ANNE GERRITSEN
The early life experiences of a man named Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98) had a lasting impact on the dynasty that would become known as “Great Brightness” (Da Ming) and lasted from 1368 to 1644. Also known as the Hongwu emperor after the first reign period (1368–98) of the dynasty he founded, Zhu Yuanzhang came from a poor peasant background. As a youth, he spent time in a Buddhist monastery, and later joined a religious-inspired rebel force that eventually spelled the end of the preceding Mongol-Yuan dynasty (1297–1368). His first-hand experience of poverty and the hardships of peasant life, together with his understanding of the potential power of temple organizations, religious groups, and rebel armies, shaped the policies he formulated. Under the guidance of scholarly advisers, the Hongwu emperor established a political regime that made agriculture the mainstay of the economy and sought to impose strict controls over temples and monasteries. He tolerated no opposition, and ruthlessly exterminated all critics, rebels, and their extended families. The laws and institutions of the Ming, some inherited from previous dynasties, some formulated under the authoritarian regime of its first emperor, remained in place, more or less unchanged until the end not only of the Ming dynasty but also the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911.
The legal and institutional continuity between the Ming and Qing dynasties, to some extent the legacy of Zhu Yuanzhang’s early life experiences, is one of the reasons why the period under discussion in this chapter, sometimes referred to simply as “late imperial China,” is usually described as a single epoch. The period begins with the economic growth and socio-cultural developments of the late sixteenth century. It covers the fall of the Ming, the transition to the Qing, and ends in the late eighteenth century. Despite the very significant changes that took place during this period, including the shift from Han Chinese to Manchu leadership and the roughly tripling in size of both population and territory under the empire’s control, the legal and institutional foundations laid by Zhu Yuanzhang remained more or less intact.
It is important to understand the implications of that institutional continuity. Take for example the size of the administration. Zhu Yuanzhang determined the number of provinces in which the Ming empire should be divided, the number of prefectures in which each province should be divided, and the number of counties in each prefecture, with a single centrally appointed administrator at the head of each unit. Territorial expansion under the Qing regime meant that a few new provinces were created, but despite the very substantial growth of the population, especially in the pre-existing provinces, the number of units and the size of the administration remained unchanged. In other words, by the late eighteenth century, county governors ruled over far larger populations than their predecessors had in the fourteenth century. Similarly, the standardized examination system and the classic Confucian texts it was based on, which served to select the administrators of the empire, remained in place for the duration of the Ming and Qing empires, despite the fact that the late thirteenth-century civil servants were confronted with an entirely different geopolitical reality from those of the late eighteenth.
During his reign as first emperor of the Ming, Zhu Yuanzhang changed his vision of government numerous times and his laws were subject to constant revisions. Throughout the reigns of his immediate successors, however, the social and legal instructions of the “first emperor” became institutionalized. Zhu had divided the population into separate social groups; families had to register as farming or military families, as craftsmen or as scholars. That registration conferred a precise social status, but also identified a family unit’s address as well as its tax and labor duties. The system of taxation throughout the empire was based on agricultural production, and most of the population paid taxes in kind (e.g. in bushels of grain and bolts of silk). It was not until the last decades of the Ming that the system was adjusted to allow single tax payments in silver instead of the complex combinations of silk, grains, and labor duties.
While Zhu Yuanzhang’s palace had been in Nanjing, in the south of the empire, one of his sons, who would become known as the Yongle emperor, shifted his capital to the north, to Beijing. There he established a palace complex surrounded by high walls, where he housed an extensive palace bureaucracy, populated by numerous palace women and a vast staff of eunuchs. The palace grounds were out of bounds for the general population, and it henceforth became known as the Forbidden City. Its hierarchically organized spaces, where the emperor ruled hidden behind closed walls, located in the far north of the empire, served as the seat of political power throughout the Ming and Qing regimes. Together with the thousands of miles of the Great Wall, erected in brick to the north of Beijing, along pre-existing lines of defense against the threat of invading nomadic forces, the Forbidden City came to symbolize what was assumed to be the political character of the Ming and Qing dynasties: autocratic, seemingly isolated, static, and unresponsive to the changes that were happening in the wider empire and in the world.
