Qianlong Research Articles

Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-British Cultural Relations. Edited by Peter Kitson and Robert Markley. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016. Pp. ix+193.

<i>Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-British Cultural Relations</i>. Edited by Peter Kitson and Robert Markley. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016. Pp. ix+193.

Introduction

Introduction

Analysis on the Composition/structure and Lacquering Techniques of the Coffin of Emperor Qianlong Excavated from the Eastern Imperial Tombs

This article presents the results of an investigation on the coffin of Emperor Qianlong excavated from the Eastern Imperial Tombs of the Qing Dynasty in Zunhua, China. The composition, structure and lacquering techniques used in the manufacturing process were analyzed in this project. Stereoscopic Microscopy, SEM-EDS, XRD, FTIR, Raman, Double-shot Py-GC/MS were used as scientific analytical methods. The results show that the structure of the coffin body consists of a wooden body layer, a lacquer ash layer and a lacquer film pigment layer. The lacquer ash layer consists of nine stucco layers and ten fiber layers on top of each other in an alternating order. The lacquer film pigment layer consists of mineral pigments, lacquer sap, animal gelatin, drying oil, quartz sand and proteinaceous materials. Pigments used in the lacquer film include calcite white, carbon black, cinnabar red and gold. The presence of three distinctive catechols along with the other catechols’ and phenols’ profiles in the lacquer film matrix clearly indicate the species of the lacquer tree was Rhus. Vernicifera. Several distinctive lacquering techniques that improved the coffin body’s stability and mechanical strength were identified in the investigation, including the “wan lacquering”, “painting lacquer above the gold” and “Jin Jiao”.

A Forgotten Friendship: How a French Missionary and a Manchu Prince Studied Electricity and Ballooning in Late Eighteenth Century Beijing

After the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, the French missionary Joseph-Marie Amiot, last of the great Jesuit scholars of China, befriended the Manchu prince Hongwu 弘旿, court artist and cousin of the Qianlong emperor. Hongwu became the most enthusiastic local patron of the ex-Jesuits still living in Beijing, helping them with research and providing them with information. Together, Amiot and Hongwu discussed new developments in natural philosophy, from electrical medicine to gas balloons. They conducted experiments in the Jesuit’s quarters at the North Church and in the prince’s nearby mansion, drawing from European and Chinese traditions alike to explain them. In the end, they concluded that their investigations were socially and politically dangerous, so they decided to keep them secret. It has generally seemed that the missionaries who remained in Beijing toward the end of the eighteenth century had few local encounters and failed to communicate contemporary natural philosophy; the story of the friendship between Hongwu and Amiot is a notable exception, revealing that cross-cultural exchange remained possible.

The Qianlong Emperor’s Letter to George III and the Early-Twentieth-Century Origins of Ideas about Traditional China’s Foreign Relations

This article examines the famous edict in which the Qianlong emperor responded to the British embassy led by Lord Macartney to China in 1793, which has often been interpreted as a symbol of the Qing dynasty’s ignorance and narrow-mindedness. An examination of a wider range of archival documents suggests that the quotation does not reflect the Qianlong emperor’s response to the British embassy, which was primarily to see it as a security threat, but rather eighteenth-century British concerns with protocol and their influence on Chinese and Western scholars in the early twentieth century, when the letter first began to circulate widely. The focus here is on Chen Yuan, Shen Jianshi, Xu Baoheng, and other scholars who edited the first volumes of published materials to emerge from the Qing archives, as well as Jiang Tingfu, Deng Siyu, and John K. Fairbank, who used these materials to create a lasting narrative of the Qing. Looking at how the letter has been interpreted illustrates both the role of archivists as co-creators of history and the extent to which many of our ideas about Qing history are still shaped by the tumultuous politics of China’s early twentieth century.

