After the defeat of the Ming dynasty, Qing emperors continued to rely on the Eight Banners in their subsequent military campaigns.

[1] Initially, Nurhaci's forces were organized into small hunting parties of about a dozen men related by blood, marriage, clan, or place of residence, as was the typical Jurchen custom.

[5] These artillery units were used decisively to defeat Ming general Zu Dashou's forces at the siege of Dalinghe that same year.

Between 1637 and 1642,[8][9] the Old Han Army, mostly made up of Liaodong natives who had surrendered at Yongping, Fushun, Dalinghe, etc., were organized into the Han Eight Banners (Manchu: ᠨᡳᡴᠠᠨᠴᠣᠣᡥᠠ nikan cooha or ᡠᠵᡝᠨᠴᠣᠣᡥᠠ ujen cooha; Chinese: 八旗漢軍; pinyin: bāqí hànjūn; Mongolian: Хятад найман хошуу).

[11] That year, rebels led by Li Zicheng captured Beijing, and the last emperor of the Ming dynasty, Chongzhen, committed suicide.

Dorgon and his bannermen joined forces with Ming defector Wu Sangui to defeat Li at the Battle of Shanhai Pass and secure Beijing for the Qing.

[18] Normally the Manchu Bannermen acted as reserve forces while the Qing foremost used defected Han troops to fight as the vanguard during their conquest of the Central Plain.

[20] The Mongol officer Mangui served in the Ming military and fought the Manchus, dying in battle against a Manchu raid.

Manchus lived in cities with walls surrounded by villages and adopted Han-style agriculture before the Qing conquest of the Ming.

[25] There were not enough ethnic Manchus to conquer the Central Plain, so they relied on defeating and absorbing Mongols, and more importantly, adding Han to the Eight Banners.

[34] To promote ethnic harmony, a 1648 decree from the Shunzhi Emperor allowed Han civilian men to marry Manchu women from the Banners with the permission of the Board of Revenue if they were registered daughters of officials or commoners or the permission of their banner company captain if they were unregistered commoners.

[37] The Qing carried out massive depopulation policy clearances forcing people to evacuated the coast in order to deprive Koxinga's Ming loyalists of resources, this has led to a myth that it was because Manchus were "afraid of water".

In Fujian, it was Han Bannermen who were the ones carrying out the fighting and killing for the Qing and this disproved the entirely irrelevant claim that alleged fear of the water on part of the Manchus had to do with the coastal evacuation and clearances.

[40] In the Revolt of the Three Feudatories Manchu Generals and Bannermen were initially put to shame by the better performance of the Han Green Standard Army, who fought better than them against the rebels and this was noted by the Kangxi Emperor, leading him to task Generals Sun Sike, Wang Jinbao, and Zhao Liangdong to lead Green Standard soldiers to crush the rebels.

[43] Sichuan and southern Shaanxi were retaken by the Han Green Standard Army under Wang Jinbao and Zhao Liangdong in 1680, with Manchus only participating in dealing with logistics and provisions.

Under the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, the Eight Banners participated in a series of military campaigns to subdue Ming loyalists and neighboring states.

Subsidizing the 1.5 million men, women and children in the system was an expensive proposition, compounded by embezzlement and corruption.

Destitution in the northeastern garrisons led many Manchu Bannermen to abandon their posts and in response the Qing government either sentenced them with penal slavery or death.

[49] John Ross, a Scots missionary who served in Manchuria in the 19th century, wrote of the bannermen, "Their claim to be military men is based on their descent rather than on their skill in arms; and their pay is given them because of their fathers' prowess, and not at all from any hopes of their efficiency as soldiers.

Their soldierly qualities are included in the accomplishments of idleness, riding, and the use of the bow and arrow, at which they practice on a few rare occasions each year.

"[50] During the Boxer Rebellion, 1899–1901, the European powers recruited 10,000 Bannermen from the Metropolitan Banners into Wuwei Corps and gave them modernized training and weapons.

Han Bannermen became an elite political class in Fengtian province in the late Qing period and into the Republican era.

The smallest unit in a banner army was the company, or niru (Chinese: 佐領; pinyin: zuǒlǐng, Mongolian: Сум), composed nominally of 300 soldiers and their families.

4 jalan constituted a gūsa (banner, Chinese: 旗; pinyin: qí, Mongolian: Хошуу), with a total of 60 companies, or 18,000 men.

It was a policy of the Qing to transfer to immediate families[67] (the brothers, father) of the mother of an Emperor into the upper three Manchu Banners and having "giya" 佳 appended to the end of their surname to Manchufy it.

The Han Bannerwoman Empress Xiaoyichun and her entire family were transferred to the Manchu Banners due to her status as the mother of an Emperor and their surname was change from Wei 魏 to Weigiya 魏佳.

[81][82] Jiang Xingzhou 姜興舟, a Han bannerman lieutenant from the Bordered Yellow Banner married a Muslim woman in Mukden during Qianlong's late reign.

Once the Manchus took over governing, they could no longer satisfy the material needs of soldiers by garnishing and distributing booty; instead, a salary system was instituted, ranks standardized, and the Eight Banners became a sort of hereditary military caste, though with a strong ethnic inflection.

Banner soldiers took up permanent positions, either as defenders of the capital, Beijing, where roughly half of them lived with their families, or in the provinces, where some eighteen garrisons were established.

Sizable banner populations were also placed in Manchuria and at strategic points along the Great Wall, the Yangtze River and Grand Canal.