It will become clear from what follows, however, that these characteristics and continuities coexist with dynamic changes, social diversity, and political openness. It is precisely by the start of our period, the late Ming dynasty, or around 1550, that significant changes began to shake the foundations laid by the first Ming emperor. While the political center of the empire remained located in Beijing in the north, the economic growth was all located in the southern parts of the empire. Economic growth was especially vibrant in the region known as Jiangnan, a highly fertile region in the southeast of the empire, where the Yangzi River forms a delta and flows into the East China Sea. It was here, in what became the economic heart of the empire, that the old taxation and status registration systems of the early Ming completely broke down. Despite Zhu Yuanzhang’s vision for an agricultural land-empire, the economic growth in the south came from manufactures, interregional trade, and export. Market towns became flourishing urban centers, small-scale manufactures became near-industrial size production centers, and the mercantile activities of late Ming traders grew to encompass trade and exchange patterns that circumnavigated the entire globe. In the south, well beyond the reach of the imperial administrators, many of those previously registered as peasants or scholars opted to participate in the far more lucrative manufacture and trade activities, leading to a social blurring on a scale never seen before. Where farming or a life devoted to study might have seemed a safe option before, opportunities for making money tempted people away from stability, lured them into towns and away from their family networks, and opened vast swathes of the population to the benefits but also the risks of trade and business. And while Zhu’s vision had been for a dynasty ensconced behind a Great Wall, safe from invaders and protected from foreign visitors, the presence of foreigners became ever more noticeable in the late Ming. Missionaries became a regular presence, on the southern coast, but also in Beijing, and foreign traders hovered in each coastal port and on each accessible island off the southern coast, keen to access the wealth of manufactures produced in the empire. And again, far from the watchful eye of the governing powers in the capital, southern administrators and residents both participated actively in this trade.
Late Ming social and cultural life
So what did life in late Ming China look like? To us distant observers, it seems that much of it played out in the public domain. The multitude of travel records, personal accounts and diaries, visual representations on paintings and scrolls, novels and short stories of the late Ming help us to visualize this world. Imagine a large city, with streets and canals, densely populated with boats, carts, sedan chairs, and pedestrians, travelling to and from theatres, temples offering a variety of religious services, and shops with advertising banners and displays of the goods and services for sale. There were goods for sale everywhere, not just in shops but also along the roads and in specialized markets. Markets were regular events: daily for vegetables, fruit, and meat from the local farms, weekly for goods sold in larger bulk such as grains and bolts of textiles, and slightly less frequently for clothing, art and antiques, and other consumer goods such as books, ink and paper, tea, and furniture. Such markets punctuated urban life, at intervals set by the rhythms of regional markets, travelling salesmen, and religious festivals, which were always occasions for large-scale buying and selling as well as theatrical performances and ritual ceremonies.
The late Ming was a time known for its lack of distinctions, its social blurring, and its dynamic interactions. The significance of the markets in late Ming social and cultural life can hardly be exaggerated. They were occasions where people of all social backgrounds mingled in public. From peasants selling daily vegetables in the street to big businessmen conducting major transactions behind closed doors, and from scribes offering to write up complaints to learned scholars with experience of the examination system, high and low status blended together on the street. Similarly, men and women mingled on the occasions of markets and fairs, deities’ birthdays, and the numerous festivals in the moon calendar. The prescriptive record may well stress the social distinctions between different social groups, the proper distances between high and low, and the appropriate separation of men and women, but the social practice was completely different.
When men and women of all ages and backgrounds encountered each other in the street, fashionable appearances were one way of flagging up distinctions. Fashion and clothing mattered, perhaps precisely because other social distinctions had become so much less visible. There were numerous silks and cottons in vibrant colors and patterns to choose from, there were styles of clothing to select and accessories to flaunt. Fashion was, then as now, about creating identities, showing personal style, and presenting an image of the self to the outside world. Houses and gardens were similarly subject to fashion and ostentation. By selecting the right pieces of furniture, combined with a few scrolls of fine paintings or calligraphy and a porcelain vase, and thereby creating the outward appearance of a scholarly studio, anyone could own what looked like the status of a scholar. By investing in the right plants and rocks, one could make a garden fit with the latest fashion in garden design. And for those with new wealth and little understanding of how to make the right choices and distinctions, there were etiquette handbooks, collectors’ guides, and manuals with samples of letters.
Behind the scenes of all this conspicuous urban consumption and social blurring was of course the vast majority of the population concentrated on the supply side to meet the demand. The growing rural population continued to intensify the agricultural output, but large parts of the population in the Jiangnan region also worked in the manufacturing of silks, cottons, and porcelains. These were in demand not only throughout the empire, but throughout the world. Chinese porcelains had long been exported to Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, but from the sixteenth century onwards, they found their way to the homes of Portuguese and Flemish nobles, Dutch burghers, and via Manila to Spanish colonial homes in New Spain. It was this manufacturing and export on a vast scale that brought enormous wealth to the Ming empire, mostly in the form of Spanish silver. If the laws of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty had allowed for the flexibility to apply taxes to the wealth generated by overseas trade, the imperial coffers would not have suffered as heavily from the draining costs of maintaining an ever-growing palace household and staving off invading forces. As it was, however, those costs came to cripple and eventually topple the Ming state.
