Manager or Craftsman

Abstract

The chapter investigates how the ‘palace machine’ of the Qing dynasty reproduced (or systematically trained) particularly skilled bannermen as ethnically-marked official experts. By mapping out these bannermen’s education, training process, and official appointments, I explain how the court system perpetuated the administrative privilege of bannermen families and how specific skills of different generations matched the particular demands of empire building projects of the Qing dynasty in different stages. I focus on a representative family, the Wanggiyan/ Wanyan clan, generations of which served the court within the institutional framework of the Imperial Household Department. Placing this extended family in the context of peer bannermen equipped with specialized skills allows me to shed light on the larger issue of the relationship between hereditary status and specialized skills in the Qing palace machine.