Painting, Peonies, and Ming Loyalism in Qing-Dynasty China, 1644–1795

Abstract From the conquest of the Ming dynasty in 1644 by the Manchurians through the literary inquisitions of the eighteenth century, seemingly innocuous paintings of peony flowers kept alive a discourse of Ming loyalism among Chinese artists and poets. While the peony's appearance in poetic imagery was deemed seditious by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1795), paintings by Yun Shouping, Shitao, Hua Yan, and Jin Nong, among many others, endured a century and a half of censorship, all the while contributing to portrayals of the flower in court imagery. This study examines peony paintings by several artists active in the Jiangnan region to consider how their works demonstrated traces of dissent or used loyalist imagery to deepen social ties. It reveals how these garden subjects were made powerfully subversive after centuries of dormant conventionality, seen merely as auspicious symbols until the Qing dynasty. Their multivalent imagery allowed them to exist in multiple, conflicted contexts: north and south, literati and academic, private and public, and, in the ultimate coup, amid both loyalists and the Manchu court.

Loyal Souls Come Home: Manifest Loyalty Shrines and the Decentering of War Commemoration in the Qing Empire (1724–1803)

Loyal Souls Come HomeManifest Loyalty Shrines and the Decentering of War Commemoration in the Qing Empire (1724–1803)* James Bonk (bio) The Manifest Loyalty shrine (Zhaozhongci), a large complex holding spirit tablets of all Qing war dead (zhenwang guanbing), was established by the Yongzheng emperor in 1724 on a property north of Chongwen gate in Beijing (Figure 1). With the military campaigns of the Qianlong reign (1736–95), the number of tablets in the shrine grew steadily. By the mid-1790s, the shrine held more than fifty thousand tablets. The White Lotus War (1796–1804), a conflict involving tens of thousands of troops in central China, led to a surge in the number of tablets. In the first five years of the war, nearly sixty thousand more tablets crowded the shrine's already overburdened tables and shelves.1 In 1802, the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820) responded to the overcrowding with an order to build Manifest Loyalty shrines in all prefectural seats (fucheng) of the empire. The new shrines, he directed, were to hold tablets of the war dead in their native places (yuanji). [End Page 61] The Beijing shrine would be restricted to the tablets of bannermen and high-ranking Han civil and military officials.2 By enshrining the dead in their native places, the emperor proclaimed, "not only would loyal souls return to their native lands (gu tu), fellow villagers and kinsmen [of the dead] would join together as an audience, gaining a greater understanding of the excellence of the dynasty's principles and clarity of its favor, and would therefore be even more inspired [to act with loyalty]."3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Manifest Loyalty shrine, Huacheng si, and Tangzi. From Qianlong Jingcheng quan tu vol. 10 (1750, rept. 1940). The Chongwen gate, not pictured on the map, is south on the main thoroughfare east of the temple and shrine. The Jiaqing emperor's decision raises a question—were these new shrines simply the product of a pragmatic decision to avoid overcrowding at the shrine in Beijing, or did they signal a broader change in the nature of war commemoration in the early nineteenth century? In her book The Culture of War in China, Joanna Waley-Cohen characterized the eighteenth century as a time of cultural "militarization."4 According [End Page 62] to Waley-Cohen, the Qianlong emperor oversaw the development of a spectacular, "multi-layered" culture of war that both celebrated the empire's westward expansion and promoted Manchu martial values.5 Unfortunately, Waley-Cohen's thorough survey of war-related ritual and cultural production under the Qianlong emperor left unanswered the question of how this culture of war evolved in the nineteenth century. The present study argues that the building of prefectural Manifest Loyalty shrines was part of a shift in the Qing culture of war in the early nineteenth century. As a conquest dynasty that staked its authority on military superiority, the Qing crafted war commemoration in the eighteenth century to enhance the martial image of the Eight Banners while downplaying the military role of the largely Han Green Standards (lüying). The most ostentatious honors for accomplishments on the battlefield, such as the portraits of eminent generals hung in the Pavilion of Purple Light (Ziguang ge), were rarely given to Green Standard officers.6 State efforts to promote an image of banner military power were accompanied by a suppression of Chinese writing on military topics. Matthew Mosca has noted that Qianlong's ban on "virtually all recent Chinese works on military strategy" had the effect of "warning the literati off the topic."7 The Manifest Loyalty shrine in Beijing was, as I discuss below, unusual in its mission to enshrine the dead of both the Green Standards and banners. However, in many ways it resembled other elements of the eighteenth-century culture of war. It was controlled by the central government and intentionally banner-centered. Though tablets of the Green Standard dead far outnumbered those of bannermen overall, the tablets of banner generals dominated the main halls of the shrine.8 [End Page 63] In the early nineteenth century central government control over the commemoration of war...

