A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology

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The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books in commemoration of a man whose work at the University of California Press from 1954 to 1979 was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies. Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment of a great and beloved author.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book p rovided by the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian S tudies Endowment, which is supported by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

A TRANSLUCENT MIRROR

A TRANSLUCENT MIRROR History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 1999 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crossley, Pamela Kyle. A translucent mirror: history and identity in Qing imperial ideology / Pamela Kyle Crossley. p. cm. "The Philip E. Lilienthal Asian studies imprint." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-21566-4 (alk. paper) 1. China-Politics and government- Ch'ing dynasty, 1644-1912. 2. Nationalism- China. I. Title. II. Title: History and identity in Qing imperial ideology. DS754·17·q6 1999 99-11002 951'.03-dc21 eIP

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI /NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).@

To the authors and editors of

Eminent Chinese of the Ch 'ing Period

Fang Chao-ying Hiromu Momose George Kennedy Teng Ssu-yu Yang Ju-chin Tomoo Numata

Tu Lien-che Earl Swisher Li Man-kuei Rufus o. Suter Dean R. Wickes L. Carrington Goodrich Knight Biggerstaff Wang Chung-min E. S. Larsen Paul Yap Teh-Iu

M. Jean Gates S. K. Chang John King Fairbank Wu Kwang Tsing Tseng Hsien-san Feng Chia-sheng Tseng Mien Y. M. Chin Walter Fuchs Ch'i Ssu-ho Shunzo Sakamaki C. H. Ts'ui Hellmut Wilhelm Meribeth Cameron Michael J. Hagerty Alfred Kuhn William R. Leete Wang Ch' ang-ping A. V. Marakueff Cyrus H. Peake Thomas C. La Fargue Jen Tai Nancy Lee Swann William J. Hail C. Martin Wilbur Homer H. Dubs Eduard Erkes Arthur W. Hummel John C. Ferguson Han Shou-hsuan Roswell S. Britton A. K'ai-ming Ch'iu Gussie Esther Gaskill Hu Shih Marybelle Bouchard

Contents

List of Maps Acknowledgments Introduction Ideology, Rulership, and History

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Conquest and the Blessing of the Past

29

Imperial Universalism and Circumscription of Identity

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PART I

THE GREAT WALL

53

1

Trial by Identity

57

2

PART I I

3

A Discourse on Ancestry

58

Political Names in Nurgan

74

The Liaodongese

84

The Character of Loyalty

89

The Early Nikan Spectrum

90

Conquest and Distinctions

99

Personifications of Fidelity

116

THE FATHER'S HOUSE

129

Boundaries of Rule

13 5

Origins of the Khanship

1}8

The Collegial Impulse

157

The Reinvention of Treason

167

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PART I I I

5

6

Contents Empire and Identity

177

Subjugation and Equality

178

Generating Imperial Authority

185

Authenticity

192

Surpassing Limits

205

THE CELEST I AL P I LLAR

217

The Wheel-Turning King

22)

The Center

224

Debating the Past

246

The Power of Speech

262

The Universal Prospect

281

The Banner Elites

285

Shady Pasts

290

Manchuness

296

Following Chinggis

)11

The Empty Constituency

)27

Postscript: Race and Revolution at the End of the Empire

Bibliography Abbreviations Index

Maps

Qing Empire Boundaries in the Qianlong Period, 1736-95

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Liaodong, Seventeenth Century

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Early Qing Conquest, 1616-46

130

Later Qing Conquest, 1644-175 0

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IX

Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of a long-term project begun in 1983, inter­ rupted in 1993, and resumed in 1995. It is consequently difficult for the ac­ knowledgments not to read as a sort of prose vita. I have done my best to avoid that while trying to do some justice to the following. Jonathan Spence's Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor first posed for me, during my years as an undergraduate, many of the questions of sym­ pathy, abstraction, personality, and identity that underlie this study, and over the long term the author's guidance and intellectual companionship have made the content of this book what it is. As I have previously ac­ knowledged, an overheard conversation involving John E. Wills Jr. in 1 982 inspired me to examine the Tong lineages closely enough to open up many of the questions that underpin this study. Professor Wills has in many more deliberate ways supported this project over its protracted life, and I . have consistently benefited from the attention he has paid to the interme­ diate forms it has assumed. Of those whose guidance and encouragement have come in more con­ ventional but no less influential forms are those who shaped my earliest in­ terests in Qing history: Lillian M. Li, Jonathan D. Spence, Yii Ying-shih, Joseph Francis Fletcher Jr., Susan Naquin, Beatrice S. Bartlett, Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, and Benjamin Elman. As professionals and as friends, all provided the challenge and support that generated this study. In subsequent years I have thrived on criticism and encouragement, both generously ladled, from William T. Rowe, Morris Rossabi, R. Kent Guy, Dru Gladney, Gene R. Garthwaite, Dale F. Eickelman, Nicola di Cosmo, Frank Dikotter, and Richard von Glahn, the last of whom read and commented on the man­ uscript for the Press. At many points, whether in response to presentations •

