of work, due to its unrestrained expression of sorrow.²³ However, this critical comment actually strengthens their claim of loyalty, because the “excessive sorrow”—at the expense of artistic perfection—manifests the sincerity of their loyal sentiments. In other words, what has rendered Gu’s painting artistically imperfect is precisely what authenticates these men’s unwavering adherence to Confucian ethical ideals.

This act of gifting, the use of the cultural symbol of Yu Xin, and the virtuous concubine’s testimony enabled friends to present one another as the “loyal turncoat.” In turn, their friendship acquired new energy. But continuity in friendship and the image of the true friend could not be taken for granted, especially as war and chaos threatened and tested the officials’ sociopolitical bonds and their different approaches to Confucian values. The times required that turncoats carefully nourish their friendships, among themselves and increasingly with loyalists, by following a shared understanding and practice of Confucian ethical ideals. Failure to do so could bring friendships to an end.

In fact, not all friendships were strengthened and enriched as turncoats engaged the discursive connection between loyalty and friendship. Take Gong Dingzi and Chen Mingxia as an example. In their service to the Qing, it became increasingly clear that Gong and Chen had adopted opposite approaches to their role as officials. Chen was eager to demonstrate his loyalty to the new rulers.²⁴ What most hurt the feelings of his Ming loyalist friends was that, in his eagerness to prove his loyalty to the Qing, he repeatedly recommended them to the court.²⁵

In contrast, Gong sought only sympathy and forgiveness from his loyalist friends. Further, within the government, Gong tried to protect his colleague-friends whose family members participated in resistance movements in the south. For this he was impeached and disciplined.²⁶ Gong’s willingness to explain his identity as a loyal turncoat and to prioritize his friends’ feelings and needs made him a “true friend.” Thus, the factional grudge between Gong and Chen was in fact a battle of competing moral images—one turncoat currying favor with the new ruler versus another who was a trustworthy friend, loyal at heart to his country. As shown earlier, in his impeachment of Chen Mingxia at court, the turncoat Luo Guoshi painted contrasting images of these former friends by highlighting Chen’s neglect of zhongxiao versus Gong’s persistent filial devotion and loyalty.

Loyal Turncoats as Filial Sons

In the early Qing, turncoat officials had to struggle constantly against the disloyal-immoral images imposed on them by both diehard loyalists and factional enemies at court. This was true even of seemingly successful turncoats at the height of their careers, men such as Song Quan. Song’s untiring investment in his zhongxiao image in various forms from the late Ming to the early Qing reveals the political skills of an experienced, intelligent official at a time of crisis. The figure of the loyal turncoat emerging from his writings and actions is someone who pursues zhongxiao ethics across the dynastic divide, and whose moral performance is even strengthened by the dynastic change.

In the spring of Chongzhen 16 (1643), exactly one year before the fall of Beijing, Song compiled and printed a collection of poetry. Many of these poems had been composed in the previous year, when the Song family had to flee their hometown, Shangqiu in Henan, amid violence and massive destruction inflicted by rebels. For six months, Song escorted his mother, Madam Ding, from their devastated hometown to various locations before they settled temporarily in Nanjing. At one point, Song almost lost his nine-year-old son Song Luo (1634–1713), and his younger son disappeared on the journey to Nanjing. Song Quan was soon summoned by the Chongzhen emperor to lead defense efforts in the capital area. In Chongzhen 16/1 (1643), Song and his family arrived in Beijing. A couple of months later, Song published a poetry collection.²⁷

The publication of this collection so soon after Song’s arrival in the capital had particular meanings. The difficult times tried a man’s determination to fulfill zhongxiao duties. Song’s career had begun with his appointment as magistrate in Shanxi. Five years later, in the early Chongzhen reign, he served as a censor in Beijing until his memorials offended powerful officials and earned him a demotion. In protest, Song resigned from office with the excuse that he had to take care of his mother.²⁸ Thus, in the last years of the Ming, Song’s moral-political performance matched perfectly with the traditional image of a loyal official, refusing to compromise with corrupt power and drawing on filial piety as both a rhetoric of political protest and an inspiration for his devotion to the emperor.

This zhongxiao image is made clear in the very title of the poetry collection, Baihua Poems from a Time of Sojourning (Baihua ke kuang), which contains a literary reference from the Book of Poetry (Shijing).²⁹ Baihua had long existed in literati vocabulary as a reference to filiality. Song begins the preface to this collection by emphasizing his filial duty toward his mother: “Baihua means the commitment to take care of one’s parents.”³⁰ Ke kuang, literally meaning residing as a guest who has lost his home, is used here by Song to describe the strong bond between him and his mother, Madam Ding, during their time of dislocation and hardship.³¹ Publishing this collection at this particular moment made Song an emblem of the Confucian masculine ideal known as “transferring filial piety to loyalty” (yi xiao zuo zhong).³²

If the publication of his poetry collection was a way for Song to reassert himself in court politics in the late Ming, then his self-portrayal as a loyal turncoat in the first years of the Shunzhi reign sheds light on how he anticipated and coped with that complex and volatile political situation in the new dynasty. During the Dorgon regency, Song’s competence and political integrity secured steady promotions. He was appointed grand secretary in Shungzhi 3/1 (1646).³³ Song represented the successful, even model, bureaucrat that the Manchu rulers desired. He did not embrace any extremes in politics or policy. His proposals to the court aimed mainly to promote a balanced agenda that would protect the interests of ordinary Manchu and Han people. Further, he had remained unidentified with any particular faction. He possessed a charisma enhanced by genuine interest in military strategy and military skills. He became an indispensable figure in the government. Hence, in Shunzhi 5 (1648), upon Madam Ding’s death, as a gesture of trust and favor, Dorgon rejected Song’s request for a mourning leave, issued him a duoqing order, and continued to assign him important tasks.

