[ { "id": 212398, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 340, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "317\n\nNowadays piracy is very much in the news again, in the Malacca Straits, the Sulu sea, and even in the waters outside Hong Kong. There is scope for a new pirate book. However, it would call for more political background and a deeper understanding of human nature than Lilius shows in this briskly moving but somewhat superficial narrative.\n\nANTHONY LAWRENCE\n\nBeatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ching China, 1723-1820 Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991. xxi + 417 pp. Bibliography. Glossary. Index.\n\nThe Emperors of China were both person and institution. The Chinese bureaucracy was the most highly developed organization of its kind in the pre-modern world, with a complex array of rules and regulations which confined and defined government. The Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723-35) is traditionally portrayed as the epitome of a ruthless despot, a cunning autocrat who developed a whole new secret police system to solidify his power. The Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-95) based his rule of more than sixty years on political adeptness, not ceremonial presence. The traditional image of a Confucian official is of a man who served principle, not a ruler, and who dared to criticize those Emperors who strayed from the Middle Way (read \"bureaucratically defined acceptable behavior\").\n\nHow do we reconcile these contradictory views? Did the Emperor terrorize the literati-officials into submission, or was he merely the tool of an ageless bureaucracy? Is Chinese history during the Qing the record of strong or weak monarchs, or did institutions evolve which tempered the influence of the Son of Heaven?\n\nBeatrice Bartlett has provided us in Monarchs and Ministers with a ground-breaking work. Bartlett, delving deeper into Qing court documents than any previous foreign scholar, has provided us with crucial information on the evolution of the political structure of China's last dynasty. Where other scholars have given us glimpses of Emperors, have laid out initial hypotheses or focused on narrower political issues, Bartlett has unlocked the actual records and drawn together different strands of research on 18th century China.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212399, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 341, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "318\n\nThe origins of the Grand Council, which served as the highest executive body under the Emperor in the Qing government from the first quarter of the eighteenth century, are clarified for the first time. It was not created one day through act of parliament. Nor was it the accidental survivor of a military planning group as its Chinese name might suggest. Bartlett shows the transformation from direct imperial personal rule (Yongzheng's ad hoc arrangements of the Military Finance Section, the High Officials in Charge of Military Strategy, and the palace memorial system) to joint monarchical conciliar administration (Qianlong's regularization of the Grand Council). The development of an inner court to offset the rigidity and limitations of the outer court is traced, and we are shown how the Qianlong Emperor adapted to the increasingly complex demands of ruling China. The Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722) was brilliant, but could rely on raw Manchu force to rule; Yongzheng and Qianlong had to use more \"Confucian\" means, at the same time surviving the factionalism of the imperial family.\n\nBartlett has not simply used the Qing archives to sketch political events, or to mark the stages of development of the Grand Council. She has used provenance to enlighten us on process, and has gained an understanding of the whole range of communication that passed between Emperor, grand councillors and provincial officials. This system has been researched before, but no one has gone into such detail on the forms of communication and the act of decision making. The grand councillors knew that control of information flow led to control of decisions. As the palace memorial system expanded from a secret, personal channel between the Emperor and a few officials to a broader, prioritized but more impersonal avenue, the councillors and their clerks injected themselves into the process. Before long they perused memorials, drafted summaries and proposed imperial replies (see, for example, pp 98-101).\n\nThe tension between Emperor and officials, and among officials, was conceptualized by Joseph Levenson in his trilogy Confucian China and its Modern Fate. Bartlett brings Levenson's provocative concept down to earth, and shows the conflict and cooperation between emperor and councillor, and inner and outer court officials. On the dichotomy of an all-powerful Emperor and officials with independent legitimacy, we are told that the outer court ran according to an administrative code. Although the monarch could probably", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212400, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 342, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "319\n\nchange these arrangements at will (and indeed in a few instances did so), for most matters imperial respect for established statutes prevailed and advice on the wisdom of proposed changes was sought and followed.' (p.6). This was not the case with the inner court in the eighteenth century. It was the creation of the Emperor. But Bartlett argues that by the end of the century the Grand Council straddled the roles of pawn and directorate. The result was a greatly expanded inner-court dominance, but one where both ministers and monarchs could be strong. While the framework for autocracy continued in place, the expansion of inner-court work and the ministerial skill and labor essential to accomplishing it weakened the monarchs' ability fully to oversee and direct the government.\" (p 7).\n\nHere I might take issue with the statement that the Grand Council weakened the monarch's ability to direct government; rather, it permitted him to do more than he could alone. It is at this point within the system that the individual comes into play, and the balance between monarchical power and conciliar power was less a question of institution, and rather varied on the basis of the personal qualities of the incumbent emperor, as well as the qualities of certain officials such as Heshen.\n\nThere is the risk in working with thousands of documents of losing sight of the wood for the trees. The reader is forewarned by the author that Part One covering the Yongzheng reign is very detailed. This reflects the evolution of the Grand Council as the Yongzheng and Qianlong Emperors experimented with the Inner Court before it was enshrined in statute. In Part Two Bartlett soars above the foliage to give us an overview of the mechanism of government.