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The Qing emperors understood themselves as patrons of artists and writers. Especially the Kangxi Emperor promoted the collection of all knowledge and writing of China. He had published the History of Ming Dynasty ( Mingshi 明史), the partially illustrated encyclopaedia Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成, the Collection of Tang poetry Quantangshi 全唐詩 and Tang prose writings Quantangwen 全唐文, the character dictionary Kangxi zidian 康熙字典, the rhyme dictionary Peiwen yunfu 佩文韻府, and the collection Siku quanshu 四庫全書, a vastcompendium that tried to subsummize all existant writings that had ever been published. Already the Kangxi Emperor, but much more his two successors, tried to ensure the correct legitimation of their rulership by ruthless "literary inquisitions". But not only critics of the Qing government were punished. The literary index of the Qing rulers also enclosed demoralizing writings, even the widespread popular novels that were written in vernacular language and not in classical Chinese. The landscape of Qing novels is therefore very different to the splendour and everyday-language of Yuan and Ming novels. Qing novels like Cao Xueqin's 曹雪芹 Hongloumeng 紅樓夢 "Dream of Red Chamber", Wu Jingzi's 吳敬梓 Rulin waishi 儒林外史 "The Scholars", and Xia Jingxu's 夏敬渠 Yesou puyan 野叟曝言 "Words of an old peasant sunning" are written in a very subtile language with many reminiscences to the old literature that can only be understood by highly educated people. Likewise are the short story collections like Pu Songling's 蒲松齡 Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異 "Strange accounts from the Leisure Study" , Yuan Mei's 袁枚 Zibuyu 子不語 "What Confucius did not say", and Li Yun's 紀昀 Yueweicaotang biji 閱微草堂筆記 "Essays from the Short Grass Hall" . Less popular anthologies are Pu Songling's Xingshi yinyuan "Matrimonial causations awakening the world" 醒世姻緣....... In the sphere of high-class theatre, we also find a subtle and romantic style in the plays of Li Yu 李漁 (the erotic novel Rouputuan "Carnal prayer mat" 肉蒲團 is attributed to him), Hong Sheng 洪昇 (Changsheng Dian "Hall of Everlasting Life" 長生殿) and Kong Shangren 孔尚任 (Taohuashan "Peach Blossom Fan" 桃花扇). Not all scholars, officials and writers were conformists with the Qing regime. From the end of 18th century on, the private correspondence between scholars was written in a very free and unpolitical style (for example, the autobiography "Six records of an unsteady life" Fusheng liuji 浮生六記 by Shen Fu 沈復), and even in the public sphere, we find writers that did not hesitate to show their unconventional standpoint, like the poet and essayist Yuan Mei and Li Ruzhen 李汝珍 (writing the novel "The causal connection of a flower and its mirror reflection" Jinghuayuan 鏡花緣) who both supported thoughts of equal rights for women. For the scholars that lived during the conquest of the Manchu, the downfall of the Ming regime was a prove for the abuse of authoritarian power of the central government in Beijing. But these people did not only criticize the Ming autocracy - and thereby supporting the new Qing rulers. Thinkers and philosophers of the new age (mid 17th century to 18th century) also criticized the traditional, sterile and impeding the style Confucian classics had been interpreted by the Neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming eras. Criticizing the authoritarism of the Ming meant also doubting the legitimacy of the new Qing rulers. Many scholars were punished to death for opposing the Qing regime, like Jin Shengtan 金聖嘆, but others stayed unmolested, like the important history criticist Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲, the evolution theoretician Wang Fuzhi 王夫之, Fang Yizhi 方以智, and Gu Yanwu 顧炎武. All of these philosophers were oriented to practical sciences (shixue 實學) and interpreted philosophy only as one part of a cosm of sciences, the study of classical Confucian writings and their interpretations were by no means the heart of education. Practical science and knowledge was propagated by Gu Zuyu 顧祖禹, Mei Wending 梅文鼎, Yan Yuan 顔元, Li Gong 李塨. The school of thinking that lead to a deepgoing change in the life of Confucian classics was the movement of text criticism that came up during the second half of 17th century. The Rites of Zhou (Zhouli 周禮) and the Book of Documents (Shangshu 尚書) were identified as later compositions than they purported to be, many histories and stories about early Confucian saints and rulers were detected as being later inventions. The Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經) did not only contain hymns for the Zhou rulers, but also simple love songs. Confucius and the writings attributed to him were dethroned by man like Wan Sida 萬斯大, Yan Ruoqu 閻若璩, Hu Wei 胡渭, Yuan Mei 袁枚, Wang Zhong 汪中, Cui Shu 崔述, and Hui Dong 惠棟. This movement was quite similar to the first researches of the Greek and Hebrew original texts of the bible, a book whose Latin version had been sacrosanct since the being of Christianity. Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 was one of the first historians to lay stress on the importance of local history of the huge empire of China. Every document, he said, had to be incorporated into a historiography, and not only annals and edicts like the official histories did. Historiography should also be a personal work - although there might be subjective interpretations (compare the greatest histores that were all composed by more or less a single person: Shiji, Zizhi Tongjian). Probably the most important writer and scientist of early and middle Qing period was Dai Zhen 戴震, a universal scholar, mathematician, philologist, one of the editors of the collection Siku quanshu, and philosopher: the most objective and earnest criticist of Neo-Confucian interpretation of the classical writings and their nature philosophy. His most important philosophical writing might be "The Origin of Goodness" Yuanshan 原善. Instead of the Neo-Confucian universal order (li 理), he interpreted any being as guided and lead by breath, odem or matter (qi 氣) that help the abstract cosmic order (dao 道) to manifest all appearances. Books about practical science and philology were not only written and published by scholars or offials, but also by rich merchants that patronized writers and artists and that engaged themselves in studies about geography, chronology, epigraphy, mathematics, philology, and the Confucian Classics. The places for scholars preparing for the state examinations were provided by private academies (shuyuan 書院). Private studies and patronage only ended with the financial and economical ruin of the rich merchant families of the lower Yangtze era at the end of 18th century.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section The Fall of the Qing, 1840-1912

Introduction, general overviews.

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The Fall of the Qing, 1840-1912 by David Pong LAST REVIEWED: 08 June 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 22 April 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0029

The last seventy-some years of the Qing dynasty, simply put, is a story of decline. But a closer examination reveals a much more complex and nuanced picture. The reasons for decline are fairly straightforward, though scholars might dispute the relative weighting among them. The period opened with the First Opium War (1839–1842), a milestone in the dynastic decline. Viewed more broadly, however, the sources of this decline—if seen as a function of ailing institutions such as the examination system or an increasingly inefficient revenue system out of sync with population growth—can be traced back to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and before. As such, this perspective focuses on large sociopolitical forces that beg the question of whether the decline was not just of the Qing political order but of China’s civilization itself. Symptomatic of this decline, reforms came slowly and with limited and sporadic government support. Known as the Qing Restoration, which began around 1860, the aim was to reinvigorate the Confucian state through administrative and tax reforms, as well as a practical application of Confucian principles in governance. To tackle the thorny problem of foreign threats, the reformers’ initial response was the adoption of Western military technology and diplomatic practices, conveniently encapsulated as “self-strengthening” ( ziqiang 自強), in 1861. But reforms soon acquired a life of their own. It became apparent early on that the adoption of one Western technological or diplomatic innovation would inevitably lead to the adoption of another. Modern guns and boats would require new military training, just as their manufacture would require machinists and engineers, and they in turn would demand support industries such as coal mining and a modern transportation infrastructure. To finance these projects, the self-strengtheners branched out into money-making enterprises. A steamship company and textile mills followed, first under government purview, but eventually, under further pressure to combat cheap foreign manufactured goods, import-substitution industries were promoted, now completely in private hands, who were touted as patriotic entrepreneurs. To meet demands, modern education was introduced. In the meantime, the foreigners—their enterprises, missionaries, and military might—continued to threaten the Qing Empire, extracting greater concessions each time there was an altercation or war, which the Chinese inevitably lost. By the end of the 19th century, some Chinese began to realize that, if they were to become a modern nation, their political system had to be seriously reformed and, should that fail, changed. The combined effect of modern commerce, industry, and education had led to major diversification and enrichment of the Chinese elites. They were now poised for greater say in the polity. When their demands were not satisfied, they deserted the Qing Court, and the dynasty collapsed in 1912. Seen in its immediate aftermath, all the efforts at reform or self-strengthening had failed. Over the long haul, the late Qing had laid the foundation for modern China. There was no turning back.

Given the nature of this topic, general overviews come largely in the forms of textbooks, of which several are notable. Hsü 2000 is a systematic, insightful account: it first appeared in 1970, and the relevant section has not been updated for some time. There is a slight emphasis on political leadership, particularly the imperial. Spence 1999 is written in smooth-flowing prose. Though shorter than Hsü 2000 , it does not give up much in terms of essentials. Fairbank 1978 and Fairbank and Liu 1980 , though somewhat dated, contain excellent essays on late Qing, some of which will be discussed in relevant sections below. In Chinese, a number of works on the history of the Qing dynasty also provide extensive treatment of the period in question. A notable example is Qingdai quanshi (especially Vol. 8, edited by Mi Rucheng, and Vol. 9, edited by Xu Che and Dong Shouyi), which adopts a Marxist perspective. Xiao 1962–1963 , though dated, probably provides the most thorough treatment of the period, in nearly 3,000 pages. Among these works, only Hsü 2000 provides a convenient, though brief, evaluation of the Qing period. Both the Qing dynasty and the 1840–1912 periods are often viewed as the beginning of modern China. Either way, the implication is that modern China is a continuing process, giving rise to numerous studies of 20th-century China that devote substantial treatment of the pre-1912 era.

Fairbank, John K., ed. The Cambridge History of China . Vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 1 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

The bulk of this work, from chapter 4 to the end (chapter 11), analyzes major political topics of this period. Authored by major scholars of China’s modern history, this is an authoritative work. The treatment is topical and, therefore, as a whole does not provide a flowing narrative.

Fairbank, John K., and Kwang-ching Liu, eds. The Cambridge History of China . Vol. 11, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Similar to Vol. 10 in organization, this volume deals with the economy, foreign relations, military, and intellectual and social developments as well as the reform and revolution of the last decade of the Qing.

Hsü, Immanuel C. Y. The Rise of Modern China . 6th ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

By far the most thorough text on the period (chapters 7–20). Balanced, methodical, and often insightful. Originally published in 1970.

Qingdai quanshi (清代全史). 10 vols. Shenyang, China: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1991–1993.

See especially Vol. 8, edited by Mi Rucheng 宓汝成; Vol. 9, edited by Xu Che 徐彻 and Dong Shouyi 董守义; and Vol. 10, edited by Liu Kexiang 刘克祥. Reflecting a Marxist influence, this “complete history of the Qing” provides ample coverage on social economic issues, highlighting the exploitation of the poor (peasants and workers). In international relations, the maltreatment of China and the Chinese by the foreign powers and foreigners—imperialism—is stressed.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China . 2d ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999.

Chapters 6–11 pertain to the period in question. Though less detailed than Hsü 2000 , this extremely well-written text provides good coverage and is especially strong on weaving social history into the main narrative. Third edition published in 2013.

Xiao Yishan 蕭一山. Qingdai tongshi (清代通史). 5 vols. Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yin shuguan, 1962–1963.

Despite its title, claiming to be a “comprehensive” history of the Qing, by far the greater part of this work—parts of Vol. 2, Vols. 3–4, and parts of Vol. 5 (tables)—relate to the history of the Qing from c . 1840. The approach is traditional, with an overconcentration on scholars and schools of thought, but the book is nonetheless a mine of information.

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Concise Reader of Chinese Literature History pp 455–466 Cite as

Poetry in the Qing Dynasty

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The Qing Dynasty witnessed the last glory of classical poetry and a key stage for a transition to the modern society. In the early Qing Dynasty, the country was war-torn, and people’s livelihoods were depleted. Faced with the cruel social reality, poignant cries about the chaos of life and the pain of home wreckage rang in the poetry circle. With the stabilization of the regime and the implementation of cultural governance measures, the Qing Dynasty became economically prosperous and culturally flourishing.

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Damin, W. (2024). Poetry in the Qing Dynasty. In: Liu, Y. (eds) Concise Reader of Chinese Literature History. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5814-6_36

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Qing Dynasty

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 21, 2023 | Original: May 4, 2018

Forbidden City WatchtowerBEIJING, CHINA - MAY 26: The of Forbidden City watchtower is seen on May 26, 2014 in Beijing, China. The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty. It is located in the center of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost 500 years, it served as the home of emperors and their households, as well as the ceremonial and political center of Chinese government. (Photo by Xiao Lu Chu/Getty Images)

The Qing Dynasty was the final imperial dynasty in China, lasting from 1644 to 1912. It was an era noted for its initial prosperity and tumultuous final years, and for being only the second time that China was not ruled by the Han people.

Fall of the Ming Dynasty

Near the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1616, Manchurian forces from northeastern Asia defeated the Ming army and occupied several cities on China’s northern border.

A full-scale invasion followed. China was defeated in 1644, with Emperor Shunzhi establishing the Qing Dynasty.

Many of the new Han subjects faced discrimination. Han men were required to cut their hair in Mongolian fashion or face execution. Han intellectuals attempted to criticize the rulers through literature; many were rounded up and beheaded. Han people were also relocated from the power centers of Beijing.

Emperor Kangxi

Kangxi ruled for 61 years, from 1662 to 1722, the longest of any Chinese emperor.

He oversaw several cultural leaps, including the creation of a dictionary considered the best standardization of the Han language and the funding of surveys to create the most extensive maps of China up to that time.

Kangxi also reduced taxes and stifled corruption and governmental excess. He enacted policies that were favorable to farmers and stopped land seizures. He trimmed his own staff and expenditures significantly.

Kangxi also squashed military threats, pushing back three Han rebellions and seizing Taiwan. Kangxi also stopped continuous invasion attempts by Tsarist Russia and brokered the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, which brought a vast area of Siberia into Chinese control and allowed him to stifle rebellion in Mongolia.

Potatoes and corn—plants native to the Americas—were introduced as crops during Kangxi’s reign, and food was considered plentiful during that time. Additionally, Kangxi oversaw an explosion in exports, particularly that of cotton, silk, tea and ceramics.

Emperor Qianlong

Qianlong ascended to the throne in 1735 and spent 60 years ruling China. Not a dynamic ruler, Qianlong’s later reign was characterized by his own disinterest in ruling.

Qianlong was more preoccupied with artistic pursuits. He published over 42,000 poems, and added his poetry by hand to hundreds of pieces of historical artwork in the palace, though he wasn’t considered very talented.

Qianlong was also obsessed with preserving Manchu culture and enacted dictionary and genealogy projects to that end. He also believed that sorcerers were targeting Manchurians and created a system of torture to combat that, while also creating a program in which thousands of Chinese books that had even the slightest disparagement of Manchurians were destroyed.

Conservative Qing Society

Social mores became more conservative during the Qing reign, with worsened penalties for homosexuals. Increased demand for purity in women led to a mass refusal of men to accept widows as their brides.

This led to significant growth in suicides of widows, and the creation of homes for widows where interaction with men was limited.

Arts Under The Qing Dynasty

This conservative shift reflected on the arts, and there was a general turn against literature and stage plays that were deemed subversive. Books were routinely banned, and theaters shut down.

Despite this oppressive atmosphere, some creative work did gather attention, as with the poetry of Yuan Mei and Cao Xueqin’s novel Dream of the Red Chamber .

Painting also managed to thrive. Former Ming clan members Zhu Da and Shi Tao became monks to escape governmental roles in Qing rule and became painters.

Zhu Da embraced silence as he wandered across China and his depictions of nature and landscapes are imbued with manic energy.

Shi Tao is considered an artistic rule-breaker, with Impressionist-style brush strokes and presentations that predated Surrealism.

The 19th century featured several military confrontations between China and the western world, the Opium War of 1840 being the first. A two-year conflict, it pitted China against Great Britain.

Opium was used medicinally in China for centuries, but by the 18th century it was popular recreationally. Following its conquest of India, Britain cultivated and exported opium to China, flooding the country with the drug.

An addiction crisis followed. A ban was attempted, and smoking opium outlawed, but British traders worked with black marketers to bypass laws.

Military confrontation became likely, and soon British forces shut down Chinese ports. Among many concessions during negotiations, China was forced to give up Hong Kong to the British.

A second Opium War was waged from 1856 to 1860 against the British and the French, bringing more unequal agreements.

Christian missionaries were allowed to flood the country, and western businessmen were free to open factories there. Ports were leased to foreign powers, allowing them to operate within China according to their own laws, and opium addiction rose.

Taiping Rebellion

Internal political and military threats created further instability for the Qing Dynasty.

The White Lotus sect was suppressed after an eight-year rebellion, lasting from 1796 to 1804. The Eight Trigrams sect rose up in 1813, taking several cities and entering the Forbidden City before being defeated.

The most deadly was the Taiping Rebellion , lasting from 1850 to 1864. Put into motion by Christian religious fanatic Hong Xiuquan, the city of Nanjing was occupied by rebels for a decade and 20 million Chinese died in the conflict.

Emperor Dowager Cixi

The influence of Empress Dowager Cixi expedited the end of Imperial China.

The widow of Emperor Xianfeng, who ruled from 1851 to 1861, Cixi was regent for her infant son Tongzhi from 1862 to 1874, then for her three-year-old nephew Guangxu, who ruled for 46 years with Cixi considered the real power behind the throne.

In 1898, Guangxu tried to take on the role of reformer in an attempt to modernize China, but this effort was squashed by Cixi after several months. Guangxu sought the support of an army general who betrayed him, and he found himself under house arrest at Cixi’s direction. Cixi also executed Guangxu’s fellow reformers.

Boxer Rebellion

The Boxer Rebellion ignited in 1899, the work of the Harmonious Fist secret society.

The group seized the property of Christian missionaries, attracting militant followers, then moved into the cities, attacking and killing foreigners.

Western countries sent troops, but Empress Dowager sided with the Boxers, declaring war on the West. Western forces defeated the Imperial Army and the Boxers in 1901, executing government members who had supported the Boxers and imposing sanctions that weakened the Qing rule.

After the Empress Dowager died in 1908, Xuantong, known as “The Last Emperor,” took the throne, but he wouldn’t reign long.

literature in the qing dynasty

HISTORY Vault: China's Boxer Rebellion

In 1900, in what became known as the Boxer Rebellion, a Chinese secret organization led an uprising in northern China against the spread of outside influences there. Was Western greed at the root of the rebellion—or was it an elaborate hoax?

Fall of the Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, overthrown by a revolution brewing since 1894 when western-educated revolutionary Sun Zhongshan formed the Revive China Society in Hawaii , then Hong Kong.

In 1905, Sun united various revolutionary factions into one party with Japanese help and wrote the manifesto, the Three Principles of the People.

In 1911, the Nationalist Party of China held an uprising in Wuchang, helped by Qing soldiers, and 15 provinces declared their independence from the empire. Within weeks the Qing court agreed to the creation of a republic with its top general, Yuan Shikai, as president.

Xuantog abdicated in 1912, with Sun creating a provisional constitution for the new country, which ushered in years of political unrest centered around Yuan.

In 1917, there was a brief attempt to reinstate the Qing government, with Xuantog being restored for less than two weeks during a military coup that ultimately failed.

Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Patricia Buckley Ebrey . The Dynasties of China. Bamber Gascoigne . China Condensed: 5000 Years of History and Culture. Ong Siew Chey .

literature in the qing dynasty

Qing dynasty, 1644–1911

The Qing dynasty the last imperial dynasty of China, 1644–1911. (1644–1911) was founded by a northeast Asian people who called themselves Manchus. Their history, language, culture, and identity was distinct from the Chinese population, whom they conquered in 1644 when China was weakened by internal rebellions. The Manchus forged alliances with certain Chinese and Mongol groups that aided their conquest of China. Manchu (man-choo) ethnic group that lived for centuries in the northeast of modern-day China. In the seventeenth century CE, Manchu people conquered China and ruled there for more than 250 years. rule did not completely uproot the government of China or its social and cultural life; instead, Manchu rulers selectively continued and adapted aspects of Chinese life they admired. They developed a style of rule befitting the multiethnic empire they commanded, of which the Chinese were the largest population. The Manchu rulers modeled many of their government practices on those of the previous Chinese Ming dynasty a series of rulers from a single family. (1368–1644). For example, they employed a civil service examination system much like in previous Chinese dynasties to recruit Chinese government officials. In addition, the emperors were bilingual in Chinese and Manchu. Simultaneously, the Manchu rulers maintained and promoted many Manchu customs at court and within the general populace.

The Qing (ching) dynasty, especially in the eighteenth century when the Qing empire was the largest and most prosperous in the world, saw prolific cultural and artistic achievements. Three Qing emperors were responsible for the notable stability and prosperity the state of being wealthy or successful. of the period. They were Kangxi (reigned 1661–1722), Yongzheng (yong jung) (reigned 1722–1735), and Qianlong (chee-en-long) (reigned 1735–1796).

The ceramic pots and other articles made from clay hardened by heat. industry reached a new height during the Qing dynasty and created some of the most splendid porcelains ever crafted. An immense variety of porcelains was produced, which included those for imperial relating to an empire, an emperor, or the home of royals. use, for popular consumption, and for export. Close contact between the court and resident European Jesuits in China had a great effect on aspects of Qing art. Some porcelains of the period displayed features that reflected Chinese-Western interactions. One Qing innovation was the production of exquisite wares painted with new colors and types of enamel an opaque (dark) paste that is used to add color to hard surfaces like metal. It turns into a glass-like texture, which also provides protection, when heat is applied. pigments ( F1954.127a-e ). Some of the colors, notably pink, was in part a result of imperial admiration in the seventeenth century for European enamel objects with this palette that were brought to the court by the Jesuits.

The Kangxi Emperor set up workshops for the manufacture of court arts, including paintings and three-dimensional objects, as well as arts for religious devotion. Some workshops were in the palace, and much of the manufacture of lacquerware ( F1990.15a-e ), enamel, jade, and carvings of ivory and organic materials occurred under court control. Other arts, like porcelain a hard, fine-grained, nonporous ceramic ware that is usually translucent and white. and textiles, were made in imperial workshops located outside of Beijing. For some special ceramics, undecorated ceramic “blanks” were sent from Jingdezhen (jing-duh-juhn) to the Beijing workshops for painting. These workshops remained in production for the rest of the dynasty.

Qing customs of painting largely followed previously established traditions. Professional artists worked either at court or outside the court; some, however, worked in both spheres. Other artists painted as an avocation and followed the style of scholar-amateur artists. Talented professional painters who served in the palace workshops produced portraits, documentary and narrative images, copies of ancient masterpieces, and religious art; they also undertook decorative projects for palace buildings. Some of the painters were European Jesuit (jezh-oo-iht) a member of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola. missionaries who served the court. Their representational techniques were greatly admired by the Qing emperors. Among them, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), also known as Lang Shining, was a favorite. He was a key figure in establishing the new court aesthetic of combining Western style realism (as can be seen in the three-dimensional modeling of a face with light and shadow) with other traditions of brushwork ( F2000.4 ).

Artists who painted as scholar-amateur artists had various goals and practices. Some sought to revitalize Chinese painting by careful imitation and adaptation of classical masterpieces. Their art was not directly inspired by nature but by the study of established techniques and styles. Some of these artists were also collectors of, or had easy access to, ancient masterworks. Other artists who more obviously broke with or radically modified past tradition a practice, skill, or talent that is passed down from generation to generation. have been known as “Individualists.” They viewed art as a form of personal expression, sometimes injecting it with a strong message of political protest or social commentary.

The nineteenth century was largely difficult for China. The opium trade that arose from unfair trade practices imposed by Europeans in the first half of the century devastated the Chinese economy. The two opium wars in 1840–42 and 1856–60 and the unequal treaties that followed violated China’s sovereignty. They had long-lasting consequences on China’s economy and society. The Boxer Rebellion in 1900 illustrated strong Chinese antipathy toward foreigners, but it was short-lived and ended with the Qing court’s forced flight from Beijing. China’s position in the world declined and internal rebellions overthrew the Qing dynasty government in 1911. China’s last emperor abdicated in early 1912, ushering in a republican China.

  • Lesson Plans

Tea Culture in China

image of people drinking tea under a willow tree

https://asia-archive.si.edu/object/F1909.247e/

Students will watch a video about Chinese tea and tea wares to learn about their impact on art and traditions. They will also think about how tea influences their community.

  • Language Arts
  • Social Studies
  • Visual Arts
  • Elementary School
  • Middle School/Junior High
  • Daily Life and Folkways

Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor

the seated emperor of Japan holding up both his hands

https://asia-archive.si.edu/object/F2000.4/

Students will analyze a portrait of Emperor Qianlong. They will look closely at the elements of the painting to see how Buddhism, the Mandate of Heaven, and foreign interactions contribute meaning to art.

  • High School
  • Power and Privilege
  • Traditions and Belief Systems
  • Cultural Interactions

Diving Deeper into Buddhism – Guanyin

carved statue showing a man holding a seed pod in his hand

https://asia-archive.si.edu/object/F1957.25a-b/

Students who are already familiar with Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha, will deepen their understanding of Buddhist beliefs and artwork. They will analyze and interpret works of art that reveal how people live around the world and what they value. They will identify how works of art reflect times, places, cultures, and beliefs.

Designing with Numbers

a long sleeved hip length bodice

https://asia-archive.si.edu/object/F2015.7/

Students will look closely at a Qing dynasty court robe known as a chaofu . They will learn about the beliefs in Chinese numerology and its relationship to language. After counting the symbols, they will learn why specific numbers of special images appear on the robe. Several related math problems are included.

  • Mathematics
  • Costume and Textile
  • Animals and Nature

China’s Long Nineteenth Century – Foreign Influence and the End of Dynastic China

a woman sitting surrounded by 4 other women standing

https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/ead_component:sova-fsa-a-13-ref7?date.slider=&q=%22FSA+A.13%22&dsort=&record=44&hlterm=%26quot%3BFSA%2BA.13%26quot%3B

Students will be able to explain the various reasons why the Qing dynasty was weakened during the nineteenth century, especially with regard to the outside influence of foreign powers.