Having gone through late-Ming factionalism, Song was alert to the political risks involved in a duoqing case. This awareness probably led him to invest heavily in a narrative of moral continuity. When his request for mourning leave was rejected, he did what he could to fulfill his filial duty. In the “Deeds of Madam Ding” (Ding taifuren xingshi), the official biographical account composed by Song for his deceased mother, he delineated an image for himself in which a son’s filial devotion intersected with his loyalty to both the fallen Ming and the new Qing regime.

According to this account, three days before the fall of Beijing to the rebels, Song was promoted to governor of the Shuntian area, an administrative district that overlapped with Beijing. He diligently set out to patrol the surrounding regions. When the rebels began arresting and recruiting former Ming officials in the fallen capital, Song happened to be conducting an inspection tour nearby and therefore did not face imminent threat. However, his mother was stuck in the rebel-controlled city, Zunhua (in modern-day Hebei). Song mobilized his former subordinates and coordinated military actions to attack the rebels in Zunhua after learning about Li Zicheng’s defeat by the Manchus at the Shanhai Pass. When Li retreated to Beijing and learned of Song’s decisive leadership in the Zunhua insurgence, he immediately dispatched thousands of troops to retaliate. Song sent a trusted friend, General Tang Yü, to the Shanhai Pass to request help from the Manchus. Tang reached the pass and delivered the message requesting loan of their forces to avenge the late Ming emperor. After the Manchus drove Li Zicheng and his army out of Beijing, Song moved his mother safely back from her refuge in the mountains. He told Dorgon that he had fulfilled his duty toward the martyred Ming emperor and would like to retire.³⁴ Dorgon reinstalled him as governor of Shuntian, with his headquarters in Miyun, in the vicinity of Beijing.³⁵

Song Quan claims that all his political decisions and actions during the late Ming and the changes of regime in 1644, especially his switching loyalty to the Qing, “resulted from Mother’s influence” (mu cheng zhi ye). Indeed, his mother’s biography radiates a spirit of zhongxiao and stresses that Song’s accomplishments as a son and an official in the two dynasties were inseparable and continuous. It recalls how Madam Ding provided moral support for Song’s answer to the Chongzhen emperor’s call to take charge of the defense of the capital area, and how, when he led the military actions against the rebels, Madam Ding met with the soldiers and delivered encouraging words. Song asserts that his revenge on behalf of the martyred Chongzhen emperor through collaboration with the Qing authority should be attributed to his mother.³⁶ The shift in loyalty to the Qing is smooth and natural, testifying to and justified by the continuity of filial devotion.

Upon entering service with the Qing, according to this narrative, Song continued to deepen his understanding of the ethics of zhongxiao. He introduces his mother’s virtuous life with a mention of his recent participation in compiling the Veritable Records of the Qing’s founding emperor, Nurhaci.³⁷ Madam Ding died at the end of Shunzhi 5 (1658). Soon, in Shunzhi 6 (1659), the court issued an edict that commissioned compilation of the Veritable Records of Nurhaci’s reign. Song assumed the official title of Grand Secretary of the Historiography Academy (Guoshiyuan Daxueshi). He states that even though he was given a duoqing order, having been granted the honorable task of supervising this history project has reminded him that composing a detailed account documenting his mother’s virtuous deeds would allow him to be at once a filial son and a loyal official.³⁸

Song’s praise for imperial generosity upon his mother’s death conveyed the same message. The Qing court had rewarded Song by sending the president of the Board of Rites to mourn Madam Ding, with an imperial edict recognizing Song’s fulfillment of the ideal of “transferring filial piety to loyalty.”³⁹ When expressing his gratitude to the court, Song made a special point of recognizing that the court had in this case made an exception by granting imperial sacrifice to a woman who had not received an official title. In this way, Song indicated that his understanding of zhongxiao actually continued to deepen with his service to the new dynasty.⁴⁰

Song Quan’s image as a “loyal turncoat” does not simply justify his shift in loyalty; it makes dynastic change one moment in an official’s ongoing, diligent pursuit of moral cultivation. Once the pattern of zhongxiao is established this way, any political decision making could be turned into an episode of continuous moral growth. For example, three months after Madam Ding’s death, the court appointed Song to preside over the metropolitan civil service examinations, a responsibility that required him to participate in celebratory ceremonies and hence violate mourning norms. Song complied, but in the written instructions to the examinees, he particularly stressed the moral significance of correct literary style: “Superb performance of zhongxiao derives from the correct style; tremendous evils derive from incorrect styles.”⁴¹ Although the same sentence had appeared a year before in a memorial jointly submitted by Song Quan and Feng Quan regarding the government regulation of literati publishing, employing the zhongxiao language at this sensitive moment seemed to serve a different purpose.⁴² It was not incidental that another turncoat grand secretary, Hong Chengchou, lectured to this newly selected jinshi cohort on the meaning of zhongxiao in the course of his own efforts to survive at court (discussed in chap. 4).