In 1644, 276 years of Ming rule came to an end when the Qing, who would rule until 1911, created a new political unity. Unsurprisingly, the dramatic chain of events that took place in that year tells only a small part of the story. The decline of the Ming dynasty had started long before 1644, when several related social, economic, and political developments had begun to weaken the regime and seriously threatened its longevity. Similarly, for the Manchu who founded the Qing dynasty, 1644 was the endpoint of a longer period of growth that originated in the steppe lands north of the Great Wall. The Manchu started as a small association of diffuse and mobile nomads unified under different charismatic military leaders. These units then became a loose federation of military troupes, which operated across a wide territory under a single leader. Gradually, this group emerged as a political organization with the ambition to establish a sedentary base in the southern agricultural lands occupied by Han Chinese peasants. From their base in these lands (which would become known as Manchuria), their forays into Ming territory only gradually began to pose a credible threat to the incumbent rulers. The Ming leadership sent out armed forces to try to stop the advances of the Manchu in the north, but their attention was divided by a simultaneous second threat emerging in the south: the rebel forces led by Li Zicheng.
Li Zicheng was born in Shaanxi in 1606, in humble circumstances and, as legend has it, with a spirit of resistance against the ever-increasing tax demands the Ming rulers and their local representatives imposed on the rural population. When famine struck, Li was able to marshal the anti-Ming sentiments of the alienated peasant population into a rudimentary military force. His dual aims of dividing the land and returning it to the peasants, and abolishing the abusive grain taxes all peasants had to pay attracted the peasantry, especially after the flooding caused by the breaking of the banks of the Yellow River in 1642. Li Zicheng and his rebel army invaded the capital in 1644, after which the ruling emperor known as the Chongzhen emperor committed suicide. But precisely at that moment, the Manchurian forces were strengthened by the defection of a high-level Ming military leader, a man named Wu Sangui. When Wu Sangui and the Manchu army defeated the rebel army, Li Zicheng fled the capital, leaving the door open for the Manchu to take possession of the palace.
For the Manchu invaders, 1644 formed the beginning of a steep learning curve and a period of rapid growth. It was necessary for the new Qing rulers to transition first from a small mobile military power to a civil government, and second from a polity that ruled within a Manchu cultural context to one that governed using Han Chinese institutions. These transitions were made rather effortlessly as the Qing had begun a process of transition prior to their invasion of Ming China, which included establishing and administering institutions similar to those of the dynasty they would soon replace. Most notable of their new institutions was the banner system. This was a hereditary registration system that divided the population into “banners,” territorial units with a mixture of military and agricultural duties. Each of these units, identified by a distinct plain-colored or bordered banner, had its own identity, sometimes on the basis of an ethnic background (groups of Manchu, but also Mongols and Han Chinese), sometimes on the basis of geographical location (such as the banner with responsibilities in border defense). But mostly, the Manchu created a combined or dual system that drew heavily on pre-existing (i.e. Ming) institutions, with the appointment of dual administrators, one Han Chinese and one Manchu, so as to marshal the expertise of the Han Chinese while safeguarding Manchu political superiority.
The Han Chinese population, most notably the elite men, had to make a fundamental choice: to stay loyal to the Ming or switch allegiance to the Qing. In the early years after the founding of the new regime, Ming loyalists had the moral high ground. They stayed true to the system they had worked so hard to join through the acquisition of Confucian learning and the passing of examinations by choosing to end their lives, or by withdrawing entirely from public life, only professing their loyalty to the Ming in secret. But as time went on, and the Qing rulers became more Confucian in their outward appearance, many switched allegiance and began to participate in the new regime.
3. Expansion of imperial control during Ming and Qing times.
The three emperors: Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong
The three emperors that ruled Qing China between the mid- to late seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century presided over a highly successful dynasty. By the time the Kangxi emperor (1654–1722) came to the throne in 1661, the chaotic transitional period from late Ming to early Qing had come to an end, and war and unrest began to be replaced by peace and stability. During the long-lived reigns of these three men, Qing China flourished: the political regime was largely stable, supported by a well-funded military; the economy grew, as did the population and the territory under Qing control. This period, known as the High Qing, is famous for its stability, growth, and numerous outstanding cultural achievements,. Of course the three emperors faced different challenges and their responses were shaped not just by the changing circumstances, but also by their different personalities. On the whole, however, the continuities justify our treatment of the three regimes as a single period.
