The Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty used the hunt as a military exercise to train their troops in the traditional martial skills of archery and horsemanship.

[2] The event provided an opportunity for Qing emperors to leave the confines of the Forbidden City in Beijing and return to the forests "north of the wall", closer to their ancestral homelands, where they could hunt and live as their ancestors did.

The Qianlong Emperor made it a key element of his effort to halt the steady decline of military discipline within the Eight Banners during his reign.

The Qianlong Emperor required the leaders of Inner Asian tributary states to join in the hunt on a rotating basis, and he frequently received foreign emissaries there rather than in the imperial palace at Beijing.

Because the bow and arrow were used both for hunting and for waging war, the practice of archery became a defining trait of the proper gentleman of the Zhou period.

For steppe nomads like themselves, hunting was still an important part of daily life, and not just an idle pursuit of the upper classes as it had become among the Han Chinese.

From these units emerged the companies, called niru ("arrow"), that formed the basic building blocks of the Eight Banners military system that went on to conquer China.

An 1807 inscription by the Jiaqing Emperor refers to the hunting preserve as Mulan/Muran, and today the area is called Mulan Weichang (Chinese: 木兰围场; pinyin: Mùlán Wéichǎng).

[11] Hunts were large-scale affairs involving thousands of participants; in addition to bannermen, there were Mongol princes and government officials present.

[24] Although Chengde was said to be a place to escape the heat of Beijing in the summer, in fact Kangxi usually stayed there into autumn, and sometimes returned in the winter.

[27] Concerned about the disappearance of traditional Manchu ways in his generation, he wrote to one of his generals, "From the third year [of my reign] the former institution of the regular training hunt will be begun.

Hunts were usually cancelled in years when the emperor visited the imperial tombs at Mukden, or for important diplomatic events.

[31] In the early years of the Kangxi era, before the construction of the Chengde complex at his behest, the emperor would travel directly to Mulan in the fall.

According to Lord Macartney, whose party took this route to reach Chengde in 1793, each day's segment of the trip was short enough to be completed by mid-day or afternoon.

While traveling the route, Macartney observed a large number of troops repairing the road in anticipation of the emperor's return trip to Beijing.

To protect him from potentially dangerous game such as bears or tigers, the emperor would be accompanied by a number of troops such as the "tiger-gun brigade".

If a tiger was caught, the emperor usually killed it personally, as part of the spectacle demonstrating the bravery and martial skill of the imperial lineage.

Messengers relayed information between Beijing, the Chengde resort, and Mulan, allowing the emperors and his entourage of imperial officials to do their work in the field.

Such events were an opportunity for the emperor to spend time with his Inner Asian subjects, many of whom did not travel south to China proper for fear of smallpox.

Macartney, eager to get on with his diplomatic mission, was nonetheless obliged by court etiquette to watch these displays and receive gifts from the emperor throughout the day.

[37] This was especially true in the Qianlong era, in which commemorative art also portrayed the triannual grand inspections (dayue)[39] of Eight Banners troops, and the dual rituals of dispatching armies (mingjiang) and welcoming their return (jiaolao).

[40] These works of art, as well as the activities depicted in them, all formed part of the Qianlong Emperor's propaganda campaign to promote martial values in Qing society.

A number of paintings produced during Qianlong's reign portray the emperor himself participating in the autumn hunt at Mulan, as well as in the other military rituals of the Qing.

[43] Copies of martially-themed paintings were disseminated widely in a variety of formats, conveying a message of military might both at home and abroad, as well as impressing a martial stamp upon domestic mass culture.

Originally the khan of the later Jin dynasty, Hong Taiji renamed his empire the Great Qing and declared himself its emperor in 1636 after receiving the surrender of the Chahar Mongols.

[47] The secondary capital and its hunting grounds, both outside the Great Wall, thus bolstered the Qing emperors' rhetoric of having brought the inner (Han Chinese) and outer (Mongol, Tibetan, Uyghur and so on) peoples together into one "family" (neiwai yijia).

The institutionalization of the hunt led to its new role as a sort of performance, a stylized homage to past practices that were no longer living traditions for most Manchus.

[50] Theoretically, all Manchus were part of the hereditary warrior caste of the Eight Banners, a military organization which expanded rapidly to include Mongol and Han Chinese contingents during the Qing conquest of the Ming.

As John Bell wrote, Kangxi saw the hunt as a way to prevent the Manchus from acquiring the perceived Chinese traits of "idleness and effeminacy".

[33] Kangxi's fears had been shared by his grandfather, Hong Taiji, who believed that the Jin dynasty of his Jurchen ancestors had collapsed as a result of entering the "Chinese Way", to the neglect of their archery and riding skills.