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Acknowledgments

of parts of this work, to my inquiries, or to an impulse to be helpful, I have received important comment, readings or suggestions from Sarah Allan, Harold Baker (and the participants of SEELANGS), Cheryl Boettcher, Peter Bol, Dorothy Borei, Cynthia Brokaw, Colin G. Calloway, Chia Ning, Ann­ ping Chin, Jerry Dennerline, Ruth Dunnell, Carter Eckart, Mark Elliott, Michael Ermarth, Carl Estabrook, Jack Dull, Robert Fogelin, Philippe Foret, Gao Xiang, Shalom Goldman, Samuel Martin Grupper, Stephen Harrell, Chang Hao, Martin Heijdra, Laura Hess, James Hevia, Roland Higgins, Robert Hillenbrand, R. Po-chia Hsia, Hsiung Pingchen, Max Ko-wu Huang, Kam Tak-sing, Kang Le, Hsin-i Kao, Richard Kremer, Philip A. Kuhn, Lai Hui-min, Li Hongbin, Li Hsiieh-chih, Beatrice Forbes Manz, Victor Mair, Eugenio Menegon, David O. Morgan, Marysa Navarro, Peter Perdue, Ger­ traude [Roth] Li, Benjamin 1. Schwartz, Helen Siu, Nathan Sivin, Justin Stearns, Donald Sutton, Lynn Struve, Frederick E. Wakeman Jr., Joanna Waley-Cohen, Arthur Waldron, Wang Peihuan, Wang Zhonghan, Ellen Widmer, Mi-chu Wiens, R. Bin Wong, Wong Young-tsu, Phillip Woodruff, Alexander Woodside, Yan Chongnian, Robin Yates, and Angela Zito. Charles Tuttle Wood and Susan Reynolds have both gone far out of their way to scrutinize the form and content of earlier drafts of this work. As model professionals and as critics of my writing they have afforded me the rare stimulation of complementary virtues. I hope that both will see some good from their labors in these pages, paragraphs, sentences, and words. The book's present form is a direct product of their intervention, and de­ spite its persisting faults it is vastly evolved over its preceding forms. The completion of this, as with other work done in the same period, would have been impossible without the support of Gail Vernazza, friends and colleagues at Dartmouth, and those I should refer to as P.N., G.B. and G.L. I am grateful to the institutions who invited me to share parts of this study and advanced the specifics of its expression: The Association for Asian Studies (1981, 1 984, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997), the American Historical Association (1982, 1991, 1997), and the American Ethnological Society (1991) . Also, in chronological order beginning in 1984: the China-Japan Program, Cornell University; "Workshop on Wen and Wu" at Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University; Southern California China Seminar at the University of Cali­ fornia, Los Angeles; American Council of Learned Societies conference on "Education and Society in Late Imperial China"; Institute for Qing Histor­ ical Studies (Qingshi yanjiu suo), National Peoples' University (Renmin Daxue), Peking; Naval and Military History Circle, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University; "Four Anniversaries" China Conference, Annapo-