The Kangxi emperor’s main challenge was the Three Feudatories Rebellion between 1673 and 1681. The rulers of three southern provinces threatened the authority of the Qing regime and proposed a re-establishment of the Ming dynasty, posing enough of a challenge to occupy half of the territory under Qing rule. The Kangxi emperor and the imperial armies were ultimately victorious, but it reinforced the emperor’s belief in the need for the continued strengthening and legitimization of Qing rule. One of the administrative innovations that followed from this rebellion was the establishment of a secret palace memorial system, whereby provincial officials could communicate directly with the emperor, without the intervention of other officials. The legitimization of Qing rule had to come mostly from the Han Chinese elite, so Kangxi invested heavily in cultural projects that drew Confucian scholars to his side. The compilation of a large dictionary of the Chinese language, known as the Kangxi dictionary, the appointment of a large team of scholars to write the history of the preceding Ming dynasty, and the issuing and widespread distribution of a short tract with moral advice for the ordinary population known as the Kangxi Edict can all be seen as emerging from Kangxi’s desire to increase the legitimacy of his regime. Finally, Kangxi was open-minded to what foreign visitors to the empire might have to offer, and appointed the Flemish Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88) to share his knowledge about medicine, map-making, astronomy, and armaments including canons. He also relied on Jesuit missionaries in his negotiations with the Russians when a border conflict threatened stability in what is now Siberia. The Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed in 1689, is significant not only for Kangxi’s appointment of Jesuits to the role of mediators and translators, but for Kangxi’s willingness to recognize the sovereignty of another political entity existing outside the realm under Qing control.
Kangxi’s successor, the Yongzheng emperor, was born in 1678, but only came to the throne in 1722, and only ruled for fourteen years until 1735. The most important political innovation of his rule came in 1733, when he established a Privy Council of personal advisers that would outstrip the importance of the Grand Secretariat, and thus became known as the Grand Council. It was this small team of close advisers that met with the emperor behind closed doors that would determine all policy until the end of the dynasty in 1911. Yongzheng continued the expansion of territory into the northwest that had started under the rule of Kangxi, leading to a substantial increase in the size, power, and budget of the military that continued under his successor, the Qianlong emperor. Contacts with foreigners, however, decreased during this period, with the Yongzheng emperor forbidding the Manchu from converting to Christianity.
The expansion of the territory by vast military campaigns and the declining fortunes of Christianity under Qing rule continued under the extended reign of the Qianlong emperor. Born in 1711, he reigned supreme over the largest population and territory of all the pre-modern land-based empires until 1799, although he officially seceded from the throne in 1796 to make way for his son, so as not to challenge the record length of rule set by his grandfather. The Qianlong emperor was not merely interested in being an emperor, and ruling over an empire that was “great” in terms of its size and population, its economy, technology, and cultural achievements; he was interested in being visible and perceived as such. He embarked on extensive military campaigns, and had himself painted as victorious military leader; he employed thousands of scholars to gather and select a complete anthology of Chinese literary texts, and promulgated its existence widely; he collected the finest examples of paintings, calligraphy, and decorative art, and added his own poems, stamps, and signatures to mark his connoisseurship; he held inspection tours throughout the realm, and had court artists record each of these events. He understood the importance of symbols of power, and manipulated these to the very best of his ability.
The Qing empire of the eighteenth century was both an extremely successful imperial regime, and, ultimately, a victim of that same success. Economically speaking, the empire flourished under Qianlong’s rule. As new territories were incorporated into the empire, new lands became available to support a growing population. The human waste of that population (also known as night soil) was used to fertilize that land, so that its output increased. During much of the eighteenth century, there was enough elasticity in the system to accommodate both a growing population and the intensification of agriculture. It was a precarious balance, and when it was lost, the pendulum swung hard in the other direction. From the late eighteenth century onwards, and especially during the nineteenth century, as we will see in subsequent chapters, the growth of the population was both unstoppable and unsustainable, with overpopulated regions suffering from an increasing shortage of land and resources, which in turn led to widespread famine and peasant unrest. But for much of Qianlong’s reign, population growth was a strength that allowed for dynamic urban centers, with large-scale manufacturing for domestic use and for export, and active networks of trade connecting far-flung regions.