TRANSGENERATIONAL FAMILY TALES AND MANCHU MORAL SUPERIORITY

The loyal turncoat as figured by Song Quan was a man unrelenting in his pursuit of moral cultivation. The success of this figure demonstrates the power of the continuum of Confucian moralism centered on zhongxiao. Song family tales spanned a few generations, from the late Ming to the early Qing. Conceptually, the notion of the dynastic cycle resembles that of the human life cycle, so the beginning of the new dynasty is considered to have been seeded in the last phases of the old one.⁴³ Similarly, the Confucian moral-political system both ensures and lives in generational continuity. In the context of a dynastic change, the new dynasty must be integrated into transgenerational Confucian family tales in order to take root. The transdynastic, transgenerational stories of Song Quan’s family show how the loyal turncoat figure became a site of negotiation for turncoat families seeking an advantageous position between Ming loyalism and Manchu claims to moral superiority as the Manchu rulers and Han elite were working out the moral-political division of labor under new political conditions.

The Exemplary Patriarch

Song Quan had not been a controversial figure in early Qing politics, so the humiliations caused by the moral attacks on him amid Manchu factionalism in the mid-Shunzhi reign must have generated a deep sense of unfairness and the desire among Song’s family and supporters to see his redemption. Song’s images as presented by his son and friends—depicting his experience in late-Ming politics, during Li Zicheng’s temporary occupation of Beijing, and in the early Qing—placed particular stress on continuity in his moral pursuits and the family’s Confucian tradition.

Friends of the Song family understood the stakes of restoring Song Quan’s public image after his political demise. The turncoat Liu Yuyou (d. 1653), Song’s in-law, who had served as the president of three boards (Revenues, War, and Punishments) during the Shunzhi reign, wrote Song’s epitaph.⁴⁴ He stressed that Song had persistently requested mourning leave upon the death of his mother and had attempted to decline the prestigious appointment to supervise the metropolitan civil service exams, though his efforts had not been successful.⁴⁵ Similarly, in the tombstone inscriptions composed for Song by his disciple, the official Tang Bin (1627–1687), the connection between the virtues of loyalty and filial piety was again highlighted.⁴⁶ These representations directly refuted the charges that had brought down Song Quan and insulted the Song family.

Song Quan’s image as moral exemplar was further sharpened by his eldest son, Song Luo (1634–1714), in his depictions of his father as an exemplary patriarch in official documents, biographies, and the family genealogy. First, Song Luo made sure that his father’s extraordinary zhongxiao performance would be reflected in official documents to erase the negative claims that caused his father’s disgrace. During the early Kangxi reign, Song Luo became an assistant magistrate in Huangzhou. In Kangxi 6 (1667), he earned honorary titles for his family members from the court. Since the imperial documents issued for such matters were based on material submitted by the officials themselves, it is particularly telling that Song made zhongxiao a central piece of his family tradition: his father exemplified how filial piety turned into loyalty, and his grandmother manifested womanly virtues by educating filial sons to become loyal subjects.⁴⁷

Starting in Kangxi 14 (1675), Song Luo compiled and printed a large amount of material related to his family history.⁴⁸ The reprint of his father’s old poetry collection, which was published before the fall of Beijing, is particularly interesting and revealing. Song Luo changed the title from Baihua Poems from the Time of Sojourning to Poems of Baihua Hall (Baihuatang shi). In addition, this reprint included poems composed during the transfer of power in 1644. Whereas the original title and contents displayed an official’s filial piety to his mother and loyalty to the Ming at a difficult time, in the reprint, Song Quan’s loyalty to the Qing enters the picture and completes his image of transdynastic moral exemplariness. The sojourning experiences of the Song son and mother in 1644 became part of the family’s journey to prosperity in the new dynasty. For example, one of the poems composed in those days, “In My Office at Miyun” (Miyun shu zhong), skillfully expresses the transfer of Song Quan’s loyalty:

Three years have passed since I bid farewell to the Ming;

Twice have I come to Miyun.

When not in office, I serve my caring mother;

Nothing in the world can make me worry.⁴⁹

These lines draw a vivid picture of an ideal Confucian man who had fulfilled zhongxiao by perfectly blending his loyal service to two dynasties with his filial devotion. Although the subject of Song Quan’s filial narrative remained focused on Madam Ding, the object of his loyalty changed in 1644, from the Ming to the Qing. In four simple lines, this poem concludes an old era and opens a new page in his public career, with a strong sense of continuity in both his personal and political lives enabled by zhongxiao ethics. This shift in loyalty is naturalized in the reprint of this collection.

Song Luo continued with the image-making efforts initiated by his father, but he cemented them by making more extensive use of print. While his grandfather and father had begun to compile a family genealogy, it was Song Luo who not only fundamentally transformed its format but also had it published. As he circulated it among both officials and loyalist literati over the years, he collected more prefaces, which enhanced the influence of his family tales, and consolidated their transdynastic, transgenerational moral narrative.⁵⁰ In this genealogy, Song Luo positions his father as the most accomplished patriarch of the family since the mid-Ming: “[My father] had served in several official positions at court and in the provinces until he became a grand secretary. Always dedicated and attentive, he transformed filial devotion into loyalty (yi xiao zuo zhong), and therefore had really inherited and realized our ancestors’ noble ideals.”⁵¹ The dynastic transition and Song Quan’s switch in loyalty go unremarked upon. Instead, they serve as the background for the extraordinary continuity and consistency in Song Quan’s filial performance and the Song family’s Confucian tradition.

Revering the Matriarch

The appeal of the loyal turncoat in in the Songs’ transdynastic family tale also derived from the figure of the Confucian matriarch, Madam Ding, who occupied a significant place in the family’s struggle over image and politics. On a practical level, she stitched various generations of the family together. On the symbolic level, she helped connect the moral continuity of the Song family to the establishment of Manchu dominance.

