They had conquered China with their own tribal-military system intact, organized into units termed _banners_. Unable to hold the country by their own force alone and, after putting down serious rebellions, unwilling to depend on the Chinese, they arranged a method of dual garrisoning. A Manchu military hierarchy paralleled the Chinese bureaucracy throughout the Empire, and Manchu bannermen were placed in every city of strategic importance. The Manchu garrisons were made up of men destined to arms, men who were the descendants of the wild horsemen of the northeastern plains, but who soon became tragic and useless idlers. Forbidden entrance into the vast and vital civilian society of the Chinese, by a decree of their own kinsman on the throne, they spent generation after generation in profound peace, forgetting war and losing their self-respect as warriors. Whatever the reason, they did not engage in practices such as the extended hunts, amounting in fact to great army maneuvers, by which Kublai Khan kept his Mongol troops hard and ready for war. An English writer, familiar with the state of the Manchu garrisons in their last years, thus described them: But, unhappily, the inactive bannermen, both at Peking and in the provinces, had towards the end degenerated into idle, flabby, and too often opium-smoking parasites; they had long neglected to keep up their archery, which in any case had become useless in these days of magazine rifles, though it might have nourished a wholesome muscular habit of body if persisted in.... In the provinces these degenerate Manchus were often, practically, honourable prisoners, rigidly confined within the limits of the city walls, in the midst of a semi-hostile population speaking a dialect which the bannermen ... had to learn, ... if they wished even to buy a cabbage in the streets; and the Tartar General, who nominally outranked even the Chinese Viceroy, was really often a self-indulgent, ignorant incompetent.[11]