One of the most significant strengths of the regime that the Qianlong emperor had inherited from his predecessors was the so-called dual system of administration. The structure itself was largely unchanged from the Ming dynasty: officials were appointed on the basis of civil service examination success, they served in provincial, prefectural, and county-level posts in areas that were not their own, to avoid the risk of favoritism, or in the capital, and rotated on a regular basis. As mentioned above, the novelty of the Qing system was that each position was held jointly by a Manchu official and a Han Chinese one. By serving together, they held each other in check, making sure both interests were served. For the Han Chinese officials, what mattered were continuities with the Ming legal structure, legitimization through Confucian values, and at least the semblance of fair taxation for the general population. The Manchu appointees, however, were there not merely to ensure loyalty to the Manchu, but to safeguard the distinct qualities of the Manchu. Through the use of Manchu language in official documentation, the imposition of the Manchu hairstyle on all officials, the separation of the population through an inter-cultural marriage ban, and ongoing training in the martial arts, Manchu identity was continuously reconstructed and reinforced. The effectiveness of this dual appointment system, and the institutional recognition of the different cultural identities, that included not only Han and Manchu but also Mongol socio-cultural groups, both lend this Qing political system an air of sophistication.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the elasticity that had until then accommodated the ever-growing population had begun to disappear. One of the most significant events to challenge the authority of the Qianlong emperor towards the very end of his regime is the White Lotus rebellion, a movement with its roots in popular religion that will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. The crucial point to note here is simply that the overall cost of its suppression, both in terms of finance and human life, seriously weakened the Qing state, and is often seen as marking a turning point in the fortunes of the dynasty.
Women and gender
For many decades, students of China with an interest in women and gender have relied on a small number of texts to inform them about the role of women in society. These were either Confucian tracts about propriety and hierarchical distinctions in all social relations, or educational texts for women aimed specifically at the inculcation of moral values. Some of these dated from before the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), so we may well ask how relevant they were in the social world of the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The complex system of texts, ideas, and values we refer to as Confucianism does identify a specific role for women; in contrast to men, women are to operate within the realm of the home, they should take responsibility for the care of the elders and children, and they should espouse values like modesty and loyalty. For far too long, women in China were depicted as helpless victims of an oppressive system that restricted their freedom, not just spiritually but physically by binding their feet. A woman with tightly bound feet, unable to walk freely, came to represent the inequalities of late imperial Chinese society.
But ideals, prescriptions, and philosophical values can only ever tell a small part of the story. Confucianism itself underwent major changes, emerging from its classical foundations before the Han dynasty as Neo-Confucianism in the Song dynasty (960–1279), and becoming more focused on the individual and the self in the late Ming dynasty. More importantly, the social context within which women’s roles took shape had changed fundamentally, especially in the economically vibrant Jiangnan region, where wealth, leisure, urban culture, and social fluidity created more freedoms and opportunities than before, especially for women.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it makes a very significant difference which sources one uses for understanding women’s lives. While Confucian prescriptions restricted women to the concerns of the household, managing the affairs of that household by the late Ming also meant taking responsibility for the business transactions of that household and making consumer choices in the market. Paintings and scrolls from the late Ming depict vibrant urban scenes where men and women both participate in the social, economic, and cultural activities that take place in the street. Even more important for understanding women are not materials written about women, but sources produced by women themselves. We have large quantities of stories and plays, poems and letters written by women and shared between extensive networks of women. These sources have opened our eyes to the extensive presence of women in the records of the past. Their level of education, the sophistication of their literary output, the geographical reach of their epistolary networks, and the political importance of their associations have fundamentally challenged the depiction of women as victims of an oppressive system. Even the practice of footbinding has been rethought, shifting the emphasis away from suffering to the cultural context in which women assigned meaning to the practice. Through writing about bound feet, exchanging elaborately made silk embroidered shoes, and celebrating shared ideals of female beauty, women appropriated the practice as their own and used it to create and strengthen shared bonds.
The transition from late Ming to early and High Qing did make a difference in terms of the official rhetoric about women. With the establishment and gradual legitimization of the Manchu regime, adherence to Confucian morals took on a different significance. To seem more Confucian and morally upright than their predecessors, Qing administrators sought ways to restrict some of the freedoms women had claimed in the late Ming. The so-called chastity cult, which had its origins in the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), flourished particularly in the eighteenth century. The imperial state used the chastity cult to extol women’s virtue in a variety of ways: by assigning high cultural status to women who preserved their chastity by not remarrying after the death of their husbands, by awarding plaques and erecting arches to celebrate female virtue publicly, and by compiling extensive lists of such virtuous women in local gazetteers. On the basis of such plaques, arches, and lists, together with the extensive body of regulations that clarified who qualified for the status of virtuous women, and who transgressed against the regulations for behavior, we might argue that the mid-Qing was a time in which severe moral restrictions shaped women’s lives. Arguably, however, the chastity cult points less to restrictions and more to the anxieties caused by the blurring of divisions along social and gendered lines that economic development had brought. The chastity cult mattered during this period, precisely because women had claimed greater freedoms than before, precisely because women played such active roles in the social and cultural realms, and precisely because greater wealth had brought consumption, fashion, and leisure to women’s lives.