A weighty character in the Song family tale, Madam Ding has an image that outshines even that of her turncoat son, Song Quan. When her grandson Song Luo edited the biography of Madam Ding for the family genealogy in the early Kangxi reign, he mostly copied his father’s original but elaborated on the transgenerational and transdynastic moral exemplariness of the Songs. One anecdote details Madam Ding’s participation in a public ceremony in the summer of 1644, at which Song Quan mobilized his Ming troops to suppress the rebels with the help of the Manchus. Madam Ding’s presence justified and even motivated her son’s shift in loyalty to the Qing and once again showed the power of his zhongxiao commitment.⁵²

The matriarch not only provided the occasion for recording the Songs’ loyalty toward both the Ming and the Qing, but more importantly, her story glorified the Manchu emperor’s moral accomplishments. The Shunzhi emperor was merely seven years old when his uncle Dorgon ushered him into the imperial palaces in Beijing. That year, Song Luo, just eleven years old himself,⁵³ had gone through war and family losses with his father. In Shunzhi 4 (1647), when he was fourteen, the court issued an edict asking high-ranking officials to send one son to serve the young emperor, a duty that came with the title and status of Imperial Guard. Song Quan complied. From then on, every day, Song Luo rode a horse and wore a sword, entering the Forbidden City with the most prestigious princes and officials.

According to Song Luo, during that time, he regularly waited at the emperor’s and dowager empress’s meals and received his share afterward. He recalled that on special occasions and banquets, he often accompanied the young emperor. He fondly remembered that one day, while sitting next to the emperor at a feast, he put some delicacies into a pocket. The emperor, curious, asked him about it. Song knelt down and replied: “Your Majesty, my grandmother Madam Ding is seventy years old. I wanted to offer her what I had received from Your Majesty.” The young emperor was delighted: “From today you can take home whatever you like!” Song would always take some rare delicacies back to his grandmother after the banquets. Madam Ding was very pleased and told him to serve the emperor with loyalty as his father did.⁵⁴ In this story the Manchu ruler’s virtues and the Song family’s adherence to Confucian ethics authenticate each other and are mutually constituted.

This narrative of the family’s moral consistency projects a glowing image of the Shunzhi emperor, who had learned how to “govern with filial piety” at a very young age. Since Song Luo would go on to become a favorite official of the succeeding monarch, the Kangxi emperor, this family tale echoed and supported the imperial family tale and the emperor’s image as a filial man. The Kangxi emperor’s deployment of “dynastic filiality” as an instrument of Qing ethnodynastic rule invoked Manchu ancestral worship and also resonated with the Han notion of filiality.⁵⁵ The discourse of filial piety—and its many rhetorical and physical manifestations—served multiple political purposes, as “a gesture of bureaucratic propitiation and an ideological expression of ethno-dynastic triumphalism.” Manchu dowager empresses, like Madam Ding as mother and grandmother, often figured prominently in these imperial filial performances.⁵⁶

By the time the episode about his grandmother was printed in Song Luo’s autobiography, the locus of image politics had shifted markedly toward the Manchu monarch. In Kangxi 20 (1681), soon after the campaign against the Three Feudatories had ended, the emperor proceeded to the Beijing suburbs, where he conducted burial ceremonies at the Imperial Mausoleums of Filiality (Xiaoling) for two deceased dowager empresses.⁵⁷ Manchu nobles and high-ranking Han officials added much luster to the event, which, in the words of Wang Shizhen (1634–1711), then director of the Imperial Academy of Learning (Guozijian), staged a grand display of imperial virtue.⁵⁸

Song Luo, now a top official on the Board of Punishments, took part in this imperial filial spectacle and compiled a poetry collection at the end of the trip. Commenting on this collection, Wang Shizhen identifies connections among the excellent services of the Song father and son as officials, the prosperity of the Kangxi reign, and Song Luo’s adherence to the poetic tradition descending from the Book of Poetry—“words of loyal officials and filial sons.”⁵⁹ Wang’s preface portrays how the Songs thrived in a prosperous empire where the Manchu emperors’ accomplishments evinced its successful governing with filial piety. Interestingly, this portrayal strove more to elucidate the exemplariness of the Manchu emperor more than to praise the Songs’ personal virtues, which no doubt reflected this important shift in early Qing image politics.

Song Luo and Wang Shizhen, like many of their Han colleagues, eventually entered history as competent administrators, dedicated agents of the state who effectively applied their cultural skills to serving the Qing civilizing projects, and admirers of their Manchu ruler’s moral exemplariness. As the Manchu monarchs established their moral superiority and eventually came to embody it more fully, turncoat officials’ concerted endeavors to publicize their own continuous moral pursuits across the dynastic divide not only testified to this shift of focus but also contributed to it.

Placing the Turncoat Generation

Indeed, reconfiguration of the moral-political division of labor between the Manchu monarch and his Han subjects occurred in part over conversations regarding the generational position of the turncoats. Ming loyalists participated in these conversations as well. The loyalist Zhang Zilie, in his preface composed for Song Luo’s collection of work, completely omits mention of Song Luo’s father, Song Quan. Instead, Zhang praised Song Xun (1522–1591), Song Luo’s greatgrandfather and a reputable Ming official, for his work on Cheng-Zhu Confucianism, and expressed his hope that Song Luo would not “ignore this family heritage.”⁶⁰ This account fails to echo Song Luo’s emphasis on the continuity of zhongxiao from his great-grandfather to his father. The conspicuous absence of Song Quan in this narrative reflects a die-hard loyalist’s reluctance to tolerate turncoats. Even so, Zhang does not reject the idea that Song Luo could revive the family’s tradition and moral reputation. In fact, he urges Song to make efforts to overcome the temporary rupture in that tradition.

