Suspect Rebels 185
warriors nationwide. We have seen in previous chapters that a Shaolin con-
nection became a prerequisite in the hagiographies of Qing martial artists.
Creators of novel fighting techniques sought to enhance their prestige by as-
sociating them with the temple, and military authors went as far as forging
their writings to provide them with a Shaolin pedigree. The temple’s legend-
ary military standing—coupled with its famed support of the Ming—made it
a symbol of choice for anti-Qing brotherhoods such as the Heaven and Earth
Society. The Shaolin ancestry enhanced the society’s military standing at the
same time as it colored it with an aura of fervent Ming loyalism.
Even as it attests to Shaolin’s fame, the myth betrays the temple’s precarious
political conditions under the Qing. To be sure, as we have it, the story is spuri-
ous: Shaolin monks never fought on behalf of the dynasty, nor was their monas-
tery ever destroyed by it. Nevertheless, wittingly or unwittingly, the legend
mirrors the tensions that have characterized the temple’s relations with the
Qing regime. It would have been surprising if a legend of a Shaolin uprising
would have circulated during a period in which the monastery was famed for its
loyal service to, and generous benefaction by, the state. That such a myth was
created during a time of mutual suspicion is less astonishing. The seventeenth
century marked a sharp decline in the Shaolin Temple’s fortunes, in which
sense the brotherhood’s foundation myth mirrors historical conditions.
The decline began prior to the Qing conquest. Like much of the Ming mil-
itary, the Shaolin Temple had been destroyed by the rebel armies that had top-
pled the dynasty, paving the way for the foreign invasion. During the 1630s
Shaolin monks were regularly drafted to the largely unsuccessful government
campaigns against the marauding troops of Li Zicheng (1605?–1645) and
Zhang Xianzhong (1606?–1647). By the early 1640s their defense of the Ming
cause became a struggle for their monastery’s survival. In 1641 Li marched his
bandit army, swollen by hungry peasants to hundreds of thousands, into
Henan. The government lost control of the province, which was sacked by his
roving troops as well as by feuding local warlords.^11 Neither Li nor the local
strongmen had any sympathy for the Shaolin monks, who had consistently sup-
ported the Ming. They razed much of the monastery and butchered most of its
monks. By the time the Manchus had crossed the Great Wall in the spring of
1644, the Shaolin fighting force existed no more.
Late Ming destruction was followed by Qing suspicion. The new dynasty
perceived in the Shaolin monks’ behavior marks of lingering loyalty to the tem-
ple’s erstwhile patrons. By the time the apprehension over Shaolin’s devotion
to their predecessors had subsided, new fears of the monks’ collusion with sec-
tarian rebels took hold. As peasant rebellions swept through the poverty-
stricken north China plains, the Shaolin Temple became a prime target of
investigation. The government scrutiny of its monks was probably not unwar-
ranted. Shaolin’s was a fluid community of which resident clerics occupied no
more than a fraction. As members of the itinerant world of the “rivers and
lakes,” Shaolin warriors did come in touch with potential rebels. Even though