Art and material culture at the Qing court
Consumption, fashion, and leisure shaped not only the social but also the material world of the High Qing. Of course the art and material culture collected at the imperial court by no means adequately represent the wider world of goods produced during the Qing dynasty. Arguably, the most significant change that occurred during the Qing was in the extraordinarily wide range of goods for sale in the markets and shops throughout the empire. But the imperial court played an important role: in the workshops of the imperial court, some of the most skilled craftsmen from within and beyond the empire worked with the finest materials to produce the luxury goods the emperors demanded. The Qianlong emperor, for example, appointed one of his trusted advisers to serve as superintendent of the porcelain production to supervise the manufacture of the finest porcelains. On the instigation of the emperor, the potters worked with new glazes and colors to create porcelains with dazzling hues, coated to look like bronze, jade, or wood, and in the shape of birds, dogs, and lions, as well as making the finest blue-and-white vases ever seen. Unlike some of his predecessors, the Qianlong emperor was not concerned if the less successful items ended up for sale by local merchants, thereby boosting the quality and design of the goods in circulation throughout the empire.
The porcelain industry was located in the southern province of Jiangxi, where the white clays were found that made Chinese porcelain famous in the first place. But that was unusual; most of the imperial workshops were located within close reach of the emperor’s private quarters in the Forbidden City. The workshops for metalwork, for example, were there, as were the jade carvers, the furniture makers, the silk embroiderers, and the kilns that fired the tiles for the palace roof. The Qing emperors all had different preferences: the Kangxi emperor was interested in new technologies and materials, and worked closely with the artisans he appointed to overcome challenges and obstacles, the Yongzheng emperor had a collector’s approach, and appointed court painters to document his favorite antiquities in the imperial collection, while the Qianlong emperor saw himself not only as a great patron of the arts but on a par with the great artists and connoisseurs of the past, adding his own calligraphies to their work. Another of his interests was to recreate certain antiquities in different materials: he had ancient bronzes made in carved bamboo, and the soft feathers of a bird or the unctuous quality of jade made in porcelain. The palace collection also contains some of the finest works of painting and calligraphy, both those inherited from the collection of the preceding Ming dynasty, and those commissioned by the Qing emperors. Some of the imperially appointed painters and calligraphers worked with long-standing models of landscape art or imitated the great calligraphers of the Song and Yuan dynasties, others brought in eccentric and individual perspectives, including those who used their paintings to profess an undying love for the Ming dynasty. Zhu Da, for example, was a descendent of the Ming imperial family who painted some of the greatest early Qing paintings in the guise of a crazy monk under the name of Bada Shanren.
Imperial interest and support lifted the skill levels of the artisans and their knowledge of materials to unprecedented heights. Artisans were brought in from the far corners of the empire, including from newly appropriated territories like Tibet and Xinjiang, to work within the imperial workshops and palace buildings. Architectural specialists from Tibet were brought to the capital, for example, to oversee the building of the Buddhist temples in Beijing, and Islamic and Tibetan carpet makers worked in the palace workshops to produce the woolen carpets that adorned the palace floors as seen in some of the imperial portraits of the Qing emperors. The art and material culture in the collections of the Qing imperial palace, now held in the Palace Museum collections in Beijing and Taiwan, may not have been representative for the art and material culture of the High Qing as a whole, but it served the palace well in representing itself to the outside world as a culturally sophisticated, highly skilled, and technologically advanced Confucian institution.
The Qing and the Nanyang
The Qing code known as the “Da Qing lüli” (“Laws and precedents of the Great Qing”), largely based on the Ming code, strictly prevented any interaction between the Qing population and overseas visitors. Anyone who proceeded either by land or by water through a barrier station would be given a punishment of eighty blows, unless they had a license to do so, and those who avoided the regular barrier stations and sought to leave the boundaries of the empire via unpatrolled roads or creeks would be punished by ninety blows. Far worse punishments were in store for those who not only left Qing lands but then proceeded to communicate with such foreigners as might be lurking in the waters and islands off the Qing coast: confinement, followed by death by strangling. Exporting goods by sea or across the land boundaries was also punished severely, especially when it concerned horses, cattle, iron-work capable of being wrought into military weapons, copper coin, silks, gauzes, or satins. Finally, anyone who had left the boundaries of the Qing and settled elsewhere was forbidden from ever returning home, once again on punishment of death.
Such were the laws, valid throughout the Qing dynasty, as they had been throughout the Ming, formulated by the first emperor of the Ming and his Confucian advisers. The aim of these laws was to support the self-sufficiency of the empire and its agricultural foundations, to protect the boundaries and keep the population safe within the boundaries. Implementing these laws effectively, however, was an entirely different matter. This had been a serious problem under the Ming regime, but became an even less tenable position under the Qing regime.
