Megha Majumder SQ3R Qing State QUESTIONS: 1. WHAT WERE QIANLONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CHINESE CULTURE? 2.

WHAT ART FORMS WERE PRACTICED UNDER BOTH EMPERORS? 3. WHICH RELIGIONS/PHILOSOPHIES DID EACH EMPEROR ADVOCATE? 4. WHICH WAS THE MOST USED TRADE ROUTE IN CHINA, AND WHAT GOODS WERE PRIMARILY TRANSPORTED? 5. WHAT DID THE SCROLLS SAY ABOUT EACH EMPEROR? WHAT STORIES DID THEY TELL? THE KANGXI AND QIANLONG EMPERORS SQ3R -The 268-year duration of the Qing dynasty included the Kangxi Emperor, who reigned from 1662 to 1722, and his grandson, the Qianlong Emperor, who reigned from 1736 to 1796. -THE KANGXI EMPEROR: For the Manchus, who were a foreign, conquering dynasty, a major task on the road to effective rule in China was that of enlisting the help of the Chinese populace, the elite scholarly class. The man most responsible for accomplishing this was the Kangxi Emperor, who came to the throne in 1662, when he was only 8 years old. He recruited scholars from the Yangzi River delta area, including the city of Suzhou. He brought these men into his court to support his cause of transforming the Manchu way of rulership into a truly Confucian establishment based very much on Ming dynasty prototypes. Through this maneuver, the Kangxi Emperor was able to win over the scholarly elite and the Chinese populace at large. The first half of the Kangxi Emperor's rule was devoted to the stabilization of the empire: gaining control over the Manchu hierarchy and suppressing armed rebellions. -THE QIANLONG EMPEROR: ruled from 1736 to 1796. His reign lasted almost exactly as long as that of his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor, and the Qianlong Emperor further emulated his grandfather by making six epic journeys to the South and commissioning a set of twelve scrolls (also titled Nanxuntu) to document one of his southern inspection tours. -Expansion of Territory under the Qianlong Emperor: Chinese empire grew to a size unprecedented in Chinese history and included Tibet and a great deal of central Asia, including parts of Russia. In addition, China extended its political control over some of the smaller states in Southeast Asia and Korea. At the height of the Qianlong Emperor's rule, China dominated East Asia militarily, politically, and culturally. -Creation of a Multiethnic State under the Qianlong Emperor: Not only Han Chinese (the Han constitute the majority ethnic group and the dominant Chinese-language-speaking group in China), but also Mongols, Tibetans, and Manchus, among others, each with their indigenous religious traditions. For example, Tibetan Buddhism, the Manchu shamanistic cult, and the religions of the Mongols (who were largely Tibetan Buddhists as well) were all well supported during the Qianlong Emperor's reign. He was a universal ruler, the first Manchu ruler to not only feel completely at ease with both his Manchu and his Chinese identities. -The Qianlong Emperor as Great Patron of the Arts: In addition to patronizing the arts, he also commissioned compendia of all the great literary works of the time. The collections of the national palace museums in both Beijing and Taipei were largely formed under the Qianlong Emperor and are the largest repositories of important Chinese artifacts that remain today.

GRANDEUR OF THE QING STATE

-The Qing state inherited a long tradition of Chinese bureaucratic rule and a political system that was of great interest to many European thinkers, such as Voltaire, Francis Quesnay, and Gottfried Leibniz, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, when Europeans were beginning to consider changes to their own political systems. The Chinese system of bureaucratic rule was unprecedented in human history, and it