\n\nMonarchs and Ministers is a seminal work, and opens up many avenues of research. We must study the officials who held concurrent titles in both the Inner and Outer Court, and determine if their authority derived from their positions as Grand Councillors or from their incumbency as presidents of various boards (much as we ponder the power of government officials that derive from their party membership in modern China). This book also looks outward from the Inner Court, and we would do well to look inward from the Outer Court. We should not underestimate the value of Bartlett's analysis of the types of documents existing in the archives. There was no guide to the materials; who drafted them, who read them.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212523, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1991", "page_number": 77, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "57\n\nCollectively, these secretaries were known as mu.38 There are a number of learned treatises on the subject in Chinese, but I do not think that the function of these people should be expounded here; suffice to say that they were treated as respected senior secretaries by the officials, including Ruan Yuan, and were assigned certain tasks. A few examples of Ruan Yuan's secretaries follow: Zhang Jian was with Ruan Yuan in Zhejiang, Canton, and after his retirement, in Yangzhou as well. He helped formulate and implement such policies as eradication of coastal piracy, famine relief, salt administration, and transportation of tribute grain by sea. Chen Hongshou's expertise ranged from river administration to coastal defence. Together with Chen Wenxu, Zhu Weibi, Shi Guoqi, and Ruan Yuan himself, he also drafted the memorials Ruan Yuan sent to the Jiaqing Emperor while he was Governor of Zhejiang. Scholars with \"an extraordinarily fine hand\"39 who worked as actual copyists for Ruan Yuan's memorials include Fang Pu, He Yuanxi, Shi Guoqi, and Wu Shucheng.40\n\nRuan Yuan found jobs for other scholars in academic institutions. The academies he founded, Gu jing jing she in Hangzhou and the Xue hai tang in Canton, had absorbed scores of scholars. Other academies took on dozens of others. Among the less commonly known academies founded or rejuvenated by Ruan Yuan were the An lan Academy41 in Haining, Zhejiang,42 and the Ta liang Academy in Henan.43 In appointing scholars he considered worthwhile to these academies, Ruan Yuan in fact helped to spread Han Learning throughout the country. Ruan Yuan must have been at his wit's end in trying to find a suitable place for so eccentric a scholar as Fang Dongshu (1772-1851). Fang, from Tongcheng, who only attained the first degree, was noted for his poverty and his inability to get along with anyone, except perhaps Ruan Yuan. In 1819, Ruan Yuan brought him to Canton to work on the Guang dong tong zhi under Jiang Fan. Jiang assigned him research and writing which was supposed to take two years to complete, but Fang finished the task in one month. Ruan Yuan then found him a job at Hai men Academy in Lianzhou, where he lasted less than one year; with a repeat performance at the Chang yang Academy for a similar period. Exasperated, Ruan Yuan took Fang onto his own personal staff.\n\nFor scholars who worked on various literary projects sponsored by Ruan Yuan, see the Appendices to this paper.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215993, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 292, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "226\n\nKangxi was an earlier Manchurian emperor who had followed the movements of Catholic missionaries with great interest, both impressed by some and later revolted by others. His imperial son and successor, the Yongzheng emperor (ruling from 1723-1736), castigated those following the \"Lord Of Heaven\" as heretics (viduan) in his commentary to the seventh maxim of his father. Legge translated and commented on Yongzheng's authoritative interpretations of the Sacred Edict in lectures presented at Oxford's Taylor Institute in 1877, and later published them in Hong Kong under the title \"Imperial Confucianism\" in the sinological journal, China Review 6:3-6 (1878), pp. 147-158, 223-235, 299-310, 363-374. A good discussion of the impact of the Sacred Edict as part of the educative dimension of the Qing dynasty's civil servants is provided in Victor H. Mair, \"Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict,” in David Johnson, et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 325-359.\n\n20. See the description and reflections of a British journalist at the scene in China Mail #803 (July 5, 1860), pp. 106-107.\n\n21. His age was given in Legge's writings on Ch'ea. The fact that he had a son is verified through the records of the Chinese congregation of Union Church in Hong Kong, where a man named Che who joined the church in the late 1860s is identified as \"the son of the martyr.\" This information was gleaned from Carl Smith's archives.\n\n22. Following Lewis Rambo's lead, we will assume that conversion is a “dynamic, multifaceted process of transformation\" including, at the very least, elements of \"cultural, social, personal, and religious systems.\" See Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 6-7.\n\n23. This is one possible literal rendering of the translated title for the \"Bible\", the phrase also being used as a general reference term in traditional China for the Ruist canon. In contemporary China, that latter association is almost completely lost.\n\n24. One Chinese scholar believes that Wang's influence on Walter Medhurst's translation commitments in the Delegates' Committee were very extensive, but offers no precise historical documentation to support the claim. It is certainly sufficient to know that Wang was Medhurst's \"native informant,\" for the influences could not help but be there, especially when questions of style and phrasing more suitable to Ruist tastes were raised. See Lee Chi-fang, Wáng T'ao (1828-1897): his life, thought, scholarship, and literary achievement (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1992, printing 1973).\n\n25. This is very generally confirmed in I-Jin Loh's essay, \"Chinese Translations of the Bible\", published as part of An Encyclopedia Of Translation: Chinese-English, English-Chinese, eds. Chan Sin-Wai and David E. Pollard (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995), pp. 54-69. Loh explicitly states, \"It is generally agreed that the literary style of this version [in both Old Testament and New Testament], which had the benefit of help from a Chinese scholar by the name of Wang Tao, was superior to the rival version [later prepared by American missionaries]\" (p. 57). The \"literary style\" was the form of literary conventions.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]