By the middle of the seventeenth century the Ming dynasty kept up the splendor of its facade over an empty treasury. The court lived by the ceremonial of a former greatness, but behind the ornamental screen there was money neither for an army on the northern frontier nor for grain in the starving provinces. The idol here is the very appearance of order: a ritual apparatus of governance standing in for governance itself — the ritual kept, the throne in its place, the realm counted as whole. Meanwhile the tax burden, crop failures, and famine were eating the country from below, and the "Mandate of Heaven" was slipping visibly through the fingers of a court busy preserving the form rather than saving the people.
The collapse converged on a single point in 1644. The rebel army of Li Zicheng, raised from the impoverished and the hungry, took Beijing; the last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, withdrew into the palace park and hanged himself from a tree, acknowledging that he had failed to hold what had been entrusted to him. But the victor could not hold his victory. The Ming general standing against the Manchus at Shanhaiguan let them through the pass, and the Manchu cavalry, together with him, crushed Li Zicheng and entered the capital. The throne, wrenched from one hand, was at once seized by another that had come from beyond the Wall.
The captivity took the form of a mark of submission inscribed on the body itself. The Qing dynasty was established, and every Chinese man was ordered, on pain of death, to shave the forehead and wear the queue in the Manchu fashion: "lose your hair or lose your head." Thus bondage ceased to be an abstraction: it was worn on the person every day, and punitive campaigns crushed those who would not bend. The subject's body became a document of subjection, the most vivid expression of how an alien order settles not only upon a country but upon the human being.
The return came through assimilation rather than expulsion. The "High Qing" — the long reigns of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors — adopted the Confucian model of governance, leaned on Chinese officials and learning, and little by little the conqueror grew into what he had conquered. Once more, catastrophe had passed the Mandate to a new bearer: one dynasty exhausted its virtue and fell, another took up the same covenant with Heaven. The same movement showed through here as well — a power that forgets for whose sake it exists yields its place to one that will have to remember it anew.