The loyalist Wei Xi (1624–1681), however, delineates a different image for Song Quan. He sees both Song’s undisrupted government service and his pursuit of zhongxiao as extraordinary accomplishments. In a postscript to the Song family genealogy, Wei stressed that Song was among the first to urge Manchu rulers to give the martyred Chongzhen emperor a posthumous title. In Wei’s account, although Song had wanted to demur from serving a different dynasty, he eventually heeded the new ruler’s insistent calls. Song’s contrasting experiences in these two dynasties—frustration in the Ming and success in the Qing—confirmed one important moral-political lesson: emperors who “sought loyal officials in unfilial sons” would fail.⁶¹ Here Wei seems to make the significant point that the Qing success demonstrated that the new dynasty had truly embraced “governing with filial piety,” and if it intended to sustain its triumphs, it should continue on this path.

Publications by the Songs’ loyalist friends, which disagreed on whether Song Quan represented continuity or discontinuity of the Confucian tradition in his family, shed light on how political conversations were mediated through the production of family tales. Different images of the turncoat employed the language of Confucian ethics in very specific ways and delivered measured political sentiments. How these images related to the emerging image of Manchu moral superiority was complex. Nonetheless, the varied representations of the turncoat all benefited the Qing court: it could take credit for employing a filial son to boost the imperial image; it could also capitalize on the turncoat’s sense of shame and guilt to consolidate Manchu claims to moral superiority.

TRANSDYNASTIC MORAL CONTINUITY AND THE RECOVERY OF LITERATI SOCIETY

Because turncoat families relied on friends—including Ming loyalists—to contribute to their Confucian family tales and making the image of the loyal turncoat, competing representations of a turncoat’s roles in his family constituted a space where political differences among literati could be articulated and negotiated along multiple generational lines—dynastic, factional, social, and familial. The Songs were but one of the many turncoat families who sought ways to enhance their moral standing after it was tarnished by Ming loyalist condemnations, in factional attacks at court, and in the Manchu claim to moral superiority. The recovery of the literati community inched forward partly through the evolving images of the turncoats. Between the capital and their hometowns, the picture of turncoats as the exemplary sons, husbands, and friends described in publications, artworks, and social spectacles not only transcended the dynastic divide but also turned the traumatic political change into a backdrop against which sincere moral pursuits had persisted and flourished. Loyalist friends did not just participate in this enterprise; they actually played an indispensable role, as we will see in the development of Gong Dingsi’s image as a loyal turncoat.

Reconnecting with the Filial Son

In late Shunzhi 3 (1646), Gong Dingsi returned to his hometown, Luzhou (Hefei, in modern-day Anhui), as a son in mourning, in Gu Mei’s company. Sailing south on the Grand Canal, their hearts were full of heavy emotions. Both memories of recent attacks on Gong’s moral performance launched by factional enemies and worries that their degrading portrayal by the Southern Ming regime would linger and bring humiliation. This first trip back home since 1644 was thus a significant personal, familial, and social event for the couple. Gong would prove his commitment to the zhongxiao ethics by performing a variety of familial duties.

Gong had two younger brothers, Gong Dingsi and Gong Dingjian. During the dynastic transition, the youngest brother, Dingjian, was the only one of the three who remained in their hometown to take care of the household.⁶² When Gong Dingsi and Gu Mei arrived in Luzhou and reunited with him, he asked her to make an orchid painting for Dingjian and then inscribed the painting himself.⁶³ Particularly interesting in this inscription is Dingzi’s historical reference to Su Shi’s meetings with his son and brother during his exile in the far south. Because Su Shi had suffered politically and personally from factionalist politics of the Song dynasty, this reference expressed Gong’s two main concerns at the time: victimization by factionalism and commitment to one’s familial bonds.

In this touching inscription, Dingzi elegantly lays out a peaceful and harmonious domestic scene: he and Dingjian stand side by side, “as intimate as various strands of the incense smoke lingering in the air,” watching Gu Mei paint orchids for the younger brother.⁶⁴ Gu’s painting, and especially its vivid description, proclaimed the familial bond between the Gong brothers and Gu. The painting, the inscription, and the poems together defied the insults that Gong’s factional enemies had hurled since the fall of Beijing—that he had been led astray by a woman from the pleasure quarters and therefore ignored his political and family duties, an image employed by many contemporaries to portray the quintessential turncoat during the transition. Gu’s painting once again provided the means by which Dingzi could reposition himself as a man with a strong sense of zhongxiao.

Gong’s image as a loving eldest brother and filial son was integral to his claim to transdynastic moral pursuits. His self-imaging enabled friends of different communities to communicate comfortably in the language of Confucian ethics and, moreover, facilitated the rebuilding of social ties damaged by the conquest and subsequent political divisions. During the four years of Gong’s mourning leave, he reconnected with former friends in the south, many of whom were Ming loyalists. In particular, his renewed friendship with the loyalist Yan Ermei (1603–1679) demonstrates the effectiveness of the language of Confucian ethics in connecting friends in opposite political camps.