An Immortal Garden: Cultural Legacy of “Fine Bamboo Garden”

“Fine Bamboo Garden” (Guyi yuan) of Nanxiang Town today is one of the “five famous classical gardens of Shanghai”, and is called “an immortal garden”, because it has withstood frequent and distinct changes of its cultural connotation. To be specific, at the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, Min Shiji and Zhu Sansong first built it, because of their plenty financial strength and good crafts, it was ingenious yet deep, a good private garden of a functionary. During the late Ming period, it belonged to literate Li Yizhi, so with more natural taste, and became to a typical poetic style garden. At the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, Ye Jin rebuilt and enlarged it, made it a famous splendid and delicate garden. From the end of the Qianlong period to the late Qing Dynasty and the Minguo Period, it was attached to the local temple, then a gathering place for local business people, then an outing sight for Shanghai people, while it was closely connected with the social and historical transformation of Nanxiang, but its lettered taste was weakened and changed into a public garden. Since the liberation till now, it has been restored and enlarged many times by the government, its poetic charm has lost to a certain extent, but the beautiful landscape and clear cultural style has made it a public garden of the people.

The lion and the dragon. Confrontation of two concepts of international relations in the context of the British expedition to China 1793-1794

This paper discusses different conceptions of international relations (Westphalian sovereignty and China’s model based on a tributary system and the central place of the imperial court in Beijing) in the context of the British expedition to China in 1793-1794. There is perhaps no more striking case of a clash between Britain and China. This confrontation was a part of the colonial period. The British mission undertook the task of commencing trade cooperation with the Chinese and establishing a permanent embassy in Beijing. The embassy was ultimately not successful. After the conclusion of the embassy, Qianlong sent a letter to King George III, explaining in greater depth the reasons of his refusal to grant the requests of the embassy. This paper shows that the only way to success was mutual understanding. The failure to obtain trade concessions was caused not only by Macartney’s refusal to kowtow in the presence of the Qianlong Emperor, as is commonly believed. It was a result of competing world views that were mutually incomprehensible and incompatible. China had a totally different perspective on their role in the world. As ruler of the “Middle Kingdom”, the Emperor of China received a Mandate from Heaven, and was nominally ruler of the entire world. China had a privileged status in the world and others could be beneficiaries of Chinese culture only on condition that they admitted this particular role. A lack of understanding of the cultural context of Chinese international relations caused the failure of the embassy.

Horse Theft, Law, and Punishment in Xinjiang during the Qianlong Reign

There are a large number of criminal cases in the Manchu archives, which occurred in Mongolia and Xinjiang and were reported to the Qing emperors. These criminal cases can be roughly divided into two groups: homicide cases and horse theft cases. Based on the records of the Manchu archives, this paper will focus upon horse theft cases in Xinjiang during the Qianlong reign. Xinjiang was a place populated by many ethnic groups under the Qing rule. In the Qing records, we found that almost all of the ethnic groups were involved in horse theft cases. The questions at issue are: why did such horse theft cases matter in the Qing dynasty, especially to the extent they even had to be reported to the central government and the Qing emperors? Based on what law were the criminals of different peoples punished in the judicial trials?My arguments are as follows: based on the Qing records, one can learn that the legislation in Xinjiang had been less mature than that in China proper, and there had not been specific regulations or laws on criminal cases including horse theft being enacted by the Qing court in Xinjiang; the law was subject to variation based on the emperors’ own will, which largely reflects the limitations and challenges that the Manchu rulers were facing during their reign in such a newly-conquered multi-cultural territory. What is certain is: first, in general, the ethnicities of horse theft criminals and owners of the stolen horses were considered by the Qing magistrates, and the criminals were punished on the basis of their and the owners’ ethnicities, thus, a diversified statutory base appeared to be applied in these trials. Second, the punishment for criminals in horse theft in Xinjiang at the time was more severe than that in other parts of the Qing Empire, and the penalties were generally borrowed from that inDaqing lüli, which, to some extent, could reflect the strong influences of Chinese and Manchu legislation.

