Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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Yet alongside this massive participation and mobilization has been a second trend: a growing effort by the Chinese government to limit how people use and interpret the visual culture available to them. Even though its efforts often failed, the Guomindang repeatedly tried to limit the political and moral interpretations of 1930s popular film. And after the 1949 revolution, the new state’s effort to control visual culture only increased. Xiao’s discussion of film historiography, Johnson’s study of Great Leap-era films, and Zheng’s analysis of Cultural Revolution images all confirm that the state’s greatest stake in visual culture lay in tightly controlling not simply image content, but perhaps even more importantly, how image content was interpreted. What becomes of this attempt to police interpretation in the age of the internet, when image consumers can also just as easily act as image producers armed with mobile phone cameras, wireless communication, and Photoshop? The chapters here comprise a historical primer for unraveling the many strands of this complex and pressing question.
One of the repeated lessons of this volume is that images do not have a single inherent meaning: whether we like it or not, whether we notice it or not, we are always imposing interpretations on them. Moreover, interpretations often change profoundly over time as people re-envision the present and the past, and rarely is there one single lens through which an entire society agrees to view an historical image. History is often written by the victors, but victory does not end debate. Historical debate may pit a dominant narrative, created by the victors or ruling powers, against one or more oppositional narrative. Historians and historical actors alike repeatedly reinterpret accepted images of history, and we are not limited to “seeing like a state.” Indeed, our goal may be to overcome distortions by state or other powerful actors by incorporating new accounts or evidence and highlighting the perspectives of people neglected in standard histories. In revising our understanding of history, the authors of these essays spur us to look again—and look differently—upon images of the past that we thought we had understood.
note
1. Yu Hua, China in Ten Words (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011) p. 31.
Chapter 2
Envisioning the Spectacle of Emperor Qianlong’s Tours of Southern China
An Exercise in Historical Imagination
Michael G. Chang
A picture is worth a thousand words. The camera does not lie. Seeing is believing. Such are the deeply ingrained platitudes of our own historically situated ways of seeing, shaped by an age of mechanical reproduction and mass mediated visual culture. But what are we, as critically minded students of history, to make of the visual evidence we encounter in our romps through the archives and in our everyday lives? If historical imagination is also a visual exercise, how are we to envision the past(s) that we study and attempt to know? This paper addresses such questions by focusing on the well-known southern tours of the Qianlong emperor (1711–1799, r. 1736–1795), the fourth Manchu emperor to rule over China proper.
Each of Qianlong’s six southern tours, which took place between 1751 and 1784,1 were extended affairs, during which the emperor and his rather sizeable entourage spent anywhere from three to five months traveling through one of the empire’s most prosperous and critical regions—the Lower Yangtze delta (Jiangnan) (Figure 2.1). “Jiangnan” literally means “south of the (Yangtze) River,” but actually refers to a more broadly defined geocultural region straddling the boundary of two key provinces: Jiangsu and Zhejiang. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these two provinces were vital to the Qing empire in a number of ways.2 Politically, Han Chinese literati from Jiangsu and Zhejiang comprised the majority of officials who staffed the lower echelons of the civil administration. Economically, these two provinces generated the bulk of the empire’s commercial and agricultural wealth, supplying it with surplus (tribute) grain and the lion’s share of tax revenues, not to mention other critical staples and luxury items such as salt, silk, and porcelain. Culturally, Jiangnan was not only the undisputed center of Han literati scholarship and refinement, but also, from the Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century onward, a bastion of Ming loyalism and anti-Manchu sentiment.
Figure 2.1 The Lower Yangtze River delta (or Jiangnan), including the emperor’s imperial route and the Grand Canal. From: Stephanie R. Hurter, George Mason University Center for History and New Media. Used with permission.
Qianlong engaged in a wide range of activities on his visits to the Lower Yangtze region. He inspected hydraulic infrastructure, presented obeisance to local deities, evaluated local officials, held audiences with local notables, showered individual officials and subjects with imperial favor and recognition, recruited scholarly and literary talents, conducted military reviews, visited scenic and historic sites, and even received tribal envoys from Inner Asia.