Yan’s zhongxiao exemplariness is legendary in seventeenth-century literati literature. First, he retained an impeccable political record during the Ming-Qing transition. Although he did not pursue an official career, Yan did occupy a prominent place in the Donglin-Fushe community. After the fall of Beijing, he was recruited by Grand Secretary Shi Kefa into the Hongguang government, hence joining the “righteous” side of the factional battle between the Donglin-Fushe camp and the Ruan-Ma clique. Following the Manchu conquest of Nanjing, Yan organized and participated in anti-Qing military activities. His rejection letter to the turncoat Wu Su (d. 1645) was widely circulated in the south and became famous as one of the most passionate proclamations against officials who had surrendered to the rebels.⁶⁵ Later, his adamant dismissal of his old friend Chen Mingxia’s repeated invitations to serve the Qing was also often cited as exemplifying the loyalist determination to resist the Manchus and their Han agents.⁶⁶ Equally widespread was Yan’s fame as a filial paragon. It was well known in and beyond the Fushe community that he and Wan Shouqi (1603–1652), another noted loyalist and Gong Dingsi’s longtime friend, bolstered their strong commitment to filial piety by supporting each other in residing next to their parents’ tombs for a long period of time.⁶⁷

It was thus understandable that, on his very first trip to the south after 1644, Gong Dingzi sent poems to Yan, seeking understanding and reconnection. To Gong’s relief, Yan replied with five poems, in which he expressed sympathy and understanding toward Gong and his decision to serve in the Qing government. Yan made it very clear that he himself would reject any invitation to work for the Manchus, but he suggested that their friendship should continue despite their different political positions. In affirming his willingness to maintain the friendship, Yan invoked the famous historical reference of Xu Shu (b. 168), who had to serve a new ruler in order to fulfill his filial responsibility.⁶⁸ Yan explained that he had made this allusion because “at the time when the capital was conquered, [Gong’s] parents were both still alive,” suggesting that Gong had a legitimate reason, filial piety, not to commit suicide.⁶⁹ Considering that Yan’s response to letters from Chen Mingxia, their mutual friend who was obsessed with recruiting Yan into government service, made no such gesture, one could argue that Yan’s poetic exchange with Gong signaled a strong endorsement of the latter’s image as a filial son.

Yan understood Gong’s situation at that moment and provided exactly what Gong needed politically, socially, and emotionally. Such a friendly exchange would contribute to the turncoat’s survival in the new dynasty. The two sides reaffirmed friendship using the language of filial piety. In turn, the image of these two men sharing a strong commitment to filial piety served as the basis for an exemplary friendship, one that could triumph despite the dynastic divide and political differences. The language of zhongxiao thus effectively conveyed their emotions, restarted their communication, and facilitated more socializing between their circles.

Mourning with the Virtuous Man

If the ups and downs of Gong Dingzi’s career testified to the instability of early Qing politics, the steady rise of his reputation among literati friends proved the power of the notion of moral continuity. The humiliation and mistreatment Gong suffered at the hands of Dorgon and his turncoat collaborators in Shunzhi 3 (1646) placed him in the camp of anti-Dorgon officials.⁷⁰ After Dorgon’s death, the Shunzhi emperor tried to tap this group to establish his own dominance. Gong returned to court in Shunzhi 8 (1651) following the completion of a term of mourning. Although his administrative talents earned him quick promotions, his pro-Han stance provoked the Shunzhi emperor’s ire. The emperor accused him of engaging in factionalism and discrimination against the Manchus. After a series of demotions beginning in Shunzhi 13 (1656), Gong’s official status plummeted, from the prestigious position of president of the Censorate to a low-ranking instructor at the Imperial Academy of Learning.⁷¹ He was one of the turncoats targeted by the Shunzhi emperor’s disciplining project right up to the emperor’s death in Shunzhi 18 (1661).

After the Shunzhi emperor died, the four Manchu regents who ruled the Qing in the place of the young Kangxi emperor adopted a politics of pragmatism. The early 1660s was a time when Manchu rule faced serious challenges, and the regents immediately promoted capable officials like Gong to important positions. The political situation in the empire looked grim. The Temple Lament Case (Kumiao An) provoked suspicion of seditious ideas. In the Statement of Accounts Case (Zouxiao An), repressive measures enacted against Jiangnan literati quickly reached the level of terror with thousands of arrests.⁷² The Qing had reached a crossroads.

Gong’s stepmother died soon after the Shunzhi emperor’s death, and his request for a mourning leave was not approved. He petitioned again, but to no avail.⁷³ The duoqing order, though it deprived him of the opportunity to retire and mourn his mother, was now a sign of trust and favor from the regents. In Kangxi 2/6 (1663), Gong resumed his previous position as president of the Censorate. He subsequently became the president of the Board of Punishments in Kangxi 3/11 (1664), president of the Board of War in Kangxi 5/9 (1666), and president of the Board of Rites in Kangxi 8 (1669).