Zheng Meijian's Sha yu yi yu (Random Medical Talks in Leisure Time) and his new ideas on pulse-taking

Zheng Meijian, a doctor of Xin'an district in the reign of Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, left his manuscript Sha yu yi yu (Random Medical Talks in Leisure Time), and was handed down in his family for generations. Sha yu yi yu was published in the Anhui Yixue of Issue 20, 1959, with horizontal layout and punctuation. The book records Zheng Meijian's understanding for the medicine, especially his new ideas on the cunkou pulse, with its underlying corresponding relationship among cun-guan-chi and zang-fu which should be combined with meridian and collateral system, claiming that the pulse taken superficially was corresponding to fu, while that taken deeply, to zang. He classified the strength of the fingers in pulse-taking into 8 levels, and advocated flexible application of pulse-taking. All his opinions had an important reference value for theoretical research and clinical application of pulse-taking.

A Mysterious Woman in A Dream of Red Mansions: Qin Keqing

Written in the mid-eighteenth century during the reign of Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty, A Dream of Red Mansions is regarded as one of the greatest Chinese classical novels. It has been popular throughout the last two hundred years and more. The whole work through which is full of mysteries not only about the book, but also about the author. Among many characters in A Dream of Red Mansions , Qin Keqing is the most mysterious. Some researchers claimed that she was the key to all the mysteries in A Dream of Red Mansions and the huge secret hidden behind the book are attached to her. This article tries to explore and analyze these mysteries about Qin Keqing, revealing the great mysteries hidden in the book.

Chinoiseries for the Qing: A French Gift of Tapestries to the Qianlong Emperor

In 1766 a set of chinoiserie tapestries produced by the Beauvais manufactory was presented to the Qianlong emperor on behalf of the French administration. Chinoiserie has conventionally been understood as a frivolous or superficial European response to China’s material culture; viewed from this perspective, the tapestries would seem to be a most unsuitable gift for the emperor. Yet Qianlong not only received the hangings, but he had a European-style palace built to house them. This article examines the circumstances surrounding the French offering, the Chinese priests who brought the gift from France to Beijing, and the meanings the tapestries could communicate in a diplomatic context marked not by official contact between the French and the Qing, but through an informal diplomacy negotiated through objects.

Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State by Mark McNicholas

Reviewed by: Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State by Mark McNicholas William T. Rowe (bio) Mark McNicholas. Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016. xiv, 265 pp. Hardcover $50.00, ISBN 978-0-295-99509-0. "You've won!" You open your email to find one from the representative of a Nigerian prince. The prince wants to get his considerable fortune out of his country, and asks your help in depositing funds in your bank account. In exchange for providing him with your banking information, social security number and other personal identifiers, and a small sum of money to assist in the transfer of funds, he offers you a sizeable percentage of his assets. If you agree to these conditions, of course, you've been had. Mark McNicholas reminds us in his rich new book that such "advance fee scams" did not originate with the internet age, nor are they peculiar to the modern West. In the eighteenth-century Qing empire it was not unheard of for a distinguished looking person, bearing impressive credentials with official seals, to show up at a substantial home with news that the resident had just been accorded a flattering imperial honor. All that is necessary to receive it is to provide the representative suitable up-front handling charges. Got you! This Qing equivalent of the Nigerian prince scheme was hardly the only type of fraud that dotted the late imperial landscape. McNicholas details—often very entertainingly—cases of phony princes, phony officials and yamen underlings, phony "secret agents" and imperial investigators, phony policemen, phony proxy agents for delivery of "contributions" (juanna) in return for civil service degrees and official ranks, and many others. Along with a growing [End Page 398] number of previous scholars, including Thomas Buoye, Melissa Macauley, Bradly Reed, and others, McNicholas has mined Qing archives—especially the case files of the Board of Punishments (xingke tiben)—to explore the variety of routine crime in early modern China. Drawing upon archival collections in Beijing and Taiwan by means of keyword searches and other sampling techniques, the author assembles a source base of some 266 legal cases, which he supplements by close reading of successive legal codes, bureaucratic correspondence, and other materials. The cases span the years 1645-1850, but are overwhelmingly concentrated in the era from late Kangxi through the Qianlong reign, that of the "high Qing" or "prosperous age" (shengshi). The prolonged crime spree that McNicholas depicts, that is, took place precisely in the period when things went right. Another authorial choice delimiting the subject is that all the crimes described entail, in some aspect or another, fraudulent claims of imperial or official agency. Given the ubiquity of contracts and property title documents in Qing society, there must have been countless instances of forgery of these, in which no invocation of official authority was advanced, but these are not the concern here. This is, in effect, a book about the early modern Chinese state. That state was the embodiment of what Pierre-Etienne Will has called "doing the most with the least." High Qing capacity to get things done was genuinely impressive. It managed with tolerable success to defend its vast and significantly expanding borders, to maintain and extend a sprawling and intricate hydraulic infrastructure, to provision its mushrooming population (a source for the throne of both gratification and alarm), to manage (albeit loosely) a booming and diversifying economy, to maintain for much of the period domestic peace, and, not least, to adjudicate many thousands of civil and criminal legal cases. It did this while remaining small, in terms of the percentage of the population in formal state employ and of the domestic product under state fiscal control. This smallness was not only a function of limited technological capacity but also of deliberate choice—"benevolent governance" (renzheng) meant, in the Qing, light governance. Indeed, the Kangxi emperor's famous 1713 pledge to never raise the land tax (yongbu jiafu), and the frequent tax rollbacks of the early Qianlong decades, may well have contributed to a formal state presence on the...

