Origin and Deployment of Qing Military Officers by Province, 1786–1908 CE

We investigate changes over time in the distribution by province of current post and province of origin for Qing military officers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this period, the Qing faced a variety of military challenges, including domestic conflicts and foreign incursions. The most important was the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), which is already known to have led to large changes in the composition of the Qing military leadership. In turn, senior Hunan-origin military officers leveraged their networks to dominate officer appointments in the coastal provinces. We examine how the Taiping Rebellion, the First Opium War and other crises affected the allocation of officers between provinces, and the recruitment of officers from different provinces. For the analysis, we use the quarterly rosters of military officers Zhongshu beilan, which have been transcribed into a database as part of the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing Jinshenlu (CGED-Q JSL). We show that the allocation of officers by province did not change during the First Opium War, but changed dramatically after the Taiping Rebellion, with a substantial increase in the share of officers allocated to the southeastern coastal provinces, reflecting heightened importance of maritime defense. We also show that there were two phases to the increase in the share of Hunan-origin officers, one at the end of the eighteenth century, and the other, better-known one following the Taiping Rebellion. Finally, we show that exceptions to the rule of avoidance in the appointment of senior military officers became more common for all types of officers from the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, and that afterward, low-, mid-, and high-level officers followed different trajectories. We conclude with an assessment of the implications of our findings for our understanding of the Qing in the nineteenth century.