During this period, Gong used his power to support loyalists and patronize Han scholars in the capital, some of whom were sons of his former Fushe friends. It was documented at the time that he even borrowed money for these purposes.⁷⁴ Most notably, he helped forestall at least two politically motivated lawsuits against his loyalist friend Yan Ermei. For Yan’s second case, likely a literary persecution case, Gong, as president of the Board of Punishments, submitted a memorial on Yan’s behalf. In late Kangxi 4 (1665), the case was resolved, and Yan was safe.⁷⁵ Many see the friendship between these two men as an example of the protection and patronage that turncoats extended to their loyalist friends.⁷⁶ However, such friendships—and the image politics built on them—benefited both sides. Yan and some other loyalist friends held up Gong as an exemplary figure in their community.⁷⁷

The crucial role Yan played in Gong’s image restoration in the early Qing was not accidental. Earlier we saw Yan’s widely recognized loyalty and filial piety. It should also be noted that his zhongxiao performance was closely related to his legendary reputation as a manly hero, an image that he and many other loyalists publicized. In Shunzhi 12 (1655), when the news of Yan’s arrest arrived, his wife and concubine committed double suicide. This was their second attempt at suicide together for their husband: the first had taken place in Shunzhi 9 (1652), but they were rescued, and their husband returned. After their deaths, Yan buried them side by side in the family cemetery. He justified this decision by arguing that the two women had committed suicide together as a sacrifice for their husband’s loyalist cause.⁷⁸ Thanks to the actions of these two women, Yan gained the same kind of hypermasculine aura associated with Ming officials martyred upon the fall of Beijing. Yan’s commemorative poems claim that their suicides made him even more exemplary than Wen Tianxiang (1236–1283), the loyal minister and martyr of the Southern Song dynasty, because Wen’s wife had failed to commit suicide and was taken to the capital of the Yuan government.⁷⁹ Thus, the heroic actions of Yan’s women enhanced his moral exemplariness.

This point was dramatically highlighted and widely disseminated by the loyalist Zhuo Erkan (b. 1653) in his Yimin Poetry (Yimin shi), a collection popular among early Qing literati.⁸⁰ In Yan’s biography, Zhuo records that upon his arrest, Yan “slew his beloved concubine” (shouren aiqie).⁸¹ Such gendered imagining around the loyalist figure echoed the ethos of martyrdom stories and made the loyalist the very opposite of the stereotypical disloyal turncoat. While it was unlikely that Zhuo himself came up with this sensational anecdote, the fact that he took the story seriously enough to include it in a carefully edited volume reveals the depth of the connection between loyalty and other gendered virtues.

Yan’s image of masculine exemplariness made him the best qualified among the loyalist community to help restore Gong’s moral reputation. Gong, remember, had been made a poster boy for disloyal turncoats in the Southern Ming and early Qing years. In Shunzhi 3 (1646), Yan had publicly recognized Gong’s undisrupted filial piety and friendship across the dynastic divide. This time, twenty years later, he would labor to publicize Gong Dingzi and Gu Mei’s extraordinary mutual commitment. In stark contrast to Yu Huai’s famous account of literati-courtesan liaisons in the Nanjing pleasure quarters, which specifically picked out the flamboyant relationship between Gu and Gong, Yan crafted an image of conventional gender propriety for this couple, stressing how their relationship—with passion, devotion, and propriety—had contributed to making Gong an exemplary Confucian official throughout the dynastic transition. Gong’s restoration would be accomplished through a variety of means, including literary production and public events after Gu Mei’s death.

In the summer of Kangxi 5 (1666), though still unable to obtain an official mourning leave, Gong Dingzi did receive a three-month short leave to return home and make arrangements for his stepmother’s funeral. From Beijing he traveled southward with Gu Mei’s coffin. Upon his arrival in his hometown, Gong found a number of friends waiting, including four famous loyalists—Yan Ermei, Du Jun (1611–1687), Tang Yunjia (fl. 1640s–60s), and Fang Wen (1612–1669)—who had come from their different locales to take part in the burials. Like Yan Ermei, the other three were among the most respected and popular loyalists in the Jiangnan literati community, known far and wide for their unwavering loyalty and literary and artistic achievements.⁸² Gong’s friendship with these moral paragons no doubt elevated the turncoat’s public image, especially on this occasion when a huge crowd of visitors gathered to offer condolences.⁸³ These loyalist friends turned the funerary ceremonies into an occasion that affirmed their transdynastic friendship and praised Gong’s moral accomplishments as a filial son and committed husband.

How were they to commemorate Gu Mei properly without violating literati gender norms? After all, she was a sonless concubine. In addition, contrary to the account made popular by Yu Huai, Gu had not received an honorary title from the Qing. According to Yu, when Gong accepted his appointment in the Qing government, his wife, Madam Tong, refused to accept an official title and stated that she would concede to Gu the opportunity to receive honorable titles from the new government. Yu claimed that Gu eventually received an official title and thus was called “Madam Gu.” Historians ever since have used this example to show that some gentry women—like Madam Tong—had more political integrity than the turncoats.⁸⁴ In fact, however, Gong’s two official wives, including Madam Tong, both received honorary titles from the Qing, while Gu Mei did not.⁸⁵

In the end, she was laid to rest in a quiet corner of the Gong family cemetery in Taohuacheng, thirty miles southwest of Luzhou.⁸⁶ It was Madam Tong, the official wife Gong married in the Ming, who would later be buried with Gong upon his death.⁸⁷ In the Gong family genealogy, Gu Mei would appear as “Woman Xu, whose birth and death dates are unclear.”⁸⁸ Since Gu’s dates of birth and death were well known, this record in the family genealogy was unambiguously meant to deprive Gu of her identity and erase her significance in Gong’s life.

However, within the boundaries of gender and status propriety sanctioned by the norms of their class, the loyalist friends not only managed to create a space in which they could celebrate Gu’s life but also promoted an ideal image for Gong. In the thirty poems composed for Gong during this visit, Yan Ermei details Gong’s extraordinary accomplishments as a Confucian official, in particular the key role that he played in saving lives, and his political integrity.⁸⁹ Yan contrasts Gong to two famous historical figures, Xie An (320–385), who was extremely accomplished as an official but indulged himself with prostitutes, and Du Yu (222–284), who was overly concerned about himself.⁹⁰ In one of the poems, references to the Big Dipper and the famous Donglin Buddhist Temple at Mount Lushan (in modernday Jiangxi) present Gong as an important political leader whose self-cultivation had brought enlightenment.⁹¹ Given that the name “Donglin” would of course bring to mind the Donglin of the late Ming, Yan seems to invoke their connection with the Donglin-Fushe community and so points to Gong’s transdynastic moral-political integrity.