Ferdinand Augustin Hallerstein on Giuseppe Castiglione`s Art

Ferdinand Augustin Hallerstein (1703–1774) (Chinese name Liu Songling) was a Slovenian Jesuit, astronomer and mathematician who made an important contribution to the development of science and astronomy in 18th century China. He arrived in Beijing in 1739, and in 1746 was appointed to succeed Ignatius Kogler as Head of the Imperial Board of Astronomy, a position he would hold until his own death nearly 30 years later. Throughout his four decades in China, Hallerstein maintained a rich correspondence with family members, other Jesuits in Europe, and even with the Queen of Portugal, Maria Anna. He was also a corresponding member of the Royal Societies of London, Paris and St. Petersburg. His letters have only recently been collected and edited.The present paper will focus on Hallerstein’s letters and what they tell us about the life and art of the celebrated Jesuit painter, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–766), especially during the reign of the Emperor Qianlong (1711–799). After a brief introduction on Hallerstein’s life and work, by means of comparative analyses and using an interdisciplinary approach, the paper will explore a) Hallerstein’s views on Castiglione and his art, and b) Chinese court painting and Castiglione’s position at the court. It will conclude with new evidence concerning Castiglione’s artistic achievements.

White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire, by Wensheng Wang

White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Empire, Wensheng Wang. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. 339 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). Scholars of the empire (1644-1911) have conventionally divided its into two halves: first, the High Qing that lasted until the Qianlong emperor's death in 1799; second, a slow nineteenth-century decline culminating in the regime's collapse. Consequently, according historian Wensheng Wang, the transition from the Qianlong Jiaqing emperor has been unjustly overlooked as a dead middle period, which does not fit neatly into either epoch. In his study White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates, Wang attempts remedy this oversight and to restore continuity across the two halves of by reconceptualizing the place of Emperor Jiaqing and his seemingly unremarkable reign (p. 4). Wang argues that once the Jiaqing emperor took power in 1799, he initiated a set of sustainable reforms that strengthened the state. Specifically, Wang examines the emperor's response two ongoing political crises at the time: the sectarian White Lotus rebellion in the Han River highlands and the chronic threat of raiding pirates in the South China Sea. Whereas past historiography viewed these events as harbingers of eventual decline, Wang asserts that the two frontier threats, one inland and one maritime, actually a reorganization of the state which better prepared the dynasty deal with larger crises following the first Opium War (1842). In admirably ambitious fashion, then, Wang simultaneously analyzes short-term events, century-long trends, and judgments on the empire as a whole. After a historiographical introduction and background chapter, Wang divides his argument into two sections. In Part II, A View from the Bottom, he dedicates one chapter each the rebels and pirates, explaining both the ideological and social-economic conditions behind them. If these chapters lean toward sociocultural history (p. 5), then Part III, A View from the Top, adopts the tone of political history. Across four chapters, Wang contrasts the shortcomings of an octogenarian Qianlong emperor and his corrupt regent He Shen, on the one hand, versus the successful reforms of the Jiaqing emperor on the other. Whereas the late Qianlong regime nearly bankrupted the empire through costly wars, the Jiaqing emperor curbed military overexpansion pragmatically compromising with the rebels and pirates while simultaneously setting institutional limits on the power of inner court officials. These policies, laid out in chapter six, represent the major thrust (p. 113) of Wang's story. As the book progresses, Wang begins shift his claims about how exactly the Jiaqing reforms were related the rebels and pirates. Although he initially argues the two crises propelled change, his story in the end primarily revolves around the Jiaqing emperor. The rebels and pirates, therefore, served less as an impetus for reform than an opportune occasion for the Jiaqing emperor execute his plan. …