contributed greatly to the ability of the Qing dynasty to rule over a vast territory and to do so in a way that was fair and that also brought the benefits of imperial rule to a large number of people. -4 ASPECTS OF QING GOVERNMENT IMPRESSIVE TO WESTERN OBSERVERS OF THE TIME: The Emperor and the Mandate of Heaven: The Chinese system of rule relied on a strong central government headed by an emperor, who, with his many relatives, constituted a ruling family and lineage. But the emperor did not necessarily have the absolute power that is often associated with traditional monarchy. That is, the Chinese never believed in the "divine right of kings." Rather, they believed that an emperor had to be an exceptional being -- a sage king -who could mediate the cosmic forces. The emperor was also not invulnerable. His actions had to be tempered by basic political expectations, and he had to do the things that an emperor should do. If he did not do these things, he could be overthrown, and this would be considered legitimate. If such a thing occurred, the emperor would be understood to have lost the "Mandate of Heaven." An Integrated Bureaucracy: The Chinese government during the Qing; political power flowed from the top to the bottom through a series of hierarchically ordered positions that extended down to the county level, where a local magistrate headed a county office, called the yamen. They had acquired their positions according to a system of merit. Examination System for Entry to Government Service: Those who had the ambition to become government officials were schooled from an early age in the canonical literature and the philosophical works of China's great Confucian tradition. Brightest and most promising of their children would be able to rise through this system. A Government of "Elite Commoners:" An important consequence of this system of meritocracy that peopled the Chinese bureaucracy with the best and the brightest of the literati was that the state was not ruled by aristocrats that had inherited their positions. Rather, it was a state ruled by those who were of the "common people," although often they were the elite among the common. -GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATS WITH LOCAL AND IMPERIAL ORIENTATIONS : The organization of the Chinese bureaucracy meant that officials continued to move between the local communities out of which they came. -Qing State Policy is not Monolithic: During Qing times the Chinese state system, though it was a monarchy, was not a monolith. The bureaucracy always had to worry about and accommodate local circumstances. -The Rule of Avoidance and a Vision of Empire: Officials existed in two "skins," the bureaucratic system was organized to prevent, whenever possible, people from acting in their official capacity in such a way that it would unfairly benefit their home province. This was done through the "rule of avoidance," Though the notion of "nation" as now defined and understood in the West was not part of the political lexicon under the Qing dynasty, there was nonetheless in the policies implemented by the official bureaucracy a sense of loyalty to one imperial, "national" entity, and a sense that policies should be applied equally throughout the empire. The resulting tension between local and empire-wide "national" interests played itself out in the daily activities of officials. -The Local Magistrate Overwhelmed by Population Increase: Growth in population did contribute, however, to what came to be one of the greatest weaknesses within the Qing bureaucratic system -- the local magistrate. The magistrate was at the lowest level of the bureaucracy and had a very large area to control, but he was not always able to do so effectively with the resources that were given to him by the state. -TWO QING DYNASTY INNOVATIONS 1. TAX POLICY- Tax Policy at the Local Level: The Qing rulers implemented many innovations in

the ways in which government was run, one of which relates to the difficult task of providing necessary services efficiently to a large and diverse population. -Taxes Levied on Agriculture but not on the Commercial Sector: China based its tax revenues almost entirely on land; that is to say, the government taxed farmers. To a lesser degree, government revenues also came from certain government monopolies, most importantly the monopoly on the sale of salt, which was an everyday commodity that everyone needed. What the Qing state did not do, on the other hand, is tax the commercial sector in any significant way. This may come as a surprise to those who think of China as a state that has tightly controlled the economy throughout the years. -Fiscal Strains, Past and Present: The impact of this non-commercial tax policy was that as Chinas population continued to grow under the Qing, even the great tax reforms of the early 18th century became insufficient to meet the needs of the growing state system. 2. THE SECRET PALACE MEMORIAL SYSTEM: "memorials" or communications on policy written by local officials and sent to the central government. Building on this existing system, the Qing introduced the "Secret Palace Memorial System," which was an opportunity for the emperor to communicate directly with officials. During the period referred to as the "High Qing" (when the Kangxi and the Qianlong emperors ruled), this Secret Palace Memorial system operated very well.