On this highly publicized social occasion, Yan carefully chose the historical references for the poems he composed that would highlight Gong’s masculine virtues. By referring to the legendary friendship between Xu Zhi (97–168) and Guo Tai (128–169), Yan posed himself as a committed friend visiting a filial son (Gong) and reaffirmed the connection through shared friendship and filial piety.⁹² In addition, Yan dedicated many poems to Gong and Gu, depicting their strong and irreplaceable bond.⁹³ A set of eight poems titled “Elegiac Poems from the Town of the Peach Blossom” (Taohuacheng wanshi), for example, was devoted to their virtues. Their mutual devotion across the dynastic divide testified to Gong’s persistent pursuit of loyalty, filial piety, and self-discipline throughout the transitional period.

Immediately after 1644, Gong was branded as the epitome of someone lacking zhongxiao ethics, a designation that resulted from political spin by factionalists in both the Southern Ming and the Shunzhi court. But over the succeeding two decades, friends like Yan Ermei persisted in their efforts to redraw his moral image. On the occasion of these public ceremonies that lasted for days, they resuscitated Gong’s reputation and portrayed him as embodying Confucian masculine ideals. According to the testimonials, Gong was loyal to the people and the government, filially pious, and a devoted spouse, not a man interested in pursuing sensual pleasures. He embodied the Confucian moral-political tradition across the dynastic divide. As loyalist friends helped the turncoat restore his moral image, they rebuilt their social networks by affirming their shared understanding of, and commitment to, Confucian ethical ideals. These efforts at image-making not only engaged turncoat-specific moral-political concerns but also, intentionally and unintentionally, helped the literati community adapt to the ongoing political experiments of the Manchu rulers.

Gong Dingzi died in office in Kangxi 12 (1673), as the court was launching its campaign against the Three Feudatories. During his twenty years of service to the Qing, the evolving image of turncoats like him registered important developments in Qing politics: Emperor Shunzhi’s disciplining mission had effectively weakened the turncoats’ collective moral standing; the Manchu regents, who dominated the court from 1661 to 1669, were less concerned about promoting Confucian virtues than putting to use the most capable bureaucrats in order to consolidate Manchu supremacy; the Kangxi emperor began to implement propaganda campaigns that publicized imperial virtues. Gong could not have foreseen that, a century later, his name would be entered into the infamous Biographies of Twice-Serving Officials as instructed by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95). But he lived in the seventeenth century, a fascinating era of crisis, change, and experiment. As the pendulum of history moved through the last moments of his life, Gong survived a damaged public image caused by dynastic change and became an epitome of Confucian moral perfection.

As the family tales of the turncoats demonstrate, early Qing political culture evolved without a blueprint, as a result of the interplay among diverse trends, impulses, and contingencies. Image politics, precisely because it operated at the dynamic intersection of the political, cultural, and social spheres, did not work to the advantage of any particular party. Rather, it permitted and even compelled political players to negotiate on multiple fronts in their efforts to reach a wide audience, through varied forms of media.

The image of the loyal turncoat, a moral exemplar whose practice of Confucian virtues persisted throughout the dynastic transition, constituted a site where multiple layers of sociopolitical relationships were negotiated. One of these layers was the relationship between turncoats and Ming loyalists. The conventional understanding of this relationship stresses moral contrast and political rupture. Although the revisionist narrative has demonstrated extensive interaction between the two groups, more attention to the turncoats’ emotive life is needed.⁹⁴ Meanwhile, in spite of the differences among various definitions of yimin, the assumption that the loyalist was morally superior to the turncoats has persisted.⁹⁵ As we have seen, this conventional picture is misleading. Turncoats at the intersection of everyday politics and life had complicated images. In response to both Ming loyalism and the Manchu rulers’ disciplining projects, with the help of their families and friends, turncoats persistently—and often successfully—claimed that they had consistently pursued loyalty, filial piety, gender propriety, and true friendship. As turncoats were continuously adjusting their positions in the new dynasty, their images defied narrow, simplified, and simplifying notions of loyalty.⁹⁶ Delicate and nuanced political negotiations among various parties took place in the production and circulation of these images between the capital and far-flung local communities, between the court and these officials’ social-familial spaces.

Conscious, persistent endeavors by turncoats to demonstrate their adamant adherence to Confucian ethical ideals across the dynastic divide show how the continuum of Confucian moralism could be adapted to new types of political negotiations. The transdynastic and transgenerational narratives of turncoats’ moral pursuits helped them, their families, and their friends express their emotions, negotiate political differences, deal with trauma, and rebuild their social networks. Their contribution to the Qing’s success was significant. The processes by which Manchu rulers claimed moral superiority and turncoats declared their transdynastic and transgenerational moral exemplariness were tangled. After all, it took the conjoined family tales of Qing monarchs and turncoats to complete the dynastic transition. These stories, which were played out in in a wide range of forms such as ritual spectacle, imperial edicts, literary works, art, and biographies, produced the indispensable and compelling characters of a successful dynastic family romance: virtuous matriarchs and patriarchs, filial sons, good husbands, and true friends, all of which were conjoined with image politics.