翁方綱在詩歌批評方面對金正喜的影響

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.&#x0D; 乾隆年間，朝鮮李氏皇朝不斷派員遠赴北京求學交流。其中著名者有金正喜（1786—1856），他精於經學和金石學，又是著名的書法大家，曾在嘉慶年間隨燕行使到北京。金正喜因此得以師事翁方綱，在經學以至詩歌批評方面，都受到翁氏的影響。本文旨在研究翁方綱在詩歌批評方面對金正喜的影響，首先論述金正喜與翁方綱二人在詩學方面的交流情況，然後從詩學門徑、重學問與性情的觀點兩方面，探討他們在詩論上的繼承關係。金正喜的詩學主張與翁方綱基本上是一致的。金正喜主張學詩者由近而遠，由宋、元入唐，從蘇軾、黄庭堅等詩人入手以學習杜甫。他能欣賞翁方綱以學問爲詩，卻反對無關實際的神韻詩。他重視性靈，但强調須具備學問和品德的修養，所以不滿袁枚佻巧浮薄的性靈詩。&#x0D; During the rule of the Qianlong Emperor of China, correspondents from the Joseon Dynasty of Korea were continuously sent to Beijing for study and exchange purposes. Among those sent was the famous Kim Jeong-hui (1786-1856). Not only was he highly proficient in the classics and in epigraphy, but he was also an acclaimed calligrapher who had followed Emperor Joseon on his diplomatic ventures to Beijing during the rule of Emperor Jiaqing. Thus, Kim Jeong-hui received Weng Fanggang as a teacher, and was influenced by him regarding both the classics and poetry criticism. This study aimed to explore the influence of Weng Fanggang’s poetry criticism on Kim Jeong-hui, starting by describing the two men’s poetry-related exchanges and subsequently discussing their relationship of inheritance in the field of poetry from two perspectives: (a) the study of poetry and (b) emphasis on learning and temperament. In doing so, we discovered that Kim Jeong-hui’s standpoint regarding the study of poetry was essentially identical to that of Weng Fanggang. Kim Jeong-hui’s philosophy was to approach what is distant by first studying what is close. Therefore, he studied the poetry of the Song and Yuan Dynasties before studying that of the Tang Dynasty, and the works of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian before those of Du Fu. He appreciated “learning that is poetry” while opposing romantic poetry, which is not practically anchored. He emphasized spirituality but also stressed the need for learning and moral cultivation; therefore, he did not appreciate the frivolous and trivial spiritual poems of Yuan Mei.

Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī

Abstract This essay reconsiders the Qing imperial appropriation of the sacred mountain range of Wutai Shan through a study of three Manchu monasteries, Baodi Si, Baoxiang Si, and Shuxiang Si, built at the court of the Qianlong emperor between 1750 and 1775. Qianlong's consuming interest in the vision cult of Wutai Shan's resident deity Mañjuśrī is displayed in the building of the three monasteries, which were all modelled after famed temples at Wutai Shan. An investigation of the ritual, architectural, and artistic productions surrounding the three monasteries reveals the crafting of a distinct Manchu Imperial Buddhist identity centered on Qianlong himself as the apparition of Mañjuśrī at Wutai Shan.

