THE EMPLOYMENT OF FOREIGN MILITARY TALENT:
CHINESE TRADITION AND LATE CH'ING PRACTICE
RICHARD J. SMITH*
Despite China's persistent and often pronounced Sinocentrism, and her general distrust of aliens in the interior, the theoretically self-sufficient Middle Kingdom in practice had to make almost continual use of foreign military talents. This was true not only of conquest dynasties and periods when martial values were disesteemed.2 The expansive Chinese dynasties of Han and T'ang also employed barbarians in a great number of civil and military capacities. It has been estimated, for example, that at times more than half of the T'ang military posts were held by men of foreign origin.3 So pronounced was Tang Wu-tsung's appreciation for foreign administrative and military talents that he commissioned his minister, Li Te-yü, to compile the biographies of thirty foreigners from Ch'in to T'ang times who had rendered "meritorious and loyal" service to China. This two chuan work, no longer extant, bore the title I-yü kuei-chung chuan (Biographies of Foreigners Who Returned to Loyalty), emphasizing the idea that it was natural for outsiders to come to the fold of Chinese culture and offer their submission and service to the Middle Kingdom.4
We do not know who the thirty individuals who "left [their] distant lands and returned to China" were, but there are several likely candidates. By looking briefly at a few representative foreigners in the Chinese military service, and examining the foreword to the I-yü kuei-chung chüan (preserved in Li Te-yu's collected works) and other evidence, we may gain some idea of the theory behind employing barbarian officers, as well as the circumstances under which they were engaged, the standards by which their loyalty was judged, and the means by which they were controlled. Such a survey provides the necessary backdrop for a discussion of Chinese policy toward foreign employees in the late Ch'ing period, when China faced unprecedented challenges both within and without.5
Although by 1860 at least a few Chinese had come to see that China was entering a new stage in her foreign relations, Chinese
* Dr. Smith is Assistant Professor of History, Rice University, Houston, Texas.