First, the generation of the Eight Banners and the feudal system of lords

The Eight Banners of the Qing Dynasty were born and developed in the course of military wars, and specifically, they were formed to adapt to conquest and annexation, and were formed as an organization integrating military, administrative, and production functions. Among them, the main ones are military functions, and then there is the administration of the banner people.

Before entering the customs, the flag soldiers were not paid, and the production was mainly hunting and gathering, and there was also some agriculture, and the main source of economy was to send troops to plunder property as the main means. After the Later Jin regime entered Liaoshen, it occupied a large amount of land, and the so-called "Ji Ding granted land" appeared, which also became the main production function of the Eight Banners, but this function basically disappeared after entering the customs.

In the process of military annexation, the Eight Banners of Manchuria conquered a large number of people, and these people were compiled as Niulu (Zuo Ling), and distributed to the people of the family with relatively high status and military achievements, and those with high status received the whole flag or half-flag, which is the so-called Eight Banners lord sub-feudal system.

The heroes with different surnames who helped Nurhachi fight the world should be given corresponding remuneration, and they should also be divided into cattle and people. In addition, those who led the people to join were also compiled as Niu Lu, and they were still under their command. These two forms belong to the division of different surnames. However, the lord of the different surname and his Niu Lu are under the leadership of the Aixin Jueluo family, such as Eyidu, one of the five ministers with a different surname, and his assistant leader was initially under the white flag, under the lord of Azig, and later changed his descendants to the yellow flag and came under the banner of the emperor.

Heroes with different surnames are under the owner of a certain flag, and there is no independence, so these people have a dual identity, from the point of view of the leader he leads, he is the master, and there are people below, but there is also a master above him, so he has both the identity of a slave and the identity of a master.

The lord sub-feudal system of the Eight Banners is different from the typical Western Zhou and Mengyuan sub-feudals, and its particularity can be summed up in four words, that is, "sealing but not building". The so-called "feudal but not built" refers to only subdividing the feudal to the subjects to make them lords (banner lords), but not establishing states, and the lords (banner lords) are not the monarchs, and all the lords (banner lords) are concentrated in the capital and centrally controlled.

The leaders of each of the Eight Banners were uniformly mobilized by the central government, and whenever there was a war, they were directly selected by lottery to form an army temporarily. The division of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the lords were divided into feudal states throughout the country, and the same was true of the Mongols, the family of Genghis Khan, who conquered Eurasia and divided some khanates, and the Yuan Dynasty established in East Asia was actually only one of the kingdoms.

Even after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols were driven north of the Great Wall by the Ming Dynasty, and their feuds were still spread across the north and south of the desert, and there were independent tribes of lords in each place. This is very different from the Manchu division, which is also the genius of Nurhachi. In this way, the dispersion and political division of the national army are avoided, and the forces can be concentrated to annex and conquer the places to be conquered.

Initially, Nurhachi's army was much weaker than the Mongol Chahar at that time, but because the Mongols were scattered and divided, there were internal contradictions and divisions, and some tribes were attached to the Manchu regime, and the Manchu Eight Banners finally defeated the Chahar and other scattered Mongol tribes. The special feudal system of the Eight Banners was also a very important factor for the Manchus to unify the Northeast, conquer Mongolia, and establish the Later Jin regime before entering the customs.