Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Pre-Twentieth-Century China,) - Softcover

Crossley, Pamela Kyle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520234243 ISBN 13: 9780520234246

Verlag: University of California Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

In this landmark exploration of the origins of nationalism and cultural identity in China, Pamela Kyle Crossley traces the ways in which a large, early modern empire of Eurasia, the Qing (1636-1912), incorporated neighboring, but disparate, political traditions into a new style of emperorship. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, including Manchu, Korean, and Chinese archival materials, Crossley argues that distortions introduced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical records have blinded scholars to the actual course of events in the early years of the dynasty. This groundbreaking study examines the relationship between the increasingly abstract ideology of the centralizing emperorship of the Qing and the establishment of concepts of identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the advent of nationalism in China.

Concluding with a broad-ranging postscript on the implications of her research for studies of nationalism and nation-building throughout modern Chinese history, A Translucent Mirror combines a readable narrative with a sophisticated, revisionary look at China's history. Crossley's book will alter current understandings of the Qing emperorship, the evolution of concepts of ethnicity, and the legacy of Qing rule for modern Chinese nationalism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pamela Kyle Crossley is Rosenwald Research Professor of History, Dartmouth College; author of Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (1990) and The Manchus (1997); and coauthor (with Richard Bulliet and Dan Headrick) of The Earth and Its Peoples (1997).

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IN THIS LANDMARK EXPLORATION of the origins of nationalism and concepts of racial identity in China, Pamela Kyle Crossley traces the shifting ideologies of a large, early modern land-based empire, the Qing (1636-1912). Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Crossley argues that motifs introduced under the Qing in the eighteenth century -- part of the crystallizing categories of identity that the Qing themselves promoted -- continue to distort the modern understanding of Qing origins. What has often been repudiated by nationalist foes of empire, it turns out, is frequently itself a creation of empire.

As the empire was formed, Crossley suggests, the complex or simultaneous rulership needed to address itself to increasingly discrete, abstract, genealogically constructed, and historicized audiences. She finds that these identities, some of which were adopted wholesale by nationalist spokesmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bore at best a loose resemblance to the factual contours of the Qing period.

Concluding with a broad-ranging postscript on the implications of her research on studies of nationalism and nation-building in modern Chinese history, A Translucent Mirror will be indispensable for scholars and students.

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A Translucent Mirror

By Pamela Kyle Crossley

University of California Press

Copyright © 2002 Pamela Kyle Crossley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520234246
1
Trial by Identity

The Ming empire (13681644) was perpetually engaged in a struggle against various peoples along its northern borders. By the early seventeenth century, an elaborate set of ideas justified by allusion to ancient selected philosophical and historical texts was repeatedly invoked by the Ming court to legitimate itself in opposition to outsiders, and to justify both open warfare with and hostile border policies against unruly peoples of the north. In philosophical circles emerging materialism was often compatible with state rhetoric on the question of civilization and identity, so that issues of descent, environment, and immutable moral character combined both to make Chinese affiliations at the borders more rigid and to discredit the barbarians' political and economic organization. As a competitor with the Ming for the domination of the Liaodong region in particular, the Jianzhou Jurchen regime fostered an entirely different view of affiliation. Identity was subordination. Neither ancestors nor place of origin could override a sincere, unselfish wish to serve the Jianzhou ruler. These rival ideologies were in manifest conflict during the wars between the Ming and the Jin/Qing in the earlier seventeenth century. They also met in exquisitely precise debate over the fate of Tong Bunian and the history of the "lineage" with which he became associated.

In Ming official geography the region just outside the Great Wall, east of Shanhai Pass and north of western Korea, was Liaodong. By Qing times the Fengtian prefectural administration would subsume most of the area. But the name Liaoyang, which was also the name of a town within the district, remained common, and harked back to the administrative geography of the Jurchen Jin empire (11211234). Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents refer to the area inconsistently as Liaodong or Liaoyang. It lay

within a roughly semicircular network of barriers and guard stations that marked the Ming boundary in Northeast Asia. Directly north was the territory of the Haixi, who thrived at the interface of multiple economic and cultural spheres.1 Northeast and east of Liaodong was the vast territory called "Nurgan," where Jurchens with complex relationships to the Ming court in China and the Yi court in Korea dominated a rich trade in raw goods. "Liaodong" and "Nurgan" were not only geographical entities; they respectively marked political and cultural territories that before the Qing conquest of China were critical to definition of the rulership and its constituencies. After the conquest, the shadows of "Liaodong" and "Nurgan" would continue to vex Qing attempts to define the imperial lineage, its following, and the shape and style of its dominion.

