Search

In the light of 19th-century attempts to universalize history and international law, the purpose of this article is to show how the theory of an Ancient Chinese international law matured and disseminated within one politics of history and helped generate another at the end of the Qing Dynasty. On the one hand, the middleman William Alexander Parsons Martin, who as part of his Christian mission and in order to make international law more acceptable to the Chinese, translated systematically international law into Chinese and attempted to universalize it by finding a proto-international law in Ancient China. On the other hand, Chinese scholars and officials sought to use Martin's theory to universalize Confucianism and rectify international law according to what they believed to be their own superior morality and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a wise choice for a backward country to explore overseas education bases to find the training for urgently needed talents. In 1900, the Qing government began actively sending students to study advanced technology in Japan. From that time, Tokyo Higher Technical School (THTS) became an indispensable overseas base for Chinese students studying abroad. Although the educational resources of THTS were not superior to those of the imperial universities, returning THTS graduates played a greater role in the industrial modernisation of China than the graduates from imperial universities. This article shows that the role of importers of technology is not only determined by the technology they have acquired, but also highly influenced by a variety of factors, such as opportunity and social demand, presenting a complex and changeable pattern in different contexts. For developing countries, the 'appropriateness' plays a more important role than the 'progressiveness' of the imported technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature, the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ orHuangyu quanlan tu皇輿全覽圖, is mostly referred to as ‘the Jesuit atlas of China’. The reason is that this early eighteenth-century atlas of all Qing China’s territories plus Korea and Tibet is assumed to have resulted from European missionaries importing European cartographic practices. In this essay, I argue that this view is outdated and can no longer be sustained. By revisiting the background of the missionaries’ involvement in cartographic exchanges between Asia and Europe, the techniques used for surveying Qing territories and the production of the resulting atlases, I show that the mapping project behind the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ is best understood as a creative answer to the unique needs of Qing frontier management and imperial control, made possible by the integration, in mensurational and in representational terms, of European and East Asian cartographic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1911-1927 period represented a window of opportunity for the creation of a Chinese military structure with a professional officer corps. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Jiang Baili emerged as a rare military theorist who had intellectual status, a nuanced understanding of civil-military affairs, and both domestic and foreign military training. The failure of Jiang Baili to influence China's military development was mainly due to his individual difficulties in focusing his intellectual talents on real-world issues. After producing two seminal works in the 1910s, Jiang lived for another twenty years as a marginalized, increasingly eccentric military analyst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644-1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China's nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China's popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an examination of Feng Erkang’s essay "Re-evaluating a Two Hundred Year-Old Mystery - a study of Emperor Yongzheng’s coronation," published on October 4, 2010. This essay is a review of Feng’s essay and a study of the issue. Out of twelve emperors in the Qing dynasty, only Yongzheng’s coronation has been called into question. The first section of the article addresses the chief reason of the problem -- that Kangxi did not name Yongzheng as heir. The second section addresses the cause of Kangxi’s death. The third section discusses accounts by the Italian missionary Matteo Ripa (1692-1745). The fourth section discusses Kangxi’s last edict. The fifth section discusses the roles Kangxi’s sons played in the palace.

This article is a study of the yellow riding jacket (magua) as a political tool and a symbol. The jackets were special items bestowed by Qing emperors; an example can be seen in "Illustrations of Qianlong’s Southern Tour." Previous scholars have criticized the yellow riding jacket as a non-Han costume. Focusing on the close relationship between politics and dress code, the author utilizes the study of the yellow riding jacket as a focus on Qing-dynasty political culture. The first section describes the origins of the yellow riding jacket, its typology, and imperial power. The second section discusses whether the jacket’s origin is Han or non-Han, and traces its evolution in the Qing dynasty.

Characteristics of Xinjiang Province, China, make it vulnerable to frequent natural hazards. Due to limited ability of the population to withstand and to recover from disasters, the region’s social and economic development is comparatively low. This article addresses the lack of research on this topic by gathering information from primary source documents from 1759 to 1911. The first part of the article provides an overview of disasters in Qing-dynasty Xinjiang. The second part of the article describes the types of relief provided by Qing government. The author concludes that the government paid a high level of attention to relief in the region.

