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As the late-Ming world neared its end taking with it the open culture it had fostered, this proved to be a challenge for the educated élite as they had to transition into the new era of Qing rule. The censorship of Qian's works and the posthumous denunciation of him by the Qianlong Emperor meant that his art was in danger of being erased from the literary scene. Although the emperor ruled in 1769 that all volumes of Qian's works be burned, such efforts proved to be unsuccessful.

This chapter introduces the Yongzheng emperor's intervention in the first controversy. The emperor wrote a lengthy book to condemn Hanyue and to promote Miyun. It shows that Yongzheng practiced Chan Buddhism in the court for a long time and left a series of works on Chan Buddhism. He was a unique Chinese monarch who claimed to have reached enlightenment and behaved like a Chan master.

This chapter examines the ideological positioning of the revisionist Qing drama. Yongzheng Dynasty (Yongzheng wangchao, 1999), Kangxi Dynasty (Kangxi wangchao, 2001), and Qianlong Dynasty (Qianlong wangchao, 2003) are the best illustrations of the revisionist genre. They feature emperors and patriots who struggle against internal corruption and social injustice as well as external threats, depicting a fictional time of heroic figures and events. The chapter argues that the revisionist drama is informed by post-1989 Tiananmen Square intellectual debates concerning the current state and future direction of China's march toward modernization and the ramifications of this. Yongzheng Dynasty serves as a case in point to illustrate how dynasty dramas have responded to the political and cultural ethos of the time.

In the historical revisionism of the later eighteenth century, the Qianlong commitment to loyalty became so abstract that Ming loyalists who had opposed the Qing onslaught were enshrined, while those who had deserted the Ming to join the Qing were in varying degrees condemned. When viewed through the lens of Ming philosophies of identity and loyalty, the cultural layering of Liaodong had had fatal consequences for Tong Bunian. When viewed through the lens of Qianlong idealism, it had fatal consequences for the culture in which Tong Bunian was raised. Nurgaci's khanate, in contrast to the Ming empire, made its primary distinctions culturally and geographically. The cultural representation of the population of Tong of Fushun became difficult after the conquest of north China. The continuing paradox was how to stabilize the identities of conqueror and conquered without creating legal, political, or ideological obstacles to continued incorporation of imperial servitors.

When the Miao of the west Hunan/Guizhou border rose in revolt in 1795, the long decline of the Qing dynasty had already begun. The outsiders intruding in the early eighteenth century fell into three categories: the frontier officials, who responded to local problems with limited resources; the several thousand soldiers brought in to man the new camps and cities; and tens of thousands of unregistered Han settlers, arriving intermittently as lone males from the more heavily populated areas to the west. To explore these tensions and changes, this chapter focuses on the contending views of officials who introduced and managed the flawed system. It centers on the clash between policies of quarantine and acculturation in the Miao frontier under the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, with emphasis on the impact of such policies on local society.

Over the long Qianlong reign, conquest came gradually to a close. The court in its later years made a conscious expression of its sense of completion, of apex, of perfection that transcended the very considerable territorial and economic sway of the empire. Nurgaci and Hung Taiji had often invoked the length of their boundaries in their expositions on the size or importance of their domains; the Shunzhi, Kangxi, and Yongzheng emperors had devoted considerable energies and military resources to expansion of boundaries in Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet, while seeking to negotiate management of a common border with the Romanov empire. The explorers, mapmakers, and weapons manufacturers who had been the foremost agents of the great imperial undertakings of the Kangxi era were overshadowed in the Qianlong period by scribes, scholars, poets, painters, and architects. The militarism of the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors had been one aspect of their particularistic competition with other monarchs.

This chapter explores the impact of the spirit of the European “curiosity cabinet” on the use of cabinets by each Qing prince, noting that the boxes were the toys of universalism, in which reality is bestowed upon objects by subjecting them to the imperial power to stereotype, miniaturize, and segregate. It discusses that Qing art of the Qianlong period is famous for its reproduction of miniaturized complete worlds in various media. As with many other developments of the earlier Qing, the imperial trajectory went from consolidations of purposes of conquest to archetypes for purposes of expressing imperial universality to collapse, conflation, and fusion of court representation in the period of disintegrating imperial rule and increasing influence from civilian elites, progressive military leaders, and anxious aristocrats.

In the nineteenth century the significance of the Qianlong legitimation of genealogical thinking and idealization of cultural knowledge became immediate. Chinese nationalists called for destruction of the dynasty and eradication of the Manchu presence in China, while peoples identifying themselves with the imperial constituencies moved, in the last years of the Qing, between loyalism to the moribund dynasty and secessionism from a state dominated by the Chinese. The extent to which the imperial ideology informed the rise of nationalist and ethnic movements in the last years of the empire is suggested by the fact that peoples accorded no status as constituencies recognized in Central and Inner Asia were able to generate ethnic movements of varying degrees of coherence and efficacy. Awareness of the evolving self-identities of non-Chinese in the domain of what was supposed to be China presented a conceptual crisis to the Chinese nationalists, regardless of their own varieties of ideological commitment.

This chapter deals with historical writing under the Ming and Qing dynasties. Historical writing was traditionally a state-run project, which consisted in the collection and compilation of sources for the production of ‘official histories’. The chapter covers the compilation of the official Yuan history and the veritable records; the formation of state historiography under the Qing and the writing of the history of the official Ming dynasty; gazetteer historiography; and the apogee of official historiography under emperor Qianlong. It also describes the unfolding and profusion of kaozheng (‘evidential research’) scholarship that went beyond personal affiliation with state historiographical institutions.