  • AP World History

painting of a man sitting in a chair with fine clothes

  • Art History
  • U.S. History
  • World History
  • Qing Dynasty Culture

literature in the qing dynasty

The Qing dynasty was reigned from 1636 to 1912, ruled by the Manchus who came from a Northeastern portion of China called Manchuria. While they were in power, they adopted many cultural practices that were already established by the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnicity in China at the time. The Manchu leaders also cultivated a relationship with the Mongols, who also inspired their way of living.

The Qing dynasty continued Ming dynasty structures such as the civil service examination and the primarily Confucian traditions. At the same time, the Manchus observed Tibetan Buddhist religious practices and spoke both Manchu and Chinese languages in court. 

The abundance experienced during the Qing period is attributed to three emperors that impacted culture at that time, namely: Kangxi emperor, Yongzheng emperor, and Qianlong emperor. 

Kangxi emperor (1661 to 1722) brought about prosperity during his rule; he was responsible for creating the Kangxi dictionary, which promoted the multilingual profile of his constituents. Secondly, Yongzheng emperor (1722 to 1735)was a strict administrator that enriched the country and allowed the arts to flourish. Lastly, Qianlong emperor was dubbed as a “patron of the arts,” owning an expansive collection of artwork. 

Literature and the Arts

literature in the qing dynasty

During the Qing dynasty, the fastest developments in culture were in poetry and painting. One of the key achievements was the composition of a rhyming dictionary in 1711. This document was printed, published, and is still used at present. Consequently, literature was popularly consumed by the male gentry class, although these pieces were often composed by women. 

In 1782, the widest compilation of poetry and prose was gathered and completed at the command of the Qianlong emperor. It was called the Siku Quanshu and was even more extensive than the one Yongle emperor had made during the Ming dynasty. 10,680 titles can be found on its pages, with 3,593 summaries alongside it. 

The Gujin Tushu Jicheng , or the “Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times,” was also made during the Qing dynasty, requested by Kangxi. Also known as the Imperial Encyclopedia , it was a collection of all the literature from decades before that and held illustrations and written works about various topics from religion, social customs, and the like. It was completed during his son Yongzheng’s reign, but he credited its creation to his father. The book had around 160 million words. 

Another compilation commissioned by Kangxi was the Kangxi Dictionary, the most reliable written document on Chinese characters. This was to standardize the Chinese writing system and honor Confucian ideals. The emperor commented that many interpretations could be made of old texts due to each individual’s different meanings regarding each Chinese character. The dictionary was widely used to prevent these misinterpretations and holds 47,035 characters.

Aside from the imperial collections, the Six Records of a Floating Life , was one of the important literary works of the time. It was an autobiography written by Shen Fu, a bestseller that documented mundane life with topics such as the beauty of his wife and childhood memories. 

In terms of arts, two of the “Four Arts” were calligraphy and painting. Imperial scholars and painters were often employed by aristocrats, officials, or by the emperor himself to create pieces. The individualist art style also emerged during the time, conveying themes related to freedom and moral outlooks that sometimes stemmed from the Manchu-led rule. Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors were also known for asking the Italian Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione to paint for them, which destigmatized the patronage of foreign artists.

Scholarly subjects were also more accessible with such personalities as Huang Zongxi being known for his political commentary. The founder of the Zhejiang school was a critic of the Chinese political system and its authoritative nature. Another Ming loyalist that was prolific in his writings was Wang Fuzhi. Much like the two former scholars, Yanwu Confucian writer who opposed the Qing dynasty. The three spread Neo-Confucian ideas and dialogue. 

Despite the anti-Manchu stance of many scholars, the emperors remained patrons of the literature and prose brought about by philosophers and scholars. 

Tea Drinking Culture

The act of drinking tea which had slowly faded in popularity throughout Chinese culture was revived during the Qing dynasty, with both the imperial court and common people enjoying tea as part of everyday life. 

In the palace, lavish tea sets became a staple. The Tea Feasts that were first celebrated during the Tang dynasty were once again practiced with more extravagant detail. In particular, Qianlong emperor held the fanciful annual “Sanqing Tea Feast” at Chonghua Palace, which the emperor bestowed upon his high-ranking officials. Furthermore, the “Qian-sou Banquet” was also held during the Kangxi rule and then the Qianlong rule. The massive feast included 3,000 officials and other aristocrats during Qianlong’s 61st year as emperor. The festivities started and ended with the act of drinking tea. Tea parties at the Forbidden City usually took place in the Wenhua Hall or the Hall of Literary Glory, the Chonghua Palace or the Hall of Double Glory, and the Qianqing Palace or the Hall of Heavenly Purity. 

Tea drinking was also done in the Imperial Academy as a way to honor Confucius, and the act was generally connected to the philosophy. Thus, it was often integrated into important ceremonies and occasions. Qianlong paired tea drinking with writing poetry as he compiled the Siku Quanshu. Lastly, another notable practice of the imperial family was drinking milk tea which was often a combination of black tea and milk. 

For the common folk, the trend culminated in the rise of modern tea houses all over the country. These tea houses became the standard meeting places for conversation or for solitary reflection. The multicultural attitude of the Qing was exemplified in tea drinking as all Chinese drank tea, not only the Han Chinese.

  • Qing Dynasty Achievements
  • Qing Dynasty Architecture
  • Qing Dynasty Art
  • Qing Dynasty Economy
  • Qing Dynasty Government
  • Qing Dynasty’s Inventions
  • Qing Dynasty Paper Money
  • Qing Dynasty Religion
  • Qing Dynasty Social Structure
  • Qing Dynasty Emperors
  • Kangxi Emperor

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Princeton University Library

Classical historiography for chinese history.

  • Introduction to Chinese Historiography
  • Exercise Files
  • 1. Dictionaries
  • 2. Geographical Aides
  • 3. Biographical Searches
  • 4. Official & Institutional Titles
  • 5. Book Titles
  • 6. Chronologies and Dating
  • 7. Locating Classical Quotations and Texts
  • 8. Translations
  • 9. Epigraphical Sources and Paleography
  • 10. Encyclopedias & the Shitong
  • 11. Gazetteers, Civil Examinations
  • Shang dynasty (trad. 1766-1123 BCE)
  • Zhou dynasty (1122?-256 BCE)
  • Qin dynasty (255-207 BCE)
  • Han dynasties (206 BCE-220 CE) & medieval China
  • Sui (581-617) and Tang (618-907 CE) dynasties
  • Five (907-960 CE) and Song (960-1280 CE) dynasties
  • Xixia (990-1227), Liao (907-1125), Jin (1115-1234), Yuan (1280-1368)
  • Ming (1368-1644 CE)
  • Qing dynasty (1644-1911 CE)

Part I: Qing History

-- qing founding, -- biographic information, -- central government institutions, -- local government, -- the elites and literati 士大夫 culture, -- the traditional economy, -- peasant life, -- high qing, -- intellectual trends, part ii: biographic information, -- indexes to biographical collections, -- biographic collections, -- nian pu 年 譜 (chronological biographies), -- commemorative writings, epitaphs, etc., -- name lists, -- genealogies, part iii: government administration, -- administrative law, -- (1) annotated bibliography of books on qing government, -- (2) useful reference books, -- (3) hui dian 會 典 (collected statutes) and hui dian shi li 會 典 釋 例 (supplimentary regulations), -- (4) penal law [da qing lu li 大 清 律 例 ], -- administrative manuals, magistrates' manuals, -- merchants' manuals, -- encyclopedias, -- collections of essays on government, -- agricultural technology and water control, -- land deeds, contracts, etc., -- manchu sources and ethnic issues, -- the writing of history during the qing and the writing of qing history, -- local & foreign archives, part iv: qing gazeteers, part v: memorials, edicts, & archives.

  • Art & Archaeology
  • Bibliographies
  • Chinese classics
  • Chinese science
  • Christianity
  • Confucianism
  • Daoism (Taoism)
  • Gender Studies
  • General histories of China
  • General works
  • Geography & Description
  • Legal history
  • Literatures (other)
  • Philosophies (other)
  • Philosophy (general)
  • Popular culture
  • Prehistory and myths
  • Traditional Chinese literature
  • World history (with parts on China)
  • General resources
  • Databases & electronic texts
  • Dictionaries
  • Electronic Journals
  • Home pages of individuals and research groups
  • Indices and concordances
  • Library catalogues
  • Online Reading or Downloads
  • Useful Online tools
  • Web exhibits
  • Brokaw, Cynthia, and Kai-wing Chow, eds.,  Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
  • Cole, James H.,  Updating Wilkinson: An Annotated Bibliography of Reference Works on Imperial China Published Since 1973 . New York, 1991.
  • Cohen, Myron.  Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China . Stanford University Press, 2005.
  • Crossley, Pamela, et al., eds.,  Empire at the Margins: Culture Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
  • Fairbank, John K, & Liu Kuang-ching, eds.  The Cambridge History of China . Vol. 10 & 11.  Vol. 10: Late Ch'ing 1800-1870; Vol. 11: 1800-1911 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978 & 1980.
  • Kirby, William, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, & David Pietz, eds.  State and Economy in Republican China: Handbook for Scholars . 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Designed for scholars and students of twentieth-century China with important materials covering the Qing-Republican transition. First part surveys the holdings of major Chinese archives and collections bearing on the economic and business history of Republican China. Second, it reproduces a series of six sets of original documents to guide students and scholars through a reading of public and private documents of the twentieth century. Third, it surveys archives and documents to encourage research on state and economy issues in non-communist China.
  • Naquin, Susan.  Peking: Temples and City Life,1400-1900 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
  • Perdue, Peter.  China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Asia . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
  • Qing dai wen ji pian mu fen lei suo yin  清 代 文 集 篇 目 分 類 索 引 (Classified index to collected essays from the Qing dynasty). Compiled in Taiwan, published by Tai lian guo feng chu ban she 臺 聯 國 風 出 版 社 , 1979. An excellent index to essays on the classics, histories, and many other topics in the literary collections of Qing scholars.
  • Smith, Richard J. The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture. Rowan and Littlefield, 2015. The main bibliography can be downloaded as a PDF file.
  • Struve, Lynn.  The Ming-Qing Conflict, 1619-1683: A Historiography and Source Guide . Association of Asian Studies Monograph. Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies, 1998. Part 1 gives the 400 year historiographical record of the Manchu conquest from the early Qing to modern times; Part 2 presents an annotated bibliography of primary sources in Chinese, Manchu, Japanese, Korean, and European languages. The digital files of the Struve monograph, slightly amended and supplemented, have been posted in the ScholarWorks system of the Indiana University Libraries (IUScholarWorks). These files can easily be accessed on the worldwide web (1) through WorldCat, by clicking on the access link in the Internet Resources entry for this volume; or (2) simply by googling author/title keywords and opening the hit from  .
  • ---, ed.  The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Late Imperial China: A Research Guide . Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1973.
  • Kessler, Lawrence D.  K'ang-hsi and the Consolidation of Ch'ing Rule, 1661-1684 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
  • Michael, Franz.  The Origin of Manchu Rule in China: Frontier and Bureaucracy as Interacting Forces in the Chinese Empire . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942.
  • Oxnam, Robert.  Ruling From Horseback: Manchu Politics in the Obio Regency, 1661-1669 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
  • Rawski, Evelyn.  The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
  • Standaert, Nicolas, ed.  Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume One: 635-1800 . Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001.
  • Struve, Lynn, trans.  Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
  • Wakeman, Frederic, Jr.  The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China . 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
  • Wang, Chen-main.  The Life and Career of Hung Ch'eng-ch'ou (1593-1665): Public Service in a Time of Dynastic Change . Association for Asian Studies Monograph. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2000.
  • Hummel, Arthur, ed.  Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period . Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943. Biographies of Abahai, Ch'en Meng-lei, Cheng Ch'eng-kung, Dorgon, Galdan, Nien Keng-yao, Nurhaci, Oboi, O-erh-t'ai, Songgotu, T'ung Kuo-ch'i, Wu San-kuei, Yin-chen, Yueh Chung-ch'i. Taipei: Ch'eng Wen reprint, 1972.
  • Lee, Lily Xiao Hong, A.D. Stephanowska, Sue Wiles, & Clara Wing-Chung Ho. Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women : The Qing Period, 1644-1911 . University of Hong Kong Libraries Publications, No 10. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.Sharpe, 1998.
  • Li Yongpu,  Quan guo ge ji zheng xie wen shi zi liao pian mu suo yin  全 國 各 級 政 協 文 史 資 料 篇 目 索 引 (Comprehensive index to  Wen-shi tzu-liao  articles: 1960-1990). Peking: Wen-shi chu ban she, 1992. Useful for locating memoirs by participants in modern Chinese events.
  • Spence, Jonathan D.  Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, 1988.
  • ---.  Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi . New York: Knopf, 1974. Paperback edition New York: Vintage, 1975.

For recent information about late imperial archives in China, see:

  • Chao Ming-chung, & Li Tso-ming.  Zhongguo di er li shi dang an guan zhi nan  中 國 第 二 歷 史 檔 案 館 指 南 (Guide to the No. 2 Chinese Archives). Peking: Tang-an chu ban she, 1994. This guide with 800 pages of text plus a 130-page index is a significant expansion of the Archives' 1987 guide. Published under the auspices of UNESCO as a part of the ICA (International Council on Archives) guide series to the sources of Asian history.
  • Chu Chin-fu, chief compiler.  Zhongguo dang an wen xian ci dian  中 國 檔 案 文 獻 辭 典 (Dictionary of Chinese primary sources in archives). Peking: Zhongguo ren-shi Press, 1994. Annotated bibliographical guide to published Chinese language primary source materials. Useful for planning historical research. 3,985 entries arranged chronologically by historical period.
  • Guo jia dang an ju 國 家 檔 案 局 (State Archives Bureau), comp.  Zhongguo dang an guan ming lu  中 國 檔 案 館 名 錄 (Directory of Chinese National Archives). Peking: Dang an chu ban she, 1990. This guide in both Chinese and English includes an 170-page introduction to Chinese state archives at national and provincial levels and a 330-page directory of all state archives at county and district levels.
  • Qin Guojing 秦 國 經 .  Zhonghua Ming Qing zhen dang zhi nan  中 華 明 清 珍 檔 指 南 (Guide to Chinese Ming-Qing precious archives), Beijing: Jen-min chu ban she, 1994. This guide was reprinted in May 1996. It is an excellent survey of Ming-Qing archives both in and outside mainland China and includes a valuable introduction to the holdings, internal organization, and usefulness of these archives.
  • Ye Wa, & Joseph W. Esherick.  Chinese Archives: An Introductory Guide . China Research Monograph 45. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. In addition the following PRC provincial and municipal archives have published guides: Shanghai, Beijing, Anhui, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Chongqing (Sichuan), Heilongjiang, and Liaoning. The Jiangsu Provincial Archives has published a survey of all institutions whose original documents are kept there. Some Chinese archival records are available on CD ROM. The State Archives Bureau plans to publish 130 CD ROMs of archival records in the near future.
  • Antony, Robert, and Jane Kate Leonard, eds.,  Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs: Qing Crisis Management and the Boundaries of State Power in Late Imperial China . Ithaca Cornell University Press, 2005.
  • Bartlett, Beatrice. "The Ch'ing Central Government Archives: Provenance and Peregrinations,"  Committee on East Asian Libraries Bulletin  63 (October 1980): 25-33.
  • ---.  Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
  • Elman, Benjamin.  A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
  • Ku, Hung-ting.  Grand Secretariat in Ch'ing China : A Chronological List . Chinese Materials Center, 1980.
  • Kutcher, Norman.  Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • Metzger, Thomas A.  The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative, and Communication Aspects . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
  • Miyazaki Ichisada.  China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China . Translated by Conrad Schirokauer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
  • Pei Huang.  Autocracy at Work: A Study of the Yung-cheng Period, 1723-1735 . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974.
  • Rudolph, Jennifer. "Creating a Personnel Base: Zongli Yamen Efforts to Penetrate the Qing Hierarchy."  The Chinese Historical Review  Volume 12 Number 2 Fall 2005: 202-229.
  • Sun, E-tu Zen. "The Board of Revenue in 19th Century China."  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies  24 (1962/63).
  • Torbert, Preston M.  The Ch'ing Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its Organization and Principal Functions, 1662-1796 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.
  • Waley-Cohen, Joanna.  Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758-1820 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
  • Wang Yeh-chien. "The fiscal importance of the land tax during the Ch'ing period."  Journal of Asian Studies  30 (1971): 829-842.
  • Wu, Silas.  Communication and Imperial Centrol in China: The Evolution of the Palace Memorial System, 1693-1735 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
  • Andrade, Tonio. "Pirates, Pelts, and Promises: The Sino-Dutch Colony of Seventeenth-Century Taiwan and the Aboriginal Village of Favorolang."  The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 64, No. 2 (May, 2005): 295-321
  • Bodde, Derk, & Clarence Morris.  Law in Imperial China . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967.
  • Ch'u T'ung-tsu.  Local Government in China Under the Ch'ing . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.
  • Hsiao Kung-chuan.  Rural China: Imperial Control in the 19th Century . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960.
  • Hu, Cheng. "Quarantine Sovereignty During the Pneumonic Plague in Northeast China (November 1910每April 1911)."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 5 no. 2 (June 2010): 294-339.
  • Kent, Guy, R. "Ideology and Organization in the Qing Empire."  Journal of Early Modern History  Volume 14 Number 4 2010: 355-377.
  • Kim, Hodong.  Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 . Stanford University Press, 2004.
  • Kwan, Man Bun.  The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.
  • Li, Huaiyin.  Village Governance in North China, 1875-1936 . Stanford University Press, 2005.
  • McMahon, Daniel. "Southern Shaanxi Offcials in Early Nineteeth-Century China."  T'oung Pao  Volume 95 Numbers 1-3 2009 2008: 120-166.
  • Reed, Bradley.  Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Rowe, William T.  Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
  • Shao, Qin.  Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890-1930 . Stanford University Press, 2004.
  • Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. "The Evolution of Local Control in Late Imperial China," pp. 1-25 in  Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China . Ed. by Frederic Wakeman, Jr., & Carolyn Grant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
  • Wang, Di.  Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930 . Stanford University Press, 2003.
  • Watt, John R.  The District Magistrate in Late Imperial China . New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.
  • Zhang, Limin. "A Comparison of Local Autonomy in Shanghai and Tianjin in the Late Qing: From the Perspective of the Establishment of City Administrative Organizations." Frontiers of History in China  v. 5 no. 2 (June 2010): 279-93.
  • Official Handbooks and Anthologies of Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (For access to the complete list, contact Professor Pierre-Étienne Will directly at: [email protected] )
  • Bai, Qianshen.  Fu Shan's World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2003.
  • Berger, Patricia.  Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003.
  • Cao Xueqin 曹 雪 芹.  The Story of the Stone  (Hong lou meng 紅 樓 夢). Translated by David Hawkes. 5 volumes. New York: Penguin Books, 1973-1986.
  • Chang Chung-li.  The Chinese Gentry; Studies on Their Role in 19th Century Chinese Society . Seattle: University Of Washington Press, 1955.
  • ---.  The Income of the Chinese Gentry . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962.
  • Ching, May-bo. "A Preliminary Study of the Theatres Built by Cantonese Merchants in the Late Qing."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 5 no. 2 (June 2010): 253-78.
  • Chow, Kai-wing.  The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
  • ---.  Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China . Stanford University Press, 2004.
  • Dott, Brian.  Identity Reflections: Pilgramages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2005.
  • Durand, Pierre-Henri.  Lettres at pouvoirs: Un proces litteraire dans la Chine imperiale . Paris: L'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences socialies, 1992. Important study of the case of Dai Mingshi 戴 名 世 (1653-1713) and the circumstances of his execution.
  • ---, trans.,  Recueil de al montagne du Sud par Dai Mingshi . Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Translation of the work that was charged with lese majeste and led to Dai's public decapitation in 1713.
  • Elman, Benjamin A.  From Philosophy To Philology: Social and Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China.  Cambridge: Harvard Council of East Asian Studies, 1984, 1990. 2nd edition, Los Angeles: UCLA Asia Institute Monograph Series, 2001.
  • ---.  On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
  • Esherick, Joseph, & Mary Rankin, eds.  Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
  • Finnane, Antonia.  Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850 . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004.
  • Guo Qitao.  Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage: The Confucian Transformation of Popular Culture in Late Imperial Huizhou . Stanford University Press, 2005.
  • Guy, R. Kent.  The Emperor's Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch'ien-lung Era . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
  • Han, Seunghyun. "Shrine, Images, and Power: The Worship of Former Worthies in Early Nineteenth Century Suzhou."  T'oung Pao  Volume 95 Numbers 1-3 2009 2008: 167-195.
  • Ho Ping-ti. "The Salt Merchants of Yang-chou: A Study of Commercial Capitalism in 18th Century China."  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies  17 (1954): 130-168.
  • Ho, Virgil K.Y. "'To Laugh at a Penniless Man Rather Than a Prostitute'; The Unofficial Worlds of Prostitution in Late Qing and Early Republican South China."  European Journal of East Asian Studies  Mar2001 Vol. 1 Issue 1: 103-38.
  • Hu, Ying.  Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898-1918 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Huang, Chin-shing.  Philosophy, Philology, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century China . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  • Huang, Martin.  Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
  • Hummel, Arthur, ed.  Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period . Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943. Valuable collection of biographies of leading Qing figures.
  • Huntington, Rania.  Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative. Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.
  • Judge, Joan.  Print and Politics: "Shibao" and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
  • Kwong, Luke S. K. "Self and Society in Modern China: Liu E (1857-1909) and 'Laocan youji.'"  T'oung Pao  Vol. 87 Fasc. 4/5 (2001): 360-392.
  • Li, Qiancheng.  Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004.
  • Liu, Kwang-Ching, ed.  Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
  • Liu, Lydia H.  Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity--China, 1900-1937 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
  • Man-Cheong, Iona.  The Class of 1761: Examinations, State, and Elites in Eighteenth-Century China . Stanford University Press, 2004.
  • McDermott, Joseph P.  A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006.
  • Meyer-Fong, Tobie S.  Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
  • Meyer-Fong, Tobie. "The Printed World: Books, Publishing Culture, and Society in Late Imperial China."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Volume 66 Issue 03 August 2007: 787-817.
  • Miles, Steven B. "Creating Zhu 'Jiujiang': Localism in Nineteenth-Century Guangdong." T'oung Pao  Vol. 90 Fasc. 4/5 (2004): 299-340.
  • Nivison, David.  The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-ch'eng (1738-1801) . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.
  • Pagani, Catherine.  "Eastern Magnificence and European Ingenuity": Clocks of Late Imperial China . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
  • Rankin, Mary.  Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865-1911.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.
  • Roddy, Stephen.  Literati Identity and Its Fictional Representations in Late Imperial China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
  • Ropp, Paul S.  Banished Immortal: Searching for Shuangqing, China's Peasant Woman Poet . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
  • Roy, David, trans.  The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei . Volume One: "The Gathering." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
  • Santangelo, Paolo.  L*Amore in Cina. Attraverse alcune opere letterarie negli ultimi secoli dell*Impero . [Love in China: as seen from some literary works in the later centuries of Empire] Naples: Liguori Editore 1999.
  • Spence, Jonathan.  Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor . Second edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
  • Schmidt, J. D.  Harmony Garden: The Life, Literary Criticism, and Poetry of Yuan Mei (1716-1798) . London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
  • Teng, Emma.  Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004.
  • Volpp, Sophie. "The Literary Circulation of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Vol. 61 No. 3 (Aug., 2002): 949-984.
  • Waley, Arthur.  Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Poet . London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1956.
  • Wang, David Der-wei, and Shang Wei, eds.  Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2005.
  • Wang, Hung-tai. "Information Media, Social Imagination, and Public Society during the Ming and Qing Dynasties."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 5 no. 2 (June 2010): 169-216.
  • Wang, Ying. "The Supernatural as the Author's Sphere: Jinghua Yuan's Reprise of the Rhetorical Strategies of  Honglou Meng ."  T'oung Pao  Volume 92 Numbers 1-3 2006: 129-161.
  • Wei, Hua. "How Dangerous Can the Peony Be? Textual Space, Caizi Mudan ting, and Naturalizing the Erotic."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Volume 65 Issue 04 November 2006: 741-762
  • Wei, Shang.  Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.
  • Weidner, Marsha (ed.).  Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.
  • Wu, Cuncun.  Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China . London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
  • Wu Jingzi 吳 敬 梓.  The Scholars  ( Ru lin wai shi  儒 林 外 史). Translated by H. Y. & Gladys Yang. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
  • Zhao, Jie. "Ties that Bind: The Craft of Political Networking in Late Ming Chiang-nan." T'oung Pao  Volume 86 Numbers 1-3 2000: 136-164.
  • Zhu, Hu. "Jiangnan Gentry's Responses to 'The Great Famine in 1877每1878': The Famine Relief in North Jiangsu."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 3 number 4 December 2008: 612-37.
  • Antony, Robert J.  Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China . Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, University of California, 2003.
  • Bell, Lynda.  One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865-1937 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
  • Bello, David.  Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2005.
  • Bello, David. "The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Vol. 62, No. 4 (Nov., 2003): 1109-1142
  • Cochran, Sherman,  Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945 . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
  • Bin Wong, R. "Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and Economic Development: the Qing Empire in Comparative Perspective."  Journal of Early Modern History  Volume 5 Number 4 2001: 387-408.
  • Brokaw, Cynthia J.  Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.
  • Elvin, Mark.  The Pattern of the Chinese Past . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973. Chapters on the Qing.
  • Brook, Timothy and Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi (ed.).  Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
  • Grove, Linda, & Christian Daniels, eds.,  State and Society in China: Japanese Perspectives on Ming-Qing Social and Economic History . Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984.
  • Chia, Lucille.  Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11 th-17th Centuries) . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center for Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2002.
  • Hao, Yen-p'ing  The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-Century China: The Rise of Sino-Western Mercantile Capitalism . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
  • Dai, Lianbin. "The Economics of the Jiaxing Edition of the Buddhist Tripitaka."  T'oung Pao  Volume 94 Numbers 4-5 2008: 306-359.
  • Dunstan, Helen.  State or Merchant?: Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China. Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
  • Ho Ping-ti.  Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
  • Glahn, Richard Von . "Foreign Silver Coins in the Market Culture of Nineteenth Century China."  International Journal of Asian Studies  Volume 4 Issue 1 January 2007 : 51-79.
  • Johnson, Linda Cooke.  Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
  • Guo, Songyi et al. "The Shanxi merchants in Beijing in the Qing Dynasty: An analysis based on 136 samples of merchants and their activities."  Frontiers of History in China volume 4 number 2 June 2009: 165-82
  • Hamashita, Takeshi. "Tribute and Treaties: East Asian Treaty Ports Networks in the Era of Negotiation, 1834-1894."  European Journal of East Asian Studies  Volume 1 Issue 1 March 2001: 59-88.
  • Leonard, Jane Kate, and John Watt, eds.,  To Achieve Security and Wealth: The Qing Imperial State and the Economy, 1644-1911 . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
  • Li, Bozhong. "Wages in Huating-Lou Counties in the 1820s [With Appendix: Weights and Measures]."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 3 number 4 December 2008: 578-611.
  • Lin, Man-houng.  China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808每1856 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
  • Madancy, Joyce.  The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004.
  • Mann, Susan.  Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750-1950 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
  • Marks, Robert.  Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • Marme, Michael.  Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge . Stanford University Press, 2005.
  • Mazumdar, Sucheta.  Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market . Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998.
  • Motono, Eiichi.  Conflict and Cooperation in Sino-British Business, 1860-1 911: The Impact of the Pro-British Commercial Network in Shanghai . New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
  • Paul豕s, Xavier. "Anti-Opium Visual Propaganda and the Deglamorisation of Opium in China, 1895每1937."  European Journal of East Asian Studies  Volume 7 Issue 2 September 2008: 229-262.
  • Perkins, Dwight H.  Agricultural Development in China , 1368-1969. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
  • Perkins, Dwight H., ed.  China's Modern Economy in Historical Perspective . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975.
  • Pomeranz, Kenneth.  The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and The Making of the Modern World Economy.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
  • Pong, David.  Shen Pao-chen and China's Modernization in the Nineteenth Century . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  • Qi, Meiqin et. al. "The Temporal Characteristics of Border Trading Along the Great Wall During the Qing Dynasty."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 3 number 2 June 2008: 230-62.
  • Rawski, Thomas, & Lillian Li, eds.,  Chinese History in Economic Perspective . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
  • Rowe, William.  Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984.
  • ---.  Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.
  • Rawski, Evelyn S.  Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China . Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1972.
  • Skinner, G. William, ed.  The City in Late Imperial China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977.
  • Tang, Qiaotian et al. "Inter-Port Transshipment between Shanghai and Hankou in Foreign Trade: 1864每1930."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 4 number 4 December 2009: 632-52.
  • Wang Yeh-chien.  Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750-1911 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
  • Will, Pierre-Eienne, R. Bin Wong, et al.  Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850 . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1991.
  • Willmott, W. E., ed.  Economic Organization in Chinese Society . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
  • Wong, J.Y.  Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China . Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Wong, R. Bin.  China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
  • Yan, Hongzhong et al. "Economic Growth and Fluctuation in the Early Qing Dynasty: From the Perspective of Monetary Circulation."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 4 number 2 June 2009: 221-64.
  • Zelin, Madeline.  The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
  • ---,  The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China . New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
  • Zheng, Yangwen,  The Social Life of Opium in China . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Zhong, Weimin (Feng, Mei, tr). "The Roles of Tea and Opium in Early Economic Globalization: A Perspective on China's Crisis in the 19th Century."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 5 number 1 March 2010: 86-105.
  • Bays, Daniel, ed.  Christianity in China, from the Eighteenth Century to the Present . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
  • Bernhardt, Kathryn.  Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950 . Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1992.
  • Bretelle-Establet, Florence.  La Sant谷 en Chine du Sud (1898-1928) . Paris: CNRS Editions, 2002.
  • Cohen, Paul.  History in Three Keys: The Boxers As Event, Experience, and Myth . New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
  • Daigle, Jean-Guy. "Challenging the Imperial Order: The Precarious Status of Local Christians in Late-Qing Sichuan."  European Journal of East Asian Studies  Volume 4 Issue 1 March 2005: 1-29.
  • Dunch, Ryan.  Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857-1927 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
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  • Freedman, Maurice.  Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung . New York: Humanities Press, 1966.
  • Guo, Qitao.  Exorcism and Money: The Symbolic World of the Five-Fury Spirits in Late Imperial China . Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2003.
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  • Huang, Philip C. C.  The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985.
  • Huang, Zhifan, Shao, Hong. "The Life and Production of the Peasants in Huizhou from the Late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China: The Analysis Based on 5 day-to-day Accounts in Wuyuan County."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 4 number 3 September 2009: 460-9.
  • ---.  The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
  • Lee, James & Cameron Campbell.  Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Stratification and Population Behavior in Liaoning 1774-1873 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • Little, Daniel.  Understanding Peasant China . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
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  • Malek, Roman SVD (ed.).  The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ . Vol. 1. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, no. 50. Sankt Augustin, Ger.: Institut Monumenta Serica and China-Zentrum, 2002.
  • Mungello, D. E.  The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785 . Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
  • Perdue, Peter.  Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 . Cambridge: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1987.
  • Potter, Sulamith Heins, & Jack Potter,  China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • Prazniak, Roxann.  Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels against Modernity in Late Imperial China . Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
  • Reardon-Anderson, James.  Reluctant Pioneers: China's Expansion Northward, 1644-1937 . Stanford Unversity Press, 2005.
  • Reilly, Thomas H.  The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004.
  • Shao, Hong. "Associations in Village Society in Jiangxi in the Ming-Qing Period."  Chinese Studies in History  Fall2001 Vol. 35 Issue 1: 31-61.
  • Skinner, G. W. "Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China (Part I)."  Journal of Asian Studies  24 (1964): 3-43
  • ---. "Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case."  Comparative Studies in Society and History  13 (1971) : 270-281
  • Smith, Arthur H.  Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology . New York: F.H. Revell Company, 1899.
  • Smith, S. A..  Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 . Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
  • Sweeten, Alan Richard.  Christianity in Rural China: Conflict and Accommodation in Jiangxi Province, 1860-1900 . Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies, no. 91. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001.
  • Wang, Jian et al. "Temple Community of Folk Religion in Jiangnan since the Ming and Qing Dynasties: Focus on Suzhou and Songjiang Areas."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 4 no. 4 (December 2009): 537-78.
  • Wei, Guangqi. et al. "Township/Village Administration from the Late Qing to the Warlord Period."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 1 number 1 January 2006: 97-123.
  • Wei, Huo. "Center and Periphery: The Expansion and Metamorphosis of Han Culture〞A Case Study of Stone Carvings in No. 1 Mahao Cave Tomb, Leshan, Sichuan Province, China."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 3 number 2 June 2008: 293-322.
  • Wolf, Margery.  The House of Lim . New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968.
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  • Yu, Xinzhong et al. "Public Health in Qing Dynasty Jiangnan: Focusing on Environment and Water Supply."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 2 no. 3 (July 2007): 379-415.
  • Zhao, Shiyu. "Chinese Society in the 19th Century from Multiple Time-Space Perspectives: Case Studies in Regional Social History."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 4 no. 3 (September 2009): 323-39.
  • Zhou, Rong. "Relief Services for the Aged in Hunan and Hubei during the Ming and Qing Dynasties."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 1 number 4 December 2006: 544-62.
  • Hummel, Arthur, ed.  Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period . Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943. Biographies of A-kuei, Chang Kuang-ssu, Chang T'ing-yu Ch'ang-ling, E-le-teng-pao, Fu-k'ang-an, Ho Shen, Hung-li, Hung Liang-chi, Le-pao, Li Ch'ang-keng, Na-yen-ch'eng, Pi Yuan, Shu-ho-te, Sun Hsing-yen, Sun Shih-i, Te-leng-t'ai, Wang Ch'ang, Ying-ho, Yung-yen.
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  • Spence, Jonathan.  Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, 1988.
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  • ---.  The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-century China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
  • Ben-Dor, Zvi Benite.  The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China. . Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2005.
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  • Chin, Ann-ping, & Mansfield Freeman, trans.  Tai Chen On Mencius . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
  • Durand, Pierre-Henri.  Lettres et pouvoirs: Un proces litteraire dans la Chine imperiale . Paris: L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences socialies, 1992.
  • Elman, Benjamin A.  Classicism, Politics and Kinship: The Ch'ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
  • ---.  From Philosophy to Philology: Social and Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China . Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1984, 1990.
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  • ---. "'Universal Science' Versus 'Chinese Science': The Changing Identity of Natural Studies in China, 1850-1930."  Historiography East and West  Volume 1 Number 1 2003: 68-116.
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  • Fogel, Joshua A. (ed.).  The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao's Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China . China Research Monograph, no. 57. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 2004.
  • Henderson, John B.  Scripture, Canon and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
  • ---.  The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology . New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
  • Goossaert, Vincent. "1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?"  The Journal of Asian Studies  Volume 65 Issue 02 May 2006: 307-335.
  • Hummel, Arthur, ed.  Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period . Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943. Biographies of Chi Yun, Chang Hsueh-ch'eng, Huang Tsung-hsi, Hui Tung, Ku Yen-wu, Liu Feng-lu, Mao Ch'i-ling, Tai Chen, Ts'ui Shu, Tuan Yu-ts'ai, Wang Fu-chih, Yen Jo-chu.
  • Janku, Andrea. "Preparing the Ground for Revolutionary Discourse from the Statecraft Anthologies to the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century China."  T'oung Pao  Vol. 90 Fasc. 1/3 (2004): 65-121.
  • Jia, Si. "Breaking through the 'Jargon' Barrier: Early 19th Century Missionaries' Response on Communication Conflicts in China."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 4 no. 3 (September 2009): 340-57.
  • Karl, Rebecca and Zarrow, Peter.  Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China . Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
  • Lai, John T. P. "Doctrinal Dispute within Interdenominational Missions: The Shanghai Tract Committee in the 1840s."  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society  Volume 20 Issue 03 July 2010: 307-317.
  • Levenson, Joseph R.  Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy . Volume I, Part One, "The Tone of Early-Modern Chinese Intellectual Culture" (The Abortiveness of Empiricism; The Amateur Ideal). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.
  • Liang Ch'i-ch'ao.  Intellectual Trends in the Ch'ing Period . Parts I & II. Translated by Immanuel C. Y. Hs? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
  • Liu, Lydia.  The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Liu, Xun. "In Defense of the City and the Polity: The Xuanmiao Monastery and the Qing Anti-Taiping Campaigns in Mid-Nineteenth Century Nanyang."  T'oung Pao  Volume 95 Numbers 4-5 2009: 287-333.
  • Mak, George Kam Wah. "&Laissez-faire* or Active Intervention? The Nature of the British and Foreign Bible Society's Patronage of the Translation of the Chinese Union Versions."  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society  Volume 20 Issue 02 April 2010: 167-190.
  • Metzger, Thomas A.  Escape From Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
  • Ng, On-cho.  Cheng-Zhu Confucianism in the Early Qing: Li Guangdi (1642-1718) and Qing Learning . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
  • Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. "The Price of Autonomy: Intellectuals in Ming and Ch'ing Politics," Daedalus  (Spring 1972): 35-70.
  • Overmyer, Daniel L.  Precious Volumes: An Introduction to Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries . Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 49. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999
  • Reinders, Eric.  Borrowed Gods, Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.
  • Robinson, Arthur G. "Pilgrims to Western Seats of Learning--China's First Educational Mission to the United States."  Chinese Studies in History  Summer2003 Vol. 36 Issue 4: 63-88
  • Vittinghoff, Natascha. "Readers, Publishers and Officials in the Contest for a Public Voice and the Rise of a Modern Press in Late Qing China (1860-1880)."  T'oung Pao  Vol. 87 Fasc. 4/5 (2001): 393-455.
  • Wang, Guanhua.  In Search of Justice: The 1905-1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
  • Wang, Gungwu.  Anglo-Chinese Encounters Since 1800: War, Trade, Science, and Governance . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • Widmer, Ellen. "Foreign Travel through a Woman' Eyes: Shan Shili's  Guimao l邦xing ji  in Local and Global Perspective."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Volume 65 Issue 04 November 2006: 763-791.
  • Wilhelm, Hellmutt. "Chinese Confucianism on the Eve of the Great Encounter," pp. 283-310 in Marius Jansen, ed.  Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
  • Wang, T. "Construction of Yan Fu's View on Social History and the Turning of Modern History."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 2 no. 4 (October 2007): 547-65.
  • Ye, Xiaoqing and Eccles, Lance. "Anthem for a Dying Dynasty: The Qing National Anthem through the Eyes of a Court Musician."  T'oung Pao  Volume 93 Numbers 4-5 2007: 433-458.
  • Zhang, Shuhong. "Hanxue Shangdui: A Case Study on the Contentions between the Han School and the Song School in the Middle Qing Dynasty."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 1 no. 4 (December 2006): 563-89.
  • Zhang, X. "Conversations between China and the West: The Missionaries in Early Qing Dynasty and Their Researches on the 'Book of Changes'."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 2 no. 4 (October 2007): 469-87, 489-92.
  • Zhang, Xianqing et al. "The Metaphor of Illness: Medical Culture in the Dissemination of Catholicism in Early Qing China."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 4 no. 4 (December 2009): 579-603.
  • Zhang, Yufa. "Returned Chinese Students from America and the Chinese Leadership (1846-1949)."  Chinese Studies in History  Volume 35 Issue 3 Spring 2002: 52-87.
  • This collection presents the proceedings of the international conference in Sankt Augustin held in 1992, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, s.j. All articles are printed in their original language, i.e., English, Chinese, German and French. Additional contributions on the subject have been included. The book is supplemented with summaries in English and Chinese, as well as with numerous illustrations, a bibliography, and a general index with a glossary.
  • Introduction: Roman Malek, Johann Adam Schall von Bell and His 1992 Anniversary;
  • I. Johann Adam Schall von Bell: The Person and His Context: Peter Hans Kolvenbach, Johann Adam Schall von Bell--A Jesuit; Arnold Sprenger, Johann Adam Schall Educational Foundation and the Intellectual Climate of His Time; Lu Yao, Three Issues on Johann Adam Schall von Bell; Claudia von Collani, Johann Adam Schall von Bell: Weltbild und Weltchronologie in der Chinamission im 17. Jahrhundert; Ma Biao, Johann Adam Schall and Chinese Traditional Philosophy; John W. Witek, Johann Adam Schall von Bell and the Transition from the Ming to the Ching Dynasty; Liu Mengxi, Johann Adam Schall旧 Role in the Reform Period; Hao Zhenhua, Johann Adam Schall and the First Dutch Diplomatic Mission to the Qing Empire; Giovanni Stary, Mandschurische Inschriften und Zeugnisse zu Johann Adam Schall von Bell; Edward J. Malatesta, The Lost Sheep of Adam Schall. Reflections on the Past and Present of the Shala Cemetery;
  • II. Johann Adam Schall von Bell and His Chinese Contemporaries: Albert Chan, Johann Adam Schall in T学n Ch寛en旧 Pei-yu lu and in the Eyes of His Contemporaries; Chen Min-sun, Johann Adam Schall, Hs?Kuang-ch寛, and Li T寛en-ching; Eugenio Menegon, Yang Guangxian旧 Opposition to Johann Adam Schall: Christianity and Western Science in His Work Bu de yi; Ren Dayuan, Philippe Wang Zheng: A Scientist, Philosopher, and Catholic in Ming Dynasty China;
  • III. Johann Adam Schall von Bell--Astrology, Astronomy, and Calendar: Claudia von Collani, Theologie und Astronomie in China; Tiziana Lippiello, Astronomy and Astrology: Johann Adam Schall von Bell; Huang Yi-Long, East磱est Cultural Confrontation and Compromise in Early Ch寛ng China. A Case Study on Johann Adam Schall旧 Civil Calendars; Zhang Dawei, The "Calendar Case" in the Early Qing Dynasty Re-examined; Jiang Xiaoyuan, Johann Adam Schall von Bell and the Ptolomaic Astronomy in China; Keizo Hashimoto, Johann Adam Schall and Astronomical Works on Star Mappings; Gu Ning, Johann Adam Schall von Bell and His Horizontal Sundial of the New Western Calendar; Minako Debergh, Les cartes astronomiques des missionaires J廥uites en Chine: de Johann Adam Schall von Bell, Ignaz K鐷ler et leurs filiations en Cor嶪 et au Japon; Yi Shitong, Newly Found Astronomical Instruments Concerning Johann Adam Schall von Bell; Nicole Halsberghe, Quotations from the Works of Johann Adam Schall in the Yixiang zhi of Ferdinand Verbiest; Jean-Claude Martzloff, Notes on Planetary Theories in Giacomo Rho旧 Wuwei lizhi;
  • IV. "Western Learning" in China--The Contribution of Johann Adam Schall von Bell: Benjamin A. Elman, The "Chinese Sciences" in Policy Questions from Confucian Civil Examinations During the Late Ming; Catherine Jami, Mathematical Knowledge in the Chongzhen lishu; Pan Jixing, Johann Adam Schall von Bell and the Spread of Georgius Agricola旧 De re metallica in Late Ming China; Zhang Zhishan, Johann Adam Schall von Bell and His Book On Telescopes; Sun Xi, Johann Adam Schall von Bell und die westlichen 强euerwaffen" in China; Isaia Iannaccone, The Geyuan baxian biao (Trigonometric Tables) and Some Remarks about the Scientific Collaboration between Schall von Bell, Rho, and Schreck; Yang Xiaohong, Die Haltung der chinesischen Intellektuellen zur Xixue (Westliche Lehre) am Ende der Ming- und Anfang der Qing-Dynastie. Ein Vergleich zwischen Matteo Ricci und Johann Adam Schall im Hinblick auf ihre Methode der 张vangelisierung durch Wissenschaft"; Zhang Xiao, Modern Scientific Culture Introduced into China by Catholic Missionaries During the Ming and the Ch寛ng Dynasties;
  • V. The Religious Writings and Activities of Johann Adam Schall von Bell: Chen Song, Johann Adam Schall von Bell in China: "Propagating Catholicism Through Academic Activities"; Adrian Dudink, The Religious Works Composed by Johann Adam Schall, Especially His Zhuzhi qunzheng and His Efforts to Convert the Last Ming Emperor; Zhao Pushan, Johann Adam Schall and His Work Zhuzhi qunzheng; Xiao Liangqiong, Schall and His Chinese Work Zhuzhi qunzheng; Angelo S. Lazzarotto, Wide Apostolic Concern of Johann Adam Schall; Horst Rzepkowski, Der Beitrag von Johann Adam Schall von Bell zur einheimischen christlichen Kunst;
  • VI. Johann Adam Schall von Bell as a Literary and Iconographic Figure: Gregory Blue, Johann Adam Schall and the Jesuit Mission in Vondel旧 Zungchin; Adrian Hsia, Der literarische Beitrag zur Darstellung der Jesuitenmission in China, insbesondere des Wirkens von Johann Adam Schall von Bell; Chang Sheng-ching, Das Portr酹 von Johann Adam Schall von Bell in Athanasius Kirchers China illustrata;
  • VII: Johann Adam Schall von Bell: Reception and Impact: Hao Guiyuan, The Differences and Similarities of Thought and Culture between China and the West Reflected in Works Written by Jesuits in Chinese in the Early Period; Yang Yi, Johann Adam Schall旧 Writings in China; Wang Bing, An Introduction of Some Chinese Records and Researches on Johann Adam Schall von Bell旧 Scientific Activities; Yoshida Tadashi, The Works of Johann Adam Schall von Bell in Tokugawa Japan; Gu Weimin; Erl酳terungen und Forschungen zu Johann Adam Schall von Bell in China im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert; Tatjana A. Pang, Russian Evidence of Johann Adam Schall von Bell;
  • VIII. The Encounter of Europe and China: Other Examples: Noel Golvers, The Development of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus Reconsidered in the Light of New Material; Rita Widmaier, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz?Streben nach Harmonie zwischen China und Europa; Gerlinde Gild, The Introduction of European Musical Theory during the Early Qing Dynasty. The Achievements of Thomas Pereira and Theodorico Pedrini; Paul Shan, Science and Faith in China Today.
  • Twitchett, Dennis. " Chinese Biographical Writing," pp. 95-114 in Beasley, W.G., & E.G. Pulleyblank,  Historians of China and Japan . London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 94-105. Other articles in English on Chinese biographies are cited on p. 97

(See Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff. An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works. Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 178-185.)

  • Fang Chao-ying & Tu Lien-che,  Index to 33 Ch'ing Biographic Collections (San shi san zhong Qing dai zhuan ji zong he yin de  三 十 三 種 清 代 傳 記 綜 合 引 得). Harvard Yenching Index. See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 104. This is a good place to go for the list of these 33 biographic collections. Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 181.
  • Hakki tsushi retsuden sakuin  八 旗 通 志 列 傳 索 引 (Index to biographies in the Pa-ch'i tong-chih). Tokyo, 1965. (1790 edition of this work on the Eight Banners). Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 182.
  • Qing shi  清 史 index to biographies, in last volume, Taipei edition.
  • Painters:  Biographies of Ch'ing Dynasty Painters in Three Collections  ( Qing hua zhuan ji yi san zhong fu yin de 清 畫 傳 集 義 三 種 附 引 得) Harvard Yenching Index. Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 185.
  • Hummel, Arthur, ed.  Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period . Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943. Index. See Index to 33 Qing Collections, above.
  • Li Huan 李 桓,  Guo chao qi xian lei zheng chu bian  國 朝 耆 獻 類 徵 初 編, 24 vols. Reprinted. (Described in Ho Ping-ti.  Ladder of Success in Late Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility 1368-1911 . New York: Columbia University Press, 1962, p. 95.
  • Qing dai qi bai ming ren zhuan  清 代 七 百 名 人 傳 (Biographies of 700 men of the Qing period). 1937. Has useful appendices, including classification by native place.
  • Qing dai hua shi  清 代 畫 史 (History of Qing painters). 8,000 Ming-Qing artists, biographies. 1970 Taipei reprint.
  • Qing shi  清 史,  Lie zhuan  列 傳 section.
  • All gazetteers have several sections for biography, giving information on famous native sons of the area, and of famous officals who served there.
  • Many biographic collections were compiled based on native place, e.g. "Famous natives of T'ung-ch'eng county, Anhwei" etc.

These give biographic information, and often quote the subject's written works (esp. memorials)

  • Gu Tinglong 顧 廷 龍 .  Zhongguo li dai ren wu nian pu kao lu  中 國 歷 代 人 物 年 譜 考 錄 . Beijing: Zhonghua Bookstore, 1992.
  • Lai Xinxia 來 新 夏 , compiler.  Jin san bai nian ren wen nian pu zhi jian lu  近 三 百 年 人 文 年 譜 知 見 錄. Shanghai, People's Press, 1983.
  • Union catalog of Chinese genealogies by the Shanghai Library. It now has 60,000 items. It will be published by Shanghai gu ji chu ban she in book form in late 2006. Data will be available online free after a decent interval to allow the publisher to recoup its investment.
  • Wang Baoxian,  Li dai ming ren nian pu zong mu  歷 代 名 人 年 譜 總 目. Index to nian pu. See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 101.
  • Chen Naiqian 陳 乃 乾,  Qing dai bei zhuan wen tong jian  清 代 碑 傳 文 通 檢 (Peking, 1959; Taipei reprint under slightly different title) See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 104; Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 182).
  • Jiang Liangfu 姜 亮 夫,  Li dai ren wu nian li bei zhuan zong biao  歷 代 人 物 年 里 碑 傳 總 表. Shanghai, 1959. See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 100.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 94-95.

(see also civil and military examination bibliographies)

  • See Nathan, Andrew.  Modern China 1840-1972: An Introduction to Sources and Research Aids . Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1973, pp. 27-28.
  • For lists of degree-holders, see Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 175-76. Available for entire Qing for  jin shi  進 士. See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 105. Some  ju ren  舉 人,  gong sheng  貢 生, and  sheng yuan  生 員 lists exist. See Ho Ping-ti,  Ladder of Success in Late Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility 1368-1911 . New York: Columbia University Press, 1962, p. xi. Gazetteers also give names (and sometimes other information) of degree holders.
  • For lists of office holders,  Qing shi  has tables for many top posts listed in chronological sequence. Local gazetteers list names of office holders, though these lists are frequently incomplete.  Chin-shen ch'uan-shu , regularly issued lists of office holders. See Metzger, Thomas.  Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative, and Communication Aspects . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 49, 154.

See Wilkinson, Endymion. The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide. Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 98.