Acknowledgments

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lis; Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia Univer­ sity; Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington; Premodern China Seminar, Harvard University; Mansfield Freeman Cen­ ter for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University; Program in Asian Stud­ ies, State University of New York; East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department, Harvard University; Modern China Seminar, Columbia Uni­ versity; Faculty Seminar, Department of History, New York University; Faculty Seminar, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University; Fac­ ulty Seminar in Race and Ethnicity, University of Texas, Austin; the Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washing­ ton, D.C. (1991 and 1992); Department o f History, Princeton University; Faculty Seminar on Race and Science, University of Pennsylvania; "Con­ tinuing Relevance of Traditional Chinese Institutions and Values in Mod­ ern China," Conference at the East-West Center, Honolulu; School for East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield; "China's Margins" Conference at Dartmouth College; Contemporary China Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Centre for Chinese Studies, Oxford; "Inventing the Past and Imagining the Future: The Construction of 'Na­ tionhood' in Late Qing China, 1895 -1912," Institute for Modern History (Chin-tai shih so), Academia Sinica (Chung-yang yen-chiu yuan), Taipei; New England China Seminar, Harvard University; Revisions Seminar at Dartmouth College sponsored by the Pat and John Rosenwald '5 2, Tuck '53 Research Professorship. The research has also been facilitated by the professionalism and cour­ tesies of the staffs of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; the Na­ tional Palace Museum Archives (Ku-kung po-wu yuan), Nankang, Taiwan; . the Wasson Collection, Cornell University; Baker Library, Dartmouth Col­ lege; the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Gest Oriental Library, Princeton University; Library of Congress; Library of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Asian Art; and the Number One Historical Archives (Diyi lishi dang'an), National Palace Mu­ seum (Gugong bowu guan), Peking; federated libraries of the Academia Sinica (Chung-yang yen-chiu yuan), Nankang, Taiwan. It is also my honor to bring to the reader's attention the financial spon­ sors of this work over the years, not only in gratitude but in some despair at the number of sources included here but no longer available to scholars: For my period at Yale (where the ideas underlying this study first became of interest to me): Yale University Fellowship, National Defense Foreign Languages Fellowship, the Arthur F. Wright Memorial Fellowship, the Yale Council for East Asian Studies and the Concilium for International and

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Acknowledgments

Area Studies, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Fellowship. And in subsequent years: American Council of Learned Societies, Mellon Fellowship in Chinese Stud­ ies; Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (National Academy of Sciences); Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College; Wang Institute Fellowship in Chinese Studies; Junior Faculty Fellowship at Dartmouth College; Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Senior Faculty Fellowship at Dartmouth College; John Simon Guggenheim Memo­ rial Foundation; and the Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professorship at Dartmouth College. Final thanks go to the editori,!l staff at the University of California Press, especially Sue Heinemann. Sheila Levine, whose extraordinary patience with the longevity of this project has only been rewarded by my wheedling to publish all this accumulation of acknowledgments, has been both shrewd and good, both indulgent and firm she is the sine qua non of A Translu­

cent Mirror. Friends in diverse places, some mentioned above in other capacities and some unnamed, have provided more inspiration than they can know or I can express here. As always, I claim all stubbornly persisting errors of fact, interpretation, or judgment.

Introduction

For some time the sources of modern "national" and "ethnic" identities have appeared to lie in concepts of community, solidarity, and common interest that have taken various forms over the centuries and in the past hundred years have been newly refined by print and digital media, as well as by the recession of imperialism. This appearance cannot be entirely de­ ceptive, particularly with respect to the nineteenth and twentieth cen­ turies, when many peoples indeed imagined themselves into communities, to abuse Benedict Anderson's phrase. The explanation has an appealing ver­ satility, in that it can be and has been imposed upon an infinite variety of national histories. Yet no matter how well the paradigm works in describing the processes by which communitarian concepts become propagated as na­ tional identities, the substance of any particular national narrative remains . elusive. The cultural bits out of which such identities have been cobbled have vastly divergent origins, and the bits themselves are not theoretically neutral or interchangeable. That being the case, the historian wonders to what extent the variety of idols available to nationalist movements in the modern era represents continuing authority of earlier times. For some na­ tions presently existing, those "earlier times" were centuries of govern­ ment by empires of conquest, whose rulers hips had need of constructing categories of affiliation that would correspond to multiple, simultaneously expressed codes of legitimacy in the rulership. The Qing empire (16) 6 1912) had a rulership that functioned in this way, and the historical result was a legacy of historical identities that exerted distinctive influence not only upon the particulars of national and ethnic concepts emerging in the nineteenth century, but upon the fundamental concepts of identity.