The introduction presents the Huizhou salt merchants, with emphasis on the unprecedented economic and political privileges they enjoyed in High Qing China. The author challenges the conventional analysis focused on merchant-literati status negotiations, arguing that this framework is based upon written texts produced by the literati themselves, and is hence not reflective of the merchants’ own concerns. By reviewing the extant literary descriptions of Huizhou salt merchants, the author proposes to explore their own voices and opinions by analyzing their interactions with material objects. This indicates the emergence of a novel and vital network between the Qianlong emperor, the imperial household department, court officials, and Huizhou salt merchants, constructed between the capital Beijing, the urban centers of Jiangnan, and the remote countryside of Huizhou. A focus on these salt merchants sheds new light on Manchu emperors’ political strategies and reveals merchants’ role in luxury consumption in High Qing China.

This chapter sets the scene for this study, examining the historical and political reasons for the Huizhou salt merchants’ rise and their connection with the court during the High Qing period. It explains how the Manchu court reformed existing salt monopoly policies by appointing the emperors’ bondservants as salt bureau officials and by establishing the new position of head merchant. These two policies injected the Manchu emperors’ own networks into the salt monopoly institution and allowed the court to effectively exert influence on the wealthiest commercial centers of the Lower Yangzi area. The Huizhou salt merchants, on the other hand, created new and direct ties with the court by obtaining head merchant positions. These merchants thus achieved unprecedented economic and political privileges that took advantage of the Manchu court’s own ethnic strategies.

Chapter 2 examines the Huizhou head merchants’ interaction with the most precious and expensive goods in eighteenth-century Jiangnan. It explores how these businessmen produced and procured objects for imperial use through the tribute system, manufacturing, and the Qianlong emperor’s empire-wide book collecting project. This chapter shows in detail how the Huizhou salt merchants procured objects from local workshops, markets, and private collections and how their personal networks and managerial ability enabled them to “run errands” for the court. While the salt merchants supplemented formal state bureaucratic systems and served as the emperor’s informal agents in Jiangnan, they also facilitated an exchange of style and taste between the capital and Jiangnan.

This chapter discusses merchants’ roles in collecting culture during the High Qing period through a study of the salt merchant Wang Qishu and his collection of seals. The Qianlong emperor’s personal interest in collecting and his compilation of a large series of court-sponsored catalogues led to a recognition of collectors in Qing society. Collectors (shoucangjia) emerged as a unique social category, and collecting came to be seen as a valued form of expertise. By locating Wang Qishu’s case in this High Qing context, the author examines how Wang used different elements associated with his seal collection to assert himself as a collector. Wang’s contemporaries also saw him as a collector passionate about seals, as an expert in seal connoisseurship, and as financially capable of amassing a distinguished collection. Through his collection, Wang assumed the role of “collector”—a new social status symbol—and thereby legitimized his position in society.

The conclusion argues that the Huizhou salt merchants emerged as “cultured and cosmopolitan men” who distinguished themselves with knowledge and skill in a wide range of fields, being famed for their managerial prowess. Through their production and consumption of a variety of objects, these merchants played multiple roles in the fluid material world of High Qing China, whether as the emperor’s informal agents or arbiters of taste, lineage patrons or moral advocates. By playing these roles, these salt merchants also constructed a dynamic and fluid urban-rural and central-local relationship in the high Qing period. Study of these salt merchants thus sheds new light on the Qianlong emperor’s political strategy in Jiangnan and reveals the differences and transformations of consumer cultures in China from the late Ming to the high Qing.

This chapter describes Wutaishan, the sacred mountain in China revered as the abode of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom. Hyecho died there around the age of eighty. This chapter describes how the mountain came to be such an important place of pilgrimage across Asia. The chapter discusses two artworks, a Japanese painting of Mañjuśrī and a Tibetan painting of the Qianlong Emperor in the guise of Mañjuśrī.

This chapter discusses the Qianlong Emperor's efforts to control the trülku institution. Among these was finding a method for identifying reincarnations that was less prone to corruption. To this end, he manufactured two golden urns for drawing lots. One he sent to the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa in September 1792 and one he displayed in the Yonghegong in Beijing. The urn in Beijing was intended for reincarnations among the Mongols. The idea was that eminent Gelukpa trülkus would draw lots from it under the supervision of officials from the Lifan Yuan. In this way, the Gelukpa elite in Central Tibet were prevented from exerting their influence over the Mongolian procedure for selecting and identifying young trülkus. The procedure for drawing lots was laid down in the first of a total of twenty-nine articles of a decree to improve Tibetan administration.

When the Qianlong emperor came to the throne, he abrogated his father’s compassionate and rational system for eunuch management. Qianlong saw his father’s innovations as a dangerous departure from the gold standard of eunuch management. Qianlong would lower eunuchs’ status, cut their salaries, eviscerate their system of ranks, and reduce their education levels. In so doing, he came to perpetuate a series of myths about his eunuchs meant to perpetuate the notion that he was strict on them. He asserted that they only performed menial tasks, never left the palace, had no wives or children, were few in number in his palaces, and were carefully watched over by him personally. In truth, he was quietly allowing them new opportunities to come and go as they pleased, and to develop business interests on the outside. He did this because he faced a growing shortage of eunuchs to staff his ever-burgeoning number of palaces, including Yuanming Yuan.