  • Telford, Ted, et al., compilers.  Chinese Genealogies of the Genealogical Society of Utah: An Annotated Bibliography . Taipei: Chung Wen Publishing House, 1983.
  • Japanese translation: Kindo shuppansha 近 藤 出 版 社 , 1988.
  • Taga Akigoro 多 賀 秋 五 郎 .  Sofu no kenkyu  宗 譜 の 研 究 (A study of genealogies). Tokyo: Toyo bunko, 1960. LOOK THROUGH.
  • van der Sprenkel, "Geneological Registers," pp. 83-98, in Donald Leslie, C. Mackerras, & Wang Gungwu eds. Essays on the Sources for Chinese History . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.
  • Zhao Zhenchi 趙 振 績 , & Chen Meigui 陳 美 桂 , compilers.  Taiwan qu zu pu mu lu  臺 灣 區 族 譜 目 錄 (Catalog of genealogies from Taiwan). Taipei, 1987.
  • Zheng, Zhenman (Szonyi, Michael trans.).  Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.
  • See also the following catalogs from Libraries with Asian collections: Library of Congress, Columbia University, Morman Genealogical Library.
  • Bernhardt, Kathryn and Huang, Philip C. C. (ed.).  Law, Society, and Culture in Late Imperial China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
  • Ma Fengchen.  Qing dai xing zheng zhi du yan jiu can kao shu mu  清 代 行 政 制 度 研 究 參 考 書目, 1935. See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 135.
  • Brunnert, H. S., & V. V. Hagelstrom.  Present Day Political Organization of China . Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1912. Basic for government posts.
  • E-tu Zen Sun,  Ch'ing Administrative Terms: A Translation of Terminology of the Six Boards with Explanatory Notes . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.
  • Read about edition, contents in:
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973. pp. 134-35.
  • Fairbank, John K.  Ch'ing Documents: An Introductory Syllabus . Third Edition, revised and enlarged. Harvard East Asian Monograph. Cambridge: East Asia Research Center, Harvard University, pp. 575-76.
  • Preston, C. F. "Constitutional Law of the Chinese Empire,"  China Review  6 (1877-78): 13-29.
  • Metzger, Thomas A.  The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative, and Communication Aspects . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 212-221.

a. Provincial regulations:

  • Chen, Fu-mei Chang. "Provincial Documents of Laws and Regulations in the Ch'ing Period,"  Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 3:6 (1976): 28-48.

b. Board regulations [Such-and-such a board's ze li  則 例]

  • 19th century editions exist for all the boards (Punishments?)
  • Board of Civil Office 1790, 1820, 1843, 1872 See Metzger, Thomas A.  The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative, and Communication Aspects . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 352 ff.
  • Board of Revenue 1776, 1796, 1838, 1851, 1865
  • Board of Rites 1845
  • Board of Works 1798, 18??
  • Regulations for other government departments:
  • Grain Tribute administration 1845
  • Green Standard Army 1801, 1825
  • Imperial Clan Court 1812, 1840
  • Mongolian Superintendancey 1789, 1817, 1841, 1891, 1908

c. Salt Monopoly:

  • Changlu 1726, 1805
  • Hedong 1727
  • Liang huai 1693, 1728, 1748, 1806, 1892, 1904
  • Liang zhe 1729
  • Shandong 1725
  • Sichuan 1883

d. Administrative punishments statutes [ chu fen ze li  處 分 則 例]

  • Much incorporated in legal code
  • For the Six Boards:  Liu bu chu fen ze li  六 部 處 分 則 例, 1828, 1869, 1887
  • See Metzger, Thomas A.  The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative, and Communication Aspects . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 350-56.
  • READ: Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 138-39.
  • Derk Bodde, "Legal Sources," pp. 99-103 in Donald Leslie, C. Mackerras, & Wang Gungwu eds.  Essays on the Sources for Chinese History . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.
  • Sommer, Matthew H.  Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Best Chinese edition of the Code to buy (Complete and annotated):
  • Du li cun yi  讀 例 存 疑 (See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973. p. 139)
  • For case books:  Xing an hui lan  刑 案 會 覽. See Bodde, Derk, & Clarence Morris,  Law in Imperial China . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Columbia University has digitized their 1902 version of the 30 vol. Xing an xin bian  刑 案 新 編, available without restrictions from their catalog.
  • For recent studies, see above,  Legal History .
  • READ Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 135-36.
  • Look at sample: "[Instructions to magistrates]"  Qin ban zhou xian shi yi  欽 版 州 縣 事 宜
  • Brook, Timothy.  Geographical Sources of Ming-Qing History . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1988.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion. "Chinese Merchant Manuals and Route Books."  Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i  2:9 (1973): 8-34.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 122-24.
  • These are less useful for the Qing since they are excerpts from sources that survive in full (especially the  Hui dian  會 典  Dong hua lu  東 華 錄  Sheng xun  圣 訓 etc.
  • See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973 for the four Qing encyclopedias in the "Ten T'ung" 十 通 set, pp. 126-28
  • The  Gu jin tu shu ji cheng  古 今 圖 書 集 成 (1725) which uses more primary sources, is good. There is an index by Lionel Giles (1911).
  • Huang chao tong dian  皇 朝 通 典 (to 1785)
  • Huang chao tong zhi  皇 朝 通 志 (to 1785)
  • Huang chao wen xian tong kao  皇 朝 文 獻 通 考 (to 1785)
  • Huang chao xu wen xian tong kao  皇 朝 續 文 獻 通 考 (1786-1911)
  • Indexes to 1936 Commercial Press editions
  • Huang chao zhang gu hui bian  皇 朝 掌 故 匯 編 (1902) in same tradition
  • For other encyclopedias, see Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 162-69; Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 94-95.
  • Fairbank, John K.  Ch'ing Documents: An Introductory Syllabus. 3rd edition . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1970, pp. 84-92.
  • Huang chao jing shi wen bian  皇 朝 經 世 文 編. 1825. This collection is discussed in:
  • Jin dai Zhongguo yan jiu wei yuan hui 近 代 中 國 研 究 委 員 會,  Jing shi wen bian zong mu lu  經 世 文 編 總 目 錄 (Complete indexes to Jing shi wen bian).
  • Metzger, Thomas A.  The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative, and Communication Aspects . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 26-27.
  • Mitchell, Peter. A Further Note on the Huang chao jing shi wen bian.  Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i  2:3 (1970): 40-46.
  • Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 119-122.
  • Wakeman, Frederic. "The Huang chao jing shi wen bian."  Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i  清 史 問 題 1:10 (1969): 8-22.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 159-63.
  • Zhao, Zhen. "Agricultural Reclamation Policy and Environmental Changes in the Northwest China during the Qing Dynasty." Frontiers of History in China  v. 1 no. 2 (June 2006): 276-91.
  • Bibliography by Mao Nai-wen. Cited in Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 163.
  • Needham,  Science and Civilization , IV:3 pp. 211-378
  • For works on rivers, dikes, canals: Reprint series (Taiwan),  Zhongguo shui li yao ji zong bian  中 國 水 力 要 紀 叢 編
  • Wang Yu-hu.  Zhongguo nong xue shu lu . Shanghai, 1964. Cited in Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 159.
  • Almanacs are often useful for agricultural information
  • Technology: Sun translation of  Tian gong kai wu  天 工 開 物 (1637) -  Chinese Technology in the 17th century . University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1966.
  • Bernhardt, Kathryn.  Women and Property in China, 960-1949 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
  • Chen, Fu-mei Chang, & R. Myers, "Customary Law and the Economic Growth of China during the Ch'ing Period," CSWT 3:5 (1976) 1-32.
  • Buoye, Thomas.  Manslaughter, Markets, and Moral Economy: Violent Disputes over Property Rights in Eighteenth-Century China . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Fu Yiling,  Ming Qing nong cun she hui jing ji  明 清 農 村 社 會 經 濟 (Peking, 1961) See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 158.
  • Islamoglu, Huri. "Modernities Compared: State Transformations and Constitutions of Property in the Qing and Ottoman Empires." Journal of Early Modern History  Volume 5 Number 4 2001: 353-386.
  • Liang, Linxia. "Rejection or Acceptance: Finding Reasons for the Late Qing Magistrate's Comments on Land and Debt Petitions." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies  Volume 68 Issue 02 June 2005: 276-294.
  • Long, Denggao et al. "The Diversification of Land Transactions in the Qing Dynasty."  Frontiers of History in China  v. 4 no. 2 (June 2009): 183-220.
  • Macauley, Melissa Ann.  Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
  • Yuji Muramatsu,  Kindai Konan no sosan: Chugoku jinushi seido no kenkyu  (Landlord bursaries of the lower Yangtze delta region in recent times: studies of the Chinese landlord system). Tokyo, 1970.
  • Wakefield, David.  Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 158-59.

Manchu sources are most useful for: Early Qing period (and late Ming); affairs concerning Manchus, Mongols, & problems of the north and northwest frontier for the 17th and 18th centuries.

  • Afinogenov, Gregory, “The Manchu book in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg” Abstract: This Research Note follows the development of Manchu-language print and manuscript collections at the Library of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It focuses especially on the works collected in Beijing by Larion Rossokhin [1741], the first graduate of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing to have any significant knowledge of Manchu. These collections formed the basis of one of the first large-scale Western Manchu translation projects, the publications of Aleksei Leont’ev in the 1770s and ‘80s, and eventually for the emergence of academic Manjuristics in the Russian Empire and beyond. Included in the note is a series of complete library catalogues from the St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, documents hitherto largely unknown to the Western reader.
  • Atwill, David G. "Blinkered Visions: Islamic Identity, Hui Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873." The Journal of Asian Studies  Vol. 62, No. 4 (Nov., 2003): 1079-1108
  • Bartlett, Beatrice. "Books of Revelations: The Importance of the Manchu Language Archival Record Books for Research on Ch'ing History,"  Late Imperial China  6, 2 (December 1985): 25-34.
  • Clarke, Michael. "The Problematic Progress of 'Integration' in the Chinese State's Approach to Xinjiang, 1759 - 2005."  Asian Ethnicity  Oct2007 Vol. 8 Issue 3: 261-289.
  • Crossley, Pamela K.  A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
  • Crossley, Pamela.  Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
  • ---,  A Transluscent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
  • ---, & Evelyn Rawski. "A Profile of the Manchu Language in Ch'ing History,"  HJAS  53, 1 (1993): 63-102.
  • Elliott, Mark C. "The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Vol. 59 No. 3 (Aug., 2000): 603-646.
  • Elliot, Mark C.  The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
  • Enatsu,Yoshiki.  Banner Legacy: The Rise of the Fengtian Local Elite at the End of the Qing . Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004.
  • Farquar, David M. "Emperor as Bodhisattva in the Governance of the Ch'ing Empire."  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies  38(1):5-34, 1978.
  • Fletcher, Joseph. "Manchu Sources," pp. 141-46 in Donald Leslie, C. Mackerras, & Wang Gungwu eds.  Essays on the Sources for Chinese History . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973..
  • F?ret, Philippe.  Mapping Chengde: The Qing Imperial Landscape Enterprise . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000.
  • Li Hsueh-chih. "Manchu Sources in Taiwan,"  CSWT  1:5 (1967): 2-6.
  • Giersch, C. Pat. "'A Motley Throng:' Social Change on Southwest China's Early Modern Frontier, 1700-1880."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Vol. 60 No. 1 (Feb., 2001): 67-94.
  • Gillette, Maris. "Violence, the State, and a Chinese Muslim Ritual Remembrance."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Volume 67 Issue 03 August 2008: 1011-1037.
  • Hostetler, Laura.  Qing Colonial Enterprise, Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China . Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.
  • Ivanov, Andrey V. "Conflicting Loyalties: Fugitives and 'Traitors' in the Russo-Manchurian Frontier, 1651-1689."  Journal of Early Modern History  Volume 13 Number 5 2009: 333-358.
  • Jaschok, Maria and Shi, Jingjun.  The History of Women's Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own . Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000.
  • Lin, Hsiao-ting. "The Tributary System in China's Historical Imagination: China and Hunza, ca. 1760每1960."  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society  Volume 19 Issue 04 October 2009: 489-507.
  • Miles, Steven B. "Imperial Discourse, Regional Elite, and Local Landscape on the South China Frontier, 1577-1722."  Journal of Early Modern History  Volume 12 Number 2 2008: 99-136.
  • Millward, James A.  Beyond the Pass : Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 . Hardcover - 450 pages. Stanford University Press, 1998; ISBN: 0804729336.
  • Millward, James A.  Eurasian Crossroads, A History of Xinjiang . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
  • Murata, Sachiko.  Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yi's "Great Learning of the Pure and Real" and Liu Chih's "Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm" . Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000.
  • Newby, Laura J.  The Empire and the Khanate: a Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand c. 1760 - 1860 . Leiden: Brill, 2005.
  • Nobuo, Kanda. "The Present State of Preservation of Manchu Literature,"  Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 26 (1968): 63-95.
  • Oyunbilig, Borjigidai.  Zur ?berlieferungsgeschichte des Berichts 邦ber den pers?nlichen Feldzug des Kangxi Kaisers gegen Galdan (1696-1697) . Tunguso- Sibirica 6. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999.
  • Pang, Tatiana A. and Stary, Giovanni.  New Light on Manchu Historiography and Literature: The Discovery of Three Documents in Old Manchu Script . Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998.
  • Perdue, Peter C. "Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective: Frontier Administration in Eighteenth-Century China."  Journal of Early Modern History  Volume 5 Number 4 2001: 282-304.
  • Rawski, Evelyn.  The Last Emperors: A Social History of the Qing Imperial Institution . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.
  • Rhoads, Edward.  Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928 . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
  • Seuberliche, Wolfgang (Walravens, Hartmut ed.).  Zur Verwaltungsgeschichte der Mandschurei (1644-1930)  [On the administrative history of Manchuria (1644-19301)]. Asien- und Afrika-Studien der Humboldt- Universitit zu Berlin, vol. 7. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001.
  • Shan, Patrick, Fuliang. "Ethnicity, Nationalism and Race Relations: The Chinese Treatment of the Solon Tribes in Heilongjiang Frontier Society, 1900 每 1931."  Asian Ethnicity  Jun2006 Vol. 7 Issue 2: 183-193.
  • Shan, Patrick Fuliang. "What Was the 'Sphere of Influence?' A Study of Chinese Resistance to the Russian Empire in North Manchuria, 1900-1917."  The Chinese Historical Review  Volume 13 Number 2 Spring 2006: 271-291.
  • Shih, Chuan-Kang. "Genesis of Marriage among the Moso and Empire-Building in Late Imperial China."  The Journal of Asian Studies  Vol. 60 No. 2 (May, 2001): 381-412.
  • Stolberg, Eva-Maria. "Interracial Outposts in Siberia: Nerchinsk, Kiakhta, and the Russo-Chinese Trade in the Seventeenth/Eighteenth Centuries."  Journal of Early Modern History  Volume 4 Numbers 3-4 2000: 322-336.
  • Wilson, Andrew R.  Ambition and Identity: Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila, 1880 每 1916 . Honolulu: University of Hawai*i Press, 2004.
  • Zhang, Shiming. "A Historical and Jurisprudential Analysis of Suzerain-Vassal State Relationships in the Qing Dynasty."  Frontiers of History in China  volume 1 number 1 January 2006: 124-57.
  • Catalogs exist for Manchu materials in the Library of Congress, Peking National Library, National Museum, Toyo Bunko.
  • Grand Council archives at the National Palace Museum have a lot of Manchu documents; Published:  Lao Man wen yuan dang  老 滿 文 原 檔 (Annals for reigns of Nurhaci & Abahai)
  • Chen, Hsi-Yuan. "The Making of the Official Qing History and the Crisis of Traditional Chinese Historiography."  Historiography East and West  Volume 2, Number 2, 2004: 173-204.
  • Chen, Qitai and Guo, Chengkang. "The Compilation of the Qingshi (Qing History) and Stylistic Innovation in Historiography." Chinese Studies in History  Winter 2009/2010 Vol. 43 Issue 2: 33-54.
  • Dai, Yi. "The Origin of the Qingshi (Qing History) and Its Initial Planning."  Chinese Studies in History  Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter 2009/2010: 6-14,
  • Demieville, Paul. "Chang Hsueh-ch'eng and His Historiography," pp. 167-185 in Beasley, W.G., & E.G. Pulleyblank.  Historians of China and Japan . London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
  • Ding, Yizhuang. "Reflections on the 'New Qing History' School in the United States."  Chinese Studies in History  Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter2009/2010: 92-96.
  • Feng, Erkang. "Studies of Qing History."  Chinese Studies in History Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter2009/2010: 20-32,
  • Hummel, Arthur, ed.  Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period . Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943.
  • Ho Yu-shen. "(Ch'ing) Historians and their Major Works," pp. 121-44 in his  Elements of Chinese Historiography . Holleywood: W.M. Hawley, 1955. (Taipei reprint).
  • Liu, Xuezhao. "My Opinion on the Use of Style in Compiling the  Qingshi  (Qing History)."  Chinese Studies in History  Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter2009/2010: 55-72.
  • Naquin, Susan. "The Forbidden City Goes Abroad: Qing History and the Foreign Exhibitions of the Palace Museum, 1974-2004." T'oung Pao  Vol. 90 Fasc. 4/5 (2004): 341-397.
  • Naito Torajiro.  Shina shigaku shi  支 那 史 學 史 (History of Chinese Historiography), (Tokyo 1949).
  • Struve, Lynn. "Uses of History in Traditional Chinese Society: The Southern Ming in Ch'ing Historiography," PhD dissertation, 1974. Michigan.
  • ---.  The Southern Ming 1644-1662 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
  • ---, ed. and trans.  Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
  • Wang, Q. Edward. " Qingshi  (Qing History): Why a New Dynastic History?"  Chinese Studies in History  Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter 2009/2010: 3-5.
  • Yan, Jun. "The Compilation of the Qingshi and the Tradition of Chinese Historiography."  Chinese Studies in History  Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter2009/2010: 85-91.
  • Provincial and district level archives: Read Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, pp. 156-58.
  • China: Many of the compendia published since 1949 have used local materials, particularly those edited by provincial or district level historical associations. See Feuerwerker & Cheng, passim, for this.
  • Guangdong province: 19th century. By chance preserved in London. See David Pong.  A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at the Public Record Office of London . Harvard, 1975.
  • Other communications between the Chinese in Canton and the British have also been preserved in London. Read Dilip K. Basu, "Ch'ing Documents Abroad: From the Public Record Office in London,"  Ch'ing-shi wen-t'i  2:8 (1972) 3-30. Also: Chang Hsin-pao and Eric Grinstead, "Chinese Documents of the British Embassy in Peking, 1793-1911,"  JAS  22 (1963) 354-56.
  • Jiangsu: Wu Hsu archives. Letters and documents from Wu while he served as taotai in Jiangsu in the 1850s-60s. Some of these have been published. See F&C, pp. 83-84 for a description.
  • Hong Kong: New Territories. Formerly part of Hsin-an district, since 1898 part of Hong Kong. Good materials from 1899-1905 on land surveys and settlement of titles. (Not, strictly speaking, Chinese language archives.) See James Hayes, "Rural Society and Economy in Late Ch'ing: A Case Study of the New Territories of Hong Kong (Kwangtung)" CSWT 3:5 (1976) 33-71. Note also: A Catalog of Kwangtung Land Records in the Taiwan Branch of the National Central Library . Taipei, 1975.
  • Taiwan: Tamsui-Hsinchu Archives. Legal materials, 19th century. See Wang Shih-ch'ing & William Speidel, "An Introduction to Resources for the Study of Taiwan History,"  Ch'ing-shi wen-t'i  3:6 (1976) p. 100. See also David Buxbaum, "Some Aspects of Civil Procedure and Practice at the Trial Level in Tamsui and Hsinchu from 1789-1896,"  JAS  30 (1971) 255-79. The materials have been microfilmed and are widely available.
  • Taiwan: archives of the Governor Liu Ming-ch'uan, 1876-1895
  • Originals are in the Taiwan Provincial Museum. Two versions have been published. See Wang and Speidel article, p. 101.
  • Russia: For Chinese language materials (seemingly central government, Kuang-hsu reign) in the Institute of Oriental Studies, see HJAS 1:2 (1936) 264, for a summary of an article (in Russian) on the non-Buddhist part of the Chinese manuscripts in this institute. Documents mentioned include: "autobiographical notes" written by Kuo Sung-t'ao and reports by other governors.
  • Xujiahui cang shu lou Ming Qing Tian zhu jiao wen xian  徐 家 匯 藏 書 樓 明 清 天 主 教 文 獻 (Archives of Catholicism in Ming-Qing China from the Hsu-chia-hui [in Shanghai] Repository of Books), compiled and edited by Nicolas Standaert, Ad Dudink, Yi-long Huang, Pingyi Chu. Taipei: Fu-ren University Divinity School, 1996.
  • Local level materials appear to be part of the Tsung-li Yamen archives on missionaries and Christians, now being published in Taiwan.
  • Zhou, Ailian and Hu, Zhongliang. "The Project of Organizing the Qing Archives."  Chinese Studies in History  Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter2009/2010: 73-84.

Gazetteers also exist for Sung, Yuan, Ming and Republican periods. See Chin En-hui and Hu Shu-chao, eds., Zhongguo di fang zhi zong mu ti yao   中 國 地 方 志 綜 目 提 要 (General digest of Chinese gazetteers). 3 vols (Taipei: Han-mei t'u-shu yu-hsien kung-ssu, 1996), which lists 8577 gazetteers geographically, with information on authorship, dating and contents.

  • Introduction to Irick catalog of gazetter reprints.
  • Leslie, Donald. "Local Gazetteers, " pp. 71-74 in Donald Leslie, C. Mackerras, & Wang Gungwu eds.  Essays on the Sources for Chinese History . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.
  • Nathan, Andrew J.  Modern China, 1840-1972: An Introduction to Sources and Research Aids , Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1973, pp. 61-62.
  • Pritchard, Earl H. "Traditional Chinese Historiography and Local Histories," pp. 202-216 in H.V. White, ed.  The Uses of History: Essays in Intellectual and Social History . Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 114-119.
  • Will, Pierre-Etienne.  Chinese Local Gazetteers: An Historical and Practical Introduction . Number 3 of Notes de Recherche du Centre Chine. Paris: EHESS, 1992. This can be ordered through: Centre Chine, 54 Bd. Raspail, 75006 Paris, FRANCE. Large portions of this were copied by Harriet T. Zurndorfer in her  China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China Past and Present . Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.

Other good works:

  • Chang Kuo-kan.  Zhongguo gu fang zhi kao  中 國 古 方 志 考 Shanghai, 1962. See Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 116.
  • Demieville, Paul. "Chang Hsueh-ch'eng and His Historiography," pp. 167-85 in Beasley, W.G. & E.G. Pulleyblank,  Historians of China and Japan . London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
  • Dow, Francis D. M.  A Study of Chiangsu and Chechiang Gazetteers of the Ming . Canberra: Australian National University. Department of Far Eastern History, 1969.
  • Myers, R.H. "The Usefulness of Local Gazetteers for the Study of Modern Chinese Economic History: Szechwan during the Ch'ing and Republican Periods,"  Ch'ing-hua hsueh-pao  6: (1967): 72-102.
  • Nivison, David S.  The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-ch'eng (1738-1801) . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966, pp. 213-244.

To locate gazetteers:

  • Chu Shih-chia,  Zhongguo de fang zhi zong lu zeng ding  中 國 地 方 志 綜 錄 增 訂. Revised and enlarged version of his 1935 work, Shanghai 1958; reprinted, Taipei, Tokyo.
  • Ming dynasty: Wolfgang Franke,  An Introduction to the Sources of Ming History  Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968, pp. 242-309. Lists all extant Ming gazetteeers.
  • Sung-Yuan:  Song Yuan di fang zhi san shi qi zhong  宋 元 地 方 志 三 十 七 種. Taipei: Kuo-t'ai wen-hua shi-yeh yu-hsien-kung-ssu, 1980.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, p. 117; Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 53; Feuerwerker, Albert, & S. Cheng.  Chinese Communist Studies of Modern Chinese History . Harvard East Asian Monograph. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961, p. 240.
  • Reprint projects are now in progress in Taiwan & China. See catalogs.
  • Taiwan:  Taiwan gong cang fang zhi lian he mu lu  臺 灣 公 藏 方 志 聯 合 目 錄, 1960. Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 55.
  • Japan:  Chugoku chihoshi sogo mokuroku  中 國 地 方 志 總 合 目 錄. (Union catalog of Chinese local gazetteers in 14 major libraries and institutes in Japan). 1969. Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 55; Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide . Cambridge: East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, 1973, p. 118.
  • Europe: Yves Hervouet,  Catalog des monographies locales chinoises dans les biblioteques d'Europe . Paris: Mouton, 1957.
  • Guo li Beiping tu shu guan fang zhi mu lu  國 立 北 平 圖 書 館 方 志 目 錄. Peking 1933-36, 4 vols. Reprinted HK, 1968. Peking National Library. Teng, Ssu-yu, & Knight Biggerstaff.  An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works . Third Edition. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 54.
  • Guo li gu gong bo wu yuan pu tong jiu ji mu lu  國 立 故 宮 博 物 院 普 通 舊 籍 目 錄. Taipei, 1970, pp. 70-185 lists gazetteers in Palace Museum collection.
  • Tsiang, Amy Ching-fen, & Hong Cheng, compilers.  A Catalog of Post-1949 Chinese Local Histories at UCLA  . L.A.: East Asian Library, UCLA, 1997.
  • Catalogs exist for the Libray of Congress (Chu Shih-chia ed.), the University of Washington (Joseph Low ed.), and the University of Chicago. Princeton University has an unpublished catalog of gazetteers -- check with the Chinese bibliographer.
  • Other library catalogs are listed in Donald Leslie.  Catalog of Chinese Local Gazetteers . Canberra: Department of Far Eastern History. Research School of Pacific Studies. Australia National University, 1967. See Nathan, Andrew.  Modern China 1840-1972: An Introduction to Sources and Research Aids . Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1973, p. 62.
  • Bartlett, Beatrice S. "Imperial Notations on Ch'ing Official Documents in the Ch'ien-lung and Chia-ch'ing Reigns." Two parts.  National Palace Museum Bulletin  7:2 & 7:3 (1972).
  • ---.  Monarchs & Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. See pp. 103-19 for Bartlett's discussion of the development of the court letter and its drafting system, which supersedes earlier research.
  • ---. "The Secret Memorials of the Yung-cheng Period: Archival and Published Versions."  National Palace Museum Bulletin  9:4 (1974).
  • ---. "Ch'ing Documents in the National Palace Museum Archives. Document Registers: The  Sui-shou teng-chi ."  National Palace Museum Bulletin  10:4 (1975): 1-17. On the Document Registers:  Sui shou deng ji  隨 手 登 記.
  • pp. 82-84 on imperial injunctions
  • pp. 94-103 on published edicts
  • pp. 103-105 on published memorials
  • Kuhn, Philip A., & John K. Fairbank with the assistance of Beatrice Bartlett & Chiang Yung-chen. Introduction to Ch'ing Documents . Cambridge: The Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1993.
  • Lo Hui-min. "Some Notes on Archives on Modern China," pp. 203-20 in Donald Leslie, C. Mackerras, & Wang Gungwu eds.  Essays on the Sources for Chinese History . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.
  • Naquin, Susan. "True Confessions: Criminal Interrogations as Sources for Ch'ing History."  National Palace Museum Bulletin  11:1 (1976).
  • Wilkinson, Endymion.  The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 142-45, 150-56.

In order to use archival material in published or unpublished form, it is necessary to understand the system that produced these documents. The basic ingredients of this system are:  edicts  (by the emperor) &  memorials  (from officials).

The most important change in this system occurred between 1700 and 1750 when the Grand Council [ Jun ji chu 軍 機 處] replaced the Grand Secretariat as the highest decision making body below the emperor, and when secret memorials to the emperor gradually reduced further the role of the Grand Secretariat. Grand Secretariat materials in Taiwan are housed at Academia Sinica. Many have been cataloged, some are published, and available to scholars. Grand Council materials in Taiwan are at the National Palace Museum. They are being cataloged, published, and are open to foreign scholars. The Palace Museum in Taiwan has recently expanded its archive building for Qing documents, and the Ming-Qing Archives at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, founded by Chang Wejen, has issued many important collections. For the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, collection, see:

  • Grand Secretariat Archives (Neige daku) This link opens in a new window

A great deal of central government records survive in China. There is a Ming-Qing Archives Office at the western part [Xi hua men 西 華 門] of the National Palace Museum in Peking, and articles have appeared based on Grand Council type documents. For introduction to the materials there and elsewhere, see:

  • Qin Guojing 秦 國 經 ,  Zhonghua Ming Qing zhen dang zhi nan  中 華 明 清 珍 檔 指 南 (Guide to Chinese Ming-Qing precious archives), Beijing: Jen-min chu ban she, 1994. This guide was reprinted in May 1996. This works is an excellent survey of Ming-Qing archives both in and outside China and includes a valuable introduction to the holdings, internal organization, and usefulness of these archives.
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The History of Chinese Literature

The History of Chinese Literature

Writing in China dates back to the hieroglyphs that were used in the Shang Dynasty of 1700 – 1050 BC. Chinese literature is a vast subject that spans thousands of years. One of the interesting things about Chinese literature is that much of the serious literature was composed using a formal written language that is called Classical Chinese .