四庫全書文淵、文溯、文津三閣書前提要之文字比勘：以三百六十五種書前提要為例

A bibliographic annotation (tiyao提要) is a brief description of the author and content of a book as well as a comment on, or a critique of, the book. The Siku Quanshu Zongmu (四庫全書總目) has long been viewed as a model of the traditional Chinese annotated bibliography and its bibliographic annotations have been praised by many scholars. It is suggested that these annotations can be used as examples for learning how to write bibliographic annotations. The compilation of the Siku Quanshu Zongmu went through three stages: (1) individual draft annotations (分纂稿) written by various scholars, (2) front annotations (書前提要) revised and modified by the officials of the Siku Quanshu Project, and (3) finalized annotations (總目提要) mainly edited and compiled by Ji Yun (紀昀). Initially, the Siku Quanshu had seven written copies and there were seven sets of front annotations. They were housed separately in the seven chambers that Qianlong Emperor (乾隆, r. 1736-1795) built to store the Siku Quanshu. Currently, only three of the seven sets are intact and extant, including Wenyuange (文淵閣), Wensuge (文溯閣), and Wenjinge (文津閣). This study attempts to conduct a collation project of the three versions of front annotations. We chose 365 pieces of front annotations from the aforementioned three sets, respectively. The results corroborate that there exist variations and differences among the three sets of front annotations. This paper presents three examples to illustrate how the collation task was done. Since these annotations were transcribed manually, it is quite common to notice that the three sets might use variant forms for the same character. The descriptions of author, title, or number of volumes might be different as well. In particular, the annotation for the same book might be different slightly or significantly among the three sets. This paper is a summary report of the preliminary findings of the collation task.

White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire. By Wensheng Wang (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014) 359 pp. $39.95

If you are going to read one book about China’s perilous transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, it should be Wang’s White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates. Clearly written and theoretically informed, the book does far more than its title promises. In showing how the court of the Jiaqing Emperor (1796–1820) responded to the crises of the turn of the nineteenth century, it explains how the Qing dynasty turned away from the grandly assertive style of the Qianlong reign (1736–1796) to the more restrained and ultimately effective political style of the nineteenth century. Throughout their rule in China, the Manchus, leaders of the Qing dynasty, demonstrated an ability to adapt Chinese political institutions to meet the needs that they perceived, and this account amply demonstrates their continued ability in the early nineteenth century.Like all good imperial history, this book describes both the center and the periphery, correctly understanding that imperial dynamics lay in the relationship between the two. Part II of the book offers a clear and valuable chapter about the rebellion lead by the messianic White Lotus sect in west-central China, and the growing problem of piracy along the coast. Despite abundant research, these events have not been placed in the larger context of imperial transition. Descriptions of the White Lotus rebellion have often come in articles or dissertations that, for one reason or another, have not been published. Wang’s careful and informed synthesis of writings about the White Lotus represents, in itself, a valuable contribution to the field.But the core of the book—a careful study of the abdication and death of the Qianlong Emperor, and the reforms undertaken by the Jiaqing Emperor in the first months of his reign—will attract the most attention. Although the events of early 1800—in particular, the dramatic execution of the old emperor’s favorite Hesen within a week of Qianlong’s death—have long been known, the careful reconstruction of the logic behind the execution and the controversial institutional reforms that followed it are new. Those who had suffered at the hands of Hesen protested that the reforms did not go far enough. They, and historians who follow them today, argued that the reforms left in place a system in which a handful of imperial counselors could dominate policy making. The counselors may have changed, as the argument goes, but the basic system did not. Wang counters this view, carefully tracing the changes in procedure and the increased attention to statute that marked the documents of the reign. Wang’s position is convincing and important; it demonstrates a continued political flexibility that rendered the Qing viable, if occasionally beleaguered, for another century.The only minor cavil is the book’s lack of a bibliography, necessitating time-consuming searches through the notes for the full citation of sources. Nonetheless, it is a small price to pay for an extremely valuable book.