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This article examines an eighteenth-century French Jesuit's translation of the final chapter of the early Qing collection of vernacular stories Doupeng xianhua 豆棚閒話 (Idle Talks under the Bean Arbor), which became a "philosophical dialogue" of a "modern atheist Chinese philosopher." The trajectory of the text is examined by analyzing the layers of meaning superposed upon it by a succession of agencies: the original author Aina Jushi 艾衲居士, a Jiangnan literatus who philosophized on the fall of the Ming dynasty; Father François-Xavier Dentrecolles, the Jesuit missionary who translated the text with extensive commentaries of his own to make a case against atheism; the Parisian editor Jean-Baptiste Du Halde who published the translation in the landmark of Jesuit sinology, Description de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735); the engravers in Paris and the Hague who remolded its cosmological diagrams to conform to their own scientific and aesthetic standards; and finally, its European re-translators and readers, some of whom used it as a weapon against the Jesuits and the Catholic Church. The gains and losses of the Doupeng xianhua during this process are discussed, as well as the new light brought by the French translation on its circulation in Qing China. Finally, the challenge this atypical case poses to received narratives of the Sino-Western cultural exchange through the Jesuit mission is assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799, r. 1735-1795) published his imperial poetry collections at regular intervals during his reign. This article reconstructs the gradual process of routinization of these activities through a close reading of the collections' prefaces and postscripts. Understanding this process helps us to understand the subtlety of the intra-court communications between Qianlong and his officials, which contextualizes how Qianlong's intent was delivered, received, and actualized in courtly practice. This routinization process also had a certain influence upon Qianlong and his successors, and suggests a possible reason behind Qianlong's large poetry production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the “playful eight-legged essay” as a form of literary parody and discusses its circulation in printed editions of The Story of the Western Wing and The Story of the Lute in late imperial China. The rise of the playful eight-legged essay was part of a philosophical and literary tradition of “game-playing,” and occurred in the context of publications that appropriated canonical genres for fashionable entertainment. Reading the playful compositions against the generic conventions of the standard examination essay, on the one hand, and the original drama commentary, on the other, the author explores the playful eight-legged essay as an increasingly autonomous mode of critical commentary that was independent from, yet still associated with, the dramatic text. Employing dramatic impersonation, the essays opened up a playful space for the staging of passion and extended the appeal of the original play by involving the reader in its imaginative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the practice of returning marked papers to rejected candidates in late imperial Chinese examinations. The practice--common from the sixteenth century to the abolition of imperial examinations in 1905--established a sense of personal communication between examiners and examinees and was an opportunity for rejected candidates to benefit from the examination system. The failed papers returned to their authors enabled them to make sense of their performance by interpreting, when not misconstruing, examiners' comments. The examiners sometimes praised the papers and blamed the decision to fail on other examiners. As a result, most rejected candidates tended not to challenge the examiners through official channels or take collective action against the examination system. Thus, in the late imperial examination system, the ways in which rejecting decisions could be negotiated and construed were no less important than the awarding of degrees to an extremely small proportion of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of a forgery case in the Board of Revenue shows how the huge increase in the legal sale of offices and titles in early nineteenth-century China overstretched the bureaucratic structures that managed it and exposed the weakness of official control over subaltern clerical personnel. The case allows a glimpse into the mostly hidden world of metropolitan clerks and the operation of a little known department in the Board of Revenue, the Contribution Office. It also demonstrates how the illegal sale of fake official ranks allowed the clerks to participate in the legal purchase of offices and thus to free themselves from the predicament of their clerical position. While legal venality contributed to general corruption in the Qing bureaucracy, it also leveled to a certain extent the differences between a professional yet suppressed class of bureaucrats and their amateurish yet socially esteemed scholar-literati superiors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role played by the Quanzhen Daoist Xuanmiao monastery in the defense of Nanyang (Henan) during the Taiping rebellion. It shows that Daoist loyalty to the Qing state and to the local community did not just stem from the abbot's personal hatred of the Taiping; it also mirrored the monastery's established pattern of collaboration with the imperial state since the early Qing and its long history of ritual service to and economic involvement in the local community. Because of its wealth and cultural and political influence the Xuanmiao monastery functioned as a vital and dynamic actor in shaping the history and society of late nineteenth-century Nanyang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]