The best literature of the Yuan Dynasty era and the four novels that are considered the greatest classics are important exceptions.

However, even during the Qing Dynasty of two hundred years ago, most writers composed in a literary stream that extended back about 2,400 years. They studied very ancient writings in more or less the original written language. This large breadth of time with so many writers living in the various eras and countries makes Chinese literature complex.

Chinese literary works include fiction , philosophical and religious works, poetry, and scientific writings . The dynastic eras frame the history of Chinese literature and are examined one by one.

The grammar of the written Classical Language is different than the spoken languages of the past two thousand years.

This written language was used by people of many different ethnic groups and countries during the Zhou, Qin and Han eras spanning 1050 BC to 220 AD. After the Han Dynasty, the written language evolved as the spoken languages changed, but most writers still based their compositions on Classical Chinese.

However, this written language wasn't the vernacular language even two thousand years ago. The empires and groups of kingdoms of all these eras were composed of people speaking many different native languages . If Europe had a literary history like China's, it would be as if most European writers until the 20th century always tried to write in ancient Classical Greek that became a dead language more than two millennia ago.

Shang Dynasty (about 1700-1050 BC) — Development of Chinese Writing

The first dynasty for which there is historical record and archaeological evidence is the Shang Dynasty. It was a small empire in northern central China. No documents from that country survive, but there are archaeological finds of hieroglyphic writing on bronze wares and oracle bones. The hieroglyphic writing system later evolved into ideographic and partly-phonetic Chinese characters.

Zhou Dynasty (1045-255 BC) — Basic Philosophical and Religious Literature

The Zhou Dynasty was contemporaneous with the Shang Dynasty, and then they conquered the Shang Dynasty. Their dynasty lasted for about 800 years, but for most of the time, their original territory was broken up into dozens of competing kingdoms, and these finally coalesced into several big and warring kingdoms by the end of the Zhou era.

The great literary works of philosophy and religion that became the basis for Chinese religious and social belief stem from what is called the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476) and the Warring States Period (475-221). Taoism, Confucian literature , and other prominent religious and philosophical schools all emerged during these two periods.

The Chinese call this simultaneous emergence of religions and philosophies the "One Hundred Schools of Thought." Perhaps so many philosophers could write simultaneously because they lived in small kingdoms that supported them.

In Chinese history, the dominant rulers generally squelch or discourage philosophical expression that contradict their own, so when there were several small powers, different schools of thought could survive in the land at the same time.

The major literary achievements of the Confucian Classics, early Taoist writings, and other important prose works originated in the late Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period of the Zhou Dynasty era. These literary works deeply shaped Chinese philosophy and religion .

Confucius is said to have edited a history of the Spring and Autumn Period called the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋) that shapes Chinese thinking about its history.

There were hundreds of philosophers and writers who wrote conflicting documents, and there was discussion and communication. What we know of the literature of this period was mainly preserved after the Qin Dynasty's book burning and from a few recent archeological finds of records.

Probably most of the philosophical and religious works of that time were destroyed. If there were great fictional books created, they have been lost. So the main contributions of this period to Chinese literature were the prose works of the Confucian Classics and the Taoist writings, and preserved poems and songs.

Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) — Literary Disaster and Legalism

At the end of the Zhou Dynasty era that is called the Warring States Period, of the surviving few big states in the land, the Qin Dynasty became the most powerful.

The Qin Dynasty had big armies and conquered the others. Once the Qin emperor had control, he wanted to keep it, and they squelched any opposition to his authority. In the conquered territories, there were teachers of many different doctrines and religions . A big philosophical and religious school then was called Mohism. They were particularly attacked by the Qin Dynasty, and little is known about it.

An early form of Buddhism was also established in China at that time, but their temples and literature were destroyed and even less is known about them. The emperor wanted to reduce the One Hundred Schools of Thought to one that he approved. He ordered the destruction of most books all over the empire . He even killed many Confucian philosophers and teachers . He allowed books on scientific subjects like medicine or agriculture to survive. So the "Book Burning and Burial of Scholars" was a literary disaster.

On the other hand, the Qin Dynasty standardized the written Classical Language . It is said that a minister of the Qin emperor named Li Si introduced a writing system that later developed into modern Chinese writing. Standardization was meant to help control the society. The standardized writing system also helped people all over the country to communicate more clearly.

The Qin Emperor favored a philosophical school that was called Legalism (法家). This philosophy of course justified the strong control of the emperor and maintained that everyone should obey him. It is thought that Li Si taught that human nature was naturally selfish and that a strong emperor government with strict laws was needed for social order .

Li Si's writings on politics and law and his propagation of this school much influenced the political thinking in the Han Dynasty and later eras. Legalism texts and the standardization of writing were the Qin Dynasty era's literary contributions.

Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) — Scientific and Historical Texts

A former peasant leader overthrew the Qin Empire. The Han Dynasty era lasted for 400 years. At the beginning of the era, Confucianism was revived . Confucian texts were rewritten and republished. Confucianism was mixed with the Legalism philosophy of Li Si. The resulting ideology was the official ideology of the Han Dynasty and influenced political thinking afterwards. The era's major contributions were historical texts and scientific works.

Sima Qian wrote Historical Records that is a major history concerning the overall history of China from before the Shang Dynasty until the Han Dynasty. The book's prose was considered a model for writers in succeeding dynastic eras. Another important historical text concerned the Han Dynasty itself.

Some scientific texts were also thought to be important for their times, thought it doesn't seem that the information was widely known or well known afterwards.

The Han Dynasty era was one of the two main hotspot eras for scientific and technical advance. But printing wasn't available for wide publication of the information . During the Eastern Han Dynasty towards the end of the Han era, the influence of the philosophy of the Confucian Classics that hindered scientific progress was waning. So people were more free to pursue invention.

Cai Lun (50–121) of the imperial court is said to be the first person in the world to create writing paper , and this was important for written communication at the end of the empire. Finery forges were used in steel making. Two or three mathematical texts showing advanced mathematics for the times were written.

The Han Empire disintegrated into warring kingdoms similar to what happened during the Warring States Period before the Qin Dynasty. For several hundred years, dynasties and kingdoms rose and fell in various places, and the next big and long-lasting dynastic empire is called the Tang Dynasty.

Tang Dynasty (618-907) — Early Woodblock Printing and Poetry

The Tang Dynasty had a big empire that benefited from trade with the west along the Silk Road , battled with the Tibetan Empire, and experienced the growing influence of organized Buddhist religions. This era's main contribution to Chinese literature was in the poetry of Dufu, Li Bai and many other poets. Dufu and Li Bai are often thought of as China's greatest poets.

Li Bai (701–762) was one of the greatest romantic poets of ancient China. He wrote at least a thousand poems on a variety of subjects from political matters to natural scenery.

Du Fu (712-770 AD) also wrote more than a thousand poems. He is thought of as one of the greatest realist poets of China. His poems reflect the hard realities of war, dying people living next to rich rulers, and primitive rural life. He was an official in the Tang capital of Chang An, and he was captured when the capital was attacked. He took refuge in Chengdu that is a city in Sichuan Province. It is thought that he lived in a simple hut where he wrote many of his best realist poems. Perhaps more than 1,400 of his poems survive, and his poetry is still read and appreciated by modern Chinese people.

Song Dynasty (960-1279) — Early Woodblock Printing, Travel Literature, Poetry, Scientific Texts and the Neo-Confucian Classics

The next dynasty is called the Song Dynasty. It was weaker than the Tang Dynasty, but the imperial government officials made remarkable scientific and technical advances .

Military technology greatly advanced. They traded little with the west due to the presence of warring Muslim states on the old trade routes. There wasn't territorial expansion, but the empire was continuously attacked by nomadic tribes and countries around them. Their northern territory was invaded, and they were forced to move their capital to southern China.

So the era is divided into two eras called the Northern Song (960-1127) and Southern Song (1127-1279) eras.

One of the era's technological accomplishments was the invention of movable type about the turn of 2nd millennia during the Northern Song period. This helped to spread knowledge since printed material could be published more quickly and cheaply .

Travel literature in which authors wrote about their trips and about various destinations became popular perhaps because the texts could be cheaply bought. The Confucian Classics were codified and used as test material for the entrance examination into the elite bureaucracy, advanced scientific texts and atlases were published, and important poems were written.

The Confucian Classics were important in China's history because from the Song Dynasty onwards, they were the texts people needed to know in order to pass an examination for the bureaucracy of China.

These Confucian Classics were the Five Classics that were thought to have been penned by Confucius and the Four Books that were thought to contain Confucius-related material but were compiled during the Southern Song era. The Four Books and Five Classics (四書五經) were basically memorized by those who did the best on the exams.

In this way, Confucianism, as codified during the Song era, became the dominant political philosophy of the several empires until modern times .

Since the bureaucrats all studied the same works on social behavior and philosophy, this promoted unity and the normalization of behavior throughout each empire and during dynastic changes. The scholar-bureaucrats had a common base of understanding, and they passed on these ideas to the people under them. Those who passed the difficult exams were highly respected even if they didn't receive a ruling post. High education in this system was thought to produce nobility .

The Five Classics and Four Books were written in the written Classical Language.

The Five Classics include : The Book of Changes , The Classic of Poetry , The Record of Rites that was a recreation of the original Classic of Rites of Confucius that was lost in the Qin book purge, The Classic of History , and The Spring and Autumn Annals that was mainly a historical record of Confucius' native state of Lu.

The Four Books include : The Analects of Confucius that is a book of pithy sayings attributed to Confucius and recorded by his disciples; Mencius that is a collection of political dialogues attributed to Mencius; The Doctrine of the Mean ; and The Great Learning that is a book about education, self-cultivation and the Dao. For foreigners who want a taste of this Confucian philosophy, reading the Analects of Confucius is a good introduction since the statements are usually simple and like common sense.

Another period of scientific progress and technical invention was the Song era . Song technicians seemed to have made a lot of advancements in mechanical engineering. They made advanced contraptions out of gears, pulleys and wheels. These were used to make big clocks, a mechanical odometer on animal drawn carts that marked land distance by making noise after traveling a certain distance, and other advanced instruments. The Song technicians also invented many uses gunpowder including rockets, explosives and big guns.

The imperial court officials did remarkable scientific research in many areas of mechanics and science. Shen Kuo (1031–1095) and Su Song (1020–1101) both wrote scientific treatises about their research and about different fields.

Shen is said to have discovered the concepts of true north and magnetic declination towards the North Pole. He also described the magnetic needle compass . If Chinese sailors knew about this work, they could have sailed long distances more accurately. This knowledge would predate European discovery. He did advanced astronomical research for his time.

Su Song wrote a treatise called the Bencao Tujing with information on medicine, botany and zoology. He also was the author of a large celestial atlas of five different star maps, and he also made land atlases. Su Song was famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock tower. Su's clock tower is said to have had an endless power-transmitting chain drive that he described in a text on clock design and astronomy that was published in 1092. If this is so, it may be the first time such a device was used in the world. When the Southern Song Empire was conquered by the Mongols, these inventions and the astronomical knowledge may have been forgotten.

Another contribution to the literature of China was the poetry of the Song era. A Southern Song poet named Lu is thought to have written almost 10,000 poems. Su Tungpo is regarded as a great poet of the Northern Song era. Here is a stanza he wrote:

The moon rounds the red mansion Stoops to silk-pad doors Shines upon the sleepless Bearing no grudge Why does the moon tend to be full when people are apart?

Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) — Drama and Great Fictional Novels

The Mongols were nomadic people who herded cattle north of the Tang Empire and wandered over a large area fighting on horseback. They believed that they might be able to conquer the world. They easily conquered Persia far to the west.

It was a big empire with high technology , a big population and a big army . Then they decided to try to conquer all the countries around them.

They attacked the Tang Dynasty, the Dali Kingdom in Yunnan, and much of Asia, and they formed the biggest empire in the history of the earth until then. They conquered Russia, a part of eastern Europe and a part of the Middle East.

In China, the Mongols established the very rich Yuan Dynasty. In their camps, the Mongols were entertained by shadow puppet plays in which a lamp cast the shadows of little figurines and puppets on a screen or sheet. In the Yuan Dynasty, puppet drama continued to entertain the rich dynastic courts in vernacular language.

Dramatic operatic theaters with human actors speaking in vernacular language was a favorite form of entertainment as well, and some of China's best dramatic scripts were written then. Also two of the four novels that are generally considered China's best literary classics were written in vernacular language then.

So though the Yuan Empire wasn't ruled by Chinese, it was an era of some historically renowned dramatic playwrights and novelists who wrote in vernacular language.

It is thought that the operatic style of the shadow puppet dramas that entertained the courts influenced the development of the operatic theater style of the Yuan Dynasty.

The Yuan rulers were fabulously wealthy according to historical accounts. They had a vast empire and control of trade in Eurasia. For the royal courts or the rich people, refined music, sound effects and talented singers were employed for shadow plays.

The Yuan "Zaju" style of opera was similar to their shadow plays. Perhaps the playwrights adopted the plots and the features. There were exciting plots, elaborate costumes, refined music and singing, action, and dance that the Mongols enjoyed. The music of the Zaju operas was called Yuan Qu (元曲 Yuan Music). The language used wasn't the Classical Language but the vernacular language , so that the theater might be enjoyed by everyone. After the Yuan Dynasty, the operatic style developed into the Painted Faces style of Chinese opera that was popular until modern times.

Guan Hanqing is regarded as one of the best playwrights of the times. He wrote Midsummer Snow that was one of the most popular drama pieces. It is a tragedy about an unjustly accused woman who received justice after her death.

The Romance of the Western Chamber was written by Wang Shifu. It is considered one of the best romantic dramas ever written in China.

Novels were another outstanding achievement of the Yuan era. The novelists influenced the future development of the genre. Two novels are still widely read now and are generally considered two of the four greatest novels in Chinese literature. These are Water Margin and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms .

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms was written in vernacular language by Luo Guan Zhong. It is historical fiction about the end of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms Period. The Three Kingdoms Period was between the Han and Tang eras. Special emphasis is laid on the two famous historical rulers Liu Bei and Cao Cao who were antagonists. It is a long novel with 800,000 words.

Water Margin is about the lives and ideals of a group of characters who fought against the corrupt Northern Song Dynasty that the Mongols conquered. It is said it was written in vernacular language by Shi Nai An, but scholars debate about the authorship. Many scholars think that the first 70 chapters were written by Shi Nai An and that the last 30 chapters were written by Luo Guan Zhong who was also the author of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms .

Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) — Novels

The Chinese rebelled against the Mongols, and the Ming Dynasty era began about 1368. The Mongols and the Ming government still sometimes fought. Because of this and the presence of Muslim countries in between, trade with the west was reduced to the pre-Yuan level.

The Ming initially were interested in exploration, and Muslims whose ancestors arrived during the Yuan Dynasty and who were familiar with seagoing trade were employed to make long voyages to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and perhaps Africa. Then they became isolationist.

It is interesting that a book that is one of the four great classics called Journey to the West about a monk going to India was written during this time of isolation. Maybe the thought of travel to the lands in the west was appealing then. Novels were the era's main contribution.

The Journey to the West is based on the historical journey of a Buddhist to India during the Tang era to learn Buddhist teachings and bring back scriptures and information. In 1629, Xuanzang (602 - 664) left Chang'an in 629 and arrived back in Chang'an in 646. Mythical tales about this journey including the character of an intelligent monkey began to be circulated long before the book was written. The author drew on known tales.

Journey to the West is thought to have been published anonymously by Wu Cheng'en in the 16th century though scholars have doubt about the authorship. The trend in that era was for people to write in Classical Chinese and imitate the literature of the Tang Dynasty and Han Dynasty.

However, this book was written in the vernacular . Perhaps because there was a lack of accurate geographical knowledge available to the author, much of the geographical landscape of the story is inaccurate. However, the "Flaming Mountains" that are near Turpan in Xinjiang are mentioned. Perhaps the author meant to poke fun at Chinese religion because a monkey is said to have defeated a whole army led by Taoist gods, and only the Buddha's intervention stopped the monkey.

The book describes India as a land of gross sin and immorality, and the monk was commissioned by Buddha to help India. The characters in the book are well known to Chinese children , and they often appear in martial arts movies and cartoons.

Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) — Novels and Pre-modern Literature

The Manchus invaded the Ming Empire from the north and established the last dynasty called the Qing Dynasty. The Manchus were not Chinese, but they retained the Neo-Confucian governing system of the Song and Ming eras.

The Qing Dynasty came under increasing attack from both internal rebellions and foreign countries. In the 19th century, foreign literature and the West became better known. In the middle of this era, the last of China's four great classic novels was written called Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦); and near the end of the era, modernistic literature developed.

The Dream of the Red Chamber also has an uncertain authorship. Like the other three great classic novels, it was written in a vernacular language – the Mandarin language that was the language of the Qing capital. It is probably mostly composed by Cao Xueqin (about 1715-1763) in the middle 1700s, and the first printing of the book was in the late 1700s.

It is thought that Cao did not live to see the first printing. It is thought that another person or other people contributed the ending of the story since the original ending of the story was lost. The book has a lot of textual problems, and there are different versions. In a preface to a printed version in 1792, two editors claimed to have put together an ending based on the author's working manuscripts that they had bought from a street vendor.

At the end of the Qing Dynasty era, the dynastic rulers came under increasing pressure both from foreign attacks and internal rebellions. Educated Chinese had easier access to foreign literature , and they were more influenced by Western culture. Students started to travel abroad to study , and schools built by missionaries educated tens of thousands of students. There was a general sense of crisis, and intellectuals started translating foreign works on science, politics, and literature. These were popular, and the culture started to change. Some writers produced fiction more like Western fiction .

Modern Era (1912-present) — Westernized Literature

Sun Yat-sen led a revolution that marked the end of Chinese dynasties in which a clan rules an empire. Of course, the big change of Chinese society that happened with the change of government led to a change in literature.

It became westernized, and the Classical Language wasn't used. The national government wanted women to have more of an equal status in society, and women writers and scholars were taken more seriously. There was a lot of politically oriented literature printed . Scholars had access to foreign literature, and many students studied abroad.

Until about 1923, there was a New Culture Movement. Writers generally wanted to lead the way in transforming China into a modern industrialized country and replacing Confucian life-style with a westernized one.

Under the national government, there was some freedom of expression, and lots of views and styles of literature were popular. China came under attack from Japan. After the Communist victory, only literature approved by the government was allowed.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The qing dynasty (1644–1911): the traditionalists.

Landscape in the style of Huang Gongwang

Landscape in the style of Huang Gongwang

  • Wang Shimin

Landscapes after old masters

Landscapes after old masters

Whiling Away the Summer at the Ink-Well Thatched Hut

Whiling Away the Summer at the Ink-Well Thatched Hut

The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three: Ji'nan to Mount Tai

The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three: Ji'nan to Mount Tai

Wang Hui and assistants

Guan Yu

Unidentified artist , ca. 1700

Wangchuan Villa

Wangchuan Villa

  • Wang Yuanqi

Maxwell K. Hearn Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2003

Defining a New Orthodoxy While the early Manchu court favored a colorful figurative style, exemplified by the imposing image of Emperor Guan, a Chinese god whose martial prowess became a symbol of Manchu power, China’s scholarly elite was deeply influenced by the theories and art of the late Ming artist, collector, and theorist Dong Qichang (1555–1636). Dong and his circle developed a revolutionary theory of literati painting based on a study of the old masters that became the foundation of a systematic stylistic reconstruction of landscape painting. Emphasizing the distinction between art and nature, Dong maintained: “If one considers the wonders of nature, then painting cannot rival landscape. But if one considers the wonders of brushwork, then landscape cannot equal painting.”

During the early Qing period, this traditionalist theory became the foundation of a new orthodox style under the leadership of Dong’s disciple, Wang Shimin (1592–1680). Wang was an accomplished amateur painter who built an important collection of old masters based on Dong’s advice. It was this corpus of prime models that helped to define the orthodox lineage of scholar painting for Wang and his followers—later known collectively as the Orthodox School.

Wang Shimin and his friend Wang Jian (1598–1677 or 1688) were the senior members of this school, but they were outshown by their brilliant pupil Wang Hui (1632–1717). Wang Hui made it his objective to integrate the descriptive landscape styles of the Song dynasty (960–1279) with the calligraphic brushwork of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) to achieve a “great synthesis.” Wang Shimin’s other preeminent disciple was his grandson, Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715)—the youngest of the so-called Four Wangs. Wang Yuanqi pursued a rigorously abstract style in the manner of Dong Qichang that could accommodate learned references to the past without sacrificing his own artistic identity. Two other important disciples of Wang Shimin were Wu Li (1632–1718) and Yun Shouping (1633–1690).

Coopting Orthodoxy: The Kangxi Emperor’s Institutionalization of the Orthodox School Coming to the throne at the age of six, the first task of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) was to consolidate control over the territories formerly governed by the vanquished Ming state and wrest power from his Manchu regents. He accomplished both objectives by shrewdly cultivating the support of the Chinese intellectual elite and by modeling his rule on that of a traditional Confucian monarch. Beginning in the 1670s, scholars from China’s cultural heartland in the south were actively recruited into government service. These men brought with them a taste for the literati painting style practiced by members of the Orthodox School. A symbolic turning point in the legitimation of Kangxi’s rule was his triumphal 1689 inspection tour of the south. On this tour, the emperor climbed Mount Tai, Confucianism’s most sacred mountain, inspected water conservation projects along the Yellow River and Grand Canal, and visited all of the major cultural and commercial centers of the Chinese heartland, including China’s cultural capital, Suzhou. Shortly after Kangxi’s return to Beijing, his advisors initiated plans to commemorate this momentous event through a monumental series of paintings. Wang Hui, the most celebrated artist of the day, was summoned to Beijing to oversee the project. Kangxi further extended his manipulation of Chinese cultural symbols by enlisting Wang Yuanqi to advise him on the expansion of the imperial painting collection.

Hearn, Maxwell K. “The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): The Traditionalists.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/qing_2/hd_qing_2.htm (October 2003)

Further Reading

Barnhart, Richard M., Wen C. Fong, and Maxwell K. Hearn. Mandate of Heaven: Emperors and Artists in China: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from The Metropolitan Museum of Art . Exhibition catalogue. Zürich: Museum Rietberg, 1996.

Whitfield, Roderick. In Pursuit of Antiquity: Chinese Paintings of the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Earl Morse . Exhibition catalogue. Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1969.

Additional Essays by Maxwell K. Hearn

  • Hearn, Maxwell K.. “ The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): Loyalists and Individualists .” (October 2003)
  • Hearn, Maxwell K.. “ The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): Painting .” (October 2003)
  • Hearn, Maxwell K.. “ The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): Courtiers, Officials, and Professional Artists .” (October 2003)
  • Hearn, Maxwell K.. “ Chinese Painting .” (June 2008)
  • Hearn, Maxwell K.. “ Wang Hui (1632–1717) .” (October 2008)

Related Essays

  • The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): Courtiers, Officials, and Professional Artists
  • The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): Loyalists and Individualists
  • The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): Painting
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  • Wang Hui (1632–1717)
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List of Rulers

  • List of Rulers of China
  • Central and North Asia, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • China, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Himalayan Region, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Japan, 1600–1800 A.D.
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  • Calligraphy
  • Chinese Literature / Poetry
  • Deity / Religious Figure
  • Literature / Poetry
  • Ming Dynasty
  • Northern Song Dynasty
  • Pen and Ink
  • Qing Dynasty
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Artist or Maker

  • Dong Qichang

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Art of the Qing dynasty

Treasure Box of Eternal Spring and Longevity, Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign, 1736–95, carved red, green, and yellow lacquer on wood core, China, 16.5 x 44 x 44 cm (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1990.15a-e)

Treasure Box of Eternal Spring and Longevity , Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign, 1736–95, carved red, green, and yellow lacquer on wood core, China, 16.5 x 44 x 44 cm (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1990.15a-e)

During the late 1620s and 1630s, peasant uprisings swept through China’s countryside and rebel armies sacked the Ming Dynasty capital of Beijing. At that time, the last Ming emperor committed suicide. However, before a new Chinese dynasty could be established, the Manchus, who were a semi-nomadic tribe from the northeastern frontier, invaded and conquered China proper. After a particularly bloody transition, the Manchus established the Qing (“Pure”) Dynasty and set about to expand their territory, ushering in an era of political stability and economic prosperity. The Manchus became great patrons of the arts, using Chinese cultural traditions to legitimize their rule both at home and abroad. 

Map of the Qing dynasty in 1890

Map of the Qing dynasty in 1890

This chapter introduces key topics in the histories of Qing dynasty art, looking at how the making of art intertwines with the politics of identity and ethnicity, from regional social circles to global audiences. It introduces art worlds both inside and outside of the Qing court (those working under the emperor), as well as relations between China and other countries (including European powers and the United States) up through the founding of the Republic of China in 1912.

Read an introductory essay about the Qing dynasty

qing grid

The Qing dynasty: an introduction

/ 1 Completed

Painting after the fall of the Ming

Bada Shanren 八大山人 (朱耷), Lotus and Ducks (colophon by Wu Changshuo 吳昌碩), c. 1696 (Qing dynasty), ink on paper (hanging scroll), image 185 x 95.8 cm (Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

Bada Shanren 八大山人 (朱耷), Lotus and Ducks (colophon by Wu Changshuo 吳昌碩), c. 1696 (Qing dynasty), ink on paper (hanging scroll), image 185 x 95.8 cm (Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

The expressive medium of painting offers insight into the tumultuous transition from the “Great Ming” to the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. Many Han Chinese remained loyal to the previous Ming dynasty and resented Manchu rule, particularly in Ming strongholds in the southeast. These yimin , or “leftover subjects,” often protested through art, such as the artist Bada Shanren, a Ming prince who became a monk upon the fall of the dynasty. His portrayals of birds and fish convey multiple meanings through gestures and expressions suggesting anger or frustration.