But what did a southern tour actually look like? Such deceptively simple questions provide the starting points of most historical inquiry; they are born of a certain degree of ignorance, which is a necessary precondition of curiosity. The answers at which we arrive depend upon our capacity to both critically evaluate and creatively interpret the range of perspectives offered by sources at hand. In the pages that follow, we will consider a variety of sources including court paintings, imperial poetry, literati accounts, administrative regulations, and archival documents. By reading this wide array of sources in conjunction with and against each other, we may conclude, somewhat counter-intuitively and paradoxically, that the court paintings of the Qianlong emperor’s southern tours, while helpful in many respects, do not necessarily provide us with a complete picture (pardon the pun) of those spectacular events.
The Mobile Court as Ethnic Detachment
One way of envisioning Qianlong’s southern tours is to ask ourselves: What was the visual impact and symbolic meaning of the mobile court in the Lower Yangtze delta?
When thinking about and imagining Qianlong’s trips to the South, some of the most persistent images that come to mind are those of the Qianlong emperor as a consummate literati tourist, visiting the scenic sites of Jiangnan and littering the landscape with specimens of his poetry. This makes perfect sense. After all, Qianlong was in Jiangnan—a “land of rice and fish” and a bastion of Han literati refinement and poetic sensibility. Moreover, Qianlong’s poetic output during his southern tours was, indeed, prodigious.
We will return to Qianlong’s poetry in a later section. But let us begin by noting that rarely does the mention of a southern tour lead us to imagine the more prosaic problems involved in transforming the Qing court into a mobile entity. River crossings like that seen in Figure 2.2 (website) are usually not the first things to come to mind when we think of the southern tours. The logistics of the imperial procession and imperial camps seem somewhat secondary, so much backdrop to the “real” business of the southern tours. We would do well to remember, however, that the hallmark, and indeed the central spectacle, of any southern tour was the physical presence of a mobile court in Jiangnan, both on horseback and in camp. More to the point, during the eighteenth century, the moving court, in and of itself, was an emblem of frontier-style mobility and martial prowess that alluded to the Qing dynasty’s non-Chinese provenance. The logistical management of the two most basic forms of the mobile court—that is, imperial bivouacs and the imperial procession—deserves further consideration precisely because they were ethnically imbued projections of imperial authority in Jiangnan.
The Qianlong court approached the logistical management of the imperial procession and encampments as a military endeavor to be dominated by members of the metropolitan conquest elite, who would be in charge of providing for the emperor’s most basic needs and security while he was away from Beijing. Chief among these were the six Grand Ministerial and Princely Superintendents of the Imperial Encampment (zongli xingying wang dachen), an ad hoc body, whose members were selected from the ranks of the Imperial Clan, the Mongolian nobility, and senior Manchu officials. Han Chinese officials were st
rictly excluded.
Even more crucial to the on-the-ground planning and logistics of the southern tours were the Imperial Escorts (xiangdao; Manchu: yarhūdai be kadalara amban). This elite detachment of bannermen performed the actual legwork of scouting and reconnaissance both before and during all imperial tours of inspection, including the southern tours.
Two high-ranking Manchu bannermen named Joohoi (Zhao-hui; 1708–1764) and Nusan (Nu-san; d. 1778) served as commanders of the Imperial Escorts for Qianlong’s earliest southern tours in the 1750s and 1760s.3 Both hailed from the Manchu Plain Yellow banner; both were highly decorated and experienced field commanders as well as experts in military supply; and both saw frontline action in Qianlong’s famed “Western Campaigns” (1755–1759).4 Figure 2.3 (website) is a portrait of Joohoi in full battle armor, painted in commemoration of his military service during the conquest of the Ili River Valley (Dzungaria) and the oases towns of the Tarim Basin (Altishahr)—both of which have been known since 1760 as Xinjiang or the “New Dominions.” The Chinese inscription reads: “Great Achievement in Pacifying the Frontier” (suijiang maoji). This was one in a series of a hundred portraits of military heroes displayed in Beijing’s Hall of Purple Brilliance (Ziguang ge)—a ceremonial pavilion which Qianlong ordered rebuilt in 1761 for the purpose of feting Inner Asian tributaries, who sometimes also accompanied Qianlong during his visits to the south.5 Tribal prelates and potentates would have had occasion to see portraits such as this while in the capital, and the military background of men such as Joohoi and Nusan was unlikely to have been missed.