In part, this was because as the population grew, there was a severe shortage of land, especially in the mountainous coastal provinces along the southern seaboard, pushing a high percentage of the population into other occupations such as trade and smuggling, and into the search for new lands beyond the Qing boundaries. The landless found opportunities for trade and settlement in places like Taiwan, the Philippines, and throughout Southeast Asia. Widespread emigration from mainland China, and the formation of overseas Chinese communities in turn supported the growth of extensive trade links that connected the coastal provinces of the Qing to the islands, kingdoms, and port cities in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. The lands to the south and southeast of the Qing (now Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the Philippines, and Indonesia), referred to as Nanyang (literally “southern ocean”), may have been closely connected to the Qing through migration and trade, but the Qing regime did not officially recognize the ethnically Chinese population that resided here as its responsibility. On a number of occasions, violent clashes occurred here, leading to the brutal massacre of thousands of overseas Chinese, without any response from the imperial government.
In part, however, the lack of implementation of laws that sought to prevent the Qing population from trading with foreigners was due to the fact that the number of officials stationed in the coastal regions was far too small to patrol the coast effectively. More importantly, perhaps, the cost of bypassing an official was more than compensated for by the profits that could be made from supplying the foreign merchants with goods manufactured inland. Corruption was widespread, not least because the official salary of a lower-order official in the employ of the state was far too low, and the expectation was that an official would supplement his salary with a range of other benefits. In the late Ming, when the patterns of migration and overseas trade first began, and up to the middle of the Qing, foreign merchants wanted far more from the Chinese than the other way around. There was intense global demand for the silk, tea, and porcelain that was produced mostly in the southern provinces, and most of these goods had to be paid for in silver. Of course the Chinese also wanted goods: precious woods, fragrances and incense, spices, plants and animals with medicinal qualities, much of which came from the islands and forested lands of Southeast Asia. But on the whole, the balance of trade was in favour of the Chinese, and silver, sourced mostly from the mines in South America, flowed freely into China. This situation created a great deal of wealth for both the empire and the southern population while it lasted. That it would change was inevitable; how it changed will be explored in a later chapter.
Christianity in Ming and Qing China
During the course of the sixteenth century, the landscape of Christianity in Europe changed profoundly. Where the Catholic Church had once more or less held sway over all aspects of the visible and invisible realm, the Reformation (i.e. the split between Catholic and Protestant religion) meant that the Catholic Church felt it had lost a large part of its followers. In response to this, the Catholic Church decided to seek souls to convert beyond the boundaries of the European “old world,” and bring the Christian faith to the new world. The order of the Jesuits, founded in 1534, prepared missionaries for their work overseas not only by giving them a religious education, but also by providing them with a sophisticated understanding of the sciences such as cartography, mathematics, and astronomy. Many other missionary orders, such as the Benedictines, Dominicans, and Franciscans, were also involved in delivering Christianity to the far corners of the earth, but in China, it was the Jesuits who had the greatest impact. In part, this was because the approach of the Jesuits was to acquire in-depth knowledge of the country they were trying to convert. As such, famous Jesuit missionaries in China were both fluent in Chinese and presented themselves to the emperor in the outward guise of Chinese scholars. Their aim was to convert the Chinese emperor, or at the very least high imperial officials, so that the followers of the emperor would then automatically follow. This top-down approach, combined with a very accommodating attitude to the existing religious terminology and patterns of practice, would ultimately earn the Jesuits a great deal of criticism, including from the Pope in Rome. Ironically, it was the critique of the Pope, and the strife between the different religious orders, that did the most severe damage to the overall success of the Christian missionary enterprise in China. In 1724, the Yongzheng emperor banned the Manchu population from converting to Christianity, and in 1737, the Qianlong emperor outlawed Christianity in China altogether.
Throughout the long seventeenth century, from the arrival of the first Jesuit in Macau in 1582, to the diminished role the Jesuits played at Qianlong’s court in the first half of the eighteenth century, numerous Jesuits played high-profile roles in China. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) was not only the first but probably the most widely known. After he successfully predicted a solar eclipse, the Wanli emperor appointed him to the position of special adviser in the Forbidden City, an honour no Westerner had achieved before him. The legacy of Matteo Ricci includes not only Chinese writings and extensive letters introducing the Chinese empire to his European readers, but also the first world map that brings together European cartography and Chinese knowledge of the realm. Instead of placing Jerusalem in the middle of the map, as was the tradition in Western mapmaking, the Kunyu Wanguo quantu, produced by Matteo Ricci first in 1584, and reprinted in 1602 at the behest of the Wanli emperor, placed the Chinese empire at the centre.