Gong Xian, one album leaf from Eight Views of Landscape, 1684, Qing Dynasty, handscroll, ink on paper (Shanghai Museum)

Gong Xian, one album leaf from Eight Views of Landscape , 1684, Qing Dynasty, handscroll, ink on paper (Shanghai Museum)

The artists Shitao and Gong Xian painted landscapes of reclusion that may feature a lone fisherman or desolate mountains—images that represented an escape from their trauma and grief over Manchu rule. Others chose to serve the Manchu court, such as Wang Shimin, but also maintained social and artistic circles outside of court devoted to the study of ancient paintings and calligraphy. Whether these artists are described as “individualists” or “orthodox” in their stylistic approaches, they represent a range of responses to the establishment of the Qing dynasty, the last era of imperial rule in China.

Watch videos about painting after the fall of the Ming dynasty

Thumbnail Bada Shanren 八大山人 (朱耷), Lotus and Ducks (colophon by Wu Changshuo 吳昌碩), c. 1696 (Qing dynasty), ink on paper (hanging scroll), image 185 x 95.8 cm (Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution).

Bada Shanren, Lotus and Ducks : Why are these ducks so angry?

shitao grid

Shitao, Returning Home : An artist who asks “Who am I, and what am I supposed to do with my life?”

Gong Xian, Eight Views of Landscape, 1684, Qing Dynasty, handscroll, ink on paper (Shanghai Museum).

Gong Xian, Eight Views of Landscape : Nature becomes a refuge for an artist after the fall of the Ming.

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Visual cultures of the Qing court

Manchu patronage gave rise to a flourishing visual culture at the court in Beijing, especially during the stability and prosperity of the eighteenth century. While the Manchus embraced Han Chinese cultural traditions as a cornerstone of their rule, they also welcomed artists, scholars, and missionaries from around the world who shaped the arts and architecture of China’s last dynasty. 

Lang Shining (Guiseppe Castiglione; 1688-1766), Assembled Blessings, dated 1723. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, Qing dynasty.

Lang Shining (Guiseppe Castiglione), Assembled Blessings , dated 1723, Qing dynasty, hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 173 × 86.1 cm ( The National Palace Museum, Taipei)

In one notable instance, it was said that the auspicious signs of twin lotuses and multi-headed grain stalks appeared throughout the empire when the Qianlong emperor ascended the throne. Upon studying these remarkable plants in a celadon vase in the imperial workshop, the Italian Jesuit , Giuseppe Castiglione (also known by his Chinese name, Lang Shining), rendered the image in the Chinese medium of ink and color on silk, but with the volume and spatial sensibilities associated with European art. Castiglione had come to China as a Jesuit missionary and would served at the Qing imperial court.

Emperor's face painted by Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) Imperial workshop, The Qianlong Emperor as Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign, mid-18th century, ink, color, and gold on silk, China, 113.6 x 64.3 cm (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment and funds provided by an anonymous donor, F2000.4)

Giuseppe Castiglioneand Imperial workshop, The Qianlong Emperor as Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom , Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign, mid-18th century, ink, color, and gold on silk, China, 113.6 x 64.3 cm (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment and funds provided by an anonymous donor, F2000.4)

His fusion of Chinese and European pictorial techniques pleased imperial tastes and led to many more commissions—including a representation of the emperor in Buddhist dress. In fact, the Manchus also produced an impressive amount of Buddhist art at the court for use in their diplomatic alliances with Tibet and Mongolia. Through hybrid approaches to court dress and objects such as lacquerware and ceramics, the Manchus proclaimed their right to rule over a multiethnic empire.

Read essays about the visual culture of the Qing court

Emperor's face painted by Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) Imperial workshop, The Qianlong Emperor as Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign, mid-18th century, ink, color, and gold on silk, China, 113.6 x 64.3 cm (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment and funds provided by an anonymous donor, F2000.4)

Imperial Workshop and Giuseppe Castiglione, The Qianlong Emperor as Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom:  A European artist in China paints a portrait of the emperor.

Summer chaofu (formal court dress) for a top-rank prince, Qing dynasty, c. 1820-1875, silk gauze with embroidery in silk and metallic-wrapped threads, China, 141 x 170.2 cm (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Shirley Z. Johnson, F2015.7)

Summer chaofu: A formal court dress for a top-rank prince.

qing portrait grid

Portraits of Shi Wenying and Lady Guan: This pair of paintings are ancestor portraits, which are formal, forward-facing portraits of deceased ancestors used for family worship.

qing lacquer grid

Treasure Box of Eternal Spring and Longevity : Skill and interest in carved lacquer reached a new peak during the  Qianlong  period (1736–95).

literature in the qing dynasty

Vase of bottle shape with “garlic” mouth: The fine quality of the  porcelain  and delicate painting details both suggest that the vase was made for and used by the court.

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Architecture

In addition to painting, the Manchus also collaborated with Jesuit missionaries at the court on architectural projects. In the eighteenth century, the Qianlong emperor initiated a massive renovation of the imperial garden site of Yuanmingyuan, or “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” a vast complex that was modeled after European villas and housed numerous cultural relics. Structures displayed both Chinese and Rococo architectural features, with attention to European illusionistic techniques such as linear perspective , while European-style edifices incorporated elements from Chinese mythology—a hybrid approach that signaled the Manchu fascination with all things exotic. After British and French troops completely looted and torched the site during the Opium Wars  (a foreign crisis between China and the West that began in south China over opium smuggling) in the nineteenth century, the ruins became a nationalist symbol to some—and questioned by others, including the contemporary artist Ai Weiwei (as discussed in an essay below)—and the subject of repatriation efforts through the present. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Empress Dowager Cixi had declared war on foreign powers in the Yihetuan Movement of 1900 (also known as the Boxer Rebellion), compromising her international reputation as the Qing dynasty neared its end.

Read essays about architecture

cixi

Summer Palace in Beijing: It is a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden design.

Yi Lantai, Maze (Garden of Ten Thousand Flowers), copperplate engraving, 1781–1786 (Photo: Getty Digital Collections)

Yuanming Yuan: The European Palaces of the Qianlong Emperor, Beijing

literature in the qing dynasty

Xunling, The Empress Dowager Cixi with foreign envoys’ wives: This photo was taken in the Hall of Happiness and Longevity  (Leshou  tang ) in the Summer Palace, Beijing.

Arts in Jiangnan

While artistic production hummed along at the Manchu court in eighteenth-century Beijing, artists and patrons outside of the court also cultivated thriving art worlds, such as in the cultural region of the Yangtze River delta known as Jiangnan, or “south of the river.” Yangzhou is one such Jiangnan city that thrived due to its location on the Grand Canal, the main north-south route for the transport of salt (which was mined and shipped all over China) during the Qing dynasty. The Qing court carefully monitored Yangzhou, first as a site of resistance during the initial Manchu siege of the city, and later as a center for scholarship and publishing amid the Qing literary inquisitions . At the same time, the Qing emperors also rewarded the city by making it a repository for scholarship, with one set of the vast imperial encyclopedia stored in Yangzhou, and by designating it as the seat of the salt administration. 

teapot grid

A Zisha “Ru Ding” teapot made by Yang Pengnian, with Chen Mansheng mark, Yixing ware, c. late 18th–early 19th century (Shanghai Museum)

As the city grew increasingly wealthy between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prominent merchants built public memorials and private garden estates, where they often solicited the work of poets and artists. These patrons signaled a shift in Qing society, where many old families (such as those attaining government posts through classical education) slipped from power as merchants profited from the opportunities within the new regime. Although they often lacked the education to partake in the more sophisticated arts and scholarship, these patrons idealized the scholarly lifestyle and so commissioned paintings, gardens, poetry, and tea culture.

Watch videos about art in Jiangnan

teapot grid

Zisha “Ru Ding” teapot, Yixing ware: A tiny teapot made for a literati audience.

The Shanghai School

Ren Yi, Portrait of Wu Changshuo Enjoying the Cool Shade of Banana Palms. Hanging scroll: ink and color on paper, 129.5 x 58.9 cms. Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Hangzhou

As trade shifted from the Grand Canal to the East China Sea during the latter half of the Qing dynasty, the city of Shanghai became a vibrant hub for the arts. The city not only attracted itinerant artists from the Jiangnan region, but also court painters who had previously enjoyed high status for their work under the Qianlong emperor, but who had sunk to the level of palace servants as imperial support waned in the nineteenth century. Art historians often use the term “Shanghai school” to refer to painters active in the city who developed commercially successful styles from various artistic sources. Some created modern calligraphy based on the study of seal and clerical inscriptions engraved on ancient bronze and stone monuments, a practice called “epigraphy.” Others looked to the vivid garden subjects of eighteenth-century Yangzhou for enlivening urban life through painting. Meanwhile, other artists turned away from sophisticated genres (such as landscapes) and media (such as painting and calligraphy) altogether, instead exploring popular subjects through woodblock prints and photography. 

Ren Xiong, Self-Portrait (1823–57), ink and colors on paper, 177.5 x 78.8c (Palace Museum, Beijing)

The artist’s confrontational manner can be read as tormented, a representation that fits with what we know about his life and the tragic period in which he lived—civil war amid the rise of Shanghai as a cosmopolitan, international port city. Ren Xiong, Self-Portrait , c. 1850, ink and colors on paper, 177.5 x 78.8 cm (Palace Museum, Beijing)

Although literary and artistic circles offered avenues for patronage and social prestige in nineteenth-century Shanghai, foreign and domestic turmoil challenged many artists. The Opium Wars (a foreign crisis between China and the West that began in south China over opium smuggling) ended in the Treaty of Nanjing, which opened Shanghai as a treaty port . Shanghai quickly transformed into an international commercial city, with residential areas for foreigners (known as the British, French, and American concessions), and soon it became the largest port in Asia. However, around the same time that the British and French sacked Beijing (during the Second Opium War), the Taiping Rebellion broke out in the countryside, and much of the Jiangnan region fell under rebel control. 

The Taiping Rebellion was an uprising of Chinese peasants which nearly toppled the dynasty and destroyed the way of life for China’s scholar-gentry class, the literati, especially those living in the Jiangnan region. Tens of millions died and millions more were displaced—and many of these refugees fled to Shanghai, further inflating the population of the city. With the unprecedented challenges of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion, the end of the Qing dynasty led many artists to re-examine many of the central features of Chinese culture and history. 

Read essays about artists associated with the Shanghai School

Ren Xiong Self Portrait

Ren Xiong, Self-Portrait : An artist confronts the traumatic moment in which he lived.

wang zhen grid

Wang Zhen, Buddhist Sage: How modern is this Chinese painting?

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The arts of the Qing dynasty reflected the global, multiethnic agenda of its Manchu rulers. Chinese imperial traditions, Buddhism, and European innovations shaped visual cultures at the court, while Han scholarship and garden cultures in Jiangnan responded to the Qing social and economic shifts. As tensions between Qing and foreign powers mounted amid domestic turmoil in the nineteenth century, artists began to ask a modern question: what of the past can serve us in this new world? 

Key questions to guide your reading

How did the manchu court use art to convey power in a multiethnic empire, how did the arts of qing china respond to the arts in other world areas, such as europe, which aesthetic traditions did artists engage with in the jiangnan region, terms to know and use.

Qianlong emperor

Jiangnan region

looting, repatriation, nationalism

Grand Canal

Shanghai School

woodblock prints

Treaty of Nanjing

Taiping Rebellion

Empress Dowager Cixi

Boxer Rebellion

For more on auspicious imagery in Chinese history, read an essay about Emperor Huizong’s  Auspicious Cranes

Read a chapter about the previous Ming dynasty

Collaborators

Stephen D. Allee, Freer Gallery of Art

Dr. Kristen Loring Brennan

Craig Clunas

Dr. Beth Harris

Dr. Rachel Miller

Dr. Steven Zucker

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution

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Qing Philosophy

Qing philosophy refers to the topography of the intellectual terrain of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, which sported coherent patterns and modes of intellection and argumentation among the texts and writings of the scholars in the period. In accordance with the current historiographical convention, the time-span fell within the so-called “late imperial” era that encompassed the transition from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the Qing (1644–1911), as well as the first half of the Qing imperium. That Qing philosophy is distinguished as an independent subject and entity, with its presumed boundaries and prominent features, is not merely a function of chronology. Rather, it points to a substantial departure from the preceding intellectual traditions, which in their aggregate form, amounted to Neo-Confucianism of the Song (960–1279) and Ming times. While Neo-Confucianism was not a monolith to be sure, to the extent that it argued robustly on behalf of individual moral introspection via one’s nature ( xing ) and mind-heart ( xin ) as the realization of ultimate metaphysical truths—variously construed as heaven ( tian) , principle ( li ), the great ultimate ( taiji ), and the Way ( dao )—it represented the foremost unfolding and predictive reality-principle that was Song-Ming thought in its totality. Qing philosophy, being in many ways a negative reaction to it, was a rupture to begin with, even though in terms of intellectual history, multifarious aspects of continuity, apart from discontinuity, must be taken into account.

It is important to note that the coherent patterns and modes identified with Qing philosophy are my own narrative and interpretive constructions for the purpose of limning the lineaments of the intellectual landscape of a time. They are analytical categories that result from my hermeneutic intervention within the intellectual history of late imperial China, the coherent features of which might not have been evident to contemporary scholars in the Qing. In short, Qing philosophy is a constructed period concept that denotes a distinct worldview with a specific temporal location.

The present essay begins, in section 1, with a synthetic conceptualization of Qing philosophy as a period concept that conveys both substantive intellectual contents and a particular temporal position. From historiographical and historical vantage points, it argues on behalf of the distinctiveness of the modes and patterns of philosophical intellection in Qing times, identifying their departure from antecedent Song-Ming thoughts while paying due attention to aspects of continuity. These dominant manners of intellection that characterize Qing philosophy are represented by four ideal-types of thinking—vitalism, historicism, utilitarianism, and intellectualism. Together, they furnished the fundamental orientations and standards by which learning was pursued, adjudicated, and evaluated in the Qing period.

Accordingly, the rest of the essay is organized around the individual and respective examinations of the four ideal-types of philosophical thinking, and hence the quadripartite structure. Section 2 explores vitalism as the philosophical emphasis on qi (material force or psycho-physical force) as the metaphysical fulcrum on which the world turns. Section 3 reveals the ways in which historicism engendered the tendency to seek meaning in human agency by appreciating particular contingencies in changing contexts. Utilitarianism, elucidated in section 4, is my hermeneutic rendering of the Confucian activist ideal of ordering the world by extending utility and function to the fullest ( jingshi ). Intellectualism, also discussed in section 4, is a representation of the Confucian quest for external, discursive knowledge, most vividly and concertedly manifested in the intellectual movement of evidentiary research ( kaozheng ).

1. Qing Philosophy: a Period Concept

2. vitalism: metaphysical reorientation, 3. historicism: contingency and constancy, 4. utilitarianism: thought and action, 5. intellectualism: external knowledge and inquiry, a. primary sources quoted, b. overview: general surveys and studies, c. the ming-qing intellectual transition, d.1 practical learning ( shixue/puxue/jingshi ), d.2 evidential learning ( kaozheng ), d.3 historical scholarship, d.4 intellectual sects and lineages, d.5 individual intellectual personage, other internet resources, related entries.

To assert and describe the newness of Qing philosophical thinking about the manifold dimensions of reality in late imperial China is to highlight a sense of departure from the immediate past, that is, to trace the transition from the Song-Ming mode of thinking to the Qing one by pinpointing the disjunction and continuity. In other words, it begs the question of the relationship between late imperial thought and the preceding intellectual traditions. Inquiries into the Ming-Qing intellectual transition have tended to adopt two narrative and analytical strategies: first, the comparative approach that creates paradigms of adjoining intellectual movements and then points out their stark contrasts and vast differences; second, the developmental approach based on the assumption of continuity, governed by notions of tradition, influence, and evolution. The comparative approach that stresses rupture was in fact adopted by the some of the towering late Ming-early Qing intellectual figures, such as Gu Yanwu (1613–82) and Wang Fuzhi (1619–92), who created an archetype of Ming thought and Song-Ming Confucianism as abstract, abstruse, feckless, and feeble, such that they became a monolithic type of thinking represented by finicky metaphysical speculation and passive moral introspection. By Qing times, such a mode of intellection became collectively known as “Song learning” ( Songxue ), with its overt focus on moral principles ( yili zhi xue ), as opposed to “Han learning” ( Hanxue ), scholarship anchored on the deep philological probing of texts and words, and their literal meanings ( wenzi xungu ). The modern restatement of this position was made by Liang Qichao (1873–1929), a most influential late Qing and Republican intellectual figure, who criticized the futility of Song-Ming thought as “vague”, “intangible”, and “abstract”. Because of the wide circulation and common usage of the English translation by Immanuel Hsu of one of Liang’s book on Qing intellectual history (Liang 1921 [1959]), Liang’s view became for a long time the basic interpretive reference point for the study of late imperial intellectual trends, creating a dominant historiography that interprets the Ming-Qing intellectual transition as a cataclysmic event that ushered in a new spirit of thought. Another giant intellectual figure, a stalwart of the New Culture (or May-Fourth) movement, Hu Shi (1891–1962), held similar views, going so far as to advance the influential thesis of Qing philosophy as scientific and progressive (Hu 1967: 104–131).

Chinese Marxist scholarship in general likewise endorses this cataclysmic interpretation of the emergence of “progressive” thought in the late imperial period. Such thesis of discontinuity also found echoes in older western scholarship, such as that of the late Joseph Levenson, which contends that it was only in the seventeenth century that voices began to be raised against Song-Ming idealism and subjective idealism (1964). In sum, according to the thesis of rupture between Song-Ming learning and late imperial thought, seventeenth-century scholars begrudged the corruption of learning by indulgent moral introspection and arcane metaphysical speculation. As a result, there emerged the study of practical statecraft for the ordering of the workaday world of institutions and administrations, which realized the time-honored ideal of jingshi zhiyong (ordering the world and extending utility). Moreover, in order to rectify the abuses of the Song-Ming empty talk ( kongtan ), evidential research ( kaozheng or kaoju ) arose, especially in the area of philology, otherwise known as Han learning, in contradistinction to Song learning that pursued speculative introspection.

The developmental approach to the question of the Ming-Qing intellectual transition based on the notion of continuity appears in Feng Youlan’s (1895–1990) classic survey of Chinese philosophy (1934 [1952–1953]), ably translated into English by the late Derk Bodde (1909–2003). Feng regarded Han learning in the Qing as innovative and creative thinking, but he also insisted that it was a continuation of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism because it produced no new metaphysical categories. More thoroughgoing in arguing on behalf of the linkage between Qing learning and Song learning was the eminent Qian Mu (1895–1990). To Qian (1937), the early Qing savants did actually uphold the Song cultural ideals, but he pointed out that the dominant scholastic Han learning and evidential scholarship of the later Qianjia period (the period of the reigns of the Qianlong and Jiaqing emperors, 1736–1820) strayed from the true moral way and political commitments of the late Ming and early Qing. The most sustained effort to interpret the intimate nexus between Song-Ming Confucianism and Qing thought is found in the seminal trilogy of volumes (Bary 1970, 1975; Bary & Bloom 1979) on Ming and Qing thought, edited by the late dean of Neo-Confucian Studies, Wm. Theodore de Bary (1919–2017), which examine the roots and nature of the intellectual transformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of its intimate ties with Song-Ming antecedents. This thesis of continuity is eloquently restated by Qian Mu’s eminent student Yü Ying-shih, who interprets the novelty of late imperial Chinese learning with reference to its organic relation with Song-Ming Confucianism by delineating the inner logic of Confucian thinking. As Yü claims, “Intellectualism”, or the ideal of “following the way of inquiry and learning” ( dao wenxue ), took center stage in late imperial thought, whereas in Song-Ming times, “anti-intellectualism”, or the ideal of “honoring one’s heaven-endowed moral nature” ( zun dexing ) predominated (Yü 1975: 105–136).

The theme of intellectual continuity was also evident in much of Japanese scholarship which generally regards Wang Yangming’s idea of liangzhi (innately spontaneous moral knowing) as a major spiritual resource for fundamental change. It credits the left wing of the Wang Yangming school for further unleashing the potentials of this liberating precept by espousing individualism and voluntarism that signified moral autonomy. Furthermore, it argues that the Qing belief in the possibility of “objective” investigations of the classics should be examined in the context of the “subjectivism” that unified the Song, Yuan, and Ming philosophical views. This scholarship also explores the import of late imperial Chinese thought in terms of the idea of multiple early modernities in world history, to the extent that the late Ming and Qing witnessed the workings of the particular historical dynamics of “early modern” ( sen kindai ) China, manifested in the new conceptions of self and society that were reformulations of some central leitmotifs and polarities in traditional Confucian thinking (Shimada 1970; Mizoguchi 1980).

Be it the comparative or developmental approach, the contention is that Chinese thought experienced notable changes in the late imperial period, roughly from the late Ming through the mid Qing. While scholars argue over the genesis, content, nature, and significance of the new developments, most acknowledge and recognize the patterned fundamental shifts in intellectual trends and directions. Some of the interrelated traits of the intellectual redirection included the following: fungibility and syncretism in thinking that tended to mitigate the authority of received opinions; palpable impulse to reorder and manage the world, invoking the ideal of ordering the world through practical statecraft and statesmanship ( jingshi ); general aversion toward metaphysical speculation and moral introspection, and the corresponding interest in the pursuit of solid and practical learning ( puxue and shixue ), giving rise to utilitarian and instrumental notions of scholarship; valuing personal practical experience, academic, political, social and otherwise, such that one’s actions in the phenomenal and external worlds loomed large; historicization of the classics ( jing ) that had hitherto been revered as sources of timeless authority, rendering them into objects of scholarly scrutiny, thereby breeding in time the meticulous scholarship of evidential research and learning, which came to dominate the intellectual world in the so-called Qianjia period; preference for limpidity, clarity, and simplicity in writing style and language; and finally, new and broadening horizons of the meaning of community, as the literati’s place in state and society was redefined and reconceptualized. To be sure, these interlarded strains of thoughts were by no means new in the Chinese intellectual universe. Yet, from the late Ming on, there seemed to be an unmistakable convergence of the various traits that fostered conceptual commonalities and intellectual confluences out of a socio-intellectual environ that was nevertheless characterized by manifold sectarian affiliations and polemics. Various modes of learning and thinking cohered to forge a new orientation that seemed to give conscious life in the late imperial period an identifiable stamp and identity.

Thus, late imperial Chinese philosophy, or Qing philosophy, is a period concept, that is, a substantive designation of an independent historico-intellectual epoch with a distinct physiognomy, an internal coherence, identifiable mental habit, and autonomous scholarly style, distinguished from the preceding Song-Ming philosophical style and content, as represented by Neo-Confucianism. The construction of this period concept is an exercise in intellectual cartography by selecting and representing the significant ideational landmarks of an intellectual landscape, thereby providing a perspective and knowledge of the terrain. The major landmarks are the dominant modes, or ideal-types, of intellectual articulation, and Qing philosophy sported four—vitalism, historicism, utilitarianism, and intellectualism. They functioned as the basic criteria of intelligibility and importance, offering the fundamental points of view according to which learning was described, measured, valuated, and adjudicated. In the process, they dislodged and supplanted the moral metaphysics and inward ethical introspection of Song-Ming thought, which was premised on the idea of realizing the totalizing dao (the Way), li (principle), and tian (heaven) through self-cultivation of the mind-heart ( xin ). To the extent that humanity’s moral nature ( dexing ) was endowed by heaven, moral-ethico perfection was the realization of the mandate of heaven ( tianming ), manifested as the ritual order established by the ancient sages. In Song-Ming thought, apprehending dao/li/tian was not merely an epistemological process, in that knowledge of dao/tian/ti was a metapraxis in which virtue, reason, knowing, and action converged.

Qing philosophy, with vitalism, historicism, utilitarianism and intellectualism as its contextual and thematic patterns of thinking and articulation, heralded a new phase in Chinese intellectual history, interrogating antecedent concepts and ushering in new approaches. I use these “isms” advisedly as terms of art, not technical ones. Vitalism in this context smacks not of the Bergsonian metaphysical postulation of an élan vital , and historicism does not appeal to the ancestral nomenclature of Hegelian dialectics. Utilitarianism appeals not to Bentham’s consequentialist philosophy, and intellectualism elides the Socratic or Thomistic reference to rationality and ratiocination. Vitalism, in the context of Qing thought, is a reference to the Neo-Confucian philosophy of qi , commonly rendered into English as material force or psycho-physical force. It denotes a view of reality that focuses attention in large part to the evidence provided by life grasped from within a body, the self, or external thing. This evidence revealed embodied experience to be composed of concrete tendencies and occurrences not readily reduced to or dissolved in metaphysical speculation or conception, such as the ontological notion of principle ( li ) or heaven ( tian ). Historicism describes the mental habit and endeavor to find and establish meaning in history as it was made by human agents, shunning supra-temporal principles and transcendent norms of universal validity, such as the idea of the constant Way ( dao ), and savoring instead the contingent and particular in varying and changing contexts. Utilitarianism takes its cue from the Confucian activist ideal of “ordering the world by extending utility and function to the fullest” ( jingshi zhiyong ), privileging the functional component of yong (utility) over ti (the essential substance of things) in the ti-yong polarity that represented the interacting inner and outer realms of reality. Just as it gave priority to outer efforts of acting as opposed to the inner quiddity of being, so it presumed an intimate relation between knowledge and action in the experiential world. Intellectualism is an abstraction from the Confucian external cultivational goal of “following the way of inquiry and learning” ( dao wenxue ), which placed a premium on discursive knowledge and scholarly pursuit as the means to comprehend the classics, understood as the textual encasement and manifestations of the profound principles of the ancient sages. In time, it bred the critical evidentiary research ( kaozheng ) that sought to thoroughly reveal the sages’ teachings and messages via philology.

To be sure, these modes of intellectual articulation were not entirely new, but it was in the Qing that they coalesced, and they were emphasized and valued at the expense of other approaches. Hence the emergence of Qing philosophy as a coherent and integrated system of ideas in terms of which reality and the world were understood.