THE GRANDEUR OF THE QING ECONOMY

-MING-QING ECONOMIC DYNAMISM AND FOREIGN TRADE: At the end of the Ming dynasty, just before the Manchus overthrew the Ming and established the Qing dynasty, China's economy was in a period of expansion. The economic growth so evident under the Ming dynasty continued under the Qing dynasty, up until the time of the Opium War in the 1840s. -The Stereotype of an "Anti-Merchant" Qing State: A common stereotype about late imperial China -- one that is actually perpetuated in the study of practically every period in Chinese history -- is that the Chinese government was anti-merchant. Common reasons given to support this assertion are: that Confucianism was anti-business and anti-merchant. -CHINA AS A VAST CONTINENTAL MARKET, IN CONTRAST TO THE SMALL STATES OF EUROPE: Unlike Europe during this same period, which was composed of many small states, each with its own political system, national boundary, and tax system, Qing China was a vast continental market with no impediments to the movement of goods across provincial boundaries. -QING CHINA'S ACTIVE ECONOMY, WITH MANY IMPORTANT MARKETS AND MANY COMMODITIES: China did not have a single central market during the Qing dynasty (Shanghai, for example, was just a small town until the late 1800s), but it was big enough to have many important markets and goods moving amongst them. -Farming Economy with Proliferation of Markets: Chinas economy during the Qing dynasty was still largely a farming economy. Eighty percent of the population lived in the countryside at the end of the Qing dynasty, and most people had some relationship to farming or to something that was a byproduct of farming. So China at this time does not fit the image of a modern industrial economy. -Development of a Complex Market Structure: The Qing dynasty saw not only an increase in the number of markets and market towns, but also an evolution in market structures. The markets that were serving the producers were moving from being periodic markets (markets that only met a few days a week, to which farmers could come and bring their produce) to becoming stationary markets that operated every day and had stores that existed all the time. -Development of a Merchant Hierarchy: Merchants who worked only within a local marketing community, and also farmers who spent some of their time working as peddlers to bring in extra money. -Taxes Paid in Money: All Chinese people had to pay part of their taxes to the government in money (usually copper coins or silver) as opposed to goods-in-kind. This meant that the farmers, especially,

had to sell what they produced in order to acquire currency for their taxes. -Paper Money and Bimetallic Currency: both copper and silver were in circulation. Copper coins with an opening cut out in the middle (used to tie several coins together) were used for everyday transactions, and silver was used for larger transactions and for paying taxes to the government. -Early Banks and Long-distance Trade: China had a huge market and a large number of commodities that were moving both within local marketing systems and over longer distances. The remittance bank was developed during this period to address this problem. The remittance bank would take cash deposits from a merchant in one place and issue him a remittance certificate, which the merchant could then take elsewhere to pay someone with whom he was doing business. That person could in turn go to a bank in his area and exchange the certificate for coins. By the 18th century there was a vast network of such banks, and they were extremely important to the development of commercial activity in China. -IMPORTANCE OF THE GRAND CANAL IN TRADE WITHIN CHINA: a major conduit for grain, salt, and other important commodities. Any taxes that were paid in kind were paid in grain, which was shipped along the Grand Canal. Thus, control of the Grand Canal was of critical importance to the Qing government. -ADDRESSING THREE MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE QING ECONOMY 1. STATE CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY: Chinese bureaucracy and the size of China throughout its history, whether in terms of the size of the territory or the size of the population, one can see that no Chinese state could have controlled economic activity completely. -The Qing, a Laissez-Faire State? Chinese customary law for the handling of economic affairs was emerging. The emerging rules, regulations, and customs of this time suited the needs of the people who were engaged in commerce. An Exception: The State Monopoly on the Salt Trade ~ state did not regulate how salt was manufactured; it only required a license for the transport of salt. -Hereditary Occupations: Chinese state had stopped trying to control what occupations people could have, most of the people involved in this system were attached to the ethnically Manchu military structures rather than to the ethnically Han Chinese military. -SILVER IN CHINA AND THE WORLD ECONOMY: China under the Qing had an enormous unmet demand for silver. As the economy grew, the populace needed silver for transactions in the marketplace. 1720s, Mexican silver dollars were used in transactions in Southern China. Western European nations during this time had very few commodities other than silver to sell to China in exchange for the tea, porcelain, and silk that were being imported to meet their own growing demand. Indeed, this inflow of silver from the West is one reason for the rapid expansion of China's economy during the 18th century. -CREATION OF THE "CANTON SYSTEM" IN 1760: Canton had a sufficient number of merchants, sufficient capital to be able to bring goods from the interior in sufficient amounts to make it worthwhile for foreigners to come all the way from England to China. The trip from England to China during this time was indeed very long, and ships only came once a year. The merchants bought everything they could to fill up the ships and soon set sail again.