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Introduction

During the Qing, ideas about the ruler and ideas about the ruled changed each other. Seventeenth-century expressions of the relationship of the khan Nurgaci (r. 1616 -26) 1 to peoples under his dominion differed fundamen­ tally from concepts of subordination to the first Qing emperor, Hung Taiji (r. 1627-35, 163 6 - 43). In the eighteenth century, particularly under the Qianlong (173 6 - 95) emperor Hongu, the ideological relationship between the ruler and the ruled completed another turn. It gained not only new complexities but new purchase on the indoctrination of aspiring officials and literate elites outside of government as the motors of conquest slowed, then rooted into pillars of civil rule. The substance of these changes may, for purposes of introduction, be crudely simplified to this paradigm: Under the khanship created by Nurgaci, a symbolic code of master to slave (these terms used after some consideration and explained in Chapters 2 and 3) was amended to a highly differentiated system of cultural and moral identities under the Qing emperorship of the later seventeenth century. In the eigh­ teenth century, the burden of the emperorship to impersonate its diverse peoples was a primary theme in the representations historical, literary, ideological, architectural, and personal of universal rule. Increasingly abstract court expression of undelimited rulership required circumscrip­ tion of its interior domains, so that criteria of identity were necessarily em­ bedded in this ideology. To readers with a general interest, the above statements may appear self­ evident. To specialists, they may appear sententious and problematic. What follows immediately is unfair to every scholar working on the Qing period and the many disciplines its history encompasses; all aim to deviate from the common narrative at some Significant point. Nevertheless, in the field 1. This name is more frequently written Nurhad or Nurhachi. The names Nur­ gad and Hung Taiji are extremely rare in Manchu documents; they are, however, amply attested in contemporary Chinese and Korean records. The names were well known in the early seventeenth century, but for reasons of protocol (if this can in­ clude spiritual considerations) are expunged from the imperial records. Both names, in the forms known in Manchu, occur only in the " old" Manchu script, which did not distinguish between certain consonants and vowels that the reformed script had after 1632. This means that as written the name could have been pronounced as "Nurgachi," "Nurghachi," "Nurhachi," or "Nur'achi." I have chosen to follow the known orthography, though it seems to me that authors are perfectly justified in writing the name however they imagine it might have been pronounced. In the case of Hung Taiji, there is also a choice of following Chinese romanization, so that Hong Taiji or Hongtaiji both are reasonable. Huang Taiji however is not, since it is based on a mistaken Chinese interpretation of the name. See also Chapter 3, nn 81, 82, 83 .

Introduction

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of Qing history certain basics are accepted. The empire is considered to have been founded by, or controlled by, or given a certain political and cul­ tural cast by, the Manchus in the early seventeenth century. Before the in­ stitutionalization of the name "Manchu," the majority population of the Qing predecessor state the Jin, usually called the Later Jin were the "Jurchens," whose name was attested in Chinese characters over the better part of the period from about 800 to 1.636. Jurchens officially became Manchus in 1.635. Apart from the Jurchens / Manchus, the Qing court re­ cruited some Mongols and conquered China, taking the Ming capital of Peking in 1.644. By that time the Qing had enlisted or impressed many Chi­ nese who joined the Qing military organization, the Eight Banners, as "Chinese" bannermen. The Eight Banners led the assault at Peking in 1.644 and during the ensuing forty years consolidated Qing control over central and southern China. The Qing rulers of the later seventeenth and early eigh­ teenth century foremost among them the brilliant and enduring Kangxi emperor (r. 1.661.-1.722) remade the court to bring it into harmony with established Chinese values, giving it stability and legitimacy that it could not gain by conquest alone. In the eighteenth century, the Qing reached its height of political control (over Manchuria, Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan, Tibet, and China, as well as the states recognizing Qing superiority in the system of court visitation, sometimes called the " tributary system"); of eco­ nomic power (ensnaring Europe in an unbalanced trade relationship based on Qing exports of tea, porcelain, silk, and other goods); and of military ex­ pansion (with ongoing campaigns in Southeast Asia as well as suppression of disaffected groups whether "ethnically" or socially defined within the empire) . This golden age was represented in the rule of the Qianlong emperor, the most "Confucian," "sinified," or simply grandest of the Qing rulers. After his abdication in 1.796 and death in 1. 799, the empire went into a "decline," during which it became vulnerable to the expansionist, colo­ nialist, and imperialist actions of Europe, the United States, and eventually Japan. The most evident point of departure in the present book from this usual understanding of Qing origins and conquest is that the monolithic identi­ ties of "Manchu," "Mongol," and "Chinese" (Han) are not regarded as fun­ damentals, sources, or building blocks of the emergent order. In my view these identities are ideological productions of the process of imperial cen­ tralization before 1.800. The dependence of the growing imperial institu­ tion upon the abstraction, elision, and incorporation of local ideologies of rulership favored the construction and broadcast in imperial publishing,

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