Vitalism as an expression of Qing philosophy focused on evidence provided by the self, the body, and external things. Opposed to the mysticism of an eternal and transcendent creative power such as principle ( li ), heaven ( tian ) or the Way ( dao ) that represented the essence of being, vitalism was in favor of a view of life grasped from within the actualities of the individual self and the external world. It stressed the immediate and ultimate completion of a concrete and dynamic life expressed in terms of qi (material force/psycho-physical force) and qi (concrete implements). It may be conceived as a dynamic monism: dynamic in the sense that it rejected an immutable dao in favor of a relativized way of contingent and finite truths; and monistic in that it dissolved the li-qi dichotomy, subsuming li , which had been considered to be the prior metaphysical and spiritual realm, under qi , the perceptual and experiential realm that had been regarded as secondary. Life within the vitalist framework was dependent on circumstances, particularized, and individualized by the external signs of the self’s contingency and finitude, including the senses, feelings, desires, and emotions. Scholars of late imperial Chinese thought, such as Theodore be Bary, Irene Bloom, and Yamanoi Yū , have pointed to the growing preponderance of this qi -based vitalist philosophy since the late Ming period, which offered a new sense of coherence in the thinking about individuals and the world. But it would be misleading to characterize Qing philosophy as entirely grounded in some sort of formalized qi- oriented metaphysics, to the extent that philosophical lucubration in terms of the Confucian categories of li and qi had ceased to hold the imagination of the thinkers. While qi , representing the material and experiential domain of life, did become ascendant in intellectual discourse, the Qing posture was distinctly averse to metaphysical pondering. Vitalism, with qi as its predicate, was a pervasive attitude that attached foremost importance to concrete realities and actions, inverting the Neo-Confucian metaphysical tendency to reduce humanity and things to an attribute, manifestation, and appearance of li and dao . Qi now reigned supreme.

In the early Qing, the most systematic articulation of the vitalist philosophy can be found in the writings of Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), who expanded the qi -based metaphysics of the celebrated Song master, Zhang Zai (1020–1077). Wang asserted that qi was what li followed. He claimed:

In actuality, li exists within qi. Qi is nothing but li . When [ qi ] agglomerates and produces humanity and things, forms ( xing ) appear. When [ qi ] disperses into the supreme void ( taixu ), it is then formless. (Wang QSYS: 1:5b)

While li and qi were one, it was the latter that gave reality its form. In fact, qi was the basic stuff of the ultimate supreme void, as Wang averred:

To say that humanity is born without the nourishment of qi , that li could be sought outside of qi , that forms are illusions, and that the nature ( xing ) is real, is to degenerate into heterodoxy. (QSYS: 1:6b)

It is important to note that even though Wang followed Zhang, he rejected the latter’s philosophical anthropology, which separated humanity’s so-called “heaven-nature” stemming from li from its “physical nature” derived from qi. Wang told us:

When one speaks of the physical nature, it is like saying that the nature lies within the matter of qi ( qizhi ). This matter ( zhi ) is humanity’s material form ( qizhi zhi xing ), within the confines of which the principle of life ( sheng zhi li ) is manifested. Since it [i.e., the principle of life] lies within this matter, qi permeates it, and just as what fills the universe both inside and outside the human body is nothing but qi , so it is nothing but principle. Principle operates within qi , where it controls and apportions qi . Thus the matter [of individual things] envelops qi , and qi envelops principle. It is because this matter envelops qi that a given individual possesses a nature. For this reason, before one’s development has taken place, there can only be the li and qi of the universe but not the individual person. Once, however, there is the matter incorporating qi , this qi then inevitably possesses principle. As far as humanity is concerned…, this nature as found in the matter of qi [i.e., physical nature] is still the original nature. (quoted in McMorran 1975: 443)

In short, Wang contended that our so-called physical nature was the original nature, by no means secondary to our heaven-nature. He, unlike Zhang, did not attribute our aggressiveness and aggrandizement to the inferior qi of the physical nature. Wang saw both principle and human desires ( yu ) as natural ( ziran ). The tradition of ritual-propriety ( li ) expressed our desires:

Although ritual propriety is purely the external adornment of the principle of heaven, it must reside in human desires for it to be seen. That being the case, in the final analysis, there cannot be a heaven that is separate from humanity, or principle separate from desires…. Hence in sounds, colors, smells, and flavors, one can clearly see the communal desires ( gongyu ) of all beings and their communal principle ( gongli ). (Wang QSYS: 8:10b-11a)

To Wang, the way of kingship ( wangdao ) was also intimately related to human sentiments ( renqing ):

The way of kingship is based on human sentiments. Human sentiments are the same sentiments shared by both the profound person ( junzi ) and petty person ( xiaoren )…. Mencius, understanding thoroughly the origin of the oneness of heaven’s principle ( tianli ) and human sentiments, recognized the possibility of the way of kingship. After seeing the beginning, it could then be extended and expanded…. Heaven’s principle resides in private desires ( siyu ). (Wang QSYS: 26:2a-3b)

Thus, Wang connected values—ritual-propriety, the way of kingship, communal principle—with private feelings, as the body and its affections became a locus of ethical experience, li -principle. In explicating the idea of “fully realizing our nature” ( jinxing ), he argued that everything in the world was of the same origin as oneself. Therefore, the individual was the fulcrum on which the world moved, and this mandated an active life. Practice, or xi , was the key to exhaustively realizing and fulfilling our nature, which was the nurturing of our very qi :

As for changing the bad to the good, it is a matter of nurturing one’s qi well. In time, one’s substance ( zhi ) is altered accordingly…. This is human ability, which is practice precisely. Thus, qi changes with practice, and nature is realized with practice. Substance is the residence of nature, nature is the regulating of qi , and qi is the substantiation of substance. [ Qi ] is what practice can control. (Wang QSYS: 7:11a-b)

In short, Wang not only collapsed the li-qi dyad into the monism of qi but he also understood qi , the basic stuff of the universe, in terms of human agency and action.

Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), also saw qi as the generative force in the cosmos:

Replete in heaven-and-earth is qi . When qi prospers, it becomes shen (spirit). Shen is the qi of heaven-and-earth and the human mind. (Gu RZL: 1:20)

He continue to say,

Coalescing to form a body is called wu (things/affairs); dispersal in a shapeless manner is called bian (change)…. Coalescing is the coalescing of qi ; dispersal is the dispersing of qi . (RZL: 1:20)

Qi was self-sufficient and all-pervasive, identified with things, objects, events, and affairs, without which “the dao has nowhere to reside” (RZL: 1:20). Similarly, Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), a polymath who was Gu Yanwu’s and Wang Fuzhi’s contemporary, saw the inextricable conflation of li and qi as a foremost ontological fact: “ Li is the li of qi . If there is no qi , then there is no li ” (Huang MRXA: 140). Their difference rests merely on semantics:

The terms li and qi are made up by people. In speaking of the phenomena of floating, submerging, rising, and falling, there is qi . In speaking of the unmistakable laws of floating, submerging, rising, and falling, there is li . In the end, they are the two names of one entity, not two entities in one being. (Huang MRXA: 1064)

He further explained,

Within heaven-and-earth, there is only one qi . Its rise and fall, and comings and goings, are the li . Apprehended by a person… [ li ] becomes the mind-heart, which is also qi . If qi is not self-governed, why is it that after spring, there inevitably come summer, autumn, and winter? What controls the blossoming and withering of plans, the mildness and ruggedness of the topography, the good and the bad movements of astrological portents, and the birth and growth of humanity and things? All are governed by qi . Since it is self-governed, it is called li . (Huang MRXA: 46)

Huang dissolved the li-qi duality by arguing that li by itself did not exist, insofar as it was an abstraction of the material and the experiential.

In anthropological terms, Huang remarked that

what in heaven is qi is the mind-heart in humanity. What in heaven is li is the nature in humanity. Just as li and qi are the same, so too are the mind-heart and nature. (Huang MRXA: 1109)

Here, Huang critiqued Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) tendency to separate the original human nature from the mind-heart, which was the site of sentiments and feelings of “pleasure, anger, sorrow, and joy”. To Huang, these emotions and affections, in their state of “equilibrium and harmony”, are the nature. Therefore,

to seek the nature outside of this cognitively natural and self-regulating mind-heart is like abandoning the flexible and changing qi in order to seek a separate li . (Huang MRXA: 1109–1110)

Huang thus invested human feelings with the steadfast solidity of the ontological substance of qi , which was the source of the cardinal virtues of ren (benevolence), yi (rightness), li (propriety) and zhi (wisdom):

Replete in heaven-and-earth is qi . Movement of this one qi in the human mind-heart… naturally separates into pleasure, anger, sorrow, and joy. Accordingly, the names of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom arise. Separate from qi , there is no li ; separate from the mind-heart, there is no nature. (Huang MRXA: 1512)

The early Qing vitalist philosophy of qi found full expression in the eighteenth century, which witnessed a strong affirmation of the primacy of materiality. In particular, Dai Zhen (1723–1777) systematically developed a philosophy based on the presupposition that the dao was constituted by things:

Dao is the name that refers to actual bodies and actual affairs…. Speaking of the dao in terms of heaven-and-earth, it can readily be seen with reference to its actual bodies and actual affairs…. Speaking of the dao in terms of humanity, it is the concrete affairs of quotidian practicality in human relations that pervade the dao…. None that arise from the body are not the dao…. The dao is living, drinking, eating, talking, and moving. One’s self and what surround oneself are all appropriately [regarded as the dao ]. (Dai MZZYSZ: 69–72)

Dai criticized the Song Neo-Confucians for artificially separating moral values from everyday social relations and activities, insofar as they identified the moral virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom with the “empty, boundless, and subtle” principle, which, being prior and primary, was “above the realm of corporeal forms” ( xing er shang ), as opposed to diurnal actions and pursuits, which was seen to be “amidst the realm of corporeal forms” ( xing er xia ) and therefore, posterior and secondary. As far as Dai was concerned, such axiology could find no corroboration in the classics:

[The Song Confucians claimed that] with respect to heaven-and-earth, yin-yang cannot be called the dao ; with respect to humanity, the physical endowment ( qibing ) cannot be called the nature ( xing ), and affairs and things of daily practicality in human relations cannot be called the Way ( dao ). There is nothing in the texts of the Six Classics , Confucius , and Mencius that agrees with them. (Dai MZZYSZ: 71–72)

To Dai, principle was not abstract and transcendent: “With regard to heaven-and-earth, humanity and things, and affairs and actions, I have not heard of a principle that cannot be verbally articulated” (Dai MZZYSZ: 38). Li , as the inner texture of things ( tiaoli ), did not exist in the mind-heart as a metaphysical entity and was found in the midst of all things. Indeed, it could not be severed from human feelings ( qing ) and desires ( yu ). Dai differentiated between what was naturally ( ziran ) and what was necessarily so ( biran ):

The desires of the nature are the signs of the natural. The virtue of the nature is conducive to the attainment of what was necessarily so. What is conducive to the attainment of what was necessarily so conforms to and perfects what is natural about heaven-and-earth. This is called the utmost attainment of that which is naturally so. (quoted in Yü Ying-shih 1982: 386)

What were naturally so were the desires and daily activities of human beings; that which was necessarily so was the inner texture of the natural, that is, principle. The natural was the foundation on which the necessitarian principle rested:

The ears, the eyes, and all the other bodily organs desire those things on which our physical nature ( qizhi zhi xing ) depends for nourishment. The so-called human desires of human nature originate from the Way of the formation and transformation of heaven-and-earth ( tiandao ). In the case of humanity, they are rooted in human nature and expressed in daily affairs. In this sense, they constitute the Way of humanity ( rendao ). (Chung-ying Cheng 1971: 76).

Since desires, as integral parts of the physical nature, constituted both the Way of humanity and the Way of heaven, human nature could not be, as the Song masters had contended, bifurcated into its moral-heavenly manifestation and material-earthly disclosure. Dai asserted that the nature, xing , was whole, comprising both blood and breath ( xueqi )—the psycho-physiological—and the mind-heart and wisdom ( xinzhi )—the cognitive-spiritual. Both, as a whole, were derived from “yin-yang and the five agents”, and “originated from the process of the production and transformation of heaven-and-earth” ( yuan yu tiandi zhi hua ). He waxed rhetorical,

As for the fact that a person is a person, if physical endowment ( qibing ) and physical constitution ( qizhi ) are cast aside, in what way can a person be described as a person? (Dai MZZYSZ: 51)

Dai’s arguments struck at the heart of the Neo-Confucian metaphysical conception of principle, the Way of heaven, and moral nature as prior and fundamentally substantive. Instead, he construed qi as the basic stuff out of which all things and the nature were wrought, and in the process, he stressed the materiality and concreteness of all beings.

In sum, a vitalist sensibility animated the philosophical thoughts of many a Qing thinker, placing qi and its manifestations at the center of life and the world. But we must bear in mind the caveat that such thinking amounted to no materialism or naturalism in the western philosophical sense of the words. Material human desires in themselves were never considered to be a principle, even though they were conceived as integral and authentic components of a holistic nature. Nevertheless, if it was not full-fledged formal philosophy, the qi- based worldview was a fundamental attitude and disposition that located life’s meanings, possibilities, and motives in the actualities of the corporeal world. As qi dislodged the importance of li , knowledge acquired through the senses’ commerce with the workaday world ( wenjian zhi zhi ), as opposed to moral knowledge attained through intuitive knowing of the virtuous nature ( dexing zhi zhi ), claimed priority. In an a-metaphysical age that was the Qing, there was no triumph of qi -oriented thinking qua philosophy, but a vitalist ontology did furnish a criterion of intelligibility that undergirded the other modes of intellection—historicism, utilitarianism, intellectualism.

Neo-Confucian thought in the Song-Ming times bore a strong dimension of ontological ultimacy, such that its criteria of intelligibility may be considered as essentially metaphysical in nature. As the vitalist sensibility began to take center stage in the late Ming and early Qing, there was a shift from the ontological (the essential and transcendent) to the ontic (the contingent and experiential), and the latter came to be expressed as a historicism—a prevailing worldview that appreciated changing particulars rather than a foundational metaphysics of eternal universals. Thus, the term “historicism”, as it is used in the context of Qing philosophy, is interchangeable with descriptions such as “the sense of history”, “the historical” and “historical-mindedness”. Indeed, a permeating sense of history seemed to have formed a common thread that ran through the learning of the intellectual stalwarts who personified the Ming-Qing intellectual transition, such as the aforementioned Wang Fuzhi, Gu Yanwu, and Huang Zongxi. They pursued their subject-matters, such as the classics, institutions, statecraft, and phonology, by coming to grips with their patterns of development and growth, taking into account their diversity and particularity. They were inclined to eschew totalizing metaphysical views that conferred on things and affairs an underpinning unity. Instead, they embraced a historicist perspective that shunned supra-historical principles and transcendent norms, subjecting the investigation of phenomena to a logic of becoming, not being. Lest we exaggerate the extent and influence of this time-bound and relativist historicist perspective, a note of reservation and qualification is needed. While the Qing philosophical mode of intellection no doubt diverged from the ahistoricist Neo-Confucianism that saw history as a function of some ultimate truth such as li , tian , or dao , it was not entirely freed from the belief in some transhistorical and universal reality. The historicism in Qing philosophy was fraught with tension, to the extent that the appreciation for the particularity was tempered by a transhistorical sense of abiding universal order.

Our ideal-typical historicism found expression in Huang Zongxi’s and Wang Fuzhi’s efforts to reformulate the Neo-Confucian ontology. Huang’s historicist sensibility can be seen in the very first lines of his masterpiece, the Mingru xue’an (Intellectual Records of Ming Scholars), in which he lay out a metaphysical predicate:

Throughout heaven and earth is the mind-heart ( xin ), whose changes are unpredictable. It is inexorably manifested in myriad different forms. The mind-heart has no fundamental substance. Fundamental substance is that which is achieved by its efficacious effort. Therefore, to plumb the principle ( li ) is to probe the myriad different forms of this mind-heart, not the myriad different forms of the myriad things. (Huang MRXA: preface 9)

While Huang asserted the mind-heart as the point of departure, he moved away from the orientations of the so-called learning of the mind-heart ( xinxue ) in Neo-Confucianism. Instead of focusing on “fundamental substance”, Huang emphasized “efforts”. Rather than moving inward toward the mind-heart, Huang’s position drifted outward into the outer physical phenomenal world, in which there were the ever-changing “myriad different forms”, differences perceived through the one mind notwithstanding. In other words, although there was the overarching universal mind-heart, this mind-heart was no incorporeal original substance hovering above the concrete variegated world of particularities and efforts. There was no immutable fundamental substance as such, as the mind-heart was developmental in nature, manifested in the external myriad differences.

Huang also had a dynamic view of institutional evolution. Upon examining the historical origins and evolutions of the various specific institutions, he concluded that imitation of the institutions described in the ancient classics was impractical, stating that “under heaven… there have not been laws and institutions that could not be overthrown” (quoted in Gu Qingmei 1978: 146). Huang saw his own time as one bound to a long historical series, as one segment contiguous with the preceding and succeeding epoch. There were the ancient Three Dynasties with their magnificent order, followed by two thousand years of disorder after the death of Confucius. Now, the time for change had again come.

Wang Fuzhi reordered the Neo-Confucian ontology through his historico-philosophical theory of shi (conditions) vis-à-vis li (principle). Wang accorded principle priority as the immanent pattern of all things and affairs, that is, as that which is “the certain” ( guran ), “the necessary” ( biran ), “the self-evident” ( dangran ), “the why and wherefore” ( suoyiran ) and “the natural” ( ziran ). But principle was embedded in concrete psycho-physical force ( qi ) and manifested in actual conditions:

Therefore, originally, there is principle which can be readily seen in material force. Accordingly, this obtained principle naturally becomes conditions. Thus principle can be seen in these necessary conditions. (Wang QSYS: 48:9.5a)

Principle and conditions should always “be discussed syncretically as a whole” (Wang QSYS: 48:9.5a-b). This relational integrity presumed that the primacy of principle was predicated on the immediacy of differentiation: “Conditions become different when times are different; principle also becomes different when conditions are different” (Wang QSYS: 58:15.3b). Li-qi as a totality represented the universe as complex phenomena of perpetually appearing contingencies, subject to the workings of human agency: “When one accords with the times, one complies with that which the time makes inevitable in order to save oneself, and so escape from disaster” (quoted in McMorran 1975: 457).

As with Huang Zongxi, Wang Fu-chih saw the development of institutions through a historicist perspective. The institutions of each age were compositely the shi , or conditions sui generis . They were the Way of that age, which human beings with volitions and transformative leverage followed. Every age had its own appropriate institutions:

The rule of every epoch should be in accordance with its own time, establishing [the particular] institutions of an epoch…. Never has there been the successful establishment of governance as a result of imitating the one merit of just the one thing of the ancients, or championing one ancient thing, obtrusively injected into the present. (Wang QSYS: 21:5b-6a)

Even the Classics prescribed no unchanging models:

As to setting up schemes or arranging for details, neither the Book of History nor Confucius said anything about them…. Because the ancient institutions were meant to govern the ancient world and cannot be followed today, the superior man does not base his activities on them, and because what is suitable today can govern the world of today but will not necessarily for the future, the superior man does not hand it down to posterity as a model. (quoted in Chan 1963: 701)

Gu Yanwu, unlike Huang and Wang, eschewed metaphysical pondering altogether. He advanced the view that dynamic historical change was the rule of the day with regard to institutional development. The value of institutions was determined by the contexts of both their origins and their subsequent functional uses. He, for instance, hammered home this message in his proposal to reform the weisuo (guard and battalion) military system of the late Ming dynasty:

Without the change of institutions, current problems cannot be rectified. If in a circumstance where change is inevitable, one still conceals the actuality of [the need for] change and obstinately clings to the position of not changing, it will certainly lead to the gravest of calamities. (Gu GTLSWJ: 128)

There must be periodic reforms to forestall calamities:

If we understand that the feudal system changed into the prefectural system, we also understand that as the prefectural system in turn falls into decay, it too must change. Does it mean that there will be a return to feudalism? No, this is impossible. But if some sage who could invest the prefectural system with the essential meaning of feudalism were to appear, then the world would attain order…. Now, the defects of the prefectural [system] have developed to their utmost…. But still, it was followed in all its details. That is why the livelihood of people is diminishing daily; that is why China is growing weaker daily. (GTLSWJ: 12)

But it is noteworthy that while Huang, Wang, and Gu argued for expedient change relative to the time and its particular conditions, they all subscribed to the universal values ensconced in the ancient Classics. Huang embraced the enduring principles bequeathed by the ancient Three Dynasties. In his famous Mingyi daifang lu (A Plan for the Prince), he affirmed the constancy of the ancient principle of governance which was, in brief, unswerving devotion to promoting the interests and benefits of the people:

When the sagely rulers appeared, they did not treat their own profits as profits, but would seek to benefit the world. [They did] not regard harm to themselves as the only harm, but would seek to release the world from harm. They had to work thousands of times harder than other people in the world. (Huang MYDFL: 2)

Wang Fuzhi also posited timeless principle in the historical process of governance. He balanced the particularities of the dynasties against the constant principles of the Classics:

For the best way of government, there is nothing better than to examine the Classic of Documents and modify it with the words of Confucius. But the central point is whether the ruler’s heart is serious or dissolute…. The great function of government is to make use of worthy men and promote education. In dealing with people, it should bestow humanity and love to the highest degree. Whether in the government of Yao and Shun, in the Three Dynasties, or [in the period] from the Qin and Han down to the present, in no case can these principles not be extended and applied. (quoted in Chan 1963: 701)

Wang saw excellence in the ancient sage-rulers’ achievements and thus regarded historical changes as divergence from the Golden Past. Gu Yanwu also enjoined rulers to uphold the Confucian “four bonds” ( siwei ) as the overarching principles that guided history:

Propriety ( li ) and righteousness ( i ) are the supreme ways in ruling people. Integrity ( lian ) and the sense of shame ( chi ) are the great principles in cultivating humanity. Without integrity, there is nothing that is not coveted; without the sense of shame, there is no [wicked] deed that is not committed. If people are like that, catastrophe, failure, disorder, and death will come. (Gu RZL: 5:53)

In his Records of Daily Knowledge ( Rizhi lu ), Gu surveyed the entire course of Chinese history, from the Zhou to his own time, and concluded that only when ethics and morals were championed that peace and prosperity could be attained.

Thus, Huang, Wang, and Gu’s admiration of the ancient past imbued their historicism with a sense of ultimacy achieved once upon a time. While they might not be seeking literal return to the past, they betrayed their yearning for the constant and the transhistorical. Their goal of encrusting measures apposite to current needs with ancient principles suggested that there was more to history than the contingencies and expediencies of any one time.

The mid-Qing witnessed the predominance of the intellectualist pursuit of evidential research ( kaozheng ), with particular regard to the exegetical and philological investigations of the classics, driven by the fundamentalist goal to retrieve the antique Way enshrined in the classical texts. Nevertheless, when the classics and antiquity were subjected to meticulous scrutiny and rigorous examination, the ancient past came to be interrogated and problematized. Which were the authentic classics? Which part of antiquity was to be restored? How should we go about apprehending the past? Therefore, what began as a classicization of antiquity aimed at cutting through the Neo-Confucian metaphysical babel ended as a partial historicization of the classics. The ancient past and the classics became objects in time to be studied, thereby given their historicity. The works and thoughts of Dai Zhen (1724–77) and Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801) exemplified the historicist temper of the time.

Dai Zhen, as we have seen, contended that everything had its principle, which varied in accordance with the thing itself. Universality was broken into particularities, such that principle ( li ) was the “inner texture of things” ( tiaoli ), the organizational pattern and textural configuration of the psycho-physical force ( qi ), manifested as “living, drinking, eating, talking and acting” (Dai MZZYSZ: 110–113). Dai questioned the notion of an essential principle invariant through time through his idea of “expedient weighing of circumstances” ( quan ), associated with the idea of change ( bian ):

With quan , the insignificant and important can be distinguished…. Constancy refers to the obvious insignificant and important [things], observed by all throughout time. As for the important becoming insignificant, or insignificant becoming important, it is change ( bian ). Change cannot be fully known without the correct measure resulting from intelligent exhaustive observations and investigations. (MZZYSZ: 125)

Consequently, right and wrong ( shifei ) should be gauged in relationship to expediency:

Obstinately adhering to the apparently important and insignificant as seen by all, [many people] affirm what is right, and criticize what is wrong. In fact, [they] do not realize that timely expediency renders the important into the insignificant, the insignificant important. (MZZYSZ: 128)

In his masterly essay, “Probing the Original Goodness” ( Yuanshan ), Dai identified expediency as one of the characteristics of the pervading common virtue of “goodness” ( shan ): “Because of its coherence with changes, it is called the norm of expediency” (Chung-ying Cheng 1971: 68). This appreciation for change was transposed epistemologically into Dai’s preoccupation with meticulous examination of the origins and developments of multifarious things in history: ancient pronunciations of characters, attire and costumes, changes in place names, implements of the artisans, nomenclature and categories of fauna and flora, mathematics, musical instruments, and the like. The principles and meanings of the sages, and indeed the Way itself, had to be found in the actual “statutes, laws, institutions and measures” (Dai DZWJ: 145), that is, things in the historical records.

Yet, there was no consistent historicism in Dai’s philosophy. His conception of change was ultimately constrained by his abiding sense of the ultimacy of “the necessary” ( biran ):

The Odes says, “Where there is a thing, there is a rule”. “Thing” is the name for an actual body and an actual matter. “Rule” is the name for its primary fundamental quintessence. All actual bodies and actual matters are natural, which ultimately return to the necessary. (Dai MZZYSZ: 60)

The “primary fundamental quintessence” and “the necessary”, in space and time respectively, denoted the totality of all beings. Individuality was simply a variation or expression of the totalizing Way, or common goodness:

[G]oodness is used to mean what is inherent in humanity [and things.]… The so-called goodness is nothing other than the formation and transformation of heaven-and-earth and the function and capacities of nature. (Chung-ying Cheng 1971: 33–34)

Individual nature was the result of the “allotment” ( fen ) by the “ dao of heaven”. One’s destiny, as mandated by the Way of heaven, accounted for one’s individual nature: “The limit set by [Heaven’s] allotment is called destiny which, in producing a kind of constitution, is called nature” (1971: 2) This foundational perspective of inexorability became in Dai’s classical learning the confirmation of the universality of the sages’ ancient values:

If we do not seek to understand the utterances and deeds of the ancient sages, there is no way we can investigate their mind [which pervades] the ensuing thousands of years. Therefore, it is through [the study of] the Classics, mathematics, institutions and categories of things that [the meaning of their] language can be comprehended, thereby meeting them with one mind. (Dai DZWJ: 177)

Dai Zhen’s philosophy was inspired by faith in the eternality of the ancient Way, concerned with effecting the return of a moral system already established in antiquity. Yet, this return was enabled only by the examination of the historical records, which yielded a keen awareness of differentness, particularity, individuality and contingency—a historicist sensibility. Dai juxtaposed the classics (the Way/ dao ) and history (expediency/ quan ), such that historical pursuits were complementary with fundamentalist classical studies aimed at restoring ancient truths.

