In 1644, after decades of conquest, the Manchus finally occupied Beijing and entered the Central Plains. According to historians' estimates, about 900,000 people entered the customs, and there is a saying that "the country entered the customs and the entire ethnic group moved westward". Such large-scale migration has exacerbated the sparsely populated situation in the Northeast.
The local official of Fengtian (Shenyang) said in a letter to the imperial court: (Northeast) "The fertile fields are thousands of miles, and there is land and no people." There are only a few deserted cities, abandoned castles, ruined tiles, and decaying ruins dotted in the vast wilderness. At that time, in addition to more than 10,000 flag soldiers stationed in the northeast, it almost became an inaccessible place.
The Northeast is the birthplace of the Manchus, known as the "Longxing Heavy Land", known as the place where the ancestors made their fortunes and the royal industry flourished. In 1667, Kangxi sent his ministers or Mu Ne to the northeast to visit and explore the holy places where the Manchus originated. The desolate and lonely scene in the northeast attracted the attention of the Qing court, and in the early years of Shunzhi, the Qing government, whose foundation was not yet stable, proposed to persuade the people to resume their business. In the eighth year of Shunzhi, it was clearly stated that if the people were willing to go to the northeast to open up wasteland and farm, they could be registered at Shanhaiguan and then allocated land to live in.
In the Qing Dynasty, where the bureaucratic system was strictly hierarchical, it was also stipulated that the number of people who could be recruited could be given official posts, and if more than 100 people were recruited, civilian posts could be given to magistrates, and military posts could be given to garrisons, and immigrants were given cattle, seeds, and rations, etc., to encourage the people to go out of the customs and land reclamation. The immigrants who left the customs were mainly concentrated in the area of present-day Shenyang, and the area north of the Songhua River was inaccessible, and the Heilongjiang River was not reclaimed in the early Qing Dynasty.
This area is far more extensive and sparsely populated than the south of the Songhua River, and only Ningguta (Ning'an), Sanjia (Yilan), Heilongjiang City (Aihui), Morgan (Suihua), Bukui (Qiqihar) and other places have a small number of officers and soldiers and bannermen. There were very few immigrants in the Heilongjiang region, but there were "liuren", that is, mainland criminals who were forcibly sent by the Qing court to serve in the frontier. The intention of the Qing court was to send these criminals to Heilongjiang, a place full of thorns and wolves, and to use the harsh natural environment here to torture and reform the cruel and cunning nature of these criminals.
In the seventh year of Kangxi, that is, in 1688, the Qing court ordered that "the recruitment of people and officials in Liaodong will be stopped forever". It is generally believed that this was the beginning of the ban on the Northeast. Although the "dragon vein" of the Manchu royal family was only in the area of Changbai Mountain in Jilin, when the Qing court was banned, it dispatched officials, set up sentry posts at all road crossings leading from inside and outside the pass, and stationed troops to check and prevent it, which was actually to ban the entire northeast.
The Qing Dynasty banned the Northeast first because the Manchurian aristocracy monopolized the Northeast ginseng, pearls, mink and other local products. The ginseng harvesting industry was formed in the Later Jin Dynasty, and it was the "livelihood" of the Jurchens. Nurhachi himself once took advantage of the opportunity to pay tribute to Beijing and carried a large amount of ginseng to trade with the capital on the way. The second is the Manchu people's prevention of the "Longxing Heavy Land", the northeast is the hometown of the Manchus, and the Qianlong Emperor once had a poem saying: The longitudinal plan of the conquest must also be guarded against.
The Han people who immigrated to the northeast in Guannai had more advanced farming and weaving techniques, and they increasingly encroached on the interests of the banner people on the land, resulting in an increasingly tense situation of land and ethnic contradictions. The Qing Dynasty once considered moving the hundreds of thousands of idle Eight Banner disciples gathered in Beijing to Jilin and other places, so that they could cultivate and practice martial arts and enrich the border defense. For this reason, the Qing court had more concerns. We did our best to maintain the Manchu custom of riding and archery, so as not to contaminate them with bad habits, so as to maintain the combat effectiveness of the Manchu army. There is also a persistent but little-known intention to consolidate, strengthen and distinguish the area from areas inhabited by ordinary civilians, i.e., to implement controlled development.
The most powerful measure of the Qing Dynasty to ban the Northeast was to set up wicker edges. The method of building wicker edge is to insert three willow trees every five feet on the three-foot-high earthen embankment, and then connect them with hemp rope, and dig a side trench with a depth of eight feet and a width of eight feet outside the embankment to prohibit pedestrians from crossing it. At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the wicker side built on the basis of the Liaodong border wall in the Ming Dynasty was called the old side. Kangxi also ordered the construction of a unilateral side from Kaiyuan Fort in the south to Liangzi Mountain in the north of Jilin City, which is 690 miles long, commonly known as the new side. At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the wicker edge was set up on the one hand to represent the boundary of the administrative jurisdiction and maintain its birthplace, and on the other hand, it played the role of the national border. The Qing court set up more than a dozen side gates in Weiyuan Fort and other places, and the side gates were stationed with officials and soldiers, and those who wanted to enter the forbidden area must hold a stamp issued by the government and register before they could be released.
The ban not only restricts people from entering the Northeast freely, but also takes some measures in the closed area, mainly adding enclosures, demarcating the boundaries of the Eight Banners, and not allowing unauthorized crossing. There is a ban on the residence of immigrants, the cultivation of fields, the logging of forest minerals, and the digging of ginseng pearls. As a holy place, the area of Changbai Mountain in Jilin Province is forbidden to live, reclaim, harvest and excavate. The branches of Changbai Mountain and its extension were also strictly protected by the Qing court as "dragon veins". The ban began to be severe, with severe penalties imposed on officials who failed to enforce it.
The Northeast has always been known for its abundant products, due to the late development and small population, it has become a "happy land" that the people of the Guannai yearn for in abject poverty, and for a time "Yanlu (Hebei, Shandong) poor people have heard of it", forming an unprecedented wave of spontaneous immigration, which is commonly known as "breaking through the Guandong". Among the immigrants who went to the eastern part of the country, the most came from Shandong Province, followed by Hebei, Shanxi, Henan and other provinces. Those who want to go outside the customs must start the ticket in advance, and pass the customs record, which is not very strict on the surface, but these checkpoints are controlled by corrupt officials like wolves and tigers, and it is like a ghost gate for the poor. As a result, a large number of people who secretly crossed the wicker side appeared, which was called "breaking the border". At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, a ban was set up in Shanhaiguan, and the mainlanders turned to Xifengkou and Gubeikou to go out of the customs, or from Tianjin and Shandong to the northeast by waterway, and a large number of displaced people avoided the checkpoints and crossed the mountains and mountains from the mountain trails.
Most of the displaced people who came to the Northeast were men who went alone, and they could only pick up their families and leave the customs after a few years, because the Qing court stipulated that "no one with their dependents would be allowed to leave", and it was also specifically stipulated that all Han women were not allowed to enter the Northeast. This provision remained in force for nearly 200 years before it was repealed.
The Qing government's ban on the Northeast lasted for nearly two centuries, and finally it could no longer be maintained during the Guangxu period, and the ban was lifted. Although the ban objectively played a role in protecting the natural resources of Northeast China, it prevented the poor people in the customs area from making a living in Northeast China, hindered the economic development of Northeast China, and violated the law of social development from the perspective of historical process. The ban of the Qing court, under the impact of the trend of countless displaced people breaking through the border and reclaiming the famine, foreshadowed the final failure from the beginning.
Excerpt from the Black Soil Record