Besides providing scouting and reconnaissance services during the southern tours, the Imperial Escorts under the command of bannermen such as Joohoi also played a pivotal role in the annual imperial hunts at the Mulan hunting reserve (Mulan weichang; Manchu: Muran-i aba), located north of the Great Wall. Here the Imperial Escorts were responsible for scouting specific hunting areas and then setting up the emperor’s main base camp at an appropriate site within the larger Mulan complex.6 The continuity of personnel in charge of logistics for both the Mulan hunts and imperial tours meant that when the Qianlong court visited the Lower Yangtze region it resembled an ethnic detachment of Inner Asian elites engaging in a form of military exercise.
“Felt Quarters” and “Boats of the Steppe”: Encampments as Emblems of Ethnic Authority
The imperial encampment was perhaps the most conspicuous projection of the Qing court’s claim to an Inner Asian heritage of martial mobility and prowess. Figure 2.4 is a schematic overview of an overnight or main imperial encampment (daying). A centrally located rectangular wall called the “yellow perimeter” (huangcheng) defined the core of the camp, the emperor’s personal quarters (Figure 2.5, website). One hundred and seventy-five simple pup-tents (or “officials’ tents” zhiguan zhangfang; Figure 2.6, website) arrayed in a circle constituted an “inner perimeter” (neicheng). A second larger ring of 254 officials’ tents together with this first ring formed a security cordon. Detachments of imperial bodyguards (such as those in Figure 2.7, website) stood as sentries at the various camp entrances. As seen in Figure 2.5 (website), the imperial quarters where the emperor actually spent the night consisted mostly of circular tents, commonly known as “yurts” (qionglu or Menggu bao; Manchu: Monggoi boo; Mongolian: ger).
Mongolian ger (yurts) of various sizes figured prominently in court paintings such as Giuseppe Castiglione’s “Gathering for a Meal during the Hunt” (Figure 2.8, website) and the “Imperial Banquet in the Garden of Ten-Thousand Trees” (Figure 2.9, website), the latter of which was imperially commissioned in 1754 to commemorate the submission of the “Three Cerings” (Cering, Cering Ubaši, and Cering Mongke) and featured a “Great Yurt” (Yuwo da Menggu bao). Finally, Figure 2.10 (website) is a less schematic picture of an encampment in which we see some ger (yurts) and the bunting that was used for the yellow perimeter.
Figure 2.4 Main imperial encampment which was used during imperial hunts and during other imperial tours of inspection, but which does not appear in the court paintings of the Qianlong emperor’s southern tours. Qing huidian tu [Illustrations of the Qing Huidian]. c. 1899. From: Qing huidian tu, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991, v. 1, p. 1026, juan 104, 3a-b.
Figures 2.7 (website) and 2.10 (website), which depict bodyguards and ger (yurts), are actually details from a set of official court paintings, four large scrolls collectively known as “Illustrations of the Mulan Hunt” (Mulan tu), produced by court painters sometime during the 1750s under the direction of the Italian Jesuit, Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining, 1688–1766).7
Encampments such as these were a quintessential symbol of martial prowess and the projection of Qing power into Inner Asia. Figures 2.11 (website) and 2.12 show two camps in which Qing commanders received the surrender of the Beg of Ush in 1758 and the Khan of Badakhshan in 1759, respectively. These two images of encampments are from a larger set of sixteen court paintings known as “Illustrations of the Pacification of Ili and the Muslim Tribes” (Pingding Yili Huibu zhantu) completed in 1766, again under the direction of Jesuit missionaries at the Qianlong court. For the sake of clarity and convenience, I will refer to these pacification paintings as Desheng tu or “Illustrations of Military Victories,” a shorter title which was used from the 1770s onward. These sixteen “Illustrations of Military Victories” were painted on the walls of the aforementioned Ziguang ge—the ceremonial hall in Beijing where portraits of military heroes were also displayed.8 As the various images under discussion demonstrate, large, circular encampments along with Mongolian ger (yurts) were part and parcel of an Inner Asian political culture that centered upon hunting as well as the conduct of actual warfare and diplomacy on the Inner Asian steppe.