A Discourse on Ancestry

The town of Fushun (Manchu Fusun*

, just inside the Ming military pale, was the primary licensed center for trade with Nurgan.2 In the early seventeenth century Tong Bunian, whose courtesy name (hao ) was Babai and whose literary style (zi ) was Guanlan, was registered at Fushun. His father, Tong Yangzhi, had been a Ming military officer posted to Kaiyuan in Liaodong. The year of Bunian's birth is not clear, but he received the Ming national examination degree (jinshi ) in 1616, and the average age of receiving the national degree in the late imperial period appears to have been about thirty-four. His success in the examinations suggests that his family was wealthy enough to raise him to be exclusively devoted to his studies. They also had the means to support him during his travels to Shenyang,

For background see Rossabi, The Jurchens in the Y|an and Ming; Robert Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch'ing History.

Seventeenth-century Ming gazetteers identify Nurgan as the territories occupied by the Haixi, Jianzhou, and "wild" Jurchens (the latter group subsuming the Nivkhs, Ulch, Golds, Nanni, Evenks, Orochons, Giliaks, and other groups of Northeastern Asia), which indicates undelimited territories northeast of Liaodong and north of Korea. The Wanli period (15881620) writer Ma Wensheng, however, considered Nurgan to be a rather discrete area one month's travel north of the Songari River, in Heilongjiang ("Fu'an Dong Yi kao," 2). This is in accord with the earlier specification of Nurgan as the immediate vicinity of the Yongning temple. The site was by the fifteenth century inhabited by Giliaks but had a century earlier been a penal colony established under the Yuan empire. See Grupper, "The Manchu Imperial Cult," 37. Generalization of the name may be been connected with the patenting of a Ming "garrison" (see below) with the Nurgan name and the tendency of such garrisons to mutate in size and location.

where he would have had to take the provincial degree (juren ), and subsequently the Ming capital (then Peking), where he would have had to stay for weeks, or more likely months, to complete the sittings leading ultimately to the palace examinations (dianke ). After succeeding in the examination, Bunian returned to Fushun briefly to await his first appointment. He married a woman of another Fushun family, surnamed Chen, and may have started planning his house in the town of Liaoyang, a grander and more central locality than Fushun. In 1618 his assignment came, and the next year he took up duties first as magistrate of Nanpi, Zhili, and then as the magistrate of Hejian, Zhili, near Peking. So far as is known, these successive, prestigious posts occasioned Bunian's only prolonged residence outside of Liaodong. It may have been during the period of his magistracy in Zhili that his only son, Tong Guoqi, was born at the house in Liaoyang.

In 1621 Tong Bunian was returned to his native terrain, with critical and dangerous responsibilities. He was called to serve under Xiong Tingbi (15691625),3 the Ming military intendant of Liaodong. In 1618 warfare had broken out in Liaodong between the Ming and the Jianzhou Jurchens. The Jianzhou chieftain Nurgaci had announced himself khan and formed a regime announcing itself as "Jin," the name of the former Jurchen empire in the region four hundred years before. Now, Nurgaci had captured Fushun. The town's entire population, including many of the collateral members of Bunian's lineage, had been taken into the Nurgan territories.4

Xiong Tingbi hoped that the recruitment of Tong Bunian would help break the downward spiral of Ming defenses in Liaodong. Xiong had been stationed in Liaodong on and off since 1608. Early in his exposure to the region he had expressed alarm at the amassing of wealth and armaments by the Jianzhou. Local Jurchen groups had all federated themselves to some degree with the Ming court. They entered into the schedule of visits to Peking to make ritual obeisance to the Ming emperor and in return were given titles, stipends, and trading rights across the Ming border. Ming records give the arrangement the easily discerned fiction of a "garrison" (weisuo ) system and identify the federationswhich were in fact liable to change their location in accord with certain political, economic, or belligerent eventsas military establishments, with their headmen recorded as officials.5 A certain amount of abuse of the system was to be expected from

ECCP, 308.

Qing shilu, "Taizu wuhuangdi" 1:12.

See Yang Yang et al., "Mingdai liuren zai Dongbei." On Jurchen commerce with Liaodong see also Serruys, Sino-J|rched Relations in the Yung-lo Period; Ross-abi, The Jurchens in the Yuan and Ming; Deng...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520234243
• ISBN 13: 9780520234246
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 423
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: De Gruyter; orders-books@degruyter.com; ; Genthiner Straße 13; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland