Before the Kangxi Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty had almost no system of li chu, and Nurhaci had tried to establish The Great Belle Daishan as the new monarch, but because Daishan's various behaviors were angered, he gave up the heart of Li Chu; the Shunzhi Emperor's ascension to the throne was the result of the struggle and compromise between the two forces (Dolgun and Hauge); Kangxi was even more infancy, assisted by heavy ministers in the dynasty, so there was almost no overly fierce dispute for princes.
Until the time of the Kangxi Dynasty, because the Kangxi Emperor had too many heirs, and there was no shortage of people who were suitable for the position of crown prince. In addition, Kangxi's premature establishment of YinRong as crown prince caused the result of the usurpation of power by the prince in the later period. As a result, Kangxi was very cold about the matter of opposing the prince, and at the same time thought that li chu was not a wise move. The conquest of the Ninth Son also exacerbated the controversy over the crown prince, so the Kangxi Dynasty did not determine the successor to the throne until the end, at least not explicitly stating that Yin Chan should be made crown prince. As a result, the legitimacy of Yongzheng's succession has always been questioned.
The controversy over the crown prince of the Kangxi Dynasty was too fierce, which directly triggered the reflection of the Yongzheng Emperor. Therefore, in the second year of his reign, he began to create a secret storage system. Some scholars say that this secret storage system of the Yongzheng Emperor is similar to the secret storage system of the ancient Persians. However, whether Yongzheng created a secret storage according to the method recorded in the Old Book of Tang and Persian Biography has not yet been clearly confirmed.
Having said that, in the first year of Yongzheng (the year of Yongzheng's reign was the sixty-first year of Kangxi), the Yongzheng Emperor summoned the prime minister Wang, the Manchu Han Minister of Culture and Military Affairs, and the Jiuqing to the Xinuan Pavilion of the Qianqing Palace, and directly announced his determination to secretly build a reserve, which roughly means:
During the reign of Shengzu (Kangxi), due to the affairs of the second brother (Yin Rong), his heart was exhausted, and now his sons were still young, and the issue of building a reserve could not be publicized, so he first wrote down the name of the crown prince and sealed it, hid it in a box, and placed it behind the Plaque of Zhengda Guangming in the Qianqing Palace, which was the highest place in the palace and testified by the ministers. As for the name of the crown prince, the princes and ministers did not know, only the emperor alone knew, this is the Yongzheng Emperor's original secret storage system, it can be said that this is a new way of establishing reserves.
Of course, as for the day of the Yongzheng Emperor's violent death, Zhang Tingyu and Ertai, the most trusted scholars of the Yongzheng Emperor, were ordered to open the box hidden behind the plaque and announce that they would be succeeded by the fourth son, Hongli, avoiding the dispute over the throne.
The implementation of the secret depository system made the position of the crown prince prematurely fixed and unknown to outsiders. Therefore, even if the princes competed for the position of prince, it would not help. However, there is a problem that the crown prince was not established by the emperor at the beginning of the throne, and because the crown prince was appointed by the emperor, he could modify it at will, so the performance of the prince also affected the emperor's examination of whether they could become the crown prince.
In this way, in addition to several emperors who had no heirs in the later period of the Qing Dynasty, other emperors also had the problem of modifying the selection of the crown prince or not rushing to establish a crown prince. Therefore, there is also a secret struggle between the princes for the position of crown prince. For example, the reason why Daoguang was able to win the favor of the Jiaqing Emperor was not because he restrained his temperament, did not argue about everything, and stood up at the critical moment to escort the meritorious, so that the Jiaqing Emperor looked at him with astonishment, seemingly indisputable, but in fact it was just a dispute.
To sum up, the secret deposit system is indeed conducive to avoiding too fierce struggles between the princes to a certain extent, after all, party struggle is harmful to politics, but it cannot completely eliminate the dispute over the position of the prince, and it is not as magical as some people say. Of course, it is undeniable that secret reserves do have a certain positive effect compared with clear reserves.