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Ma Degong: Commander in the Ming–Qing Transition

English editorial translation of the Chinese source entry

Ma Degong was a military commander from Liaodong who had previously held the Ming rank of regional commander-in-chief (zongbing). In the second year of Shunzhi he and Tian Xiong secured control of Zhu Yousong, the Hongguang emperor of the Southern Ming, and submitted to Qing auth…

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Source-based English editorial manuscript · Historical details subject to final source verification.

Overview

Ma Degong was a military commander from Liaodong who had previously held the Ming rank of regional commander-in-chief (zongbing). In the second year of Shunzhi he and Tian Xiong secured control of Zhu Yousong, the Hongguang emperor of the Southern Ming, and submitted to Qing authority. Ma subsequently received command at Zhenjiang. The event formed part of the collapse of the Hongguang regime and should not be reduced to a routine transfer of appointment or presented as the action of either participant acting alone.

Historical Background

Ma then served in the prolonged campaigns along the southeastern coast. He became provincial military commander (tidu) of Fujian in the thirteenth year of Shunzhi and received a third-class marquisate in the eighteenth year. The provincial command was an executive military position, whereas a marquisate was a title awarded for merit and governed by its own succession rules. The two are not interchangeable ranks.

Sources and Interpretation

In the second year of Kangxi, Ma was killed during naval fighting in the Xiamen area. The court posthumously elevated his marquisate to the first class and conferred the posthumous name Xiangwu. His son Ma Sanqi succeeded to the hereditary title and later served as commander-in-chief at Chaozhou. In the fourteenth year of Qianlong the marquisate acquired the additional honorific designation Shunqin. The distinction between a lifetime appointment, posthumous promotion, posthumous name, and later redesignation is essential: titles introduced after Ma's death were not names he used during his career.

Sources and Bibliography

  1. Historical text at Wikisource
  2. Historical text at Wikisource
  3. Historical text at Wikisource

Links reproduce references supplied with the Chinese editorial manuscript; they do not establish that every individual statement has undergone independent archival verification.