For the most part, Ming loyalism had nothing to do with restoring the actual Ming Dynasty, just as Confederate statues have nothing to do with military achievement. It's about race.

Of many major differences between the Ming and Qing, among the most critical was that the Qing leadership was, by and large, Manchu, and therefore, in Han Chinese eyes, alien. The Manchus were not nomads, indeed their lifestyle before the conquest of China was broadly sedentary, but Manchuria had its own distinct culture, including political culture, in discourse with but distinct from that of China to its southwest. These distinctions probably mattered little to most Han Chinese, who would have conceptualised most of the northerly non-Chinese peoples, nomadic and sedentary alike, into a broad continuum of 'barbarians'. For 'barbarians' to rule China was anathema to the sensibilities of many in China, especially the traditional gentry-scholar-elite, but the Qing did not always endear itself to China's peasant population either.

The blow was worsened by the nature of the Ming itself. The Ming had come to power in the 1360s by overthrowing the Yuan state established by the Mongols, and had built much of its identity on a sense of Han Chinese cultural superiority and of superior 'civilisation', particularly through the regime's promotion of an especially inward-looking branch of Neo-Confucian philosophy. And of course, the Ming marked the separation of Han civilisation from non-Han barbarism on the landscape of Asia through the construction of what would become the Great Wall. James Millward, summarising Arthur Waldron's work on the subject, captures the idea very succinctly:

The late Ming court chose to build walls as a military policy, but, as Arthur Waldron has shown us, the decisions that led to that choice were reached in a political climate that increasingly viewed the purity of categories and the strictness of boundaries as a litmus test of dynastic loyalty.

That being said, ideas of cultural transformation had not yet disappeared from the mental landscape, and it was still in theory possible for a non-Han to become culturally Sinified. But the idea that there was some cosmic order that demanded separation between the 'civilised' and the 'barbaric' had taken root among a particularly radical segment of the scholar-elite, which on the one hand justified Ming China's inability to really project power beyond the sedentary Sinosphere, and on the other led to an intense hostility to the possibility of an uncivilised presence in China.

And then that possibility became reality.

While 'Ming-Qing transition' can be a bit of a euphemistic description for 65 years of on-and-off conflict that claimed the lives of some 25 million people, the alternative term, the 'Manchu/Qing conquest of China/the Ming', erases some of the complexities and ambiguities at work. Chief among them is that the Qing did not overthrow the Ming. When the Manchu Banner armies marched into Beijing on 6 June 1644, the last fully-recognised Ming monarch, the Chongzhen Emperor, had been dead for over a month. In late April, the city had been captured by a peasant rebel army under Li Zicheng, who declared himself the Yongchang Emperor of the Shun Dynasty. Li did not command the allegiance of the Ming army defending the frontier against the Manchus, however, and that army and its commander, Wu Sangui, defected to the Qing invaders and allowed them through the Great Wall.

Wu's defection added another actor to what was already quite a complex situation, because even the Shun-Ming war was not simply a bilateral conflict between the rebels in the north and the remnants of the imperial clan in the south. The southern branches of the Zhu family, who held largely symbolic control over a series of ceremonial fiefs, squabbled amongst each other for control over the imperial title – between April 1644 and December 1646, the so-called 'Southern Ming' went through six separate emperors (whose 'reigns' overlapped significantly), and all of them attempted to rally some sort of support from regional strongmen to assist them, as did a number of princes who did not stake their own claims to the throne. While this resistance was short-lived (most of urban south China was in Qing hands by the end of 1650), it would be where the first phase, or perhaps first form, of Ming loyalist activism took place.

The local strongmen whose favour the southern princes were courting were not simply a group of opportunists. Many were genuine loyalists to the Ming regime, or at least genuine enemies of the Qing. The most famous example of these is Koxinga, born Zheng Sen and latterly taking the name Zheng Chenggong (chenggong literally means 'success'), who swore loyalty to the self-proclaimed Longwu Emperor and who achieved a number of tactical successes against Qing forces on the mainland, but, partly as a result of strategic blunders on his own part, he was never able to capitalise on his successes. However, Koxinga remained at least nominally committed to the survival of a Han Chinese state outside Manchu dominion, and so invaded southern Taiwan in 1661, expelling the Dutch garrison and establishing a principality nominally as part of the Ming but effectively self-ruling, as the last Southern Ming pretender was by this point on the run from Qing forces in northern Burma. Koxinga died of malaria in early 1662, but his successors more or less doomed the regime, or at least accelerated its decline, when they supported the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1670s.

The Feudatory revolts are a tough issue to really work out. The Qing had granted control over China's southern regions to three major Han Chinese defectors: Wu Sangui got Yunnan and Guizhou, Shang Kexi got Guangdong and Guangxi, and Geng Jingzhong got Fujian and Zhejiang. The revolt of Wu and Geng in 1673 occurred in response to the Kangxi Emperor's demands that they retire and pass control of those regions to the Qing regular administration, and was an attempt to pre-empt a Qing military response to their refusal. The revolt proved unsuccessful, but was not without appeal. In particular, Wu officially claimed to support a Ming restoration, despite not being of the Zhu family himself, having no Zhu family claimant to prop up, and having rather infamously turned his back on the Ming nearly three decades earlier when Li Zicheng seized Beijing, and having seemingly been a Qing lapdog ever since. In other words, once the actual Ming were gone, movements actively claiming to be Ming restorationist were not actually at all interested in re-establishing the rule of the Ming state. 'Restore the Ming' was simply a thinly-coded shorthand for 're-establish a Han Chinese dynasty'.

But not all resistance was military. A critical locus of what might be termed non-restorationist loyalism – that is, holding onto symbols of loyalty to the Ming state for one's personal peace of mind, rather than any actual political goals – was the matter of the Manchu queue edict (which I discussed at length (heh) in this Tuesday Trivia feature). Those who refused to shave their foreheads and were executed, those who escaped into the woods and mountains to keep their hair, and those who joined monasteries to shave entirely, all sought to retain for themselves a clear aspect of their cultural – some might even argue ethnic – identity, defined against the markers of Manchu identity being imposed by the Qing. While the language of this could very much be in the form of Ming loyalism, it seems quite clear, especially from the writings of Lü Liuliang, that Ming loyalism and Han Chinese pride were part of the same package of ideas.

But, as you no doubt are aware, Ming loyalism didn't die out with the last of those who had lived under Ming rule. What happened when, to appropriate a line from Tacitus, 'few indeed were left who had seen the Republic'? Perhaps the most infamous act of anti-Qing resistance was the Zeng Jing treason scandal of 1728, when an otherwise obscure scholar from Hunan attempted to incite Yue Zhongqi, the commander of the Han Chinese component of the Qing army on the western frontier, to revolt and avenge the fall of the Ming. Zeng was arrested and almost guaranteed to be executed, but the Yongzheng Emperor, in an unusual display of clemency, corresponded with him while he was in prison, and, convinced of Zeng's contrite realisation of his wrongdoing, not only spared him but gave him public office, with implicit instructions to root out the rumour mills which had created the impetus for his insurrectionary plot. The Zeng Jing case, explored at depth by both Jonathan Spence and Pamela Crossley, serves as one of the most important pieces of evidence regarding the state of discourses of ethnicity in the Qing period.