GRANDEUR OF ART DURING THE QING

-SCHOOLS OF ART DURING THE QING DYNASTY: "the Individualists," was a group of men largely made up of loyalists to the fallen Ming dynasty. The Individualists referred to themselves as "leftover subjects of the Ming" and practiced a very personal form of art that sought to express their reaction to the Manchu conquest -- either a sense of resistance, reclusion, or sadness over the fall of the Ming dynasty. A second group of Qing artists included those men who dedicated themselves to the preservation of Chinese traditional culture by returning to the careful study of a canon of earlier masters that had been defined in the 17th century. Their commitment to replicating and being inspired by this earlier canon of masterpieces led to the labeling of these artists as "the Orthodox school." A

third group of Qing artists included commercial and court artists who specialized in large-scale decorative works. Such artists were employed by the imperial court to produce documentary, commemorative, and decorative works for the imperial palaces. -The Scholar-Artists: The Individualist and Orthodox masters were proficient scholars who often embellished their paintings with poetry. These men were part of a long-standing tradition of the "scholar-artist" that had existed in China as far back as the 11th century. Members of the educated elite, also called the "literati," had already taken possession of calligraphy -- the art of writing -- as a form of self-expression. -Wang Hui and the Orthodox School of Painting: It was a stroke of genius on the part of the Kangxi Emperor to enlist the foremost Orthodox school master, Wang Hui (1632-1717), to direct the painting of the monumental Southern Inspection Tour scrolls, the execution of which was sure to be an enormous challenge. Wang Hui was one of the leading artists of the time and an acknowledged master at creating long landscape compositions in the handscroll format. Furthermore, his selection immediately identified the Qing court with China's most revered artistic traditions. -CHINESE APPROACHES TO THE WORK OF ART: Personal expression valued over "Realism." Since the 14th century what mattered most in Chinese painting was the artist's ability to express his personal feelings rather than to describe the external appearances of things. As a result, most Chinese painting connoisseurs regarded the European style as little more than a gimmick. -The Importance of Poetry for Artists and Connoisseurs: Chinese literati artists wrote poems directly on their paintings=importance of both poetry and calligraphy to the art of painting; a painting should not try to represent or imitate the external world, but rather to express or reflect the inner state of the artist. -REPRESENTING SPACE AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD: 13th century-Chinese artists had mastered the illusion of recession in space. But after this time, the representation of space and the description of the external world gradually ceased to be the principal objective of artists. -European Approaches to Representing Space: Greco-Roman times and again in the Renaissance, artists created the illusion of spatial depth on a flat surface through the use of linear perspective, which meant that implied parallel lines were drawn to intersect at an imaginary point on the horizon called the "vanishing point." -Chinese Approaches to Representing Space: formats that are used in Chinese painting have an impact on how pictorial space itself is conceptualized in the Chinese painting tradition. -INFLUENCE OF EUROPEAN ARTISTIC STYLES ON CHINESE PAINTING: late 16th and early 17th centuries, European Jesuit missionaries began to enter China and serve at the imperial court. missionaries brought engravings, illustrated books, and paintings with them; Chinese were introduced to Western linear perspective and the use of shading to model forms as if they were illuminated by a single light source (called "chiaroscuro," an Italian word literally meaning "light-dark"). One Jesuit artist in particular, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) -- who served under three Qing emperors (including the Kangxi Emperor and his grandson, the Qianlong Emperor) and even had a Chinese name, Lang Shining -- had a major impact on documentary painting at the Qing court. -CHINESE ART IN EUROPE: PORCELAIN: One of the most important Chinese exports to Europe in the 17th century was porcelain, which had been invented in China about 1,000 years earlier. As European demand for Chinese porcelain grew (in part because European ceramic centers at this time did not possess the technical knowledge required to manufacture porcelain), porcelain from China, and later Japan, was by the 1630s flooding the Europe market. -Porcelain Production in China: The manufacture of porcelain in China evolved over time into a highly specialized set of related crafts that together formed an entire industry. -RECORDING THE IMPERIAL SOUTHERN INSPECTION TOUR SCROLLS: The Qing emperors were the first to undertake multiple tours of inspection to all corners of the empire. During his 60-year reign, the Kangxi Emperor completed six southern inspection tours. The Kangxi Emperor's

