Through eight dimensions, including the privileges of the Eight Banners, land seizures, the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, centralized power in the Grand Council, the dual Manchu-Han system, clerks manipulating officials, unofficial fiscal levies, and salt merchant monopolies, this book analyzes how power and wealth were distributed in the Qing Dynasty. It reveals how the dynasty constantly teetered between sharing out the spoils and losing control: from Eight Banners elites living off the state to local clerks sidelining officials, and from Yongzheng’s reform making surcharges public revenue to Yangzhou salt merchants relying on privilege. In the end, this system, centered on imperial power and dependent on informal rules, became irreparably unbalanced when local governments amassed fiscal power after the Taiping Rebellion, a fundamental cause of the empire’s collapse.