But were tent encampments such as those featured in Figures 2.4–2.11 (website) and 2.12 also used in the Lower Yangtze delta during the Qianlong emperor’s southern tours? In addressing this question, our first inclination might be to turn to yet another group of court paintings known as “Illustrations of Southern Tours” (Nanxun tu). Two sets of southern tour paintings, each consisting of twelve large scrolls, were produced by the Qing court. The first set commemorated the earliest southern tours of the Kangxi emperor (1654–1722, r. 1661–1722), Qianlong’s grandfather, and was completed in 1691 under the direction of Wang Hui (1632–1717), a Han Chinese court painter and native of Suzhou prefecture. Never to be outdone, the Qianlong emperor commissioned a second set of southern tour scrolls to commemorate his own trips to the south. This second set of southern tour scrolls was completed in the 1750s and 1760s under the direction of one Xu Yang, another Han Chinese court painter who hailed from the Suzhou area.
A close examination of both published images and existing scholarship suggests that depictions of imperial camps are conspicuously absent in both the Kangxi- and Qianlong-era southern tour scrolls.9 The closest that one comes to even seeing a single ger (yurt), let alone an entire imperial encampment, in the southern tour paintings is at the bottom of Figure 2.13 (website), a detail from the first scroll of the Kangxi-era southern tour paintings, which shows two camels with collapsed ger-frames packed on their backs.
A naïve or straightforward reading of the southern tour paintings as mirror-like reflections of historical reality might lead us to conclude that imperial encampments like those portrayed in Figures 2.4–2.11 (website) and Figure 2.12 were in fact not used during the southern tours. However, both archival and published sources provide incontrovertible evidence that two sets of equipment for these large sorts of circular camps were in fact used in a “leap-frogging” manner as the Qianlong emperor traveled through the South.10
Figure 2.12 Surrender of the Khan of Badakhshan. 1759. From: Qingdai gongtu huihua, 190.
Of course, encampments were not the only form of lodging available to the emperor during a southern tour; he might also stay in more permanent structures designated as imperial lodges or travel-palaces (Ch. xinggong, Man. tatara gurung). Indeed, Qianlong increasingly resided
in imperial lodges as more and more were constructed during the late-1750s and 1760s. But this did not obviate the need for tents and encampments during his visits to Jiangnan. After all, even the most elaborate imperial lodges were not large enough to accommodate Qianlong’s entire retinue of some 2,000–3,000 people. For example, archival documents reveal that during Qianlong’s third and fourth southern tours of 1762 and 1765, the Grand Council, other metropolitan ministers, and high provincial officials all frequently camped in tents. Indeed, a total of 1,100 extra tents were needed at five overnight stops even though imperial lodges were already built there.
In addition, during each day’s travels the emperor would take meals and receive local officials at one or two intermediate rest stops (jianying, dunying, or wu-dun; Manchu: uden-i ba) where bannermen would set up secondary day camps.11 As Figure 2.14 illustrates, the main structure of these intermediate camps was a Mongolian ger (yurt).12 Here we may appreciate how the intermediate camp in Figure 2.14 resembles the scene portrayed in Giuseppe Castiglione’s “Gathering for a Meal during the Hunt” (Figure 2.7, website). Also worth noting is Qianlong’s order in 1755 that of the four colonels and sixty guardsmen in charge of logistics and security for intermediate encampments, one colonel and twenty guardsmen were to be drawn specifically from Mongol units. So, even though the Qianlong reign witnessed an increase in the number of imperial lodges along the route of the southern tours, camps and Mongolian ger (yurts) did not disappear. On the contrary, the Qianlong emperor became even more insistent that they continue to be used. In short, imperial encampments and Mongolian ger (yurts) were symbolically significant, even in the most densely populated and Chinese-dominated urban areas of the Lower Yangtze delta.