Eight Banners

The Eight Banners were a hereditary Manchu system of military, social, and administrative organization. Its eight color-coded divisions later incorporated Mongol and Han Chinese units.

Banner system: A Qing institution that organized people into hereditary military and administrative units called banners. The Eight Banners were the central Manchu form of this broader institution.
Nurhaci: A Jurchen leader who unified several tribes and founded the Later Jin state in the early seventeenth century. He organized the banner system as part of his political and military consolidation.
Hong Taiji: The son of Nurhaci who expanded the Later Jin state and renamed it the Qing in 1636. He formalized Mongol and Han Chinese banner divisions as the state expanded.
Qing conquest of the Ming: The process by which the Qing state replaced the Ming dynasty as ruler of China during the seventeenth century. Banner armies were central to the Qing military expansion that culminated in the conquest.
Manchu people: An East Asian people whose leaders founded the Qing dynasty and built the Eight Banners. Manchu identity and banner membership were closely linked in the system’s early form.
Jurchen people: A Tungusic-speaking people of northeast Asia whose descendants include the Manchus. The earliest banners organized communities that Nurhaci drew from Jurchen society.
Dorgon: A Qing prince and regent who led Manchu forces into Beijing in 1644. His leadership brought banner forces into the conquest of the Ming capital.
Manchu conquest of China: The seventeenth-century establishment of Manchu rule over China under the Qing dynasty. Banner forces provided the core military organization for Manchu expansion and rule.
Household registration: A state practice of recording households for taxation, labor, military service, or population administration. Banner status attached to households and passed through generations.
Later Jin: A state founded by Nurhaci in 1616 that preceded the Qing dynasty. The banner system developed as the Later Jin expanded its rule.

Linked from 21 pages