What Pak Chiwŏn Missed : Tall Tales of the Panchen Lama at Qing Chengde

Abstract

Pak Chiwŏn’s brush talks with the Qing literati documented in his celebrated travelogue, Yŏrha Ilgi or Jehol Diary, written after his trip to Qing Chengde in 1780 serves not only as a window on particular episodes that took place during important events, but also a wealth of information on Qing society, culture, and, more important, its people’s ideas, understanding, and perspectives on the overall socio-political issues from ethnic discrimination against the Han Chinese to literary inquisition, a severe censorship on writings. This essay focuses on brush talks concerning Tibetan Buddhism and aims to make sense of the Qing literati’s narratives about the Panchen Lama and what Pak Chiwŏn failed to see. A closer look into the brush talks reveals that the Qing subjects from other parts of the empire outside of the Tibetan region were fixated to their own misunderstanding and imaginations on what Tibetan Buddhism could be which they had forged by squeezing it into the framework of existing discourses in their regions of residence. However, considering the autonomy exercised by the Qing constituents in buying into such narratives about the Tibetan Buddhism and the Lama, it is worth noting that they were making sense of the Qing emperor’s action on their own terms as his constituents. In this essay, I argue that what Pak Chiwŏn missed when he entertained rumor, myth, legend, and tall tale about the Panchen Lama was that the Qing literati had already made a central space for the Qing emperor in their moral universe.