A testimonial of the synthesis of history and classics was Zhang Xuecheng’s famous statement in his Wenshi tongyi ( General principles of literature and history ): “The Six Classics are all histories”. He further said, “The ancients never did talk of principles separated from affairs. The Six Classics are the statutes and records of the government of the ancient rulers” (Zhang WSTY: 2). These claims formed the foundation of Zhang’s view of history: history referred to the history of the institutions and laws of antiquity, and principles could only be discussed with reference to actual events—history. If the classics were time-bound, that is, within antiquity, then the dao resided therein was temporally circumscribed:

The meanings concealed in what had occurred once upon a time [in antiquity] can be adequately explained through glossing and etymological study of the [classical] texts. As to the development of events which occurred thereafter, the classics could not have anything to say. (WSTY: 42)

The classics recorded only the laws and institutions of the ancient rulers, the material realities of the ancient Way:

The learning of the Three Dynasties recognized only history and not the classics. [It was because it] was intimately related to human affairs…. [O]ne who talks about human nature and heaven’s mandate must study history. (WSTY: 52)

In order to know the dao -in-history, one had to examine the entire course of history. Recent history revealed the recent Way, and ancient history shed light on the ancient one. Consequently, Zhang promoted the study of current history and the development of an awareness of “valuing the institutions of the current ruler”. Learning involved investigations of the existing institutions closely connected to human relations and daily utility. No matter how advanced scholarship on the ancient past was, without knowing the present, it would be “inappropriate for practical application” (WSTY: 53).

But Zhang did not see the past simply as successive parades of relative spatial forms and temporal segments. Instead of particularizing the ancient past and the classics once and for all, Zhang often sought in them the universally normative. The dao -in-history pertained to the pattern of change of the political, social and institutional polity, things such as “government, pedagogy, marking out boundaries, delimiting prefectures, well-field system, feudalism and education” (WSTY: 34). These were changing forms of life relative to their own place and time, embodying their own Way. But overarching these particular Ways was the transhistorical dao of the ancient sages, enshrined in the classics, which Zhang called the “the essential Way” ( daoti ):

The essential Way leaves nothing unembodied. It is exhaustively explicated in the Six Classics. The various other philosophers were able to write at all, maintaining their well-reasoned viewpoints and making logical sense, because [they] invariably had attained [understanding] of one aspect of the essential dao . (WSTY: 16–17)

This transhistorical Way was thus the provenance of all learning and philosophy. Elsewhere, Zhang regarded this Way as “moral-ritual teachings” ( mingjiao ):

What the ancient sage-rulers showed the world to enlighten the people were nothing but [their] moral-ritual teachings. Since ancient times, none have achieved peace without moral-ritual teachings. (WSTY: 95)

Moral-ritual teachings were the very stuff and source of governance. When Zhang urged that post-antiquity history be examined independently of the Six Classics, he did not aim at demolishing the classics’ sacral authority. He only cautioned against any literal usage of them in historical endeavors, which could swamp all sense of change after the Three Dynasties. Zhang enjoined us to “value summing up the essence of the principles of the Six Classics and narrate events in time in order to probe the great dao ” (WSTY: 42). History, in a sense, was the unfurling of this authoritative “great Way” ( dadao ), the meanings and messages of which were expounded in the classics:

The great meaning of the Six Classics is brilliant as the sun and moon. [The lessons of] losses and gains in the Three Dynasties can be projected [as guides for the subsequent] hundred ages. (WSTY: 50)

Thus, in the “essential dao ”, the “great dao ” or the essential and great “moral-ritual teachings”, Zhang’s historicism was dissolved.

As the cases of Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng show, Qing thought involved the rethinking of the individual as a historical being who verified the validity of institutions and laws through the authority of history, resisting values and norms that were conceived as the formulaic good applied to all times and cases. Yet, it dislodged no telos of the ancient Way, as a mainspring of Qing philosophy was surely the retrieval of the dao of the classics. Historicism as a means of evaluating the past achieved no hegemony. What occurred was a critical hermeneutical exploration of the ancient classics and writings. Within the boundaries of the inherited intellectual tradition, the classicist endeavors bred a historicist sensibility, problematizing the nature of the Way as the embodiment of truth-in/above-history. This historicism signified a discursive tension that placed a strain on an intellectual field, but one nevertheless circumscribed by age-old Confucian values.

In traditional China, the Confucian literati did not consider thought and learning to be separate from action in the public world at large. They were, in fact, much inspired by a beatific vision of a public space in which social and political actions yielded a world of peace and order. In the classic text, Doctrine of the Mean ( Zhongyong ), the profound paradigmatic person ( junzi ) is described as one who reverently realizes one’s virtuous, heaven-conferred nature, and pursues inquiry and learning. The Great Learning ( Daxue ) further tells us that these efforts have a three-pronged end: cultivating the self ( xiuxin ), ordering the state ( zhiguo ), and bringing peace to the world ( ping tianxia ). Thus, the individuated internal goal of achieving sagehood ( neisheng ) is inextricably bound to the outer concerns of implementing the Way of kingship ( waiwang ). In contradistinction to Plato’s or even Hegel’s otherworldly philosophy—Plato saw the philosopher as one whose body (not mind) inhabited the city of his fellow human beings, and Hegel viewed philosophy as a world stood on its head, from the vantage point of commonsense—Confucianism regarded the world of workaday affairs as coterminous with the world of ideas in which thinkers dwelled. The abiding ideal of “ordering the world and extending utility” ( jingshi zhiyong ) demanded the conjugation of private moral cultivation and its public realization. In Qing philosophy, there was this palpable intellectual purport based on the utilitarian ideal of ordering the world, which bred a moral seriousness about the everyday realities of society and state. This utilitarianism posited an intimate relation between thought and action, regarding as insignificant or irrelevant metaphysical concepts that resisted translation into some form of effort leading to concrete outcomes. The corollaries of xue (learning) and zhi (knowing) were yong (utility) and xing (action).

To be sure, this utilitarianism was not devoid of moral and normative imperatives, to the extent that actions had to be inspired and guided by values such as moral rulership ( wang ), rightness and integrity ( yi ), and public-mindedness ( gong ). At the same time, it embraced an ethical perspective that invested value in the utility and function of secular, institutional amelioration. From the late Ming onward, thought did gravitate far more toward actualities and practicalities, as the ideal and slogan of jingshi , ordering the world, took center stage. Gu Yanwu loathed what he considered to be the “empty and vacuous learning” ( kongxu zhi xue ) in the Ming times, which

disposed of and refrained from talking about the ills and deprivations within the four seas, and spoke always about lofty imperceptible subtlety and absolute holistic purity. (Gu GTLSWJ: 43)

Following the examples of the sages who never severed the ties between learning and socio-political concerns, Gu proclaimed that

he would not pursue any learning that does not relate to the central principle of the Six Classics and the affairs and responsibilities in the current world.
all the books written by them [the sages] were for the purpose of discarding the wrong and returning to the right, and of changing customs and practices so as to attain order and harmony, (GTLSWJ: 142)

so “a profound person pursues learning to illuminate the Way and save the world” (GTLSWJ: 103). Gu wrote his masterwork, Records of Daily Knowledge ( Rizhi lu ), to urge participation in society, a life-long endeavor that “did not end until death” ( si er hou yi ). The book formulated practical views that would be useful for the rulers:

I wrote…the Records of Daily Knowledge , the first part of which is on classical studies, the middle part on the way of governance, and the final part on general experience and general knowledge, altogether over thirty fascicles. In the event a prince appears, he would discern in it actual practices and affairs. With it, he could elevate this current age to the prosperity of the ancient age of order. (GTLSWJ: 103)

A similar utilitarian thread ran through Huang Zongxi’s thought. He defined the existential mission of a Confucian profound person, junzi , to which everyone should aspire: “To bring peace to the country and to preserve society are the obligations of a junzi ” (Huang MYDFL: 32). His learning was meant to form “the warp and the woof of heaven-and-earth” ( jingwei tiandi ), and so he criticized scholars for

trying futilely to manage the world by lavish and high-sounding ideas of establishing the ultimate in order to regenerate the masses, of establishing the mind-heart of the universe, and of following the everlasting peace of the thousand ages.

Arrogantly, they

view those who manage finances and taxation as engaging in hoarding profit and wealth… and those who carefully supervise administration and government as tawdry officials.
when the day to serve the country comes, they are bemused and befuddled, as though they are sitting within a cloud. Therefore, the ways of the world ( shidao ) have become corrupt and rotten. (Huang NLWDHJ: vol. 6, p. 549)

The practical ways of the world could be found in the classics and histories: “The Six Classics are all books that recorded the Way…, the actual rulership ( shizhi )…, the actual practices ( shixing )” (Huang NLWDHJ: vol. 6, p. 442–443). “All that was recorded in the Twenty-one Histories was the enterprise of ordering the world” (Huang NLWY: vol. 6, p. 351).

Wang Fuzhi also castigated the late Ming literati for embracing empty intuitionism, “becoming lax about maintaining clear distinctions in social relations ( minglun ) and investigating things”, such that they no longer cared about “whether or not names correspond to realities” (quoted in McMorran 1975: 434). Learning, to Wang, must have a practical intellectual purport:

Every paragraph, every title, every work, and every sentence should lead one back to one’s body and mind-heart. They should cohere with one’s grand purpose,
to distinguish its grand meaning in order to establish the basis for cultivating oneself and governance. (quoted in Ji Wenfu 1978: 1–3)

Wang privileged the study of history precisely because of its practical utility: “What is valuable about history is its account of the past as the teacher of the future”. History would be ill written if “the general framework of ordering the world ( jingshi ) is not illuminated” (quoted in 1978: 1). In short, historical learning, in the end, was statecraft.

While it seemed evident that utilitarian thinking that actively combatted moral intuitionism predominated in the early Qing in the seventeenth century, its edges might have been dulled in the eighteenth century. The conventional explanation is that scholars channeled their energy into the sort of pedantic studies of philology and classical texts, as represented by the so-called movement of evidential learning ( kaozheng xue ) that received the court’s approval and encouragement. But it is a very partial view that fails to convey the whole picture, as utilitarian thinking was in fact alive and well among the kaozheng practitioners and partisans, many of whom continued to see the classics as guides to ordering the world. Qian Daxin (1728–1804), a towering figure in the kaozheng movement, touted the practical value of these ancient texts:

[The Five Classics] were employed by the sages to make the warps and woofs of the world. The ultimate goal was to render the world good. The secondary function was to rule oneself. (Qian QYTWJ: 310)

Qian referred to the classics specifically in terms of the ideals of jingshi and zhiyong —ordering the world and extending utility:

Confucian learning rests with the illumination of the substance in order to extend utility. The Odes , Documents , and Rites are all writings for the ordering of the world. In the Analects with twenty fascicles and Mencius with seven fascicles, more than half are discussions on administration and government. What the masters and students discussed and sought at the time were the principles of sustaining oneself, of living in the world, of refusal, of acceptance, of receiving, and of giving. As for [the philosophical questions of] nature and the Way of heaven, even those who were eminently upright did not hear of them. In this manner, the Confucians worked on practicality and utility, and did not value empty talks. (QYTWJ: 373)

In short, wen , literary expressions and writings, must seek to realize the following practical goals: illuminating the Way ( mingdao ), ordering the world ( jingshi ), revealing the subtle ( chanyu ), and rectifying customs ( zhengsu ).

Zhang Xuecheng’s historiographic thinking was anchored on the goal and ideal of ordering the world. Because the classics “outlined the ordering of the world by the kings and the emperors”, they were histories indeed. Zhang proclaimed that “historical learning is for the ordering of the world” ( shixue suoyi jingshi ):

I say, “historical learning is for the ordering of the world. It is surely not writings of empty words”. For instance, the Six Classics all came from Confucius. The early Confucians thought that his greatest achievement was the Spring and Autumn Annals. It was precisely because it was intimately related to the social realities of the time. Those of the later ages who spoke about writings disregarded social realities, and discussed in an abstract manner the nature and heaven. Thus, I know they achieved nothing. Scholars who do not know such purport [of learning] are not qualified to talk about historical learning.

Zhang criticized the Han learning scholars for dwelling on the trivial ceremonial details ( quli ) while neglecting and ignoring the basic political institutions ( jingli ). Practical learning meant understanding “the essential substance of the ancients in order to enlarge the mind-heart”, so that one could “determine what is right for the present” (Zhang WSTY: 53).

The discursive production of Qing philosophy was empowered and powered by the utilitarian impulse to engender and yield utility, seeking emancipation from the moral introspection of Song-Ming thought. As Qing philosophical thought abjured abstract pondering of metaphysical matters and questions, it turned to advocacy for ameliorative actions that directly bettered the state and society.

A protuberant ideational strand that made up the Qing philosophical universe was the affirmative outlook regarding discursive knowledge and intellectual pursuit of the dao as the Way of the exterior world, supplanting the introspective endeavor and spiritual contemplation aimed at internal enlightenment and realization. A word here about the socio-political context of this shift is necessary. The intellectualist reorientation that characterized the Ming-Qing transition owed much to the literati’s conception of the palpable political, social, and economic problems of dynastic decline, which eventuated in the fall of the Ming and the establishment of a conquest dynasty. As they saw it, the root cause of dynastic declension and demise was the pervasive moral and spiritual degeneration brought on by the intellectual bankruptcy of the late Ming, as learning and thinking fell under the pernicious sway of empty intuitionism and internal introspection. A moribund culture and a weak state could only be reinvigorated with the right kind of learning that was concrete, practical, and substantive. This culture of criticism as a result placed a premium on the classics, the actual words of the ancient sages as the substantive source of authority. Antiquity itself, personified by the efficacious virtuous deeds of the sages, served as the exemplar of order and amelioration. As particular attention was lavished on the thorough, literal understanding of these texts and words, an intellectualist philosophical outlook emerged in the world of thought and learning. Yü Ying-shih has famously labeled this outlook “intellectualism”, which is an ideal-type thinking abstracted from the Confucian quest for “the way of inquiry and learning” ( dao wenxue ), in contradistinction to the anti-intellectualist enterprise of “honoring the heaven-endowed moral virtuous nature” ( zun dexing ). The former sought data and corroborations of realities in the external realm of myriad phenomena and things, whereas the latter appealed intuitively to the internal realm of one’s very nature, whose quiddity was morally good, insofar as it was endowed by heaven. If Song-Ming philosophical thought was characterized by its identification with inner moral reckoning and awakening, then the Qing counterpart was marked by its special focusing on external, objective knowledge, whose basis and point of departure were the classical texts as objects of cognitive inquiries.

Yet, the point must be made that embedded in this rupture was continuity in some important ways. The entire Song-Ming tradition of thought was no doubt subjected to wholesale reexamination, but to begin with, the basis of their criticism and construction stemmed from a well-established preexisting strand of learning. One famous Song definition of the quintessence of the Confucian tradition by Liu Yi (1017–1086) identified the three principal components of ti (substance, essence, spirit, principle, core, and soul), yong (function, utility, practicality, application, action, and effort) and wen (literature, writings, philology, belles-lettres, textual learning, classical studies). Together, they constituted the goals and contents of Confucian learning. Qing intellectualism focused on the primacy of wen as a central manifestation of yong . Moreover, the scholars, despite their general discontent with what they perceived to be empty and recondite Song-Ming learning and their desire to reform it, continued to delineate their scholarly and philosophical allegiance in terms of association with the two schools of Neo-Confucianism: the so-called Cheng-Zhu school and Lu-Wang school. In fact, many of them engaged in intellectualist enterprises precisely for the purpose of wielding philology as a weapon to defend their philosophical views while at the same time seeking to weaken and demolish those of their opponents.

Nevertheless, even though Qing intellectualism was an outgrowth of the Confucian tradition with a time-worn pedigree, it was also new in the sense that the kaozheng (evidential research) movement and methodology, the utmost expression of the intellectualist spirit, by virtue of its intellectual scale and density, wrought an epochal breakthrough. It came to be inescapably and unmistakably identified with the special Qing way of construing reality and the world. Kaozheng scholarship opened up hermeneutic issues of interpretation. As Benjamin Elman has pointed out, the classics as a whole were unproblematically recognized as assent-eliciting cultural and textual capital, but once they were subjected to interrogation as individual separate texts, dissent and disquiet arose. The authenticity of some texts came to be questioned; their places in the heterogeneous commentarial came to be debated; their authority came to be reassessed; and the manner of retrieving the antique messages came to be argued. In short, the classics were historicized. Moreover, what began as studies of the classics spilled over into other areas of inquiry—bronze artifacts, pre-Qin thinkers and texts, history, geography, cosmology, science, and so on.

Gu Yanwu, in the early Qing, asserted that the study of principle ( lixue ) was irredeemably contracted to the study of the classics ( jingxue ). According to him, in ancient times, any study of principle was perforce an investigation of the classics, in which the basis and operation of principle could be discerned and understood. Hence his research of ancient phonology:

I think that the study of the Nine Classics should begin with textual analysis, and the study of textual analysis should begin with a knowledge of phonology. It is the same with the study of all the various philosophers and the hundred schools. (Gu GTLSWJ: 76)

Gu criticized his contemporaries for pursuing what was to him empty and abstract “Chan Buddhist learning” ( Chanxue ), since they relied on the “records of dialogues” ( yulu ) of the Song-Ming scholars and ignored the classics, which were the ben of learning, that is, the root, substance, and basis. He rejected the totalizing methodology of yiguan zhi fa (the way of connecting everything), which was the epistemological orientation of Song-Ming learning that eschewed and swamped concrete particulars. Instead, Gu called for “ duoxue er shi (to get to know through multifarious learning)” and “ duojian er shi (to get to know through multifarious observation)”, such that one achieved “ boxue yu wen (erudition in all writings)” (Gu GTLSWJ: 43–44). To him, the classics recorded and consisted of nothing but “what the sages had heard and seen ( shengren suowen suojian )” (Gu RZL: 37–38). His intellectualist stance was a classic expression of “following the way of learning and inquiry” ( dao wenxue ), involving empirical observations and painstaking accumulation of broad knowledge.

Huang Zongxi, as a self-touted follower of the Lu-Wang tradition, made a point to reinterpret Wang Yangming’s central idea of “ zhi liangzhi ” (extending spontaneous moral knowing to the utmost) in intellectualist terms. While Wang tended to think that knowledge must be grasped in terms of the ultimate substance of one’s own mind-heart and could not be made clear in words, thereby casting doubt on the efficacy of words and discursive practices, Huang spoke on behalf of the Ming master by claiming that the act of “extending” ( zhi ) innate moral knowing was practice, that is, the very act of “broad learning, examining and inquiring, deliberation with utmost care, and identifying differences clearly are all practices” (Huang MRXA: v.2, p. 53). Later, Quan Zuwang (1705–1755), an admirer of Huang’s scholarship, would offer this encomium by citing Huang’s words:

[Huang] once said, “The profession of [studying] the classics is for the ordering of the world (ordering the world).” Therefore, he did not pursue the learning of the petty Confucians but commanded [himself] to study the classics and history. He also said, “Without [such] study, the changes and transformations of principle ( i ) cannot be verified”. (quoted in Gu Qingmei 1978: 118)

Wang Fuzhi also repudiated the Neo-Confucian epistemological assertions of the possibility of mingjie (esoteric understanding) and miaowu (mysterious enlightenment), both which were anti-intellectualist in conception, in that they referred to direct intuitive apprehension of the truth without the intervention of actual study. He insisted that “the principles of the multitudinous things cannot be known without learning and cannot be distinguished without erudition”. Knowledge, for Wang, came from our direct engagement with and experience of the “changing external forms” ( kexing ) in the universe, such as

the rising, setting, waning, and waxing of the sun and moon, and the succession of the seasons, the birth and death of the myriad things, and wind, rain, dew, and thunder. (quoted in Hou Wailu 1958, 108)

He claimed that

when a thing is known, then its name is known. When its name is known, then its significance is known. Without contact with things, even if the mind-heart is imbued with its innate ability, [it] cannot name the names, and things cannot be accomplished. (ibid., 108 ***see previous* )

Wang thus argued strongly in favor of “investigation of things” ( gewu ), which employed both the mind-heart, and our senses of hearing and seeing, that is, empirical observation. He defined their inexorable interrelation and interaction in the quest for knowledge:

The effort of the investigation of things employs both the faculty of the mind-heart, and hearing and seeing. Study and inquiry are the mainstay, aided by thinking and distinguishing between differences…. Hearing and seeing are the resources for the functioning of the mind-heart, setting the direction for it to follow. (quoted in Ji Wenfu 1978: 45)

Wang’s theory of knowledge affirmed the irreducibility of discursive knowledge gained thorough investigating things—study and inquiry—to morality spontaneously apprehended by the mind-heart.

In the eighteenth century, when the kaozheng (evidential research) movement held sway, the common consensus was that learning must be concrete and empirical. The ultimate goal was to retrieve and restore, via philological explications ( xungu ), the pristine and unadulterated meanings of the sages’ words, so that their moral meanings ( yili ) could come to the fore, crystal clear. Qian Daxin said it well:

There are first writings and words ( wenzi ) and then there are philological explications of the classics. There are first philological explications and then there are moral principles. Philological explications of the classics are the sources from which moral meanings are derived. (Qian QYTWJ: 349)
Under heaven, is there any endeavor that abandons study and inquiry and specifically pursues the reverent realization of one’s moral nature? (QYTWJ: 245)

Here, he explicitly affirmed the importance of following the way of inquiry and learning, warning against exclusive focus on the realization of our putatively moral nature. This intellectualist stance was shared by Dai Zhen, who also waxed rhetorical:

But if the pursuit of study and inquiry was abandoned, would it then be possible to lead a life for the reverent realization of one’s moral nature? (Dai DZWJ: 140)

For Dai, to study and inquire was to “hear the dao ( wendao )” (DZWJ: 145). Thus, the intellectualist quest was antecedent to any attempt to apprehend principle and the nature:

To seek the most appropriate [principles] means that knowledge comes first. In no way does sagely learning ever call for eliminating selfishness without also seeking to remove befuddlement, or emphasizing action without first emphasizing knowledge. (quoted in Yü Ying-shih 1982: 389)

To put it plainly, “moral nature… feeds on learning and inquiry in order to develop sagely intelligence” (quoted in 1982: 390).

Zhang Xuecheng shared the kaozheng scholars’ enthusiasm for concrete and critical study of the classics (which he regarded as histories) and their aversion toward esoteric moral speculation. He stated, “The ancients never did talk about principle removed from things and affairs”, and “those who talk about nature and heaven’s mandate must study history” (quoted in Yü Ying-shih 1976: 46). Like Huang Zongxi, he redefined, in intellectualist terms, what Wang Yangming’s notion of zhi liangzhi (extending spontaneous moral knowing to the utmost) meant. Wang’s liangzhi was innate, spontaneous, ineffable, and intuitive, realizable through internal introspection. By contrast, Zhang’s version referred to “what a learner considered to be closest to his talents ( cai ) [and]… affective and emotive predispositions ( xingqing )”, both of which were natural predispositions “to learn” ( xue ). On the other hand, Zhang explained the notion of “extending” zhi as “the learner’s effort to search for knowledge” ( xuezhe qiuzhi zhi gong ) (quoted in Yü Ying-shih 1976: 79–80).

In sum, intellectualism, as a leitmotif in the constellation of Qing philosophy, expresses itself in two ways. As a methodology, it referred to the pursuit of inferential and empirical knowledge, most prominently manifested in textual philological research. As a philosophical outlook, it reevaluated and revised the central Neo-Confucian notion of internal self-cultivation aimed at spontaneous realization of the heaven-endowed moral nature, arguing instead in favor of the quest for external knowledge mediated by the noetic senses. Intellectual cognitive faculties would take precedence over the intuitive power of the mind-heart.

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  • Zhang Xun 张循, 2013, “’Junzi xingli buqiu biansu:’ Qingdai kaojuxue de shehui xingge ‘君子行礼,不求变俗:’ 清代考据学的社会性格”, Qingshi yanjiu 清史研究 1(February): 24–32.
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  • –––, “Hanxue de neizai jinzhang: Qingdai sixiangshi shang ‘Han Song zhi zheng’ de yi ge jieshi 汉学的内在紧张:清代思想史上“汉宋之争”的一个新解释”, Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 中央研究院近代史研究所集刊63(March 2009):49–96.
  • –––, 2009, “Haxue neibude ‘Han Song zhi zheng:’ cong Chen Li de ‘Han Song tiaohe’ kan Qingdai sixiangshi shang de shencheng hanyi 汉学内部的’汉宋之争:’ 从陈澧的’汉宋调和’看清代思想史上’汉宋之争’的深层涵义”, Hanxue yanjiu 汉学研究 27(4): 295–328.
  • –––, 2010, “Budu Han Song shu ye zheng Han Song xue: Qingdai Han Song zhi zheng ‘fengqi’ de xingcheng 不读汉宋书,也争汉宋学:清代汉宋之争“风气”的形成”, Zhonghua wenshi luncong 中华文史论丛, 4(December): 275–314.
  • Zhang Lizhu 张丽珠, 1999, Qingdai yilixue xinmao 清代义理学新貌, Taibei: Liren shuju.
  • –––, 2003, Qingdai xin yilixue:Chuantong yu xiandai de jiaohui 清代新义理学: 传统与现代的交会, Taibei: Liren shuju.
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  • Ge Rongjin 葛荣晋 and Wang Juncai 王俊才, 1996, Lu Shiyi pingzhuan 陆世仪评传, Nanjing: Nanjingdaxue chubanshe.
  • Gu Qingmei 古清美, 1978, Huang Lizhou zhi shengping ji qi xueshu sixiang 黄梨洲之生平及其学术思想, Taibei: Guoli Taiwan daxie chubanshe.
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