The Wanli emperor offered patronage to Ricci, but the two men never met. The Kangxi emperor, patron to the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88), entertained a very close relationship to this missionary, appointing him to an official position as chief astronomer and mathematician of the Qing empire and demanding personal instruction in the Western sciences. Neither the Yongzheng emperor nor Qianlong were as interested as the Kangxi emperor was in the acquisition of knowledge about the wider world. The Qianlong emperor did, however, appreciate the knowledge and skills of missionary painters, and used these very effectively to help promulgate his vision of the Qing empire abroad. An Italian missionary by the name of Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) served as court painter under Qianlong, and made numerous famous portraits of the emperor, combining European painting skills with the ideals and practices of Chinese imperial court painting.
Despite the high positions awarded to select Jesuits, and the tireless work of numerous lower-profile missionaries in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, Christianity did not reach a very large part of the Chinese population, in part because of imperial sanctions against conversions, and in part because of the refusal of the Christian Church leadership to tolerate the coexistence of Christianity with the family-based ritual practices and popular religions that shaped the this-worldly and other-worldly views of the Chinese.
Jesuits and technology in late imperial China
Arguably, the contribution of the Christian missionaries to Chinese science and technology, and especially the exchange of scientific knowledge between China and Europe, is greater than to the spread of Christianity in China. The Jesuits saw the “arts,” such as mathematics, astronomy, and mnemonics (memorization techniques) as additional tools for attracting the Chinese and convincing them of the glory of their Christian God. For the Chinese emperors, however, that glory was less significant than their own position. They were keen to capture the Jesuits’ skills for their own purposes. The Shunzhi emperor (1638–61), who ruled when the Qing was founded in 1644, appointed the German Jesuit Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) to advise him on matters related to astronomy and religion, and the two are said to have spent a great deal of time together. We already saw that the Jesuit Verbiest, too, had a close relationship to the emperor, serving in an official position in the imperial bureaucracy under Kangxi. In his role as Director of the Imperial Observatory, Verbiest rebuilt the institution and equipped it with armillary spheres, globes, sextants, and other instruments for measuring the size and distance of celestial bodies and predicting their trajectories. The early Qing emperors were keen to marshal the powers of these astronomers for the empire, and happy to employ European specialists for the purpose.
In 1687, a group of French missionaries arrived in China. The party included Louis-Daniel le Comte (1655–1728) and five other Jesuit scientists. He remained only for three years: in 1691, he had been assigned the task of returning to France to inform his superiors that the mission near Beijing was struggling financially. During his time in China, he travelled from Shanxi where his original assignation was to Xi’an, where he spent two years, and later on to Canton. Like Matteo Ricci and the many missionaries after Ricci, Le Comte sent long letters back to Europe, describing the features of life in China that struck him as noteworthy, but while Ricci’s letters were full of admiration and wonder about the marvels of this sophisticated empire, Le Comte’s letters are more critical. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits felt that although China lacked Christianity, the Europeans had a great deal to learn from the Chinese, and common ground could be found, both in religious belief and in scientific thinking. By the end of the seventeenth century and during the course of the eighteenth century, especially when the so-called scientific and industrial revolutions in Europe began to transform all aspects of life in Europe, European thinkers and visitors to China started to focus on what they considered to be an absence of scientific thought and a lack of technological development in China.
The critical attitudes in writings about China by eighteenth-century European missionaries and merchants can to some extent be explained by the continued failures they faced: lack of freedom to proselytize seriously hampered the missionaries’ chances to convert the population of China, and the lack of access to the interior meant that traders were reduced to visiting certain ports, at set times of the year, through a small group of imperially appointed, designated merchants. But their criticisms of Chinese science and technology, and their description of the Chinese empire in the eighteenth century as stagnant, would leave a lasting impression on views held by Chinese and Western scholars on the High Qing. Only in recent decades have scholars begun to pay more attention to the ways in which Chinese science and technology did develop in the eighteenth century, and to evaluate Chinese scientists “on their own terms,” as historian Benjamin Elman has described it.
The High Qing was a period of growth and dynamic development: the population grew, the territory under Qing control increased, a more sophisticated multi-cultural and multi-lingual administration than ever before was in operation, Chinese manufactures increased and tea, silk, and porcelain were exported all over the world and in larger quantities than ever before. And even if there were not as many scientific innovations during the Qing as there had been during the Song dynasty, they were still numerous. The use of Western armament technologies in the Qing imperial army, the use of Western cartography in mapping the empire, the use of perspective in the paintings commissioned by the imperial court, the use of colored enamels to make imperial porcelains reveal that particularly for the purpose of strengthening the imperialist ambitions of the emperors and their administrators, collaborations between Western and Chinese scientists also thrived as never before during the High Qing.