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This chapter explains the rise and fall of Chan Buddhism in the 17th century. The chapter shows that Chan Buddhism was revived through romantic imaginations of textual ideals and thus should be described as a reinvention. The literati and Chan Buddhists formed various kinds of textual communities that were devoted to reading and interpreting ancient Chan texts. However, the revived Chan Buddhism based on textual ideals contradicted the ritualized monastic reality in many ways.

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.

Chinese dynasties had for centuries issued awards for extraordinary virtue to the chaste and filial to provide exemplars for the moral cultivation of their subjects and to enhance their own image of virtue and benevolence. The expansion of categories of state-sanctioned chastity suicides served as a politically benign and pragmatic gesture of support for the values of Han literati, whose movement for revival of ritual and moral orthodoxy was gaining momentum over the first half of the eighteenth century. If the first two reigns of the dynasty saw the creation of a new state discourse on female virtue, it was the Yongzheng Emperor who constructed the institutional edifice to promote and enforce the evolving state orthodoxy.

The state chastity cult constructed by Yongzheng was only one of many statecraft incarnations of the empire's civilizing ambitions. Its full political and cultural significance comes into focus when one looks at the web of state technologies developed in the latter half of the century to mold society and transform customs. The intertwined agendas of moral transformation (jiaohua) and state building shaped much of the social policy making of the Yongzheng and Qianlong years, indicating that commitment to the Qing vision of the thoroughness, precision, and intimacy of the state's loving support for its subjects was widely shared by Han and Manchu officials alike. Emperors and policy-making officials expounded their views of how to routinize the civilizing mission in bureaucratic practice. These wide-ranging discussions produced new laws and policies to intervene in diverse realms of social life and promote chastity, frugality, and respect for social hierarchy throughout the empire.

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 tumultuous succession to power of the Yongzheng emperor, and the role eunuchs played in it as foot soldiers and rumormongers. Eunuchs in the princely households of Yūnreng, Yūntang, and Yūnsy worked on behalf of the princes they served, sometimes luring them into further wrongdoing. Several of these eunuchs became notorious for corruption, bribery, and the kidnapping of children.

Influenced by the succession struggle, Yongzheng set about creating a system for eunuch management that would keep eunuchs from having undue influence on the princes and their households. He worried about one of his sons in particular, Hongjeo, whose brother would become the Qianlong emperor. Yongzheng sought to ensure that this son would be kept insulated from the harmful effects of eunuchs. Yongzheng also sought to rationalize eunuch management and render it more compassionate. He created a rainy day fund for eunuchs, doubled their salaries, awarded them a cemetery west of Beijing (Enjizhuang), and sought to find ways to use ranks and salary to incentivize them to work harder.

This chapter describes a series of the bakufu’s attempts to reform Manpukuji and to recruit more Chinese monks to Japan. During the late seventeenth century, measures had been taken by senior councilor Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu to respond to the corruption of dharma transmission. In the early seventeenth century, the control over the Nagasaki trade by the bakufu affected Manpukuji’s attempt to recruit Chinese monks to Japan because the bakufu demanded the recruited monks to demonstrate credentials of being authentic Zen monks within Yinyuan’s dharma transmission. Although great effort had been made to invite a senior Chinese monk named Zhongqi, the attempt was thwarted by Emperor Yongzheng and his Zhejiang governor Li Wei, who arrested a group of Chinese monks at Putuo Island before they departed for Japan.