RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299
317

Nowadays 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.

ANTHONY LAWRENCE

Beatrice 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.

The 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").

How 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?

Beatrice 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.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j
40

PRIVATE PATRONAGE OF SCHOLARSHIP AND LEARNING DURING THE MID-QING: 

RUAN YUAN AND THE SCHOLARS AROUND HIM* 

WEI PEH T'I 

This paper is an initial essay towards a biographical study of Ruan Yuan (1764-1849), a major scholar-official and patron of scholars of the Qianlong, Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns. I hope that by examining the life and work of a competent and respected scholar-official of this era, 'the prime exemplars of any age'.1 I may be able to bring into focus the critical problems and atmosphere of early 19th century China, the two score or so years immediately preceding the Opium War after which traditional Chinese institutions and values began to change. I have been fortunate in being able to make use of the extant Qing archival documents and Ruan Yuan's own publications for this research.

Ruan Yuan left considerable literary remains. I have located 75 titles, including a number of monumental publications that carry his name as author, compiler or editor. There are also prefaces he wrote for his own and other scholars' works, indicating that at least he had known the content of them before publication. Impressive indeed as these achievements were, questions about Ruan Yuan's actual efforts arise.

* I would like to thank the following libraries for allowing me access to their valuable collections in preparing this paper: Library of the National Palace Museum, the National Taiwan University libraries; the National Central Library; the Fu Ssu-nien Library of the Academia Sinica; The Library of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong Libraries; the Rare Book Collection of the Beijing Library; the Oriental Manuscripts Collection and the Main Collection of the British Library, the Harvard-Yenching Library of Harvard University; the Gest Library of Princeton University; the Library of Congress; the New York Public Library; and Qing letters from the collection of the late Dr Wang Shih-chieh. I am also grateful to the following individuals for their help and comments on an earlier draft of this paper: Chang Ling-sheng, Ch'ang Pe-te, Chuang Chi-fa, Wang Ching-hung, Wang P'u and Wu Che-fu of the National Palace Museum (Taipei), Wang Junyi and Huang Aiping of the People's University; Ji Longwei of Yangzhou Teachers' College; Feng Erkang of Nankai University; Beatrice S. Bartlett, Iona Crook and Stephen Shott of Yale University; F.W. Mote of Princeton University; Elizabeth Sinn, Maureen Sabine and Shih Hsio-yen of the University of Hong Kong; and Deng Linyu and Xu Xiaohui of the Chinese International School of Hong Kong. Of course, they are not responsible for the errors contained in this paper. My gratitude also goes to the Department of History and Centre of Asian Studies of the University of Hong Kong. I have opted to use pinyin to accommodate a particular Chinese software program, but have left the Wade-Giles transliteration in quotations.

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