grandson, the Qianlong Emperor, followed his example and also made six southern tours. -THE KANGXI EMPERORS SECOND SOUTHERN INSPECTION TOUR OF 1689, DOCUMENTED BY WANG HUI AND HIS ASSISTANTS: Politically, the Kangxi Emperor's first two southern tours were the most significant. The emperor embarked on his first tour in 1684, just one year after the suppression of the Three Feudatories rebellion. His second tour, in 1689, was longer in duration, more extensive in its itinerary, and grander in its display of imperial pomp. It was this more splendid second tour that the emperor chose to have commemorated by a set of twelve monumental scrolls, collectively titled "Picture of the Southern Tour" (Nanxuntu) -THE QIANLONG EMPERORS SOUTHERN INSPECTION TOUR OF 1751, DOCUMENTED BY XU YANG AND HIS ASSISTANTS: The Qianlong Emperor undertook six southern inspection tours, just as did his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor. The first tour was completed in 1751, when he had been on the throne 15 years, and like his grandfather, Qianlong commissioned a set of twelve monumental scrolls to document this journey. But the painting of these scrolls under the direction of the court artist Xu Yang (act. 1750-after 1776) did not begin until 1764. The scrolls were completed in 1770, in time to be presented to the Qianlong Emperor on his 60th birthday. -VIEWING THE INSPECTION TOUR SCROLLS TODAY IN LIGHT OF THEIR INTENDED PURPOSE: The Southern Tour scrolls of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors were never intended for a general audience. Celebratory and commemorative, they were created as historical documents for posterity and not intended to set stylistic precedents or to woo viewers of the time. -Significance of Mt. Tai as a Pilgrimage Site: In China it was possible for a person to be a Confucian in his governmental life, a Daoist in his private life, and also a Buddhist. These three traditions often overlapped in the practice of everyday life. Mt. Tai is an excellent example of the Chinese approach to an integrated religious life. All three major Chinese religious and philosophical traditions -Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism -- had major temples on Mt. Tai, and these temples were important pilgrimage sites. But Mt. Tai had long been a sacred mountain, even before any of these philosophies had fully evolved in China. Farmers went there to pray for rain; women went to pray for male offspring. The Kangxi Emperors visit to Mount Tai was a particularly significant event because he was Manchu and not ethnic Han Chinese, for the Qing dynasty was in fact a conquest dynasty. -THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTROLLING THE WATERS: THE QIANLONG EMPEROR'S INSPECTION OF WATER CONTROL MEASURES AT THE HUAI AND YELLOW RIVERS: The threat of floods has been the greatest threat to economic and political stability. During the Qing dynasty, insuring that the Grand Canal remained passable for the transport of grain taxes and commercial goods from Southern China to Beijing, the capital in the north, was a paramount concern. -SILK, COMMERCE, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SUZHOU AND THE GRAND CANAL: The Kangxi Emperor's Visit to Suzhou in 1689~The seventh of the twelve scrolls recording the Kangxi Emperor's second southern inspection tour takes the viewer from the city of Wuxi to the city of Suzhou in the fertile Yangzi River delta region of China. This is the commercial heartland of the empire; it was important for the emperor to ally himself politically with the gentry of this region. Silk was one of the commodities that was an imperial monopoly, the revenue from which went directly to the emperor's "privy purse," which refers to those monies used exclusively to underwrite the cost of running the imperial palaces. -The Qianlong Emperor's Visit to Suzhou in 1751: The sixth of the twelve scrolls recording the Qianlong Emperor's first southern inspection tour depicts the emperor visiting the city of Suzhou, just as his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor, had done some 60 years earlier. Suzhou remained the cultural capital of China even into the 18th century, and both emperors' visits underscore the importance of Suzhou to the imperial household as well as to the rich commercial life of China under the Qing dynasty. The sixth scroll also shows the imperial barge of the Emperors mother, who accompanied him on his tour, being pulled along the Grand Canal on the outskirts of the city. During Qing times the Grand Canal was a major conduit for grain, salt, and other important commodities. Any taxes that were

paid in kind were paid in grain, which was shipped along the Grand Canal. Thus, control of the Grand Canal was of critical importance to Qing rulers. Scroll Six follows the Grand Canal past a number of commercial streets where various trades people, stores, and restaurants showcase local products. The scroll shows that a number of temporary stages were erected for performances held in honor of the emperor, in order to entertain him and his mother as they pass along the Canal. The scroll also depicts several gardens, for which Suzhou was renowned. During the Qing period, much of what Europeans learned about China came from the reports of Jesuit missionaries, who had lived in China since the late 16th century and were enormously impressed with what they found in China during this time.