This paper discusses an important issue on the Manchu-Han relationships in the Qing dynasty, namely the differences in the law of Qing dynasty regarding its treatments of different ethnic groups. The distinction between the Manchus and Han people could be barely seen if we only pay attention to the Qing rulers' sinolization sayings that "the Manchus and Han people are one family" and "no distinction between the Manchus and Han people." But from the household register policy, we may see clearly that the Qing dynasty ruled the Banner people and Han people in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on administrative system and characteristics of Xinjiang before the founding of the province. According to the author, because of the unique social environment in Xinjiang, the Grand Minister Superintendent of Xinjiang could not directly undertake simple and unified management. There was a need to divide the region and to share responsibility with other senior military and political officials. Under the Limin system (migration into Xinjiang from China proper), counties were established earlier East of Tianshan Mountains. However, in the North Tianshan mountains, the change from Limin associate magistrate to Fumin associate magistrate appeared before counties had yet to be established. Under Military Administration, the configuration of officials for Limin mostly followed the pattern of the banner staff as the principal seal-holding official and the Han staff as the assistant. These offices should follow the instructions of Urumqi Banner Commander-in-Chief and the Grand Minister Superintendent of Xinjiang, and were managed indirectly by the Governor of Shaanxi and Gansu. This was a unique pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early Qing Dynasty, Ministry of Public Works was overall responsible for river conservancy and the ministry delegated authority to the Director-general of the Grand Canal. By the eighteenth century with ever-increasing population pressure on the economic development of socity, the Qing government was more seriously concerned with matters related to the national economy and the people's livelihood. At that time the Governor General of Liangjiang (Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Anhui) was given the bureaucratic responsibility and power to administer river conservancy. In the process they realized that their value had improved and promptly made the transition to technocrats. This administrative change revealed the eighteenth-century social environment required talented bureaucrats and technical personnel and that social environment also provided a great stage for the transformation of administrative bureaucracy. Secondly, there were positive aspects of the changed bureaucratic system: the importance of the personal qualities of bureaucrats could not be ignored, and bureaucrats at all levels of government held the administrative lifelines of autocratic imperial authority within this complex bureaucracy at all levels of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I reconsider young Dai Zhen as outsider of Eighteenth-century China and provide a revisionist account for the dynamics of mid-Qing Confucianism. The first section, "Merchant and Examination", introduces the avenues of social mobility for Huizhou merchants in the system of elementary education and civil service examinations. Dai Zhen was cast as an outsider to this largely exclusive system and appeared to be incapable of succeeding in it. In the second section, "Overcoming Classical Literacy", I describe how Dai Zhen chose to pursue, against overwhelming odds, elites status and knowledge, and how he acquired classical literacy by his own efforts. In the third section, "Engaging Literati Sociability", I describe in detail the politics and sociability of Shi Jing (1693- 1769),who embodied a residual form of Ming Dynasty Donglin Activism. Here I will show how Dai Zhen attempted to take part in the unpredictable dynamics of sociability among members of the national elite. In the forth and final section, "Technical Methodology for Classical Studies",I identify the intellectual proposal that emerged from Dai Zhen's engagement with Shi Jing. The proposal, embodied in this epistolary document, proves to be the key for understanding what had propelled Dai Zhen to this point in 1750 and what he would continue pursue afterwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an overview of Russian missions to China. Between 1715 and 1917, there were eighteen Russian Orthodox missionaries dispatched to Beijing; seven of these were accompanied by security officers. On the surface, these officers served as escorts; in fact, they were sent as covert diplomatic agents by the Russian empire. During their stay in Beijing, they collected intelligence in order to provide information that would help determine Russian foreign policy. The first part of the article is a brief history of these missions. The second part of the article describes official duties. The third part describes missionaries backgrounds as well educational achievements. Upon their return to Russia, many served as China experts and held important posts.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, western physicians and medical observers became fascinated by the Chinese practice of emasculating young boys and men to serve as palace eunuchs. As a result of interaction and encounters between western physicians and Chinese eunuch patients at western hospitals and dispensaries in Peking, emasculation became a serious subject of medical inquiry that also shed light on Chinese-western mutual perceptions. The writings of these western physicians are the only known historical accounts of the emasculation procedure from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) extant today. More than just voyeuristic commentaries on another Orientalist stereotype of ‘exotic’ China, these accounts presented readers with what their authors perceived to be textual evidence of the efficacy and/or superiority of western medicine and even offered insight and medical data of importance for topics being debated in the West, such as the use of castration to resolve sexual and psychological deviancy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will examine the newly released Rehe archives and explore the Qing government's allotment of enormous financial subsidies to the Rehe region for the purposes of enhancing the empire's border defenses in that area. During the Qing dynasty, tax revenue consisted primarily of monies collected from land taxes, and this revenue was an important financial base for the local and central governments. The land in the Rehe region, however, was largely barren and infertile, and thus, land tax revenue was insufficient to support the residing troops and lamas there. Consequently, financing for the area was mostly provided by the Imperial Household Department and the Board of Revenue. After 1771 (the thirty-sixth year of the Qianlong reign), temples in the Rehe region enjoyed increasing budgets for construction and renovation. Prominent examples include the Putuo Zongsheng (Potala) Temple and the Xumi Fushou (Tashi Lhunpo) Temple. Both of these temples were decorated with brilliant golden cupolas and cost over a million taels to erect, and their construction demonstrates that the income of the Imperial Household Department had increased by that time. Especially after the Lianghuai salt case, during which salt merchants had refunded to the government over ten million taels, the Qianlong emperor was able to construct temples in a manner of much greater extravagance than was previously possible. During his reign, the Qianlong emperor visited the Mountain Resort in Rehe forty-nine times. Each time he held religious ceremonies in the temples there, and Mongolian nobility participated in these activities as well. Two important temples in the region, the Putuo Zongsheng Temple and the Xumi Fushou Temple, were replicas of the two most significant centers for Tibetan Buddhism at the time, the former imitating the Potala Palace of the Dalai Lama, the latter the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery of the Panchen Lama. The Putuo Zongsheng Temple and the Xumi Fushou Temple reproduced the significance and function of the original edifices they imitated, subtly shifting the religious center of the Mongolian peoples from Tibet to Rehe. The Qianlong emperor built the Puning Temple for his birthday religious services, the Pule Temple for his esoteric practices, and the Yongyou Temple for ritual offerings to his ancestors. He hung pictures of himself and the Seventh Dalai Lama in the Putuo Zongsheng Temple and constructed a glass longevity tower in the Xumi Fushou Temple. All of these examples demonstrate the Qianlong emperor's faithful devotion to Tibetan Buddhism. Seen from a historical perspective, the Qianlong emperor's establishment of Tibetan Buddhist temples in the Rehe region helped to maintain more than a century of peaceful relations with the Mongolian government. When compared with the seven to eight million taels the Ming dynasty spent in wars with the Mongolians every year, it is clear that the Qing dynasty's strategy for rule was both more successful and more cost effective than that of the Ming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]